In autumn 2024 Beth Davies became the latest poet in the city to take on the role of Sheffield Poet Laureate. She follows in the talented footsteps of Danaé Wellington – who chose Beth to take up the mantle after her – and, before that, Warda Yassin and Otis Mensah. The civic role is one of the legacies of former Lord Mayor of Sheffield Magid Magid, who set it up with the aim of spreading the joy and inspiration of poetry across the city.
Beth's path to Poet Laureate includes being awarded the New Poets Prize in 2022, publishing her debut pamphlet The Pretence of Understanding with Sheffield-based publisher The Poetry Business in 2023, and performing at the likes of Off the Shelf Festival of Words, Durham Book Festival and more.
We chatted to Beth about creative community, accessibility in poetry and the potential for inspiration in everything, as she tells us what she hopes to achieve with her two years as Sheffield Poet Laureate.
How would you describe your poetry?
Describing my own poetry always feels a bit weird, but I aspire to write poems that anyone could take something from, whether they are a seasoned poetry-lover or someone who doesn’t see themselves as interested in poetry. That kind of accessibility is definitely important to me in my work.
For me, poetry is a space for reflecting, questioning, processing. I’ve written quite a lot about memory, time, and change, and how we interact with these forces in our lives. I’ve been told that some of my poems can have a kind of subtle wittiness to them – I’ve been trying to explore this a bit more in my writing lately.
What inspires you?
I feel inspired by my creative communities (shout out to Hive South Yorkshire and The Writing Squad), by my friends who are writers, and by being in spaces with other poets in general. But in terms of subject matter, I find inspiration in ordinary moments and memories that feel like they have some edge of strangeness, wonder, and/or significance to them – I do believe that there is potential for poetry everywhere, even if we don’t always know where or how to find it.
What are your hopes and plans for your time as Sheffield Poet Laureate?
I am hoping to connect with people from different walks of life across Sheffield through poetry – and perhaps to spread that sense that everybody’s life is worthy of poetry.
What do you love about Sheffield?
Having grown up in Sheffield and lived here most of my life, I sometimes have a bit of a tendency to see Sheffield as the default city, the benchmark that everywhere else is compared to. Nowhere else quite measures up in terms of what I want in a city to live in. For me, it’s not too big and not too small, not too quiet and not too frantic. I love the green spaces, the culture, the community, the history.
Most of the Sheffielders I know have a sense of local pride and identity, even if sometimes in a slightly self-deprecating way. I love the sense that even if it’s not a perfect city, it’s our city and that’s important to us.
And what (if anything) would you change about the city?
I'd love it if there were more community spaces where people could come together, run events/activities, or just spend time in public without having to spend money or justify their presence! Public libraries are a great example of this, and they deserve so much more support and funding. In my ideal Sheffield, we'd have lots of different kinds of free accessible community spaces all across the city, and a range of things going on in all of them!
