Why Frida Kahlo?
What the Water Gave Me is a sequence of fifty-two poems, each based on one of Kahlo’s paintings. When I was at the Royal College of Art, training as a sculptor, a tutor said my studio reminded him of her home, the Casa Azul, and he suggested I should take a closer look at her paintings. Though I’d noticed her personal, bold and sometimes shocking style, I didn’t really know her work well. It didn’t occur to me to write poems in her voice until I was finishing The Zoo Father, my second collection, in 2000. I must have been reading about the bus crash she suffered when she was a teenager, and how the injuries from that caused her lifelong pain, which she depicted and transcended in her art. I saw a connection with the poems in The Zoo Father, which is also about transcending childhood trauma. I wrote the first two poems ‘Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (I)’ and ‘Remembrance of an Open Wound’, on the same day. Both narrate the violence of the accident and how the bus han
