The Seren Poetry Podcast · Alternative Stories

Vanessa Lampert: 'Say it With Me'

·41 min·15 clips

The conversation begins with welcome and context. Rhian Edwards introduces Vanessa Lampert as an Oxfordshire acupuncturist and poet with an MA, several prizes, editorial work, workshops, and the pamphlet On Long Loan behind her. Say It With Me arrives as a first full collection rooted in domestic life, memory, family, parenthood, loss, and the wish to bring people together. Then Lampert reads, and the room shifts. Her park poem works through refusal, naming what will not be allowed there before it reaches roses, held hands, hidden stars, and return. The gentleness does not come cheaply. Edwards lets that weight carry them into a craft question about poetry, childhood, change, growing up, and loss. Lampert answers through language. Children, she says, are still at the beginning of life in words, close enough to invention that a wrong word can turn into a creative one. That thought gives the craft talk its shape. For Lampert, poetry can recover some of that early looseness, when expression is less guarded and stranger connections feel possible. The exchange stays warm and practical. The poems are not treated like sealed objects on a shelf. Edwards and Lampert keep coming back to how a speaker reaches readers, family, and friends. Humor gets its place too. Near the end, Lampert says she wants people to smile, which puts warmth beside the book's harder memories and losses. The close is gentle. Edwards thanks her guest without flattening the seriousness of the work, leaving room for pleasure, access, and recognition. This is craft talk with a pulse: candid domestic detail, childhood invention, grief held carefully, and still the chance of a smile.

As heard by us

A candid poetry discussion that links domestic life, memory, and loss to wit and feeling.

Vanessa Lampert's Say It With Me is presented as a debut poetry collection shaped by domestic life, memory, family, parenthood, loss, and the body, and the episode gives those ideas a clear and humane frame.

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Why you'd press play

For a reflective poetry conversation about how a debut collection is built, with room for memory, family, loss, and a smile.

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