The Poetry Came First by Anita D. Hunt

authorvalpenny
Jul 25
3 min read

I am pleased to be able to welcome author and poet, Anita D. Hunt to the blog today to discuss her love of the written word and her new collection of poetry, Moods Swings.

Thanks for inviting me to your blog today, Val. As you know, I am a published novelist and short story writer, my prose has been enjoyed by many over the years, but people are often surprised when I mention that I’m also a poet. They’re even more surprised when I tell them the poetry came first.

I’ve always loved stories and the chance to escape into other worlds, whether of my own making or someone else’s. At secondary school, we were once given a poem about a man whose face looked like an elephant. I can’t remember the title, who wrote it, or much else about it, but I vividly remember the homework: write a short story about how it would feel to be that man.

I couldn't do it.

Instead, one line kept circling in my head: Me, the man with a face like an elephant. Before I knew it, I’d written a poem instead of the story we’d been asked for. I handed it in, half expecting to be told I’d ignored the assignment. Instead, it came back with an A+ and the comment: ‘You weren’t supposed to write a poem, but this is really good.’

I doubt that poem, even if I’d kept it, would have earned a place in Mood Swings, but to my fifteen-year-old self it was a revelation. Perhaps this love of words, of rhythm and emotion, was worth pursuing after all.

I suspect most writers are both blessed and cursed with the same affliction. Ideas arrive uninvited: a fleeting image, a single sentence, or a line that refuses to leave until it’s written down. Sometimes those ideas grow into novels or short stories. Sometimes they become poems and while I’ve happily shared my fiction with readers for many years, my poetry remained largely private. It became my guilty pleasure—a place to explore emotions without worrying where they might lead.

Writing poetry is very different from writing fiction. A novel asks you to build a world and inhabit it for months, sometimes years. A poem asks you to capture a single moment, a single feeling, and distil it into as few words as possible. It’s concise, emotional, and, I hope, capable of opening hearts as well as minds.

That’s why Mood Swings finally found its way into the world. Without ever consciously planning it, I’d written poems that charted my own emotional landscape: marriage, motherhood, divorce, work, friendship, grief, loss, anger, betrayal, forgiveness, and, above all, the belief that even after the darkest moments, life can become brighter again.

I never set out to write a poetry collection. Like so many stories before it, Mood Swings simply grew until it insisted on becoming a book. Sharing such personal writing feels more daunting than publishing fiction, because these poems come from lived experience rather than imagined lives. But I’m proud of this collection, and I hope that somewhere within its pages readers will recognise a little of their own journey too.

The Blurb

Some days we feel unstoppable. Other days we barely recognise ourselves.

Mood Swings is a collection of poems for anyone who has ridden the emotional rollercoaster of life. Exploring everything from love, anxiety, grief and anger to hope, healing and self-discovery. These poems speak to the moments we rarely say out loud. Honest, heartfelt and sometimes, painfully familiar, this collection embraces the messiness of being human and celebrates the strength it takes to keep moving forward.

Because every emotion has its season.