The Watching Stair
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“Be consumed. Lost and in perfect control.” Diana Hendry’s advice to a piano-player captures well the sense conveyed by her poems, intense lightings-up of very accurately-seen emotional and imaginative states, but always with important larger questions waiting behind them. These are accessible, highly intelligent, wide-ranging poems that have a wonderful psychological truthfulness, particularly about relations between mother and daughter, but then go beyond the individual situation to become a meditation on meaning in the face of mortality. As she says in another poem: “What to do with the smallness of my life/ is such an enormous question.”
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“Be consumed. Lost and in perfect control.” Diana Hendry’s advice to a piano-player captures well the sense conveyed by her poems, intense lightings-up of very accurately-seen emotional and imaginative states, but always with important larger questions waiting behind them. These are accessible, highly intelligent, wide-ranging poems that have a wonderful psychological truthfulness, particularly about relations between mother and daughter, but then go beyond the individual situation to become a meditation on meaning in the face of mortality. As she says in another poem: “What to do with the smallness of my life/ is such an enormous question.”
Wind, go easy
On the apple tree at my gate
So that my daughter,
When she arrives, late
As usual, will be
Welcomed
By open arms of blossom.
Published: 14 September 2018
ISBN: 978-1-905208-41-8
Pages: 77
“Be consumed. Lost and in perfect control.” Diana Hendry’s advice to a piano-player captures well the sense conveyed by her poems, intense lightings-up of very accurately-seen emotional and imaginative states, but always with important larger questions waiting behind them. These are accessible, highly intelligent, wide-ranging poems that have a wonderful psychological truthfulness, particularly about relations between mother and daughter, but then go beyond the individual situation to become a meditation on meaning in the face of mortality. As she says in another poem: “What to do with the smallness of my life/ is such an enormous question.”
D.M. Black
The Watching Stair is a wonderfully apt title for this collection. Like the narrator of the title poem, Diana Hendry is ‘intensely good’ at both ‘watching and listening’. The result is a collection of poignant, often wryly humorous and always beautifully-crafted poems that open windows on childhood and old-age.
Vicki Feaver
Diana Hendry grew up by the sea on the Wirral peninsular. The Watching Stair (2018) is her first collection with Worple Press. She’s published five other full collections including The Seed-Box Lantern: New & Selected Poems, two pamphlets – the most recent being Where I Was 2020 – and a joint publication with Douglas Dunn and Vicki Feaver (Second Wind, Saltire Soc). She’s won first prize in the Stroud International Poetry Competition and the Houseman Society Poetry Competition and (with Hamish Whyte) was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship.
Of her forty-plus children’s books, ‘Harvey Angell’ won a Whitbread Award and her YA novel ‘The Seeing’ was short-listed for a Costa Award. Her books have been dramatised and read on BBC radio. Diana has also published a collection of short stories, ‘My Father as an Ant’ and has had a number of stories published in journals and read on the BBC.
She’s been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow based at Edinburgh University; a Writer-in-Residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary and a co-editor of New Writing Scotland. For a number of years she’s reviewed fiction for The Spectator. She’s assistant editor of Mariscat Press and lives in Edinburgh.
