I find it takes a few days for an idea to take shape and begin to turn into a poem. At the end of March I was able to write really slowly, taking a few days annual leave that I had left over. I
wanted to write about a story someone told me about a man who looked after an elephant when she retired from a circus. He noticed that wherever the circus stopped the elephant’s skin turned the colour of the local mud. In Dixie and Mr George retire to Whipsnade Zoo I wrote about the places I imagined the circus going to and the colour and texture of the mud. I was struck by how the poem took on lines depending on where I wrote it. During an afternoon in the university library in Cambridge on a very windy day watching people battle past on bikes I wrote about it as if it was under water. It was a real luxury to be able to move around and write from different places on the same poem.
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