Next year sees the publication of my third collection of poetry with Bloodaxe Books, The Day Hospital. The poems are all monologues, in the voices of elderly psychiatric patients, most of them immigrants, four of them the grown-old children of parents killed in Nazi-occupied Europe. I used to be a psychiatric nurse in London, and the book is a fictionalized portrayal of some of the people I cared for. In fact, one man I nursed, who had left his widowed mother in Germany to come and work in London, and who never recovered from her subsequent murder in the camps, was the catalyst for the whole project.

The man, 85, was mute, and schizophrenic. Over a period of a couple of years or so at the end of his life, we became very close. That is, we had short conversations. He began to tell me about his nightmares, and the guilt he carried. At his death, as a very young poet, I felt a responsibility to write about his life—to give him the voice that had been robbed from him by grief. I tried. I failed. I tried and failed better, as Beckett might have said. Finally, a decade later, I wrote the poem. Once it was written, other ‘voices’ came—clear, genuine, un-negotiable. It was as if I was listening to dictation and had only to transcribe. Those came to be the monologues of The Day Hospital. The experience of writing them changed me profoundly.

This year I became poet in residence at The Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs near Rome. I’ve found that this year, finally, I’ve laid to rest anxieties regarding how much I’m writing, whether it will be recognized, shortlisted, and so on. Being a poet and being a hermit are similar callings, it turns out. Both demand a certain surrender. Both involve some kind of renunciation of the material world. As a poet, your first task is to accept your invisibility; to write without worrying about readership or publisher. The second is to accept you have minimal control over what you produce and when, or even the form (which content should dictate). The third is to make sure you have unobserved space to listen, in silence and humility, for the poem to create itself. The Day Hospital being born helped teach me this—I’ve never felt more of an instrument of something beyond my control.

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Sally Read’s first collection The Point of Splitting (Bloodaxe, 2005) was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh prize for best first collection. Her second collection, Broken Sleep, came out in 2009 and her work was recorded for The Poetry Archive in the same year. Her work has been extensively translated into Italian by Andrea Sirotti and Loredana Magazzeni. Read, an ex-psychiatric nurse, is based in Santa Marinella, Rome, where she is Poet in Residence at The Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs, and in Bungay, Suffolk. Her third collection, The Day Hospital, is due out with Bloodaxe in 2012.

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This blog is part of the 'Looking Back Looking Forwards' series edited by Fiona Robyn between the 1st and 7th of January. What did we learn about writing and about ourselves in 2011? How will we use this knowledge in 2012? What do we hope for? Do join us and write your own post, tagged with "Looking Back Looking Forwards" (don't forget the quotation marks & capitals). Read other's posts here (or by clicking on the tag). I'll be featuring a small selection of your blogs during the week. Enjoy.