I’ve been so fortunate to be offered a four week writing residency in the Baltic town of Ventspils in Latvia. I’m staying here all through October, in the International Writers’ and Translators’ House, with a group of talented and delightful writers, composers, poets and translators.

I’m working on what I hope will be a poetry book about women travellers. But also, I’m taking in Latvia. Here’s a few impressions from my first full day here.

I’m bowling down the cycle path 
beside the Venta,
in the sun. Vast yellow cranes 
top me up with unreasonable joy. 
Pterodactyl, they
snap beaks over a red-bellied 
dry-freight, ocean-going ship
that’s fully the length of a street.

The bike has a clunk
in its bottom bracket but
we fly downriver, then are forced
to bypass the old Russian factory.
There’s time to mull
its dark and broken windows, 
flat roofs hairy with weeds,
the cracked concrete empty car park.

At the Citro supermarket
I’m on Andreja iela 
and locking up the bike,
when a woman in her winter coat
begins a chat in Latvian.
‘Angliski’, I try, ‘Labdien’.
And smile a lot. 
She is encouragingly 
delighted.