Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Catherine Fisher, who lives in Newport, writes both poems and YA fantasy novels. In poetry, she has won the Cardiff International Poetry Prize, while with her novels she has been shortlisted for many awards including the Smarties Books Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Children's Fiction. Her futuristic novel Incarceron was published to widespread praise in 2007, winning the Mythopoeic Society of America's Children's Fiction Award and selected by The Times as its Children's Book of the Year.

SHEENAGH: I think you've said before that you, like me, are one of those who can't write poetry and prose at the same time because the rhythms are so different; the poems just come out prosy. Do you consciously think yourself into a poetry or prose mood? When something starts to germinate in your mind, how soon do you know which form it's going to take? And what would you do if, say, you're in the middle of a novel and you suddenly get a really good impetus for something that just has to be a poem?

CATHERINE: It's hard to write both at once; sometimes it works. I don't really do anything consciously with writing- it's all just spur of the moment. If a line comes to mind which is quite obviously a line of verse- or even an image or idea, I try to jot it down and keep it to work on. Whether a vaguer idea will turn out prose or poetry sort of depends on the size of the thing- having written many novels I know now when it's going to be a big story, with lots of complications, rather than a more stripped-down subject for a poem or a series of poems.
    If I'm in the middle of a novel and I get an idea for a poem I usually just do it, or at least make notes about it. A novel takes about a year to write so if you wait you'll have lost it... which happens sometimes.

SHEENAGH: Your poetry is basically aimed at adults while your novels have been marketed to children and young adults. Granted, the divide between YA and "adult" books is a bit artificial, I read your YA fantasy novels with pleasure and I'm sure an intelligent child would like your poems. But have you ever been tempted to write "adult" novels, or poems specifically aimed at children?

CATHERINE: I think I just write the books for me now- I don't really think about the YA or adult thing, and as you say, the adult readership for YA is huge. The only thing that makes the books YA really is that the protagonists tend to be young people- having said that, most of the other characters are adults and they are just as important. In the current set, The Chronoptika books, Jake and Sarah are the nominal heroes, but then there's Venn, Wharton, David, Maskelyne, a whole host of adults who are almost equally important.
    Having said that, publishers have rather different ideas and don't like too many adult characters. They seem to feel that teens only like to read about other teens, which I think is untrue. After all, this is the time in life when the adult world is impinging, and teens want to learn about it. When I was that age there were no YA books really, so I went from Enid Blyton etc straight to Sherlock Holmes and plenty of sf. And that was good.
    So if I wrote an adult book it wouldn't be that different. Though of course there is the bitter truth that so called adult fiction is taken more seriously by critics and pays better. But also it is true that the YA market seems to be prospering, even in these tough times.

SHEENAGH: "I think I just write the books for me now- I don't really think about the YA or adult thing" - That's always been my impression; your books certainly never talk down to young readers. But I know that some of your UK titles have been altered in US editions, because US publishers haven't trusted their readers to understand the British titles (though why Crown of Acorns became Circle of Stones still baffles me; have US children really never seen acorns?) Have you ever encountered any other sort of intervention like this? I'm thinking not only of how you always credit readers with the brains to know or look up what's new to them, but also of times when you've tackled emotionally difficult material - killed off parents, allowed siblings to admit to serious resentment of each other, or allowed your young 18th and 19th-century girl protagonists to be at fairly explicit risk from men, though luckily they're pretty good at taking care of themselves. Has a publisher or editor ever tried to get you to simplify or tone anything down?

CATHERINE: The Crown of Acorns title change baffled me too. Circle of Stones is so bland! I don't really understand some of these changes. The funniest one was the change of The Oracle, a title which was considered too baffling for US kids and finally became The Oracle Prophecies. Of course. So much simpler.
    There are other interventions but they are fairly low-level- mostly questioning word usage, usually because a word can be unfamiliar or idiomatic or mean something else there. I don't think I've ever been asked to tone down content, or had complaints about what goes on in the books- at least not from publishers. Some US librarians have lists which rate you for content.. how much swearing, how much violence etc.
    But I think my books are fairly innocuous compared to the more realistic YA book. At least fantasy distances violence and danger. The stuff that happens in your own street is probably far more frightening, in real terms.

SHEENAGH: "As for poetry, I hope anyone can read it. " - we both know they can't, though. Or at least, they tell themselves they can't. Many adults, certainly, seem to have a mental block as soon as they see what someone described to me as "those little short lines" and to assume it won't be for them. I would hope that doesn't apply so much to children, but I haven't your experience with them. Do you see any way to overcome this reaction of fear, antipathy, whatever one calls it? Particularly if, as I suspect, it isn't natural to children but develops as they grow older.

CATHERINE: I don't think young children have learned an antipathy to poetry. On the contrary they love it, but for them it is an oral art, like singing or stories. Joining in, chanting along, having fun with words.
    I think maybe children learn to fear poetry because somehow they pick up this idea that it is 'difficult', not straightforward, that it doesn't tell a story and hides its meaning in metaphors. So it becomes a puzzle to be solved.
    Having said that, of course poetry is difficult, because it's dense, compacted, packed tight. It's taken neat. Or, in another image which I'm playing with at the moment, a poem is like one of those pellets that owls regurgitate. You have to break it open and pick out all the bones and fur to find out what the poet has been digesting.
    Good teachers can make it loved, but many teachers find it difficult too, I suspect.
    I think the only way to keep that fresh response of the young is to read the stuff aloud, which transforms it. As a kid I chanted reams of poetry to myself because I loved the sounds, the rhythms, the rhyme. As well as the sharp, brilliant visual flashes you get.
    Teaching is hard and in these days there is little room for fun. But the child who 'gets' poetry will never lose their hunger for it..

SHEENAGH: Like many YA writers, you are deeply rooted in mythology: Welsh, Egyptian, Norse, among others. And this often goes hand in hand with the futuristic element: ancient archetypes and themes play out in a new guise for a new age. I've noticed that your dystopian futures, as in the Chronoptika books, tend to be materialistic, practical, cleansed of myth, which fortunately reasserts itself like Nature resisting the pitchfork. Again, is that conscious or just the way you naturally see the world? And do you think it would actually happen? (I'm recalling Terry Nation saying gloomily that he couldn't imagine a future that wasn't basically dystopian.)

CATHERINE: Myth is fascinating and eternal. One reason I enjoy it and use it a lot is that these are well tried and tested stories; there is something in them that goes deep, however often they are re-interpreted. And they do go well with the futuristic.
    I have done a few dystopias and yes they tend to be materialistic places, and the reason for that, I suppose is that it's my worst nightmare- places where stories and the past have been obliterated. But the stories always come back. In Incarceron, for example, the prisoners have a whole secret mythology of a prisoner called Sapphique, who once escaped, and will one day return. The really fun part for me is creating this backstory and playing with mythic tropes, writing whole sections of scripture and poetry about him or by him, while keeping the reader wondering if in fact he ever really existed.

SHEENAGH: Following on from that, one mythology I haven't particularly noticed surfacing in your work is Irish, and I know you have Irish ancestry. Any plans in that direction?

CATHERINE: Ah. I love the Irish stuff. It has a peculiar, raw savage feel. It's different to the Welsh stories which are softer - the myths of Cuchulain etc seem primal and unrefined. To start using them would be a challenge- and somehow dangerous, as if I would be handling powerful, unstable dynamite..
    So I have no plans just yet in fiction, but certain poems may happen, as a way into it.
    I don't think humanity will ever lose stories. At the moment we seem to have more of them than ever, and everything is always being reworked. Sometimes I don't like the results, but I like the obsessive need for it.

SHEENAGH: Your little poem pamphlet Folklore (Smith/Doorstop Books 2003) was very much about that, how folk motifs survive by being reworked in each generation. When you say "sometimes I don't like the results", are you thinking of anything in particular?

CATHERINE: Well, I'm being purist here. I love the idea that stories are being constantly reworked. But that means writers can- and do- take liberties with the characters and re-arrange them in new scenarios and different adventures. Which is fine, as long as there is some integrity with the originals. I suppose I'm thinking mostly of TV and film adaptions- things like the recent Jason, and Merlin, which I don't tend to watch because the modern idiom and 21st century responses of the characters irritate me. But then it's always been like that. I bet there was some crusty old scribe back in the 1100s complaining that Chretien de Troyes' new version of the grail story totally wrecked the original, and that things didn't really happen like that.
    The great thing about myths is there is no original and there is no really.
    This impinges a bit on fan fiction, but of course with that there is an original.

SHEENAGH: Talking of which, I know you've encouraged children in the past to write fan fiction based on your books, particularly when they wanted the story to continue and you wanted to go off and write something else! Did you ever read any of it, and if so, how did you react? I know there was a fair bit, and I'm guessing a lot of it revolved round Getting People Together who didn't explicitly come together in the books - young readers don't half want true love to triumph, whatever else happens...

CATHERINE: I gather there is quite a bit of fan fiction around, especially about the worlds of Incarceron and Sapphique but I have never gone looking for it and haven't read much. I have no objection to people writing it as long as it's clear it has nothing to do with me. As you say, I imagine it's mostly people playing with the characters' relationships and re-arranging them to their own liking, or inventing new adventures for them. I understand the desire to do that, if you are so in love with that world or those characters that you just want more and more of them, and the author is too busy (or disinclined) to provide it. Also it can be a way into writing, as copying paintings is for artists.
    But I think in the long run it leads to sterility, and writers have to be brave and take the step away and invent their own stories.
    By the way, earlier I said that with fan fiction there is an original, and that's true, in that say, the book of Incarceron exists. But looking at it in more detail, even that book is actually an assemblage, an artwork created out of thousands of bits of things- paintings, poems, books I've read, films, places I know, and many more tinier, intangible things. Only the way it's put together and expressed is truly mine.
So maybe, even with fiction, there is no ultimate original.
    Which doesn't stop me feeling possessive about the work and uneasy about what happens to it out there..

SHEENAGH: Talking of originals, both your poems and your novels sometimes use historical characters, but very differently. When, in your poems, you get into a past voice, like James Hartshill in The Unexplored Ocean, or the two adversaries in "Incident at Conwy", it seems you're trying to get as close as possible to the reality of being them. But with the historical characters in your novels, like John Dee, Maskelyne, John Wood of Bath, it seems the first thing you do is work free of the reality, changing names and at least lightly fictionalising the character. Why might that be?

CATHERINE: Actually these two examples are quite similar. James Hartshill, for instance, is invented. I wanted to write a set of poems about Cook's voyages and initially tried to use Cook's voice, but that method was full of potential pitfalls. His diaries exist, he was a real person. So I could easily be seen to get things wrong, be inaccurate, and would be constrained by his responses and the things he really did. It was easier to comment on Cook through Hartshill, who can be or say anything I want him to be. He starts off as very young and naive and grows disillusioned.
    So that is very similar to the way I use Jonathon Forest as a fictionalised version of John Wood. Wood was a wonderful man and full of crazy theories, but the demands of fiction meant that his life had to be re-arranged into the pattern I needed. So Forrest is Wood, but not quite.
    For example, Wood actually met a young woman called Sylvia and took her into his household, but she later committed suicide. In my story Crown of Acorns she does not do that.
    It's as if one is writing an alternative form of what happened, or trying to impose pattern, because real lives are so chaotic and random. I think that this is the need underlying most fiction.

SHEENAGH: Many of your YA protagonists, especially the girls, are quite spiky, combative characters. Is that a reaction against the sort of "heroines" you and I mostly had to put up with in the books of our childhood?

CATHERINE: Oh well, we've all cringed at the stereotypes. It is a reaction against them, but in fact I think YA readers- who tend to be mostly girls- now simply expect them. In my teen reading I had no trouble being the boy hero in my mind, but now readers don't have to do that. Things have changed, and that's good...

SHEENAGH: For some reason I've never quite figured out, I found the tree buried upside down in Darkhenge hugely sinister and unsettling! Where did you get the idea for that?

CATHERINE: It is immensely sinister, which is why I love it. It comes from Sea Henge, the neolithic timber circle found on a beach in Norfolk, I think, and which was the subject of a huge row between neopagans and archaeologists. In the centre of the circle was what turned out to be the remains of an upturned tree-trunk. Enigmatic. Unexplained. Just there.
    There is just something so intriguing about that. Such a sense of lost stories and rituals.
    Hence the book's themes of the Unworld, and the shamanic ladder into other dimensions. Incidentally if you are ever in the Fwrrwm in Caerleon they have a modern sculpture there of an upturned tree which is truly tremendous, and maybe a bit like how the original might have looked.

SHEENAGH: A huge row between neopagans and archaeologists sounds such a wonderful scenario, I want to read the book about it! I know you've been very involved with archaeology; its influence is obvious in many of your books. Is there anything else from that arena that you're thinking of writing about? (I bet we could show you some inspirational stuff in Shetland if you ever come up so far!)

CATHERINE: In Darkhenge I did try to convey both sides of that argument- whether to leave the remains in situ and let the sea destroy them, or take up the timbers and preserve them, even though it's the place they surround that's important. By the way, Seahenge by Francis Pryor is probably the book.)
    I love archaeology and especially the Neolithic, which has such fascinating mysteries. What we lack, of course are the stories those people told. And without them we will never understand them, however familiar we become with their material circumstances.
    Imagine trying to understand Christianity without knowing the story of Christ, or Norse myth without Odin, Thor and co...You'd have a vague idea, that's all. Not even any names.
    I'm not planning anything from that far back in the past at the moment though, as my next book is a contemporary one. But that's all top secret yet

SHEENAGH: We'll be waiting with interest…


Catherine's website is here

Poems

The White Ship

The white ship sails all night out of his dreams,
her fierce figurehead drinking the cold sea.
He leans and fingers her smooth, open lips.

Spindles of ice her frosted spars,
sails crumpling, sloughing and filling
with the salt breathing of the wind.

All day he sits, talks, works, and he forgets her,
till in a window or in someone's words
comes sea-glitter, a gull's rebuke,

and in the turning of his head he's back
among creaks and whispers, the rotating wheel
that no-one grasps, the cabin with its lamp

swinging on the outspread charts.
It's those charts he never can remember;
always as he gropes for them they've gone,

leaving a sense of infinite distance;
islands marked with strange calligraphy;
and names, names he almost knows,

that tantalise but just won't come,
so that in songs or a poem's skirl
he tries their echoes over on his tongue.

Each night he journeys on the winter ship,
hands on the ropes, feeling the spray,
living in the cracks between his days.

And where he's sailing to he doesn't know,,
except that it's too late to turn back now;
that here are all the spaces of his art,

the craft he once thought he was master of,
driving him out across an endless sea,
alone under the stars; far from home.

(From Altered States, Seren 1999

Incident at Conwy

During the Wars of the Roses a Lancastrian officer was shot by a marksman stationed on the battlements of Conwy Castle. The river between them was at least half a mile wide. The feat was recorded by several chroniclers.

1. Llewelyn of Nannau

Oh man, you are foolish to wear that surcoat.
the gold and the blue outrage the dull afternoon.
You are a heraldic flicker among the leaves
tempting my pride.
I have not killed men in the stench and fury
of battle only, that I would baulk at this.
I am an archer. I send death winging,
sudden and cold over parapet and fosse;
the lightning that strikes nowhere twice.
I'm too far away to see your pain,
the blood that will sully that bright coat;
too far for the shriek from your lady's arbour.
Nor will imagination spoil my aim.
The taut string creaks against my fingers,
brushes my cheek softly, as I draw back.
My eye is steady down the shaven shaft.
You're a roebuck, a proud stag, a target.
Your words do not goad me, I can't hear what you say.
Your death will be skilfully given, and without rancour.
At least I am not too far from you for that.

2. Rhys ap Gruffudd Coch

The river is wide, and the leaves cover us.
we are safe enough, but they are certainly ready
- each tower and arrowslit is crowded with faces,
and notice the fool on the battlements with his bow.
This castle will drink an oblation of blood
before we break its stone teeth.

That archer has seen me; he lifts his bow.
Well the river will not bleed from his arrow.
Doubtless he would kill me if he could
and boast about it over the spilled wine;
a distant, stout, nameless man
who would never have seen my face.

Then he would thresh about in the straw at night,
seek solace from priests, drink away memory,
but the line would have been thrown between us,
the bright gift passed, that he could not take back.
Look, he draws. If he should strike me down
I will never be so far from him again.

More poems here

And here's an extract from Catherine's ongoing Chronoptika Quartet. This is from the first book in the quartet, The Obsidian Mirror. Gideon is a human boy who was stolen years ago by Summer, the queen of the Shee who live in the wood where "all times are now", and he longs to escape.

The Shee knelt and touched the footprints, sniffed them. Then it raised its hands to its ears. "What is that terrible whining cry?"
    Gideon was wondering that too. "Is it the world freezing up?"
    He had been with them so long, they had taught him to hear as they did. He could hear the cold night coming down, puddles on the gravelled track hardening infinitely slowly, the icy crystals lengthening and creaking to a pitted surface. He could hear the birds edging on their frozen roosts, the blown barbs of their feathers, the blinks of their beady black eyes. He could hear the frost crisp over the windowpanes of Wintercombe.
    But this whine was worse than all of that.
    "Sounds like a human machine," The Shee rose, disgusted.
    Gideon nodded. The creatures' aversion to metal still pleased him, even after all this time. It was their one weakness. The Shee listened, snow dusting its thin shoulders, its moonpale hair glimmering.
    "Summer will want us to investigate." Gideon turned.
    The Shee's eyes went sly. "Enter the Dwelling? Many have tried. Venn is too careful."
    "For you, he is. But I might be able to…"
    "Summer forbids it."
    It was a risk. They were treacherous beings – this one would betray him in an instant. So he said heavily, "You're right. And after all, tonight there's the Feast."
    The creature grinned, as he had known it would. "The Midwinter Feast! I'd forgotten. We must get back."
    Its quicksilver mind would be full instantly of the promise of the music, the terrible, tormenting, fascinating music of the Shee. The music that devoured lives and time and his own humanity, the music that enslaved him and haunted him and that he hungered for like a drug.
    "You go," he said. "I'll come later."
    "I have to bring you. She'll be furious." Its bird-eyes flickered. He saw the small pointed teeth behind its smile.
    "I'll follow you. I just want to see where these prints go."
    It hesitated, tormented. Then nodded. "Very well. But be quick!" It turned, and its patchwork of clothes ebbed colour, a magical camouflage, so that now it wore a suit of ermine and white velvet, the buttons on its coat silver crystals of ice. it stepped sideways, and was gone.

If you're reading this, you've probably already read the first two books in the Chronoptika series, The Obsidian Mirror and The Box of Red Brocade (see links for reviews). Briefly however, for anyone who's not caught up: there is a house called Wintercombe Abbey, in a wood populated by the beautiful but dangerously non-human Shee. The house contains an obsidian mirror, which is a time portal, and a number of ill-assorted persons, not all human and not all from the same time, who have conflicting designs on the mirror. Sarah, from the future, wants to destroy it, having seen what harm it will do there. Venn and Jake want to preserve and use it to rescue loved ones dead or trapped in the past. Maskelyne wants it for purposes unspecified but probably to do with power. Others in the house are uncommitted.

The first book was set in winter, the second in spring, and in the third we have arrived at Midsummer Eve. Those who've read them will recall also that the first, which was much concerned with Jake and his missing father, was haunted by quotes from, and references to, Hamlet, while the second, in which the corruption of power emerged more strongly, was similarly haunted by Macbeth. But behind both was another Shakespearean influence plainly lurking, that of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in this volume it comes into its own.

Those who use the mirror are now getting more skilled at it, in particular Moll, the Victorian urchin whom Jake met in vol 1 and who makes a welcome reappearance here. And the fact that they can now do more of what they want means they have to think harder about whether they should. Several of the characters, in this volume, are troubled by conscience and conflicting duties, and those with dual natures, like Venn and Gideon, are faced with choices between them. In this the volume mirrors its Shakespearean inspiration: the Dream is all about choices and loyalties.

As usual, the action moves between different times and locations: the Abbey, the unfathomable Wood that itself contains worlds, and a very believable and exciting Paris at the time of the Terror. And as usual, I read it far too fast because it was so gripping: the lure of "what happens next" was as strong as ever. Now I'm going back to savour the actual writing, in particular the mesmerising evocation of the Shee and their Wood:

The Shee came down round him in clouds. He watched how some of them stayed butterflies and how others transformed, wholly or in part, to the pale tall people he had seen before, their clothes now brilliant scarlets and turquoises and oranges. With soft rustles and crackles their bodies unfolded. Abdomen and antennae became skin and smile.

Quite apart from being invested in the characters and what happens to them – Gideon, in some danger at the end of the volume, Wharton, looking more and more like the representative of human decency, the irrepressible Moll - the vividly described locations make this perhaps Fisher's most gripping project for some time. Only one to go now, and it's beginning to sound as if that one will have to travel, at least for part of the time, into the far future from which Sarah comes and which we haven't yet seen first-hand. Can't wait.

Let them enjoy their little day,
Their humble bliss receive.
Oh! do not lightly take away
The life thou canst not give!

Thomas Gisborne, in that verse, was exhorting his reader to avoid treading on a worm. Anyone who takes it on himself to abridge a human life had better have a bloody good reason, ie one very much better than profit, spite or possessiveness. I can just about see a justification, in a case where someone's life does far more harm than good in the world, particularly if it threatens the lives of others.

But Anne Cluysenaar was a witty, warm, cosmopolitan woman and a thought-provoking poet. I met her several times and always had fun in her company. If she'd died in the way of nature; well she was 78; one would boast, with Chaucer's young drunks, "we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth" and then realise ruefully that there's nothing to be done. But she was, apparently, murdered, and that makes me very angry. Do we get so much time here, that we can afford to lose any? She was still writing, she published a book this year and I don't suppose her friends and family were at all ready to lose her. I'd need a lot of convincing that she ever did more harm than good, or that whoever assumed this right was able to give the world anything as worthwhile as "Whatever we're made of, it wants to know/
how it came to be what it is." Here's the rest of that poem of hers:

Hunting the Higgs

No wonder they love a laugh, the physicists.
What ever they find or don't, it's OK.
Symmetries of the world just remnants
of those which, if perfect, would only have led to

no world at all – anti-matter, matter
would have cancelled each other out. Maybe.
Or maybe not, if the theory is at fault.
And if it is? More exciting still.

Whatever we're made of, it wants to know
how it came to be what it is. In us,
for a while at least, the stuff of stars
gets a glimpse of its own precarious life.

Like a single life, that will soon be gone.
Universes before, maybe, or after
our own, we won't ever get to explore.
They make up what is, though. And here we are!

So I haz a new collection of poems out. They were written, mostly, while I still had a base in both Cardiff and Shetland, and are very much about leaving one place and becoming at home in another. Sort of Cardiff to Shetland with occasional stops-off in Norway (holidays) and the sixteenth century (Francis Walsingham's spy operation rendered in sestinas). From Seren, here. As you would gather from the title, they're a bit mortality-haunted. Here's one:

Come and Go

He has chosen, far nearer the end
than the beginning, to live
where, every day, he can watch the land

come and go, each time gleaming as if
it were new made. Sandbars shoulder
into the sun, their whereabouts too brief

to map, never drying out. Under
its pulsing skin the sea echoes
sunlight, shadows the clouds, goes undercover

in mist. What it is to be bodiless,
boneless, to reshape, to fill
with yourself the moulds of coves and bays,

take yourself back. He walks mile
after mile, blanking aches, stays up late
in the blue half-light, resists the pull

of sleep while he can, while his sight
still serves him, before that jerry-build,
his body, can no longer house a spirit
still nowhere near done with the world.

If the teachers liked teaching once, they definitely don’t any more. […] They trip up, we laugh. They cry, and it’s even funnier. […] We make fun of their twitches and the way they speak, that’s if we let them speak at all. […] Because this is war. […] Although when I say we, I don’t actually mean me and Jess. We always wear the right uniform and do our ties up properly. We bring our homework in on time and only ever talk in class with a teacher we’re not afraid of.

The way this passage subverts and undermines its original premise is typical of Rhian Elizabeth’s debut novel. Hannah, its narrator and protagonist, announces herself from the start as an unreliable narrator: a potential author of fiction, indeed. Having done so, she then proceeds to speak, for the most part, very openly and honestly, so you forget for long stretches that, apart from being a child, she also sees herself as a writer who embroiders and riffs on reality. She pulls this trick several times in the narrative, recounting something as if it had actually happened, before making it clear that this was in fact only one of several possible outcomes and not the one that actually came to pass.

“The truth”, whatever that may be, is a key theme of the novel; most of Hannah’s problems with adults are caused by their elastic definition of truth. They cannot tell childish fantasies from lies, yet themselves distort or ignore the truth when it does not suit them, like the grandmother evading a question about someone’s terminal illness by pretending her hearing aid is on the blink.

Hannah’s first-person narrative begins when she is aged five and ends when she is sixteen. First person in a very young voice is hard to pull off, especially when, as seems to be all but compulsory these days, the novel is in the present tense. If you write first person in past tense, you can have it both ways: write from the perspective of the child that was, but with the vocabulary of the adult you now are, and no reader thinks it odd – it is, after all, how most of the greatest child voices in literature were created. But with the present tense, we can only suppose it is All Happening as we read, and that is more problematic. When I came across the first age marker that told me Hannah was five, I was downright surprised; I had already been listening to her voice for two chapters and it wasn’t the voice of a five-year-old, even a clever one. She could think like that, but she couldn’t possibly formulate her thoughts in some of the ways this voice does.

This did cause me some problems near the start, though fewer than it might have done because the writing is extremely assured, quite unusually so for a first novel, and tends to carry you along with it. By the next time marker – going to comprehensive school at 11 - Hannah’s age has caught up with her voice and the problem disappears. The teenage argot and behaviour of Hannah and her best friend Jess are observed with forensic and often very funny accuracy; young readers (and this novel should appeal to both an adult and young-adult readership) will be cackling, while readers with teenagers of their own will be tearing their hair and longing, at intervals, to slap the pair of them. Though often infuriating, they are so basically bright and harmless that one cannot be indifferent to what happens to them, particularly when self-destructive urges seem to have taken them over. The downward spiral they get into is, again, very subtly observed, so that, for instance, the decline in their standards of personal hygiene hits us as forcibly as it does the young narrator in one of her more lucid moments.

Another instance of this subtlety in the writing struck me in the account of the school outing to a play in Cardiff. I know that this event, though not, thank heaven, its riotous outcome, is based on fact, because I saw that very production there myself. At first, it seemed odd that Hannah is not sorry to see the play interrupted; at this point she is very keen on English and, unlike most of her classmates, has read it. Only later did it occur to me that the play bears on her life and contains a character she might well wish to see silenced. There is absolutely no mention of this in the account of the incident; the reader is left to figure it out in a way many writers would not have had the confidence to do, especially at such an early stage of their career.

Here, the author has taken a real event and transmuted it into the material of fiction. As the novel ends, Hannah in unreliable-narrator mode challenges us to wonder if she will do so, or is already doing so:

It took me a while but I know now that words are nasty little things and I’m done with them. And it’s funny, isn’t it? I did warn you. I told you right from the start that I’m the girl who lies, so, really, you probably shouldn’t believe a single word I’ve said.

I think this novel’s title does it less than justice. There is a reason for the clear reference to a birth weight, but as an attention-grabber, an incentive to pick up the book, I should say it was a non-starter – indeed to some it may signal “mum-lit”, which could not be less accurate (mother’s place, in this book, is firmly in the wrong). It deserved a more memorable, unusual title, perhaps with a dash of the humour that never deserts Hannah. The writing is confident, assured and doesn’t sound like anyone else I can think of offhand.

Like his previous collections, this one contains much journeying and much fascination with the way words work when arranged in patterns. It also reminds me of an earlier collection, Dragons, in that you can see the influence of Welsh topography and history becoming stronger in it. Above all it is notable, like all his work, for two characteristics that are not found together all that often, but that work together very well: accurate observation and creative speculation. He is very good, in other words, at both pinpointing in words exactly what he sees and imagining what he has never seen. The first quality brings a mountain to life in "Walker": sheep on its steep slopes

canted to one side,
trotting on their adjustable legs
till my upright seemed askew

and its wetness:

my feet pressed
a black oil from the spongy surface.
The hollows bristled with reeds.
One might drown there, high above the earth

- true, and quite disconcerting when one comes to think about it. The other side of him is at work in "The Man in the Moon", based on Francis Godwin's 17th-century prose fantasy of lunar exploration (the work Cyrano de Bergerac parodied). When the poem's protagonist invents goose-powered flight and tests it out with a lamb aboard, we not only see the lamb:

I tied him to the frame. The geese flapped.
the rag-doll face showed nothing.
A bleat blew away,

and for the space of two fields
he treadled the air

but also feel his own later ascent beyond weather and gravity and see earth from a new angle, the "pear with a bite out of one side" that is Africa. The same curiosity about the different enables him, in "Familiar Spirit", to inhabit the ghost that is now uncomfortable with thoughts of the humanity from which it has loosed itself:

that sugar-mouse flesh I had once,
and its hangers-on of arms and legs,
hair, toenails, parents, siblings

The title sequence, "Muscovy", chronicles another journey that must have felt fantastic in its day, the embassy to Moscow on which Andrew Marvell served in 1663-4. Again it is the observational and imaginative detail that brings it alive: the cold that "finds you in your sleep", the sauna where you bake "till your hair hurts". Its unnamed narrator (not Marvell) is by turns bemused and amused, and the humour which has always featured in Francis's poetry also surfaces in the word-games of this collection, like "Enigma Variations", an alphabet whose every verse analyses a letter by omitting it, and "Poem in Sea", whose lines each consist of three words or part-words beginning with s, e and a. Somewhat on the same plan is "Was", a poem less about the past and memory than about the way these ideas are constructed, the way smells, tastes, habits become iconic for an era:

Cabbage was cooked everywhere at once.
Curry was pacified in its circle of rice.
Wine was a sweet gold opened at Christmas.

The TV was afloat on a sea of fuzz.
It was switched on early to let it breathe.
The end of it was a diminishing star.

It's possible that those who never watched TV in the 50s and early 60s will miss just how accurate and evocative this is, which would be a pity. But this poet's curiosity, keen eye and verbal exuberance should entertain and absorb most readers.

Catherine Fisher's many fans will be delighted to hear that her latest, The Obsidian Mirror, is the start of a sequence. Fisher works differently, I think, in standalone books and sequences. The standalones, like Crown of Acorns, Darkhenge and Corbenic, tend to focus on some deep-seated trauma in the young protagonist's mind; he or she will, via the medium of fantasy, find some way of living with reality. The journey is essentially a foray through an individual mind. In the sequences, Fisher can show her immense craft at world-building (as in the two Incarceron novels, where a misguided attempt to halt change and development has resulted in a world of fake surfaces and hidden realities rather like a film set). In these sequences, although the protagonist will still have his/her own issues to work out, there is also a whole universe of equally fascinating minor characters with their own journeys, sometimes parallel, sometimes interlocking. They are already emerging here as they did in The Book of the Crow, her last work on this scale, and I'm already particularly invested in Molly, a Victorian street urchin of immense character and resourcefulness, of whom we shall surely see more in the next volume.

The workings of time have always been a fascination of Fisher's; in Corbenic, Cal gets off at the wrong station and finds himself in Arthurian times, while in Crown of Acorns three stories, from different times in history, run parallel. But this is the first book of hers I recall in which the possible mechanics of time travel have played any part. The mirror of the title is a way of travelling in time, and both a man, Venn, and a boy, Jake, are trying to use it for personal ends, while another character, from a different time, is trying to destroy it for altruistic reasons. At least, that's how things seem now; anyone acquainted with Fisher's ability to produce plot twists that are both credible and surprising will be wary of coming to any definite conclusion on motives for some time yet.

Another Fisher signature which I am personally delighted to see reappearing is her fascination with cold. Anyone who recalls the gripping imaginative prose of the Snow-Walker trilogy will be happy to find themselves back in the depths of winter, and these descriptions are among the most memorable passages in the book: the moon "a silver fingernail through the branches", the snow that "fell in slow diagonals, twirling out of the dark". One of the most striking moments is when the wood-dwellers emerge:

The Shee were flocking from the wood. They carried bells and chimes, many beat drums and the deep throbbing rhythm made starlings rise from the trees and call to each other across the sky. The snow had stopped falling; now it lay deep and still and the clouds were clearing. High above, like a dust of diamonds on black velvet, the stars were coming out, sherds and slivers of brilliance, eerie over the frozen Wood and the blue-white hummocks of the lawns.

As usual, the narrative impulse was so strong that I devoured the thing in a ridiculous hurry and will need to re-read. But I'm already completely hooked. The sequence is currently set to comprise hopefully four books, possibly three. The more the better, I say.

Stupid deaths, stupid deaths,
Hope next time it's not you.

The above is of course the jingle of Death, in his slot in Horrible Histories exploring gruesome and unlikely ends. I don't suppose this was in Meredith's mind when he chose his title, but it occurs to me whenever Wil Daniel is exercising his pub quiz talent for citing examples of the same. Nor are the only examples historical, like Aeschylus (brained by a falling tortoise) and Henry 1 (surfeit of lampreys). In the course of the novel, a man falls unaccountably from a bridge; another drowns because his friends don't know the one thing about him that would tell them he was in trouble, while a third troubles the coroner as a result of a bizarre shooting. Not to mention Wil himself, constantly rolling cigarettes while dying of lung cancer, as stupid a death as one could well imagine.

This novel is full of trajectories (balls, arrows, stones), which may be launched by humans but are then often unpredictable and out of their control, and journeys which frequently don't go where they meant to either. There is more than a hint, indeed, that the only sure end of all these journeys is death, and that, this being so, it is the time spent in motion, rather than the end of it, that matters.
( more behind cut )

Mike Thomas is a serving police officer in Cardiff. His debut novel, Pocket Notebook, was published by Heinemann in 2010. It tells the dark but often comic story of Jacob Smith, a troubled and unorthodox policeman who uses his police notebook for the unauthorised purpose of chronicling his spiralling breakdown. Pocket Notebook was named one of the nine ‘Hot Books’ to watch out for at the 2009 London Book Fair and was on the 2010 Wales Book of the Year Long List.

In this excerpt, Jake has been suspended, and has no business being on patrol. But he goes anyway, into streets which he no longer sees in quite the same way as anyone else...

"What you've done here is just the start," I say, moving closer. "It's just a few small steps to a life of crime, boy. Possibly worse. You could end up as a threat to the security of the country. It's lucky I got to you so quickly. To nip it in the bud."
       "It's just spraying a wall..." one of them mutters, eyeing me with an odd expression.
       "Right", I say. "You've asked for it." I whip out the old Fixed Penalties, ask their names, addresses, dates of birth. The boxes of the pro forma aren't big enough for all the details but I write them down anyway. Fill in three of them as best I can, flip the top copy off each, hand one to each of the artistes.
       "What's this for?" Carrier Bag asks, looking at the chitty with a mystified expression.
       "A fine," I tell them. "For criminal damage."
       "But it's a parking ticket," he says, wrinkling his nose.
       "Don't be clever with me!" I yell, then clench my jaw as they look at each other; look at me. Start giggling. Cheeky little bastards.
       "Come on," Carrier Bag says to his chums. "Let's chip. This dude's a freak."
       My fingers toy with the mouse gun through the fabric of my cargos. I feel the muzzle, the trigger guard. The handle with its magazine of nine-millie bullets. "Laugh all you want, boys," I tell them as they shuffle towards the main drag. "You won't be laughing when you've got to find eighty quid each for those fines, yeah? Ha! Yeah? Are you listening to me?"
       They disappear around the corner. I hear screams of laughter. [...] Another small incident taken care of for the greater good. I pull out my cigar tin, select the half-smoked reefer, light it and take a long drag. I hold my breath, lean against the wall. Exhale. Nice. Very, very nice. Just chill and smoke and work out what you need to do next, Jake. I finish the spliff, stumble out of the alleyway.
       My face hurts and it takes a minute for me to realise I'm grinning uncontrollably. I really can't relax my cheeks or lips. Not to worry. Adds to the agreeable air. The smiling, helpful policeman. I nod at a couple more pensioners. Wave back at a bus full of primary school children, forget to stop waving even after the bus has driven off and it's just me shuffling down the street with my arm in the air.

( Interview and links behind cut )

Leslie Norris was a fine Welsh poet and short story writer who lived and taught for many years in America, at the Brigham Young University. He's one of those writers whose work is hard to find onlne, but the poem here, "Christmas Day", demonstrates among other things how important animals were to him. He died in 2006 and the university where he taught has now brought out a double number of their semi-annual publication Literature and Belief (vols 29 and 30.1., eds Daniel Westover and Jesse S Crisler) devoted to him. Most of it is interview transcripts, critical articles on him and unpublished poems, but some folk who'd known him were asked to contribute and not being really a Lit Crit writer I sent them a poem, which I chose because Leslie was extremely fond of animals and birds and often wrote about them - he has a memorable description of a barn owl in the poem of that name, "a small/Fur mitten inexplicably upright/And hissing like a kettle".

The poem I sent is about a polecat ferret, because I think he'd have admired her as much as I did. Here it is:

The Madonna of the Rocks

She was in a narrow crevice
on Eshaness; she looked up
as they looked down

into a small, savage, pure white face
to take the breath away.
Lifting her lip

over tiny ivory knives, keeping
her kits behind her, she stood
her ground, staring

defiance at the giant faces
who could not tell her
they too were parents,

could only admire how she spat
come on if you think you're hard enough
at Herod's army.