Julieann Campbell on Milk Teeth: poetry and the uses of enchantment

Putting a book of poetry together is a curious thing. You feel somehow exposed, your inner thoughts laid bare for all to see. I’ve often said that showing people your poetry is like someone looking up your skirt. A fitting analogy, I thought to myself again this year, as I grappled with my first collection, Milk Teeth.

In my daily life, I tend to write about other people – and for other people. I am, by trade, a storyteller. But as a newspaper reporter, in oral history work and working with the Bloody Sunday families, it all demands strict, historical accuracy and attention to detail. Poetry, by contrast, has always felt intensely subjective and precious. It provides a certain liberation, and I feel very protective of it.

I’ve always been the sort of person who writes things down. It began the night I had my first kiss behind the bungalows at the White Chapel. I was 14 years old and giddy with excitement as I rushed back home to note down every glorious detail.

The kiss went nowhere, of course, but that night signalled the beginning of another life-long love affair. I thus became a diarist, which led me to poetry and in the decades since I have amassed a vast (and largely irrelevant) collection of old diaries, poetry notebooks, letters and the like. I never questioned this preoccupation or imagined a higher purpose for it. I just like to write things down.

Writing poetry has always been part of that custom. It evolved as part of my need to document things, whether others found them interesting or not. I write about things that interest me. I still remember my first attempt at poetry, when tasked to write a poem for homework. My blushing pride when our teacher, the dashing Mr Barr – a giant with Magnum PI moustache – insisted I read out Limousines, Limousines aloud to a class of expectant 11-year-olds. He promptly gave me 10/10 for effort. If only he knew what he’d started...

Fairy tales enchanted me. Then Greek myths and legends, and then a whole new world opened up with all I learned of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells and Keats. I saw inspiration everywhere. I began collecting more books than I could ever read – I still do. As the poetry swelled, I started filling other books with drafts and ideas, too. How glad I am now, 25 years later, to still have every old tattered book and realise their worth.

And while old journals were too private, too mortifying to see light of day – poetry was different. Poems were written in the hope that they might be read someday. Even the awkward, personal poems felt different somehow. They felt pure. Honest. They still do. I needed Milk Teeth to reflect that subtle variation.

Selecting the contents of Milk Teeth felt brave and bold for all these reasons. I relished the challenge of gauging which poems were likely to offend or shock, which would evoke nods of empathy. I noticed much more humour in my work, too, which pleased me immensely.

I sought my family’s approval for several poems, which, to me, felt too private for public consumption. St Patrick’s Night appears as a revised version, because the original contained details about my father’s death – incidental things that my family had probably long forgotten – so I had to tread carefully. Particularly as none of my family were big poetry fans.

Another poem, Christmas Eve, felt equally as sensitive, recalling how we had always lined up on the stairs as children, “to see if Santa’s been”.

The day we closed my father’s coffin,
we stood there again.
Eldest first, we waited in line,
one at a time.
We felt deep the poignant stab
as our surviving elder took the helm.

I also found great solace in poetry when I became a new mother, and, as the book’s title suggests, my daughter’s arrival was a huge influence. I abandoned all-night parties for nappies. Nursing on demand, I had little time for diaries, TV dinners or even lifting the phone, but the short-sharp nature of poetry meant that I could still let flow when the need arose. The poems were usually a mess, but it enabled me to capture all the newness and worry, the heightened emotions. They helped me make sense of everything.

I see now that poetry has been invaluable as a means of recording Saffron’s childhood. I love those poems. I love their simplicity. In All God’s Creatures, I noted an early fascination with insects; “A joy so readily lost in adulthood, when, as pests, they are swatted away.” In Wait a While Longer, I fretted over the decision to taken down a safety-gate outside her room during her first real purge of baby things.

She’s right, again.
Outgrown all our precautions,
and though I protest – she now talks louder.

Out go fluffy blankets, bibs, first toys.
Tonight, down comes the safety gate.
Dismantled, and thus ends her infancy.

Another theme that has emerged in the collection is my general wariness of gadgets and rushed 21st-century living. My brief attempt at internet dating felt so surreal, I knew I had to write something about it, and Happy New Year came about because of a distinct lack of human contact one New Year’s Eve. Instead of everyone hugging on the stroke of 12, people sat glued to mobile phones. In The Digital Dilemma, my daughter gets to grips with reality.

We sat in silent fascination
as four-year-old fingers hovered
over a glossy magazine,
palms out, trying in vain
to magnify its photographs.

The decline of language and literacy is something I feel very strongly about, too, and these concerns do come across in Milk Teeth. A Crime in Any Language records the loss of lovely words like “deliciate” from the dictionary, forsaken for the likes of “amazeballs” and “twerk”.

Likewise, when I first heard my niece and nephew say YOLO, the humour of the ensuing debate immediately lent itself to a poem.

What does it mean? I asked,
presuming it might be French,
or some hip new language
too cool for us ‘oldies’ to use.

They scoffed at my ignorance
and giggled quietly under their breath
with all the defiance of youth...

It’s puzzling that us writers are often much maligned as dreamers and layabouts. For me, storytelling is a noble profession and something I aspire to. Since my careers teacher first laughed in my face in sixth form, I’ve noticed that writing is one of those professions talked about in hushed tones. I’m guilty of it myself, sometimes. It’s only now, after years spent scribbling, can I confidently declare “I’m a writer” when someone at a party asks what I do. If I’m feeling particularly bold, maybe now I’ll say, “I’m a poet, too”.

I guess I’ll have to get used to strangers looking up that proverbial skirt...

Julieann Campbell is an award-winning author and poet from Derry. A former reporter for the Derry Journal, she won 1st place for a collection in the 2008 Charles Macklin Poetry Competition. Her first non-fiction book, Setting the Truth Free: The Inside Story of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (Liberties Press, 2012), won the 2013 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. Julieann is currently Chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust, overseeing the £2 million redevelopment of the Bogside’s Museum of Free Derry. Milk Teeth is her first solo poetry collection, supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

"Milk Teeth cuts with the precision and incision of a poet in full command of her art. One of true wonders of this collection is Campbell's ability, or more - her mission - to breathe life into memory and moments long past, so that they dance before us in the full awakening of the living poetry..."
Dr Liam Campbell, Ulster University

Milk Teeth is published by Guildhall Press. www.ghpress.com