Rocky road to recovery

New Light for the Old Dark, Sam Willetts, Jonathon Cape; £20

IN a hotel just off Piccadilly Circus Sam Willetts tells me he has just been ripped off at a West End newsagent paying for a packet of tobacco. Talking to Willetts about his latest collection, New Light for the Old Dark, you sense the whole affair has a sort of dreamlike quality to it.

Just a few years back — at the height of his heroin addiction — Willetts says he could barely read, never mind write poetry.

“I wrote poems as a child, and then I stopped writing for a very long time. With this collection I have been writing steadily for the last 10 years — the only time I stopped was when I went into rehab. In my first two or three months in rehab I didn’t do anything really. I certainly couldn’t write, I could barely read. Then gradually it came back, in fact it came back with a bit of a vengeance. I began to get well, and wake up and I became pro-productive.”

Coming from a middle class Jewish family in Oxford, Willetts had everything going for him in his late 30s when addiction took over his life, severing several relationships and ruining him financially. So what was the catalyst that drove him over the edge?

“When I became addicted to heroin I was in a good place in my life, as they say: I had a good relationship with someone I loved very much, I had a good place to live and some prospects, and really, it was as if the only thing to wreck it was heroin, and so I did. It sometimes seems the explanation was as simple and as perverse as that. I’m a bit of a saboteur. I’ll sabotage my life, given the chance.”

Willetts’ debut collection read as a whole, perhaps tries to make sense of this self-destructive streak he speaks of. Willetts takes the reader on a magnificent journey that sensually lilts from innocent childhood memories — roaming through the lustrous landscapes of Oxfordshire — to the dead end despair of addict-filled junk dens as an adult, where he is desperately trying to find a vein to inject into.

Another area that Willetts heavily explores is the relationship between himself and his mother — who was a Jewish refugee in Poland in World War II, escaping via Siberia, eventually settling in the UK.

Although he has spent his whole life in England, the images of his ancestors, and the horrors of the holocaust, seem to plague Willetts throughout the poems in this collection, the questions perhaps more important than the answers, which there don’t seem to be any readily available.

“My Jewish ancestry and all that’s associated with it comes into my thoughts a lot. However, I’m very wary of appropriating other peoples suffering and sort of making it my own. And the poems in the book about that part of my family, that history, are an attempt to find out more about it. But when I went to Poland to try and find some sort of truth, I actually failed, I ended up doing a runner and nearly cracking up, it all got a bit on top of me, and by the time I was getting to Auschwitz I just couldn’t stand it really.”

Reading at the Southbank Centre in London in January — alongside Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney — was the icing on the cake for a life that has gone from zero to hero in a few years, says Willetts.