David Floyd joins poet Lisa Kelly to visit the Finchley donkey that inspired her Forward Prize shortlisted poem

Poet Lisa Kelly standing next a field in Finchley where she saw a donkey — Lisa Kelly next to the donkey’s field

A Finchley poet has been shortlisted for a major national prize for a poem she wrote about a donkey in a local field.

Lisa Kelly, who lives in Finchley Central, has been shortlisted for one of this year’s prestigious Forward Prizes for Poetry.

The Prizes, which will be awarded this year at a ceremony in Durham on 10th October, have been running since 1992 and previous winners include current and former poet laureates Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy.

Lisa’s poem ‘I wanted to show you a donkey in the field or I want to show you the donkey in a field’ is one of five poems shortlisted for the ‘Best Single Poem – Written’ category, having originally been published in The Rialto poetry magazine.

The poem was inspired by a regular walk that Lisa takes from her home in Finchley Central to the nearby Darlands Nature Reserve and Lisa invited Barnet Post to join her on the walk to hear about how she came to write it.

She told Barnet Post: “I have a walk that I do quite often and I started doing it pretty religiously in lockdown. A ritual, more or less, around the Darlands Nature Reserve and sometimes I would vary it by taking another route home.”

This was when she first encountered the donkey, Ned, in the field in Lullington Garth.

A donkey in a field in Finchley — Ned, in the field

Lisa explains that she wanted to show the donkey to her husband, Jim, however he “very unkindly went and twisted his ankle” just after they’d started the walk. “He was unable to walk any further and I was pretty upset. Not for him but because, as I said: ‘I wanted to show you the donkey in the field’. And that was the first line that came to me of the eventual poem.”

She adds: “Sometimes you can agonise over writing a poem but this one was a bit of an outpouring. It ended up being a prose poem where, in my mind, it looks like two fields on the page.

“I just remember seeing this field and the donkey. It’s one of those fields where you think: ‘there aren’t many spaces like that in built up areas of London’ “

Barnet Post notes that the field seems quite unkempt. Lisa agrees: “It’s a pretty scruffy field” but adds: “I think it’s got a raggedy charm about it… It’s not a self conscious field. It’s not a field saying ‘here I am, I’m hoping that I’m going to get lots of visitors’.”

Lisa describes the poem as: “A love poem to the fields that we might be losing and things in my life that I have lost.”

She adds: “It came together in an intense look at the language around the difference between ‘a field’ and ‘the field’ and ‘a donkey’ and ‘the donkey’, which is a little bit nerdy but it felt like a way to explore bigger themes around loss and what we feel we need to protect.”

Lisa says the poem is an example of how poetry “gives you the time to explore language in a way that sometimes in our society we don’t have the time or the luxury to do that.

“But then I think ‘well is it actually a luxury?’ Sometimes I think it’s a necessity to think more carefully about what we’re trying to say and how we say it.”

A poster warning people not to feed Ned the Finchley donkey — A poster warns people not to feed Ned the donkey

This is not only the one of Lisa’s poems to be inspired by both Finchley and nature. Her walk also takes to the nearby garden centre, Finchley Nurseries, that “has a table where they have plants that they can’t sell or that people don’t want (that are nearly dead) and you’re invited to take them”.

She adds: “I’ve amassed a lot of nearly dead plants (and also a broken ceramic leopard) which are now in my garden. So that’s an ongoing project that I’m doing as a diary. I don’t know where it’ll go in the end.”

Talking more generally about living in Finchley, Lisa reflects: “I enjoy its diversity and you can have a very busy urban high street with lots of different restaurants and cafes and shops selling all sorts of different fruit and vegetables. Then, five minutes walk off the high road, you can be in green fields in Dollis Valley.”

Although it does have a drawback for a writer: “When I was first living in Finchley Central there was an independent bookshop, but that’s gone… There are different independent shops popping up but – I would say it wouldn’t I – I miss a bookshop.”

Lisa is looking forward to the Forward Prizes ceremony this month and says of her shortlisting: “Recognition of any sort is really lovely. I feel delighted and privileged because there are so many good poems out there and so many really interesting poets.”

For more information on the Forward Prizes for Poetry go to: https://forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry/

No news is bad news

Independent news outlets like ours – reporting for the community without rich backers – are under threat of closure, turning British towns into news deserts.

The audiences they serve know less, understand less, and can do less.

If our coverage has helped you understand our community a little bit better, please consider supporting us with a monthly, yearly or one-off donation.

Choose the news. Don’t lose the news.

Monthly direct debit

Annual direct debit

£5 per month supporters get a digital copy of each month’s paper before anyone else, £10 per month supporters get a digital copy of each month’s paper before anyone else and a print copy posted to them each month. £50 annual supporters get a digital copy of each month's paper before anyone else. £84 annual supporters get a print copy by post and a digital copy of each month's before anyone else.