“I think poetry has many doors. A sentence can hold a thousand exits and entrances. Somewhere in there is a direct line from my personal experience with the world. I am always drawing from my own self but also want to find a way to hold a chorus of voices together. Like a single colour has many shades depending on where the sunlight hits it.” Whether hearing Greta Bellamacina speak in conversation or reading a piece of poetry, there is no denying the award-winning actor, poet, and filmmaker’s words hold a bold, beautiful, and lasting power. And her latest book, Who Will Make The Fire, is no exception. Full of imagination and truth, love and loss, depression and hope, and the grounding power of nature, the project is a profound and personal work that highlights its author’s innate ability to tell stories that connect with an audience.

“There is a line from the title poem that says, ‘to let death give birth like the sea / the sea an eternal child / tangled in a deep well of rainwater.’ This strange cycle that lives around us and inside of us is what I wanted to explore as a way to understand the darkness better.” Here, she speaks with Wonderland about the project, the writing process, and the reflective properties of both poetry and film.

Read the interview…
 
Hey Greta! How are you doing?
I am good, just looking out of the window onto the bluest skies. After months of rain and wind the sunlight is finally here, it’s a joyous thing.

Can you tell us a bit about how you first got into acting and writing? What was your first love?
I’ve always done both for as long as I can remember. I guess I started acting professionally quite young, but writing has been the long thread to everything I have always done. I grew up doing a lot of youth theatre and drama classes on the weekends. I wasn’t sure at the time why I felt so compelled to act. But later I realised it was the quiet and unspoken truths of performing that I loved. Acting really is the physical embodiment of poetry and writing is the re-working and recalling of the ideas of things. I like when they both bleed into one another. That’s when I feel most alive working in both film and poetry.

Who or what were some of your early inspirations?
Growing up I watched a lot of classic musical films like The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang… I got lost in their fantastical worlds, and their songs. The surreal quality to them. There is something so hopeful and redeeming to those films. Darkness is everywhere but somehow the light always gets in. I also spent a lot of time playing with my siblings. I am one of five so we were often left to play and reinvent ways to entertain each other. Then when I got a bit older, I found poetry. I didn’t understand everything I read. But I knew the sentiment. Like a song without understanding all the lyrics. Poetry felt like the voice of the heart.

Congratulations on Who Will Make The Fire! What inspired you to write this book?
Thank you. I first started writing these poems with the idea of writing a ‘biography of the wind’ with the wind as a metaphor for our evolving states of mind. A way to explore the battles that we keep closed inside of ourselves. But then as I continued writing the poems I became more interested in the cycles of things, like the cycle of a flower, the continual cycle of dawn, the cycle of spring… these cycles are the antidote to pain and war and battle. There is a line from the title poem that says, “to let death give birth like the sea / the sea an eternal child / tangled in a deep well of rainwater.” This strange cycle that lives around us and inside of us is what I wanted to explore as a way to understand the darkness better.

What themes and ideas does it discuss?
There are a combination of questions inside this book asking what it means to live vividly and passionately in the world and truly in the here and now. Especially when we live so close to war and tragedy. Also, while I was writing this book, two poet friends passed away, so I wrote poems for them. “I Do Not Hate my Enemy” is dedicated to the Irish poet Niall McDevitt and the poem “Lamer Than Love” is for Michael Horovitz. Again it goes back to love and this idea that our lives are a part of the “daylight heaven sleeping in poems.” We all go back to the garden eventually.

When did you start working on it and what was the writing process like?
My previous book Tomorrow’s Woman came out in the pandemic with the American publisher Andrews McMeel. I went to Baltimore to launch the book and then everything closed down. Then I started writing this book… There are poems like “The Mile Long House in Your Recovery” which is about that feeling of being isolated… “The door remains firmly bolted / sometimes this realisation keeps you smiling / sometimes this realisation pushes you further away”… But then there are bits of the poem that talk about little rays of hope… “The wind that is a miraculous house / presses its face to the wall / the horse can be in the house for days / it remains mythical because it takes just what it needs.”

I tend to write poems that are both immediate responses to things, like my peace poem “Meltdown” that I wrote and performed for the Ukrainian refugee fundraiser at the Tabernacle. But then other poems seem to fly in for no reason but to exist. It’s important to stay open to both ways of writing I think.

For you, how does writing about personal experiences differ from writing fiction? 
I think poetry has many doors. A sentence can hold a thousand exits and entrances. Somewhere in there is a direct line from my personal experience with the world. I am always drawing from my own self but also want to find a way to hold a chorus of voices together. Like a single colour has many shades depending on where the sunlight hits it. Writing for screen I tend to write from a place of fiction, but often the ideas are all from a lived place.

What are some of the differences you’ve found between publish a book of poetry vs acting in a film? Are there any similarities in how you approach the creative processes?
Both acting and writing are reflective places. It’s about the subconscious mostly. Since writing this book, I’ve made three films, two of them — with the great Italian director Riccardo Vannuccini — have been some of my most rewarding experiences. For our first film, Commedia, we shot it in Rome and I play a mental patient, and we worked with words, but also a lot with movement theatre. The second film, Things and Other Things, we wrapped in December last year and we shot it in Tuscany in the countryside. The film is dedicated to imagination. We filmed it entirely in abandoned buildings, a theme park, schools, hospitals… it’s a film about when everything is gone we are forced to imagine. I loved working with an entirely Italian crew also, there is a real joy to the way things get done. The third film is my very special collaboration with Jaclyn Bethany and that film is called Tell That To The Winter Sea which is released on Apple TV on the 1st of July.

Is there a particular poem you’re especially proud of?
There is a poem called “Yellow Wasteland Song” in the book. It is dedicated to my eldest son Lorca who has autism. It is about the power of looking at the world with unique eyes and paying homage to his version of the world which I feel very lucky to be a part of and experience. There are lots of rhetorical questions and voices in the poem: “they say they do not understand me / but they have been dancing in a chamber of sea-songs / lilac blue infant of home.”

Are there any other authors you’re loving right now? 
I only just discovered the Ted Hughes collection Lupercal — there is a poem called “A Dream of Horses.” I think the last line explains it all: “The forever itself a circling of the hooves of horses”….

Greta Bellamacina’s new poetry book, Who Will Make The Fire is out now.