It's the best affirmation you could hope for ... '
The article below was corrected on Wednesday October 12 2005. While James Sheard has had a long collection with Sheffield Hallam university, he has at no point been taught by Helen Farish.
Congratulations! How does it feel to receive such recognition for your first collection of poetry?
It's fantastic! I think what's meant the most is having that endorsement from the panel, feeling that my book has been noticed and recognised - it's the best affirmation you could hope for. I think if you get that for a first book you feel an increased confidence in terms of your own writing, which I hope will show in the next one.
So ... are you writing the next book already?
I am, actually. I've been very fortunate: I haven't had that painful silence between books that writers often talk about. I just carried straight on, more or less. Obviously when you finish a book like that and all the editorial work is over there is a kind of exhaustion, but a few weeks later I wrote a poem which I think will be the key poem in the next book, and then a few weeks after that I got the title ... The poems are gathering themselves under the title, which is the reverse of what happened with Intimates, where I wrote all the poems and got the title at the very end.
The title of Intimates felt very significant - I read all of the poems with the title in mind, and it affected my reading of them quite strongly. How important do you think titles are for poetry collections?
Titles are so often missed, and I think they're a wonderful opportunity to speak to the reader. Poets give so much thought to their titles, and then they're often lost, or no one comments on them. For me it was a deliberate statement on the nature of the subject matter, an indication of what you could expect to get from the book. And then of course there's also that nice pun, the suggestion of what poetry intimates ...
You don't want to reveal what the title of the next volume will be?
I'm too superstitious!
There's a real sense of your presence in Intimates. Will you carry that forward into a second collection?
At the moment, if anything, I've become more interested in autobiography. But there are dangers with a very personal - or apparently personal - "I" voice. Recently, for example, someone asked me [because of Biopsy, one of the poems in the collection] if I'd had cancer. Well, I haven't, but you can write about experiences that aren't directly yours. Obviously there's always a distance between the poet and the poem, and I want to keep on asserting that, but in the end my voice is definitely confessional - my influences are confessional poets, people like Sharon Olds and Anne Sexton in particular - and I think if anything that voice might be more pronounced in the next collection.
It can feel quite risky, though. 'Look At These' [the first poem in the collection, which begins "Seeing you makes me want to lift up my top,/ breathe in and say Look! Look at these!"] for example, felt extremely risky. I didn't send it to my editor for a long time because the exposure felt so in your face, but then I realised I was holding it back for the wrong reasons. Perhaps the reason that it has been picked up and commented on so much is precisely because people sense it's risky - and they're all thinking, "did she dare say that?".
Why did you start writing poetry? When did you start?
I suppose I had various stabs at it as a teenager, and then long silences. But I had a Hawthornden fellowship in 1997, and I came away from that with a group of poems and a much stronger sense of myself as a writer. So I suppose since then my ambition has been to write a book. But life is always going on. It's taken me some time.
As to what made me write ... Somebody talked once about writing being a creaming off of the excess, in the sense of your responses to your life or whatever's happening - I like that idea.
That's very like a line at the end of one of your poems: "You walked by, skimmed it off".
Yes! Gosh that's very neat - in fact, forget about creaming off the excess, just use my line! I think I would always need to write - it's wonderful to have recognition, but I would - will - always continue to write, with or without a prize.
· Buy Intimates at the Guardian bookshop.