My fellow poet Miriam Scott, who has died aged 76 after an extended sickness, was a feminist poet and editor. Underneath the identify Diana Scott, she edited the anthology Bread and Roses: Ladies’s Poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries (1982). Compiled to “give pleasure each to readers who haven’t learn a lot poetry, and to those that really feel that poetry is already very a lot a part of their lives”, the ebook’s scholarly introduction sensitively addressed the character of inspiration and of girls’s writing at completely different occasions.
Miriam’s early poetry had appeared within the Arts Council’s New Poetry anthologies and in Gallery journal, amongst different publications. She co-authored the influential pamphlet If Ladies Wish to Converse, What Language Do They Use?, with Mary Coghill (1977); and, with Judith Kazantzis, Harriet Rose and me, was a member of Prodigal Daughters, an modern girls’s poetry theatre group of the mid-Nineteen Seventies to early 80s. Prodigal Daughters carried out their very own poems in dramatic sequences, along with dancers, musicians and singers.
Born in Waltham, Massachusetts, to Joan (nee Rawlinson), a language instructor from the Channel Islands, and David Scott, a technical journalist from the US, Miriam attended Woodhouse grammar college, Finchley, in north London, having moved to the UK on the age of two. She graduated in drama and trendy Greek from Birmingham College in 1968.
She then taught English as a overseas language, and undertook different part-time work whereas growing her personal poetry and translating poetry from the Greek. In 1977, Miriam moved to Leeds, the place two years later she married John Harris, and raised his younger daughter, Kati, as her personal, remaining near her after she and John divorced in 1989. Miriam managed Leeds Lodging Discussion board, a social enterprise supporting homeless individuals, till 2008.
Miriam had a wonderful alto voice, and through her years in Leeds she collaborated with the bass-baritone John Rath on singing translations of Schubert’s Die Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin, which have been efficiently carried out.
Her assortment of poems Going to the Island (2000) was created as a part of the Opening Line, a author improvement undertaking run by the Phrase Hoard in partnership with Yorkshire Artwork Circus, based mostly in Huddersfield. Described by the poet Ian Duhig as shifting “past being information of occasions to changing into occasions in themselves, the achievement of a real poet”, Going to the Island is predicated on Bardsey Island, off the coast of north-west Wales, which Miriam knew effectively, however, as she wrote, “many different islands, actual and imaginary, have additionally contributed”. Going to the Island was set to music and carried out with Eilir Owen Griffiths at Leeds Lieder + in 2005.
Her final 15 years have been spent in Pembrokeshire with Eliot Baron, whom she met in 2008 at a storytelling retreat held on the Nationwide Writing Centre of Wales at Tŷ Newydd. They lived within the village of Maidenwells and married in 2011. Miriam was lively in poetry and storytelling teams, and he or she and Eliot sang at many group occasions and tenting festivals.
She is survived by Eliot, Kati and by her sister, Ann.
