Larry Lamb on becoming a poet at 79: 'It comes right from your soul'

Larry Lamb | Contributed

My life was begun on a park bench in 1947. The first thing my parents did wrong was to meet. It went downhill from there. They were totally mismatched and forced into marriage. Unfortunately, they stayed together for nine years and then it exploded. My mother took my baby sister, and my father took me and my brother to live with his mother. Much later, when I started writing poetry all this stuff came tumbling out about being, like so many, a war-damaged boy.

There was a lot of song when I was a boy in Edmonton, that was from my father. And I can sing. The rhymes and rhythms of poetry really are a part of me. But there was little poetry. Except for the comic poem “Albert and the Lion”. Like thousands of young men my dad came back from the war with that, and I learned it from him. Whenever I turned up for an audition and was asked to perform something that would be it. “Albert and the Lion” got me my first job in the West End and has been at the core of my career for 50 years.

I started writing poetry in 1983 when I was 36 and had my first big foreign location job – an American TV series about Columbus. I was pretty fit, but I started to get super fit and I’d stopped drinking. Suddenly there was this urge to write. All this poetry bubbled out of me. Things about my life as a little boy, born into a really messed up situation, with two people who shouldn't have even met.

But of course, I was busy so they got stowed away. Almost 40 years later, I was looking around for something in the attic and found this file of poems. I'd become friends with a very active and successful poet, a guy called Hussain Manawer, and he asked to have a look. He was really encouraging, filmed me performing a couple and put them online, where they did well. He encouraged me to write more but the only thing I knew about was rhyming couplets. Hussain’s style was much more free – a roving kind of rap style. I gradually started to pick that up and incorporate it into what I do.

Then a couple of years ago I was going round festivals like Hay talking about my novel – as part of the talks I would recite one of my poems. The audiences seemed to like them and I got invited back the next year to just do the poetry. One of the common audience questions was “are you going to put them in a book?” Well, that’s the plan and I pretty much know what it’ll be called. It’ll start literally with me being created, and finish with one called “Gravestone”.

That came about because me and a friend, both approaching 80, were emailing backwards and forwards and writing poems about getting older, looking into the future as the future gets shorter and the past gets longer. We decided to write poems about what we’d want on our gravestones. So, the book will be From the Womb to the Tomb, and Observations Along the Way.

But being on stage and reciting my poems is the first time I've ever really enjoyed performing. There's no writer. I'm the writer. There's no producer, no director. There's me and the audience. That's it. That's what I like about it. It's very direct. It's very personal. And there's no shield, nothing between you and the audience. I love it like I've never loved any performance before.

There’s always been a joy within acting. But doing poetry in front of an audience is the first time I've felt completely at ease.

As an actor you're always watching, and pinching stories, faces and habits from people. It's the same with a poem. You're getting stuff from people and people's lives.

My approach is straightforward. If there's something that's bugging me that I want to write about I'll write down key lines. They become a skeleton, even though they may not appear in the finished poem. But I gradually start building up from these key lines.

READ MORE: Ceitidh Campbell on the future of Gaelic poetry: 'languages are not rescued by nostalgia'

I don't write when there's anybody around. I've got to be totally isolated. No music, no telephone, just me. I have this little old place in Normandy where life ticks on at a very slow rate. As winter closes in I just go there and write. The days are short, the nights are long, and being on my own is something I've learned to love. My emotions run high, and things start to occur to me.

Writing poetry has helped me look back at fighting my way out of the turmoil I was born into, and gradually making a life of my own, escaping. It helps because it comes right from your soul. The rhythms and the rhymes fascinate me. They're lurking in there as I tell myself a story. All of a sudden there are lines that come out and interweave. That's the joy – discovering the music of it.

Larry Lamb is appearing at the Wigtown Book Festival on 3 October, see www.wigtownbookfestival.com. The Scotsman is the 2026 media partner of the Wigtown Poetry Prizes, see www.wigtownpoetryprize.com

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