Headlines from a Bottom Drawer - Poetry by Jane Kingshill

BRUSSELS - April 2, 2015 - PRLog -- ... Moving with assurance between dramatic monologue and evocation of landscape, humour and bleak regret, her voice may echo Shakespeare, nursery rhyme, or everyday conversation, but is always original and unmistakably her own.

Profound, lyrical, and with an artist’s delight in colour and shade, she responds to natural beauty and human pain with imagery that is rarely simple, often startling, and always rewarding.

Jane Kingshill was born on 13th October 1923 in Blackheath, London. Her mother Katharine Moore was the author of several historical studies, and later in life turned to fiction, her novels including the award-winning Summer at the Haven (1985). Her delight in literature and her disciplined professionalism were important influences on Jane’s work.

Shortly after the Second World War, Jane’s twin brother Christopher was drowned in a swimming accident, and two of her three half-sisters also died young, one in her thirties, one in her forties. Loss and mortality shadow much of Jane’s writing, as perhaps they do most poetry. Another theme that came to preoccupy and fascinate her was the Jewish background of her husband Peter, whose family had escaped Nazi Germany. Politically passionate, she was on the side of any dog or underdog, and her social sympathies inform much of her writing. In the late 1950s Jane and Peter moved to Kent, where they lived in an old water-mill on the river Darenth and brought up their three children. The landscape of Shoreham, which in the nineteenth century had inspired the artist Samuel Palmer, was a Valley of Vision to Jane too, her painter’s eye lending her nature poetry a peculiar vividness and intensity. Jane Kingshill died in 2012, three years after Peter’s death. Her poetry survives her.


Foreword

Some poets find success in their early years; others write for a lifetime almost in secret, their work known to just a few admirers. Jane Kingshill did both. A poem she composed at fifteen was published in Cyril Connolly’s prestigious magazine Horizon in 1942, a promising start to any author’s career. After that, however, she followed a career in painting and stage design, and although she never abandoned her poetry, it was only when she was in her sixties that she began to take it seriously as a craft, after joining a poetry workshop at London’s City Literary Institute. The class’s members and its leader Katherine Knight recognized her talent as outstanding. Helped by their encouragement and perceptive criticism, she was able to develop her gift, and from this time onward she wrote more regularly and with more commitment, refining and revising her poems with sustained application. In the 1990s she suffered a nerve injury, and for much of the next twenty years she endured severe pain, becoming largely bedbound.

She worked on her poetry daily, producing manuscripts crisscrossed with rewriting and overwriting, plus the odd scribbled cartoon. They sometimes defeated the author herself when she came to make a fair copy. Her family made periodic efforts at collecting the poems, but typed versions were always subject to copious re-revision, and it was only after her death in 2012 that all her poems were assembled, deciphered, and transcribed. There are several hundred of them, and more exceptional than the quantity is the sheer bravura quality of the poetry, its originality and emotional range, richness of reference, variety of colour and texture. She can pass from dramatic monologue to lyrical evocation of the natural world, from humour to bleak regret, in a voice that may echo nursery rhyme or Shakespeare, popular song, hymn or fragment of overheard conversation, but is always unmistakably her own. It is work that invites and challenges. A competition run by publishers Aquillrelle in 2014 offered publication of a book of selected poems: submission of a sample twenty-five won the prize, and the result is this collection.

http://www.aquillrelle.com/authorjane.htm