About

My name is Carole and I’m a poet and life-long learner. I’m too lazy to make much effort to have my poems published but four of them have been anthologised by the Forward Press. They are: Boxing Day, 1975, Staring Bright, Hiroshima September 13th 2001 and Unidentified which is to be published in 2009. The name ‘Watermaid’ comes from a poem of that name in a sequence of poems called ‘Labyrinths with Path of Thunder’ by Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, who died in the Biafran war. Besides poetry and literature in general I’m interested in the theatre, films, philosophy, theology and my garden.

I live on the south coast of England, on the edge of the New Forest, between Southampton and Bournemouth. I’m a closet townie , having spent my childhood in London and just south of Manchester.

I enjoy learning new things and I originally graduated in Chemistry, which I then taught before switching to Maths. I studied literature and philosophy with the Open University when my children were at school and more recently obtained a Diploma in Literature and Creative Writing.

In 2008, my second grandchild, Noah, was born in Salford. In between blogging, I studied post-colonial literature and French. I did a project on Nuala Ní Dhomnaill, who writes poetry in Irish. Her anthologies are in dual language form, and two of them, The Fifty Minute Mermaid and Pharoah’s Daughter, have been translated by Paul Muldoon. There is a resurgence of writing in minority languages to combat the loss of identity brought about through globalisation as much as the more obvious historical reasons. In 2009 I may finally get round to doing an MA in Literature.

In 2008, I finally saw The Cherry Orchard on stage and an excellent production of Six Characters in Search of an Author; both at Chichester Festival Theatre. I saw Blood Brothers at the Mayflower and The Playboy of the Western World at the Nuffield Theatre (both in Southampton). My favourite dramatists are Chekhov, Brecht, Ibsen and Arthur Miller. I’m also  a dedicated watcher of Dr Who and am old enough to have seen all ten incarnations of the Doctor.

My elder son lives in Switzerland with his Taiwanese wife and grandson, Rupert. My daughter is a lecturer in the English language department at Kanda University of  International Studies at Chiba, near Tokyo . My younger son lives in Salford. My mother, who is ninety-five and has memory problems, now lives in residential care.

I occasionally blog at http://wheretherainbowends.blogspot.com and http://disturbingthedust.blogspot.com/