Home Front combines the collections of four female poets on the experiences of war for those left behind. The narrative of Isabel Palmer’s first collection, Atmospherics, begins with seeing her only son go to war in Afghanistan soon after his 21st birthday. The poems that emerged from her weekly writing ritual caught the eye of Andrew Motion, who writes in his foreword that the collection’s “subjects have a high level of documentary interest, but Isabel Palmer’s particular achievement is to invest them with the authority of the heart.” Motion’s praise is restrained, yet very expressive and complementary. His sincerity left her feeling “very honoured and very humbled.”

It is clear on first meeting Isabel Palmer that she is open, warm and very motherly. She talks frankly and tenderly about how her collection came to be published. “When Afghanistan came around, the most natural thing for me to do, to absorb myself in something other than watching the news all the time, was to write poetry. I found it quite cathartic. It was painful, but the focus it demanded to find exactly the right words took my mind off obsessing about news broadcasts of death and injuries. That’s why I wrote the poems. But as for seeking publication, I felt so strongly that there weren’t voices explaining what it was like for those left behind.” Though the poems were written for very personal and private reasons, she now wants to help people understand these experiences of “unpopular wars”. She tells us, “This is what really happens—you must make up your own mind about whether it’s justified or not.”

Palmer’s poems came to be combined with those of Bryony Doran, Jehanne Dubrow and Elyse Fenton when Bloodaxe received four collections describing the experience of being a woman on the Home Front, which were “all very compelling, and very different in their styles of poetry.” She was delighted to join forces, since “we all felt that our individual egos and our success in poetry was far less important than telling a story in as powerful a way as we can.” Doran’s collection is written with a fantastically dry sense of humour. “Her poems are far more direct in how they tackle the experiences, and there’s a sense of irony as well.” Dubrow sees her experience in a historical context, invoking the plight of Penelope in the Odyssey. Palmer’s poems are “about fear,” and what sets her apart is her exquisite choice of images. She thinks her “focus is always on the language, and the sounds of the language, and finding the right image for the feeling I’m describing.”

Palmer is right about how right her images feel—her father’s gun is “fast and sleek as a salmon”—and this accuracy was often reached in one draft. “I didn’t change them very much. They came from somewhere quite deep—I didn’t think someone looking back on the experience months or years later could really find a better way of saying it.” It is obvious from reading her poems that she has thought carefully about lineation and the sounds of her words. Her background as an English teacher meant that she knew all about shaping diff erent kinds of poetry, but “that never came into it. It was all about allowing the thoughts to come and then revisiting it later to see if maybe that word or that image wasn’t appropriate.”

The poems beg to be read aloud, resembling invocations or addresses rather than letters. It was important to Palmer that the poems felt as if she were talking directly to her son—it was her way of “bridging the communication gap.” Phone calls were rare and brief, so every Monday morning she put together a parcel to send to Afghanistan and wrote a poem. When sending a parcel, according to Isabel, “the important thing is to find something that they want, to find something to lift their morale, and to find something that isn’t too heavy—and that seems to me the same process as writing a poem.”

Home Front is launched on Remembrance Day—the only day that felt appropriate for Palmer. The new voices in this quadruple collection are powerful, unusual and varied. They have so many stories to tell, and they are calling for listeners.

“I am rubbish.” This was the opening statement of Steven Moffat’s talk at the Oxford Union on Monday, and it’s an assessment most of the audience presumably disagreed with. Best known for helming Doctor Who and Sherlock, Moffat’s career stretches back to 1989, and covers such varied genres as children’s TV, sitcoms, feature films, as well as the BBC One dramas which helped make his name. In his brief address before a general Q&A, Moffat stressed the importance of self-awareness.

“I am rubbish. I first became aware of my rubbishness when I overheard my wife on the phone to some camera-people. ‘Don’t get him to take the lens back to Cardiff,’ she said. ‘Why? Because he’ll lose it. I know he’ll lose it. Because he’s rubbish.’ I heard her say that. I took the lens. I lost it.” But rubbishness is a universal trait: “everyone is in disguise as a competent human being”. Diligence is an important factor in success: “you can’t control how rubbish you are… but you can control how hard you work.”

Moffat has been called many things; showrunner, creator, executive producer. But the title he really cherishes is ‘Writer’. “It’s great to be a writer, because we make it up! It’s like you’ve done all the homework, and everyone else copies it.” Moffat was playfully resentful of directors. “They’ll say ‘my inspiration for this movie was this or that moment in my life or this or that artistic vision… and not the 120 pages of finished script my screenwriter gave me! Who else has that, in their job? Oh look, here’s exactly what I need to do.”

The talk then moved into an interview, starting with Doctor Who. Moffat has no patience with the idea of ‘overloading’ the audience. “Children nowadays, teenagers nowadays, are some of the cleverest audiences in history – they’re keeping up with television while texting and tweeting each other, and they’re all getting it. We try never to have a dull moment on Doctor Who.” Catering to adults is fairly straightforward – “it’s like when you go into a restaurant and you eye the children’s menu, and you wish you could order from that instead – it’s the same principle.” There are challenges – “you have to be ringingly clear” – but Moffat was adamant that “to write for children is to write better… everybody likes children’s stuff.”

As well as executive producing Doctor Who, Moffat is co-producer on Sherlock. They’re two very distinct shows, but Moffat finds the differences easy to manage. “I’ve spoken to Mark [Gatiss] about this; we’ve just got to pretend that we don’t work on both. They’re both part of the same landscape, so when a similarity crops up we just try and go with it rather than getting anxious.” It’s not a difference that keeps either writer up at night: “The Doctor is a sort of space Sherlock Holmes anyway.”

Sherlock and Doctor Who are both prestige BBC shows; how does Moffat view the corporation and its future? “The BBC is an unequivocal good – that doesn’t mean every decision it makes is good, or that it’s above reproach, but there’s nothing else in the world like it, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. The circumstances which produced it are never coming back.” Moffat is not totally enamoured of the beeb; “Mark says: ‘you love the BBC, but you don’t expect the BBC to love you back.'” Governments naturally go after the corporation; “no-one likes being criticised. If I had power over every TV critic in the world, I’d have them all executed!” Nevertheless, Moffat hopes that the BBC “remains the powerhouse that it is.”

Returning to Doctor Who, an audience member asked if there was anything Moffat could tell us about the next series. There was talk of a return of the Cybermen, perhaps even an origin story, but Moffat seemed reticent. “Anything is possible… but it’s not an idea that I’m aware of. It’s kind of been done, and I’d be hesitant to return to it. But then I generally speaking lie, so you never know”.

Conscious of potential spoilers, Moffat ended with a tease of series 10: “The Doctor will reliably save the day. There will be big speeches and evil monsters. There will be an epic amount of urgent standing. And you’ll all fall in love with Pearl Mackie as Bill.”