Anne-Marie Fyfe is an award-winning poet, runs The Troubadour poetry venue in London and was chair of The Poetry Society for three years. Yet, growing up in Northern Ireland, she never wanted to become a writer.

‘There was poetry in the air,’ she says, name-checking Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Mebdh McGuckian. ‘I just never thought about writing poetry. If anything, I wanted to be a painter.’

Luckily for the art world, Fyfe changed her mind and her latest collection of new and selected poems, Understudies, has just been published by Seren Books. Fyfe cocks her head thoughtfully and describes the process of winnowing through her previous collections as ‘liberating’. ‘You get all these poems off-side,’ she says.

In fact, since the collection went to print, Fyfe has been writing much new material. She does concede, however, that it was strange to go back and see some of her older poems with fresh eyes. ‘There is a distance from the poem,’ she admits. ‘You forget how you felt about the poem when you wrote it, the inspiration for it.’

Off-handedly Fyfe adds that Carol Rumens recently wrote about her poem ‘Interstate’, when it was chosen as The Guardian’s poem of the week. She isn’t boasting – although she has the right to – just segueing into a discussion about what writers put into poems and what readers take out of them