Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week I want to look at the poetry

of Salima Hill and one particular collection by her, which is called Menu Feed Pigeons

and was published in 2021. And one of the reasons I became aware of this is I went to the

live presentation of the forward poetry prize in which the poets read from their nominated works.

This was just a couple of years ago and the reason that Salima Hill stuck in my mind from that

evening is that she wasn't there and someone else read from her collection, Menu Feed Pigeons

and they intimated that she was not a big fan of poetry readings. So I was intrigued and I

read some of the stuff she said about this, which I thought was interesting. She said that at

poetry readings, stuff like, and I quote, carefully balanced line breaks and patiently maneuvered

stanza breaks all disappear. So you don't notice the technical skill of the written poem when

it's been read out loud is her theory and also you know how I go on to you in these podcasts about

the voice of the poem and not mistaking that with the voice of the poet. So often poets use various

devices to not quite be themselves in the poem. It gives a more license to say and do

other things. They take on a sort of persona for the purpose of that poem or that collection of

poems and she thinks that seeing a poet read aloud kills that somewhat. She says it suggests that

the reader we have before us is the first person protagonist of the poem that she is reading.

The elaborately created fiction is shattered, which I had never thought of before but I suppose

if the poet is standing there reading first person poetry, you can forget the whole concept of

the voice of the poem, the persona, etc. Anyway, this book menu for pigeons is a collection of

sequences of poems. What she does in this Salima Hill is that she has very short poems and she'll

have a little seven or eight or more pages of those poems on that theme and then she'll move on

to another sequence and the sequence I've picked is actually 49 pages of very short poems, usually

...