Poet Jay Hulme on writing his debut collection 'Clouds Cannot Cover Us'

Jay Hulme’s first full collection of poetry, Clouds Cannot Cover Us, has just been published by Troika - and very proud of it we are too.

While this may be Jay’s first published collection, he’s already an award-winning poet and performer: Winner of Slambassadors 2015, finalist in the 2016 Roundhouse Poetry Slam and Highly Commended in the 2018 CLiPPA Awards.

Clouds Cannot Cover Us showcases Jay’s unique voice and form of expression. The poems have been carefully chosen to chart his journey from growing up in a working class family in Leicestershire, to his feelings and thoughts about school life and his experience as a transgender teenager.

It’s a brave and bold book, and a very personal one. So what was Jay’s experience of writing it? In a recent guest blog post for the Federation of Children’s Book Groups, he takes us behind the scenes of his creative inspiration and process.

“I often say that if I didn’t already love poetry by the time we studied it in secondary school, I’d have hated poetry. The work we studied didn’t reflect our lives or experiences.”

“In writing this collection I thought about what I cared about as a teenager, and what I care about now. I thought about what it is I wanted to say. It turns out that what I wanted to say was what I wanted to hear as a teenager – the truth. No ‘protecting’ young people from the issues, no minimising their problems or experiences. No lies. What I wanted to say, what I hope this collection says, is: The world is terrible. I get it. I see it. I know. But I promise you, there’s still good out there.”

This book doesn’t shy away from the ‘issues’ it tackles, which include domestic violence, homelessness, class divides, family strife, transphobia, racism, death, refugees, disability, poverty and more.

“I worried that this would be too much for a publisher, but Troika had asked me, specifically, for a poetry book for teenagers. They’d seen me perform. They’d read my work. I sent off the manuscript – it felt like a game of chicken where I was waiting for one of us to blink. They didn’t blink… ”

Find out what happened next - read the full text of Jay’s guest blog, On Writing Cloud Cannot Cover Us, over at fcbg.org.uk/on-writing-clouds-cannot-cover-us

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Clouds Cannot Cover Us
Jay Hulme