“How we spent a lifetime dying / raised our glasses clowning / lest anyone should mark / that we were lost, crying / in the dark.” These lines from her poem On the Death of Stevie Smith show the solemn side of my mother, Peggy Poole, an award-winning poet and broadcaster, who has died aged 91.
She was best known as an unstinting champion of emerging poets: “Without her, I wouldn’t have written poetry,” one of them said. Another explained: “She opened the door to publication.”
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