In conversation with poet Natasha Cuddington, Ruth Carr discusses her new poetry collection, Catching the Missing Beat, and reflects on her journey as a writer, editor and tutor. 

Known for her support of women writers, Ruth is the co-founder of independent poetry publisher Macha Press and the editor of The Female Line: An Anthology of Northern Irish Women. 

Ruth’s new collection considers how the past can be accommodated within the present, reflecting on personal experience, overlooked lives, war, global warming and nature.

Meet the poets

In her fourth collection Ruth Carr invites the reader to reflect on the past, the present and the future. Values are weighed up through personal recollection, observations of nature, animals, the weather, current issues and reflections on some quite remarkable lives. What emerges is an attempt to find, against the backdrop of global warming and warmongering, ‘a kind of synthesis / where whole and broken heart/are intimate.’ Her work has been widely anthologized, has appeared on billboards, been put to music by the Ulster Orchestra, and she has read in venues ranging from Kilcar to Moscow.

Natasha Cuddington is a poet and critic. Her translations, essays and reviews have appeared variously. An assistant editor at Cyphers, she co-curated Of Mouth and was a Belfast Book Festival Associate in 2022 and 2023. She leads workshops at The Crescent Arts Centre, Open Arts and collaborates with disability arts charities. With Ruth Carr, she co-edited Ann Zell’s posthumous Donegal is a red door and Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse. Her debut Each of us (our chronic alphabets) was published in 2018.