Julie Boden was the seventh Birmingham Poet Laureate and for my money the best. She knew how to celebrate her city because she knows how to celebrate herself. Her private verse about family and friends is as good as the observational writing she does when when watching a saddened man at the end of marriage drinking tea at Tescos. Empathy no problem. After a public reading of 'Three Minutes' a woman asked her if she had been 'on the game.' herself. At my Wake I hope someone reads. 'She loved him in the Sutton Coldfield way.' Her poems of place are clever.
She will experiment, technically she is skilled, but if appropriate she turns her hand to traditional forms. Like all real poets she writes work to order for money but even working in that mode produces the goods. Nothing is hammered out on her anvil unless it is fit for purpose. Ask her to write an elegy on the death of a sculptor and it will be there in three days not only in the appropriate rhyming scheme but also following a classical content order. If this makes her sound scholarly, she is, on the other hand she first came to my notice after winning the City of Birmingham Poetry Slam.
There are weaknesses. She spends too much time helping other writers and emailing them instead of aiming to be buried in Westminster Abbey. She is the most accomplished poet I know. She also sings.
Brian Lewis (2008)