I was born sixty years ago in a war-torn Germany. My grandfather, contemporary of the famous poet Rainer Maria Rilke (whom he had actually met)had been a poet and translator. Unfortunately he died before I was born, but I think he left me through his genes this never ending love of poetry and a talent for languages. Early on, at around the age of six, I started reading poetry and scribbled my own verses inspired by nature as well as feelings. I studied for several years at the universities of Madrid, Aix-en-Provence and Perugia and wrote poems in Spanish and French, had many friends among the contemporary Spanish poets and won a prize in a Spanish poetry competition. One of my poems was chosen by the Spanish poet and Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre and published in an anthology in honour of his 80th birthday. When I later moved to Oxford in the United Kingdom, I first had a love-hate relationship with English, but soon it became a love affair and I wrote hundreds of poems, published some in magazines and books and later joined writers' sites on the internet. Many of my poems were published there. Even when very young, I had always thought of the poets I read as family, my own kin, who spoke a language I could understand and "feel." I believe in reading out poems aloud and prefer simple vocabulary. What fascinates me are the possibilities to express feelings. What I respond to is the way a poem can liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seems to me that simple language best suits this; I like scale, but I like it invisible. I love those poems that seem so small on the page but that swell in the mind; I do not like the windy, dwindling kind. Scharlie Meeuws      

winner in Faringdon poetry competition, her poems published in many anthologies and magazines. One of her first poems in Spanish was included in nobel prize winner's Vicente Aleixandre's 80th birthday homenage