rob mclennan : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Lydia Unsworth

 

Lydia Unsworth is a poet from Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Place Writing in Manchester, looking at kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. She has 6 poetry collections and 4 above/ground press chapbooks, and has two new poetry collections coming out in 2026, Stay Awhile (April, Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and This Now Extends to My Daughter (May, Blue Diode Press).

Lydia Unsworth lectures in Ottawa at The Factory Lecture Series and reads via “VERSeFest presents” on Sunday, March 29, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

rob mclennan: You’ve two new titles out this spring—Stay Awhile and This Now Extends to My Daughter—how do you see these titles in terms of your overall trajectory?

Lydia Unsworth: Firstly, these two books were written in parallel, in one great sprawling document, so I’m really pleased they are coming out at the same time. I kind of see them as siblings. They are the first books I received any kind of funding to help me write, which was fantastic as I was out of work for a little while and this great sprawling document written late at night was how I was processing everything and making a game of it. Anyway, due to the funding, I was able to pay for editing and worked with Fran Lock on them. I wrote into the poems for a long time and essentially cleaved the document in two. I think I was angrier writing these two books than I have been during the writing of any of my previous books, which I suppose is part of growing up and understanding the larger systems behind everything and the traps they keep us in. But I was also funnier, and less scared of hiding the ignorance and honesty in my voice, and that shift came through repeated performing. I started performing more regularly after 2022, so after I’d finished writing Arthropod (Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers), which was written during the pandemic largely and in the Netherlands. There’s a poem in my above/ground pamphlet, Gag, called “Montage”, and I read that at Tom Branfoot’s More Song poetry night in Bradford, UK, and people were laughing, and that experience kind of changed the way I wrote. I found I only wanted to read the funny ones, and so I had to write more of them. I also realised that I could write exactly what happened in a way, and the poetry was in the filter of the noticing, all the stored-up connections, and in the placements of the little punchlines among the seriousness. So basically, to answer the question, I think these two books are just my voice, without anymore the trying to find or hide it, and they are written with performance in mind.

rm: Is an attention to performance how you usually approach composition? How does the text on the page translate to performance, and is that something you hope the reader might garner from their own reading?

LU: I think attention to how it sounds out loud is how I approach composition, or rhythm, or where I put it on the page. And I suppose humour underlies everything I do. Like, if it amuses me, then it must work on some level. I don’t know if that’s the same as performance, but it’s definitely vocal now, my rhythm, and I don’t know how that comes across on the page, or in another person’s inner voice, but I try to make the spacing tell the reader where to pause. And I write a lot of prose poetry, as you know, which is supposed to be intense and frantic and fast to me. I remember seeing “Not I” by Samuel Beckett at the theatre in Salford once, and I think those 7 minutes of a disembodied red-lipsticked mouth screaming at me in a crowd in the dark was one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me. A friend did say at my last reading that she thinks my poems are made for the performing of them, and that was interesting, that this feeling I had about the change could indeed be sensed by another. But saying all this, there isn’t any really performative element to the way I read, it’s the dead-pan under performance of it, the sort of resilient cheeky resignation of the voice somehow, I dunno. It’s like I hold the emotions inside a certain dry irreverence to stop it all getting out of hand.

rm: I’m curious where this approach to the prose poem as “intense and frantic and fast” emerged.

LU: I think that’s just how my brain thinks. I started writing in a very automatic way, during my art degree, just typing as fast as I could, and I love the surprise of it, the way the brain associates, almost bypassing consciousness, or at least reflection, and sometimes the connections feel a little bit like magic, like everything is just hanging around in there waiting to be used, both very new stuff, the ephemera of the day, for example, or phrases from a film or song, mixed up with really old, imprinted stuff from way back. And then the editing carves into that, shapes it. I like maintaining the rectangle of thought, and the speed of the capture. I suppose in that way it reminds me of photography, in that it’s near instant and sort of the same shape, as opposed to a carefully planned-out painting composition.

I’m not saying all prose poetry works like this, but the writing I like tends to make me want to read faster and faster and sort of fill myself with the all-over-the-consciousness energy of it. Like a thought roller coaster.

rm: Honestly, I think this fits in with your approach to the placement of your poems on the page as notational, as you suggest; how lines appear on the page. Do you see your poems, then, as equally comfortable on the page as they are being performed?

LU: Yes, I see them as the same these days. Of course I don’t know how it is to be somebody else, but the way I perform them is exactly how they are to me as I write them. There’s a little more adrenaline in the performance, and a little more confidence on the page, perhaps, but it’s a minor detail.

rm: I’m intrigued at the idea of these two works composed in parallel, paired in a single expanded compositional document. Is this a structure you’ve worked prior to these collections? What prompted them into two separate titles as opposed to something singular, made up of parts?

LU: I think it was the editing process with Fran that helped me separate them. As I said, I was out of work for a time, and I was taking a train every week to a sort of overlooked middle-sized town nearby Manchester to complete a job application in a café and go look for the most exciting concrete building I’d seen in that place on the internet, to kind of try to gamify the mundanity of the process. I didn’t like the way I was free (from work) but also trapped (by parenting and by the job centre’s ludicrous demands that you’re supposed to apply for 30 jobs a week and spend 8 hours a day 5 days a week doing so, as if that’s any indication of quality) by circumstance, so I was trying to find a way to bend the situation into something that felt more creative, and justify going for a walk basically. So the document started there, documenting all these places and buildings and my moving through them (I was recently back to the UK after 7 years away and was terribly homesick) as a distraction from the larger structure stuff I had going on in my life at the time. Anyway, the structural stuff was of course creeping into the poems – the job centre, the admin, the insomnia, relationships, things the kids needed (like housing!) – but I just kept going, writing it all down, usually very late at night. Then at some point I had nearly 300 pages of it. Usually way before that point I sort of stop and assess what’s happening in the document and break it up and chuck bits out (so yes, I do often start with just one document), but I didn’t have any headspace for that. And that’s right around the time the arts funding came in and I found something part-time to tide me over until I figured out what to do next and a lot of the pressure released. Then I realised there were two very different collections here, and also that one of the reasons I hadn’t stopped was that I had a lot more to say about the kind of post-industrial, underfunded environments I had moved back to, but that’s another story.

rm: Do you see your work as responses to environment? How do your poems begin?

LU: Yes, definitely. I also spend a lot of time at the moment travelling to specific environments precisely in order to respond to them. A lot of my work currently is working in this way. I like the rich yet almost boring details of the (predominantly urban) environment, and how by attending to such details you raise their status, change their nature. I love the accidental juxtapositions in the landscape, in shop windows, in car parks, or just passing by. The same street can provoke a different poem every time I pass it, and I actually have a lot of recent prose poetry sort of hyper-focused on the details of the school run. I love walking with other people too, as fragments of the conversations we have flow together through the landscape’s own poetry and my personal memories and associations when I later come to write it up. And that blend, also mixed with focused reading – like knowing what I want to fill my consciousness up with and why before I start writing – does a lot of the work for me it seems.

Saying that, my early drafts too often begin with “I was walking ..” or “On the bus yesterday ...” and I do often have to chop the first bit away in the editing process. 

rm: I’m curious about the way you shape manuscripts, as you sound very much as someone who writes books, as opposed to individual, stand-alone poems. Have you a shape or a subject matter or a sense of form or tone in mind when attempting to begin a project, or is the process more organic?

LU: I do write books at the moment, I think, and I noticed that myself only recently. Perhaps that’s the freedom of having the time while I’m doing a PhD. I think I was writing out of a sense of desperation or “needing to catch up” for a long time there, as I didn’t really have the confidence to know how to even begin for about a decade, despite sort of being sure this was the only thing I really wanted. My first baby was born just before my first book was published and I remember writing that very intensely while pregnant, with what was in a way the deadline expanding inside me. Happily, I think the kids just meant I didn’t have enough time to worry about failing anymore; I could write first, and have anxiety later, that was the thinking. Anyway, that’s besides the point. I think now, since the experience of splicing this document in two, I think maybe, at least currently, I am working in a much more project-based way. Though, saying that, there is also a sprawling document running alongside those projects, which is accumulating mass in a more organic fashion. It’s actually already very long – but, to quote NOFX, the desperation’s gone. Or, it’s changed, in any case.

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan is the author of nearly fifty published books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which is the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), listed recently by the CBC in their “Best Canadian Poetry Books of 2025.” A further title, edgeless, a suite of long poems, will be out this spring with Catlin Press. His above/ground press, which now has a clever substack, will be thirty-three years old in July. He is the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival, which holds its 16th annual festival from March 24-29, 2026.

Catherine Owen : Sandy Shreve (1950 – 2026)

 

 

 

First, some randomly assembled facts of her life as a Canadian maker.

Sandy Shreve wrote, edited and/or co-edited eight books and four chapbooks. Her last poetry collection was Waiting for the Albatross (Oolichan Books, 2015). Her previous books include Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions, 2005), Belonging [Sono Nis Press, 1997], Bewildered Rituals [Polestar Books, 1992] and In Fine Form, 2nd edition - A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin Press, 2016, co-edited with Kate Braid). Sandy also edited Working for a Living, a collection of poems and stories by women about their work (Room of One's Own, 1988). After receiving a BA in Canadian History in 1973, she worked in communications for 15 years and, before that, as an office manager/conference organizer/student advisor, secretary, union co-ordinator, library assistant, and reporter.

Born in Quebec, she was raised in New Brunswick and made her home in Vancouver for four decades until moving to Pender Island in 2016. Most importantly, perhaps, Sandy founded BC’s Poetry in Transit program, an initiative that’s still going strong, and, through the Vancouver Industrial Writer’s Union, among other avenues, she promoted the cause of work poetry, women’s poetry and form poetry.  In her last decade, she turned to photography, then painting, her geometrically abstract work in acrylics and oils appearing in juried shows and being purchased internationally.

One of the things she said about poetry that means something to me: “Poetry…that meticulous balancing of ideas, through image, metaphor and other devices; and the music of it—meticulous, again, that selection of words and their order until they sing.” BC BOOKWORLD

Music. Singing. YES!

And now my own recollections of Sandy Shreve. 

I met Sandy in my early twenties in Vancouver. Living with an outgoing impresario who was forever running events around town, I encountered so many poets I might not otherwise have met. The impresario was, however, 13 years older than me and so my age was regularly being, if not called into question, then announced with some suspicion. That was my first memory of Sandy, how she would say to me, “But you’re SO young!” And I would be irritated at the possible presumption that this number meant I had less to contribute. I told myself I would NEVER say that to any young poet in the future. Have I? I can’t recall if I have kept that promise ;)

At any rate, my first impressions of Sandy were not particularly warm. And yet, I kept bumping into her in the scene, and eventually, she got over my youthfulness (or I simply got older) and it didn’t matter anymore.

Really, I met Sandy first at the library, where I read her Bewildered Rituals book as a teenager in 1992, part of the process of my determination to read all the books of Canadian poetry available. Here’s one from it that struck me at the time for its unromantic melding of a filing cabinet and a recycling bin with blooms.

 

SPRING CLEANING
Sandy Shreve
From:   Bewildered Rituals. Polestar Book Publishers, 1992.

weeding the files I pretend
the cabinet into a plot of land
as if through this thinning
it will blossom
and everyone who walks in
will admire my new bouquet
lean into each drawer
and breathe deeply the scent
of sorted papers, no longer
ragged edges crammed in every
which way and poised to slash
at skin in vengeance
but petal soft and quivering
to the gentle nudge
of noses seeking fragrance
instead of sneezing dust
now billowing up as I shred
pile after pile of paper
bound for some recycling bin
and bound to come back to me
again in more superfluous copies
to be stuffed and wedged and jammed
into the spaces I've created
for flowers.

I then read her in Tom Wayman’s 1991 work poetry anthology Paperwork (Harbour Publishing) and through Shreve’s poetry was introduced to other poets who soon became important to me like Kate Braid. By 2004, I was submitting to (and being rejected by) the initial (Raincoast/Polestar, 2005) edition of In Fine Form, the Canadian Book of Form Poetry, and, though disappointed, being reassured by the text’s validation of my own fascination with form poems, and especially, by those now being written in my own country!

You see, the work of Sandy Shreve (and Kate Braid) on this anthology perhaps began my understanding of my own duty to the Canadian poetry community. Or maybe it was a few years prior, when Sandy initiated BC’s Poetry in Transit program, 28 years later still presenting poems on buses and the Skytrain. The work she did to advocate for poetry as an essential part of everyone’s lives was vital. Artists can’t only make art, as I argued in my 2015 compilation The Other 23 and a Half Hours or Everything you wanted to know that your MFA didn’t teach you (Wolsak & Wynn). Artists also need to contribute in some way to their artistic communities, whether by reviewing, hosting events, serving as mentors, editing anthologies and otherwise elaborating the language via which we can more deeply comprehend, and grow in, our creating.

In that compilation, Sandy contributed to the section called “Free Range Writers” where she talked about the value her day jobs had on her writing:

[these jobs] put me in environments where I was exposed to several of my interests (literature, feminism, justice) …. [and] being in the workforce… [offered me] a bit of distance from the intensity of writing and studying poetry…it gave me connections to other people, other lives and experiences I would not have otherwise come across.

The year after this book came out, a form poem of mine, a villanelle from Trobairitz (Anvil Press 2012) was finally chosen for the 2^nd edition of In Fine Form in 2016 (Caitlin Press). Sandy wrote to me, addressing some confusion I had expressed: “no you ARE in the book…guess your publisher didn’t let you know…we’re delighted to have it in any case…the one where you use Beziers as a rhymed end word. I adore this poem.”

As part of that beautiful circle, I now use this edition to instruct my Concordia University students (as did Kat Cameron prior to me!) in the eternal art of form poetry, both lauding and quibbling with the text’s selections, as one must.

Prior to the anthology, Sandy’s poem “Fidelity,” along with a playful photo of her by Patrik Jandak, had appeared in a calendar honouring 14 Vancouver poets, called Hot Sonnet, that I and another ex had produced through Above and Beyond Productions. And we had also both appeared in the anthologies, A Verse Map of Vancouver (Anvil Press, 2009) and Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC (Mothertongue Publishing, 2013). More recently, I had asked Sandy to do an interview on my podcast, Ms Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws on Spotify (2021-2024), but at that point she shared that she had been writing, “very little poetry for the last five years” and had been concentrating on painting. However, she finished by enthusing, “It’s a great idea, what you are doing!”

She was just as enthusiastic, albeit necessarily critical (so wonderful not just to hear gush or see a thumbs up but to hear real engagement), when I showed her a few documentaries I had been making in 2025 with my Clio Project, an initiative designed to honour the art and lives of women over 65. I wanted her to be part of this vision, suggested visiting her in December to do a shoot and she was excited, but sent reservations couched in the calmest terms possible in her situation: “I hope things will settle down soon…things went a bit sideways as my husband Bill is now in hospital” and then, months later, with utterly realistic chagrin, “one thing about Stage 4 cancer is that there is no getting well, just trying to stabilize and achieve quality of life…so I will have to bow out of this project…for now.” And then the generosity of “Very exciting, what you are doing!”

We chatted for a few more months about the widow’s loneliness, the continuance of art, the beauties of Pender Island. The last thing she said to me when I sent her Lyn Westfall’s documentary was, “That’s a good one, Catherine.” And I knew her praise did not come easily and that maybe I was still the young, unformed one in her mind, but I was happy we finally had this bond, knowing we were both passionate about forms, about living our lives fully, about creating community in our tiny fierce world of makers.

Here’s one of my favorite poems by Sandy Shreve, a glosa that responds to PK Page, who in her own glosa was responding to Elizabeth Bishop. That’s how it is, or how it needs to be, that passing and passing and passing down.

 

BIRD WATCHER AT DORCHESTER CAPE
Sandy Shreve
From:   Belonging. Sono Nis Press, 1997.

But occasionally, when he least expects it,
in the glass of a wave a painted fish
like a work of art across his sight
reminds him of something he doesn't know
              "Poor Bird" P.K. Page

How could she miss them, pale tan on the mud flats
A myriad of peeps here somewhere, come from away to feed
she stands at the edge of a gravel road straining to see
The tide nibbling in and the bright bluebells
twitching with Queen Anne's lace in the wind, at first
fill up her eyes     Then the land begins to lift
Again and again, all those birds, blurred air, composed profusion
the perfect music of a fugue, this synchronicity
in a winged field      Something inside her shifts
But occasionally, when she least expects it

a lone sandpiper stays behind, too intrigued
with its small patch of tidal land to fly
off in the hope of finding what it already has
Dashing this way and that, it drills in familiar ground
each spot offering something
undiscovered, something the whole flock missed
The solitaire scatters prints along the shore
until suddenly, in the wash of the oncoming tide
it halts     Stares at the water as if
in the glass of a wave a painted fish

appears, brilliant fins stiff in its liquid home
An exotic body rising from the depth of somewhere else
and with each breath of the bay, drifting closer
to the sandpiper's feet, a colourful puzzle
She observes the stillness of the bird
imagines it will soon take flight
half hoping it will find
its designated place in the flock, returning now
a curvature of movement, brown and white
like a work of art across her sight

a restless sketch, sunlit into diamonds and topaz
the radiance luring her gaze away
from the odd sandpiper enchanted, she thinks, by the tide
She blinks in disbelief at jewelled air
the like of which she's never seen before
The glitter flutters briefly, then the show
dissolves to camouflage     Her heart beats wild as wings
when the solitaire breaks its trance to race
straight into the multitude, whose safe shadow
reminds her of something she doesn't know

 

 

 

 

Catherine Owen, born and raised Vancouverite, is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and prose, including her latest, Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024) which was nominated for the Al Purdy and the Robert Kroetsch prizes. Her first book was published 28 years ago and she still keeps given'r from her 1905 house in Edmonton, where she also teaches form poetry, edits, reviews, juries, runs a performance series, and creates documentaries (and gardens). This Fall, Wolsak & Wynn will release her hybrid-memoir, 16 Homes.