STEPHEN LEWIS talks to poet Pauline Kirk, whose seventh volume of verse is to be launched in York...

PAULINE Kirk has an "observant eye", she says. Which is how she came to spot the owlstone while she was out walking one day. It was lying there in an old lane in a disused industrial area of the Midlands, just outside Birmingham: a small stone, not much more than a pebble, with distinctive owl markings.

Being a poet, she picked it up and the owl markings sparked off a train of thought.

"It triggered ideas about owls - the owls we used to have at our last house, and the way the urban sprawl ate us up and the owls disappeared," she says. "Then even further back to the owls I heard in my childhood, and finally back again to the stone in my hand."

The result was Owlstone, the title poem of her seventh collection of verse, which is to be launched at York Central Library on Saturday as part of Read Write York.

Pauline is already known to would-be writers in the York area, having recently led a ten-week creative writing programme for writers of all ages and abilities at the central library.

Born in Birmingham and educated in Nottingham, she lived for several years in Australia before moving to Leeds in 1978.

For many years she worked as a senior officer with Leeds Social Services, before an award from Yorkshire Arts allowed her to pursue a full-time career as a writer. As well as publishing seven volumes of poetry, her work has appeared in journals, magazines and anthologies. She has also published two novels.

Her poetry, she says, has a strong sense of place and time - as well as an awareness of the natural world around us that we are in danger of losing. What it isn't is "clever, clever".

"I hope my poetry is accessible to everybody," she says. "What I get the greatest buzz from is when somebody comes up to me after a reading and says 'that is just what I feel but have not been able to say'."

She lives in Dringhouses, York, having moved here from Leeds last November - and admits she now wishes she had done so long ago. "I'm absolutely loving York," she says. "The pace of life is less aggressive than Leeds, and I find that people have time to talk and be friends. And I love a sense of history in things.

"There are lots of places to explore still. I get off the bus sometimes, and think 'ooh, I'm not a tourist. This is mine!' It's a lovely feeling."

Odds are, it won't be long before that feeling for York starts to feature in some of her new poetry.

Owlstone is published by Thalia Press, priced £5.

Updated: 10:06 Wednesday, May 07, 2003