Perse pupils’ poems picked for prestigious anthology

Two Perse students are set to have their verses published in an illustrious poetry anthology.

Kitty (Upper Sixth) and Zuyi (Year 10) will see their respective poems Watercolour and Waterfall appear in print in a new volume entitled Elemental:Water, compiled by Pembroke College Elemental Poetry, later this month.

Poems featured in the book have been written by a cross-section of people of all ages from Cambridge.

With water as the theme for the anthology, Kitty said she was keen to combine her poem with her passion for painting.

She said: “I ended up going down the route of writing about watercolour painting and the process involved.

“I wanted to talk about how water and art relate together, so I thought about escape and flow, and I feel like a watercolour painting is similar in that way.

“I do a lot of watercolour painting at home and I really like the link of what you can make between different artistic processes like painting and poetry and what they both offer.”

Kitty felt her verse writing had also been inspired by a visit by renowned poet Imtiaz Dharker to her A level English literature class at The Perse earlier this year.

She said: “She got me thinking about the process of writing poetry and I was really keen to try it. She said she doesn’t write to try to understand things she has written, she has written it for her own personal self-reflection to process her own thoughts.

“I liked the idea of writing just to process thoughts. It’s a very calm and meditative way of writing.”