{"id":6367,"date":"2026-03-19T14:59:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T14:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6367"},"modified":"2026-03-19T14:59:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T14:59:07","slug":"catherine-redford-on-poetry-and-the-new-collection-the-way-the-water-held-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6367","title":{"rendered":"Catherine Redford on poetry and the new collection The Way the Water Held Me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When my wife died at the age of 33, Mary Shelley was a natural companion in my journey through grief. Widowed two hundred years before me when Percy Shelley drowned in a boating accident, she, too, had been left with a young son to bring up alone. Not only that, but both of us were separated from family and friends at the time of our bereavements; my wife and I had moved to a new part of the country just six weeks before she died, while Mary had left her support network behind in London in order to follow Percy to Italy. Mary famously wrote the loneliness of her grief into her novel The Last Man <\/em>(1826), in which Lionel Verney \u2013 a portrait of Mary herself \u2013 becomes the last surviving human on Earth after a deadly plague sweeps the globe. Two centuries later, I grieved through the lockdowns and social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After my wife\u2019s death, I turned to creative writing as a means by which to work through my grief. Wanting to examine the complexities of bereavement, I wrote poems on memory and mourning, on the public rituals surrounding death and the ways in which individuals find coping strategies for their loss. Those poems turned into my debut collection, The Way the Water Held Me<\/a><\/em>, which was published this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Incorporating Mary Shelley into my poetry provided a source of comfort, helping me to feel less alone as a young widow. Her presence also helped to legitimise my emotions and took some of the shame away from the messiness of my grief; I\u2019d expected to be sad after my wife died, but I\u2019d been unprepared for the fear, anger, desperation, and even resentment that I felt. Mary became a canvas onto which I could project these feelings, whether as teenage best friend, gothic heroine, or doppelg\u00e4nger. In \u2018I allow Mary Shelley to create another monster\u2019, I depict Mary as \u2018ripping the seams\u2019 of my life and \u2018restitching it as her own\u2019, so that I become \u2018A double \/ treading in her footsteps, her loss lived again \/ through me\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was also interested in exploring the complications of Mary\u2019s own personal path through grief, given the less-than-ideal state of her marriage at the time of Percy\u2019s death. In the depths of her bereavement, she was eager \u2013 perhaps even desperate \u2013 to depict their love as perfect, whereas Percy had complained to friends of her \u2018coldness\u2019 and had betrayed her with a number of other women. Although there is no evidence that an affair took place, Percy\u2019s infatuation with Jane Williams is evident in some of his last poems. I wanted to create an imaginative space in which Mary is able to confront this humiliation. In \u2018Mary Shelley and I survey the aftermath\u2019, I depict a post-apocalyptic scene in which Mary and I view the ruins of their house on the coast; in the poem\u2019s closing lines, I sense the words from Percy\u2019s Jane Williams poems \u2018scuttling \/ into the dark corners of her [Mary\u2019s] mind\u2019 as she acknowledges her late husband\u2019s unkindness towards her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by the closing chapters of The Last Man<\/em>, post-apocalyptic imagery is a thread running throughout the collection. However, I didn\u2019t want to tether my work solely to the nineteenth century; instead, I also allowed myself the freedom to depict this metaphor for grief from more modern perspectives, such as the detonation of a nuclear bomb. I play with such anachronisms throughout The Way the Water Held Me<\/em>. Rather than having Mary simply visiting me in the present or me visiting her in the past, I create a mutual space that we can occupy through the layering of timeframes. We watch late-night TV together, then sit by the hearth. I visit her in her rooms in 1820s London, where she wipes my wife\u2019s text messages from my mobile phone. In \u2018Mary Shelley and I hold a s\u00e9ance\u2019, I bring together the experiences of our respective youths, depicting us listening to Coleridge by candlelight before miming nineties indie songs into hairbrushes. The result is something both disorientating and universal in its atemporality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I particularly enjoyed incorporating Mary\u2019s own words into my poetry, quoting from her letters, journals, and novels. At times, I rework or subvert Mary\u2019s original meaning: words from The Last Man<\/em> are reordered to create poems about the Last Woman, lofty reflections on posterity and empire becoming a simple portrait of the suffering and demise of a lone female in a world that fails to acknowledge the loss of civilisation. \u2018Mary Shelley writes to tell me that her husband has drowned\u2019 is another collage poem, this time made from words used by Mary in her letter to Maria Gisbourne of 15 August 1822. In this letter, Mary describes how the final house in which she lived with Percy was \u2018after his own heart\u2019; in using these words in a new context, I was able to play with the idea of Mary keeping Percy\u2019s physical heart (or some incinerated organ resembling it) in her desk. In doing so, I simultaneously acknowledge, participate in, and interrogate the myth-making that surrounds Percy\u2019s death and Mary\u2019s widowhood, from the hastily-abandoned volume of Keats in Percy\u2019s pocket to the wreck of the boat that mysteriously survived. In turn, this informs my poetry about my own experiences of the fetishisation of death, from mourning rituals to the significance we assign to the possessions kept when a loved one dies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Way the Water Held Me<\/em> (The Emma Press) is available now from all good bookshops, priced \u00a310.99.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Part elegy, part s\u00e9ance, part scream\u2019 (Fiona Benson, winner of the Forward Prize for Poetry)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018A beautiful, heartbreaking book\u2019 (Liz Berry, winner of the Forward Prize for First Collection)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Catherine Redford is a writer, researcher, and editor. She has published widely on Romantic and Victorian literature, with a particular focus on Mary Shelley, the Last Man theme, and the Gothic. Her poetry \u2013 which has featured in journals and anthologies including Magma, Under the Radar, and Lighthouse \u2013 embraces the crossover between the creative and the critical. Catherine has previously held positions as both a lecturer and a Career Development Fellow at the University of Oxford.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my wife died at the age of 33, Mary Shelley was a natural companion in my journey through grief. Widowed two hundred years before me when Percy Shelley drowned… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[45,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6367"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6367"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6370,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6367\/revisions\/6370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}