“I feel poets have saved my life. The poets are our companions. They have found words for states all of us have experienced.” So said Marie Howe on a 2012 visit to Scotland, where she was appearing as a guest of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Howe’s first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe’s ‘poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots’. Jennifer Williams interviews Howe about the craft of writing poetry, focussing on her poems ‘The Star Market’ and ‘The Snow Storm’. Image: Untitled by T.Carrigan, under a Creative Commons licence

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