Poetic candour

Punk rock roadie, police officer, vicar, exorcist, best-selling novelist – G P Taylor has had an interesting career.

The Scarborough-based writer has now added to his already impressive, not to say eclectic, CV with his first book of poetry, Watermark, published last month.

Subtitled ‘stories from the darker side of love’ it is a raw and powerful debut collection that came out of a difficult period in his life.

Taylor was working as an Anglican vicar in North Yorkshire when his first children’s book Shadowmancer, published in 2003, became a word-of-mouth bestseller – it has since been translated in to 48 languages – and after being offered a publishing deal with Faber and Faber he gave up his ministry to take up writing full-time.

He went on to write several more hugely popular books but his career as a successful writer for children came to an abrupt end seven years ago when his youngest daughter was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and at around the same time he underwent life-saving heart surgery. He decided to take a break from writing to look after his daughter and to recuperate from his own illness.

“During that time my marriage started to break down,” he says. “I had been married for over 30 years so it was a big wrench for me and because there were so many emotions running through my mind I wanted to do something to catalogue how I was feeling.” So he began to write poetry. He and his wife eventually separated in 2014 and he says that writing poetry became almost a form of therapy that “really helped me get through a lot of the mental turmoil of entering into a divorce”.

Sitting at a beachside café in Scarborough, he would dictate the poems directly in to his phone, then download them later and write them up. “It had to be spontaneous poetry, not too polished,” he says. “I started to post them on Facebook and people were reading them – it was a way of sharing how I was feeling.” He was approached by a publisher who had seen the poems online and suggested the anthology.

These are poems that come straight from the heart and they are uncompromising in their honesty. The Darker Side of Love, for example, chronicles unflinchingly the pain of a relationship breakdown – ‘as if love is a bus to Hull/taken by pound shop pilgrims/who are forever disappointed/with their imperfect purchases/our love will never be the same again’.

While Like a Fool, a poem about the loss of faith precipitaed by his daughter’s illness, pulls no punches in its depiction of organised religion. ‘Purple-clad Pharisees with fat cat salaries,/swindle with words at every turn/to protect the cash of the family firm… And like a fool I believed/never questioning truths of heaven and hell’. The poem goes on to talk of living in ‘the land of black and white/where they were wrong and only I was right’.

I wonder whether the experience of losing his faith was traumatic, since it was such a significant part of his life, but he says that on the contrary he found it liberating. “I was suddenly set free from all the dogma and conditioning that had been part of my life for the past 40 years. I was free from having to pray and go to church and do the right thing. I could just be human and be me.”

His faith has since returned but in a completely different way. “I used to be a straight up and down Anglican but I am more liberal now,” he says. “I’ve realised there are a lot of grey areas in life.”

Other poems touch on guilt, desire and despair. He is dealing with very big personal issues – marriage breakdown, infidelity, depression, loss of faith, loneliness – and I wonder whether he had any misgivings about being so candid in his writing. His response is unequivocal.

“No, I had to be honest because for so many years I had been dishonest about my emotions,” he says. And his courage in speaking out has clearly been helping others who are dealing with similar situations. “I never thought it would,” he says. “But the feedback so far has been amazing. Relationship issues and marriage breakdown is affecting lots of people. So many are falling out of love or suffering loss and bereavement and I think because the poems are so honest, they are touching people.”

He tells me about his recent appearance at the BBC Radio Love to Read weekend in Oldham. “There were about fifty people in the audience and I read Like a Fool. When I stopped reading there was silence and I realised that people were crying. Afterwards they were saying how much the poem had moved them.”

It has inspired him to take his poetry out to share it with others. He is currently on a house tour, going in to people’s homes to do readings. “I want to take poetry out to a non-poetry audience and for those who might not have heard poetry before,” he says. “There is no charge – I will turn up for free for conversation and poems.” He already has dates lined up in Scarborough, Billingham, Sunderland and London.

Next weekend he is going to be reading for forty people in a farmhouse near Whitby. “I’ll read from the book, tell them about what’s been happening in my life and what inspired the poems,” he says. “I’ll be looking at falling out of love, finding love in all the wrong places, the darker side of love.”

In the epilogue to the book, Taylor writes ‘For me, poetry is sharing the life and sentiments of the writer. It is a window into their lives, small stories they want to tell.’ His stories are profound and compelling and are sure to resonate with many readers.

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Taylor says that creating the poems not only helped him steer through troubled waters, it also enabled him to begin writing prose again. “I hadn’t written any books for several years and now I’ve finished a novel called Lucia for young adults and adults,” he says. “It’s a gothic coming of age tale centred on the life of an upper class girl in Yorkshire and events in her life throw her in to all sorts of adventures.”

Watermark, with illustrations by Owen Claxton, is published by Fabulous Books, £8.99.

To book G P Taylor for a poetry reading at your home, contact him via his Facebook page.