Guest Feature – Zoe Brooks – Patricia M Osborne

I’m delighted to invite poet, Zoe Brooks, over to Patricia’s Pen for the first time. Zoe has come along to chat about inspiration for Fool’s Paradise (Black Eyes Publishing UK) so without further ado, it’s over to Zoe.

Inspiration

Zoe Brooks

I have written poetry for as long as I can remember – my first published poem was in the local parish magazine when I was 8 years old. Over the years I have written about many subjects: nature features prominently and of course relationships, but there is often an awareness of the larger context – of our place in time and history, of myth, politics and spirituality.

In early 1990, only a few months after the overthrow of communism, I visited Prague with a Czech friend of mine. She had fled her country in 1968 and was returning at last. I found the visit profoundly moving, I was an outsider but could see the city through the mirror of my friend’s eyes, albeit darkly. When we got back to England, I started writing Fool’s Paradise – a long poem for voices about three travellers (one returning to his home city), who are guided by a fool they meet on the way.

As is so often the way, I started with one trigger, but then what I wrote decided to go on a different journey. My friend was a Jungian, and we had been talking about the archetype of the Fool and his journey in myth and folklore. I am a historian by training, so Prague’s history as a place of occasional freedom and recurring oppression featured strongly in my thoughts, and not just Prague and the Czech Republic, but also those other cities and countries for which this is true – most obviously now of course Ukraine. As a result, the city that the Fool and his companions travel to is not Prague (for starters the oppressors are still there), but an imaginary combination of many places. Nor is the journey just physical, but metaphysical, it is ‘a dive into the uncanny’ to quote Fiona Sampson.

Structurally Fool’s Paradise is influenced by the verse plays I performed in as a teenager and have loved ever since, the most influential of which was Louis MacNeice’s Dark Tower. I love writing in a number of voices and with a number of characters. How my poetry sounds is very important to me and writing a verse play is like writing a choral piece rather than a solo. Multiple voices allow for multiple views and tensions, plus of course dramatic and narrative progression.

When I started writing Fool’s Paradise in 1990, it came in a rush, red hot. But it took me until 2021 before I was finished with it and it with me. In the meantime I had made my own journey – for fifteen years I owned a farmhouse in the Czech Republic and spent about half of my time there. I sold the house in Jan 2020. Was that a coincidence? I think not.

About Zoe Brooks

Zoe Brooks’ poetry career began when she was discovered by Michael Horovitz of Poetry Olympics in the 1980s. Following post-natal depression, she stopped writing for three decades. She resumed in 2018, since when she has had two collections published – Owl Unbound (published by Indigo Dreams 2020) and Fool’s Paradise (Black Eyes Publishing 2022). She is currently working on a collection about her time spent in a Czech farmhouse.

Zoe also likes to hear and support other people’s work. As a result she is a leading member of the team at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.