Mervyn, you have lived for most of your life in Essex and, latterly, in neighbouring Suffolk. Which of these two counties do you prefer and why is the concept of place so important to you in your work?

I have no absolute preference for either Suffolk or Essex. I was born in the Hampshire countryside because of the Second World War but left there when I was about 18 months old for the prefabs in the East End of London. My earliest memories are of playing on the bombsites but fortunately my father was offered a three bedroom house in the New Town of Basildon in Essex. We lived in Pitsea which in those days was little more than a marshland village. Basildon was in its infancy and apart from our small estate and one other a couple of miles to the northwest it was so-called ‘wasteland’ awaiting development, farmland, hawthorn thickets, elm trees and most of all for me with my evolving love of nature, the Thames floodplain with its attendant creeks, saltings and marshes. This was, and still is, the formative landscape and seascape of my prose and poetry. Although I have lived most of my life in the coastal areas of south Essex I am also a lover of the countryside in general and spend a lot of time roaming the highways and byways of the Essex hinterland. When I was 60 years old I had the opportunity to move to the countryside of mid-Essex in Coggeshall. I was already sharing houses with my partner Clare and by that time we had already lived together apart, if you see what I mean, for nearly 30 years. We decide between us that I should make the move and that we could then have a country home and one at the seaside in Leigh-on-sea. About 8 years ago I moved to Suffolk and now live on the outskirts of Lavenham. I consider myself particularly privileged to have both the coast and the marshes of Essex and the countryside of Suffolk to inspire my writing.

As a writer primarily of nature, which is your favourite season and why?

I have often said that I don’t write the weather it is the weather that writes me. Obviously there are times when I feel separate from the world around me but there are also those occasions when I feel completely at one with nature. It is mostly through the weather that I feel this connection and therefore all the seasons have something to offer sentiently, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. I am obsessed with weather extremes. Whether it’s floods, thunderstorms, blizzards, freezing fog, droughts or heatwaves, it is with those sorts of extremes that I feel more alive. At the same time I experience great joy and delight at the sight of the first snowdrop of the year, bluebells in the May woods, swifts and swallows returning from south of the Sahara and Keats’s ‘seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness’. When I look through my work over the years I notice the time and the weather are probably my major preoccupations. Most of my poetry collections have been structured seasonally. I would say that 70% of my work in both prose and poetry concerns itself with nature and the environment but that still leaves 30% to deal with my other major interests such as local history, fishing, country pursuits, agriculture, the arts in general and a certain amount of satirical writing. To answer your question more directly - I love all the seasons but it is usually the one I am in at any given time that takes precedence.

I know that you are a keen fisherman. Indeed, one of your books, ‘The Incomplete Dangler’ (with a nod to Izaak Walton, of course!) is given over wholly to this subject. Where are your favourite places to fish and how does this activity play into your writing?

In a stressful world, fishing is my form of mindfulness and meditation. Whether I’m beside a river or a pond or a lake my anxiety levels immediately start to reduce. We all stare into the water don’t we? Almost everyone is fascinated with reflections and refractions. There is something deep and spiritual about looking into water. There is that sense of connecting with what I can only call otherness. I have spent a lot of time in my life fishing in small boats out at sea but this is completely different to my freshwater fishing. It has its depths and dimensions of course - the soundlessness of the oceans and the infinite prospects of the endless skies and unfathomable horizons. But it is not the same as the sense of belongingness I get from the creeks, marshes and saltings that I know and love or the willow and alder haunted rivers and lakes I fish in all seasons of the year. I have fished at sea and on inland rivers and lakes in most of England and in a few places in Scotland. My favourite area for sea fishing was in my local waters. In a friend’s 18ft Shetland with two 16hp Evinrudes we could get from the mooring at Westcliff-on-Sea out of the Thames Estuary and on to the Maplin Sands in less than forty five minutes. To sit out there at low tide on a hot, calm and sunny day in June, July or August is something way beyond the ability of words, especially my words, to describe. Fishing for bass, dogfish or thornback rays (known as roker locally) in the sunstruck sparkling waters with the sandbanks and the blue sky above you and the little terns hovering and diving for sand eels is without doubt a totally otherworldly experience never to be forgotten. I have fished the Chelmer/Blackwater Navigation that runs for 13.75 miles between Chelmsford and Heybridge Basin on the Blackwater Estuary for more than 60 years. I have also fished the River Stour on both the Suffolk and Essex sides since my teenage years. Nowadays I belong to the Sudbury and Long Melford angling club, the Hadleigh (Suffolk) angling club and the London Anglers Association. With an old school friend even in our mid-seventies we still have fishing trips to such places as the River Thames, the River Severn and the River Wye. Fishing for me is more than just about catching fish. I spend much of my angling time watching what is going on around me and absorbing whatever it is that might inspire some prose or a poem at a later date. I usually take a notebook as well - just in case! Here is a quote from one of my favourite fishing writers:

“It’s not a game or a sport but a genetic imperative that makes us whole again every time we give it expression” - Chris Yates - How to Fish.

Fishing aside, you also have an interest in rivers, with some of your books following the course of rivers such as the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation and, more recently, the River Stour which you have captured in all its seasons in your quartet of books ‘Bridge Across the Stour’. How would you sum up your fascination for rivers and the inspiration that they have given to you?

As a lifelong fisherman I have always been fascinated by rivers. When I started fishing seriously in the late 1950s there were not so many lakes to fish as there are nowadays with what’s known as ‘commercials’. For me these lakes are overstocked with far too many carp for my liking. In the 1950s most of us learnt to fish on rivers and canals and I suppose the love of those two habitats sticks with one throughout one’s life. I did, and do, fish lakes and reservoirs but prefer those that have a more natural aspect - but rivers and canals were my first and all-abiding love where angling is concerned. As a nature lover rivers are the perfect place to be as they attract much in the way of wildlife. These watery environs have their own unique flora and fauna. In my local River Stour at Liston Mill Pool on the Essex/Suffolk border I regularly fish in the company of kingfishers and otters when I’m nestled deep in amongst swathes of comfrey, yellow flags and Himalayan balsam. If this is not inspiring then I fail to see what is. I wrote a book entitled ‘Reflections’ which covers twelve months, twelve moods, along the Chelmer/Blackwater Navigation. In another book I follow the River Stour from its headwaters in Cambridgeshire all the way through Essex and Suffolk until it flows out into the North Sea between Felixstowe and Harwich. As you say, my latest efforts to portray the riverine environment in all its different facets come in the form of four seasonal volumes entitled ‘Bridge across the Stour’. I like to write about the cycles of the seasons, the cycles of our lives and their correspondences. So much of our lives seem to be lacking in variation which tends towards a sense of monotonous familiarity. We don’t follow the old festivals as much as we used to.

What do you find are the most challenging aspects when it comes to writing a poem?

If I’m writing formally the greatest challenge is to make pararhyme (assonance and consonance etc.) and enjambment appear natural. ‘Fixed and free as in a rhyme’ - as I believe Edward Thomas once said. If I’m writing free verse the challenge is to stop it sounding too much like prose - to get some form, rhythm and internal sound patterns going. As I believe T. S. Eliot once said - ‘there’s no such thing as vers libre for those who wish to do a good job’.
I think that my major challenge is knowing when to stop - poem endings. If one is not careful one is always liable to overstate things - to be too explicit. Sometimes a poem is going along swimmingly and you know that it wants to end but nothing you can think of seems to fit. If I’m faced with this particular problem I just put the draught away and go back to it at a later date and then quite often the poem will somehow finish itself.

Who are your favourite authors?

The list is extensive and I probably won’t remember all of my influences - but here goes:
William Wordsworth, John Keats, Thomas Hood, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Mew, Frances Cornford, Emily Dickinson, Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Andrew Young, Gillian Clarke, Frances Horovitz, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W H Davies, John Clare, Norman MacCaig, Sylvia Plath, Basil Bunting, Edmund Blunden, David Jones… I could go on but the list may well turn out to be pretty near endless! The two poets I have been reading recently are Jeremy Hooker and Alice Oswald. Like Wordsworth I am also interested in the infamous ‘spot in time’.

A few years ago you revived ‘Littoral Magazine’ – this time as an on-line magazine as opposed to a print copy. Are you managing to attract more contributors from abroad as a result of this decision to move on-line?

There were two main reasons I stopped publishing Littoral magazine as hard copy. Firstly, I couldn’t get anyone else to help me with the magazine and as a publisher of other poets whilst at the same time trying to write my own prose and poetry it was difficult to juggle so many different creative things at once. Secondly, although the magazine was doing reasonably well financially and more than covering my outlay there were so many overseas subscribers that I would have dozens of magazines to be weighed and stamped which didn’t go down very well with all the other waiting customers at the post office. Now that it is online life is so much easier. There is still a lot of work involved but it’s enjoyable work. Do I have more overseas submissions than before? Not really - it is much the same as it was when the magazine was in print format. The magazine is published 8 times a year to coincide with the pagan sabbats, the solstices and the equinoxes.

Describe for us the local poetry scene in the South East of England. Would you say that it is fairly vibrant?

Yes - very vibrant and quite healthy I would say. Where I live in Suffolk there is a poetry group that meets in Sudbury and another that meets in Bury St Edmunds. We have the Suffolk Poetry Society of course which organises all sorts of poetry events throughout the year including the Crabbe Poetry Competition and the Suffolk Poetry Festival with some well-known names reading their work. The Essex poetry festival is no longer running but there are poetry groups in Manningtree, Wivenhoe, Colchester and elsewhere in the county. I have been a member of the Southend Poetry Group for more than 40 years and it is still going strong.

As a publisher, how do you view the appetite for poetry among the general population in this country at the present time? Do you think poetry has a future or do you think that it will always remain a minority interest?

Sadly I feel that poetry will remain a minority interest. The last I read was the fact that only 10% of the population read poetry regularly and that only 1% of those reads or buys contemporary poets other than the most famous and most promoted by their publishers. Anthologies tend to sell reasonably well. There is performance poetry that does well at the moment and things like rap and slam etc. but there are always exceptions like the beat poets in the sixties when it looked as though poetry was well and truly on the up - but then it inevitably slowed down again. I think one needs a metaphorical frame of mind to get the most out of a poem and in a world of soundbites and flashing images not many people seem to have the time or the inclination to involve themselves in something that might take a considerable amount of time and effort to get results. Nevertheless what is good will last and I believe that there will always be those of us who love this craft or sullen art to keep the good ship poetry well and truly afloat.

What projects are you working on now?

Apart from the online magazine, I have a ‘collected poems’ to work on for another poet and it should be out by June this year. I am also continuing to publish occasional books of local interest for the Basildon Heritage Society of which I am a member. I am writing two volumes of books (November to April & May to October) entitled Coast and Country - Nature’s Almanac. The High Window Press will be publishing a collection of poems for me in late spring or summer entitled - Arrangements in the Key of Light. I will also be publishing this time under my own imprint, a collection of poems entitled Birdsongs. This will consist of some 100 or more poems about birds both published and unpublished that I’ve written over the last 50 years or so.

To close this interview, here is one of Mervyn’s poems, published with his permission:

Hot Line to a Cold Heart

There is a line between us:
a line that divides the water
as it flows on its journey seawards.

           It holds

like the morning sun
           the unchanging light
                       that is always changing

yet you and I have denied
           all this talk an babble
                       as the river’s slow succession

                                   here succumbs
                       to our strange
           connection.

 You draw me down
to the fathomless cold depths
      of my understanding

where I feel the pulse
        of something as you plunge
                      and increase the tension.

There is a line between us that this pen
           cannot plumb or plunder

and as you rise towards me
and we fight for our different reasons

your scales and my clear eyes at the point of meeting
are stunned by the sudden flash
           of recognition -
of the thresh and sparkle.

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