“Louise Goulding. Parisian TV presenter and celebrity whose career took a strange turn after what she called ‘a vastation’ that overwhelmed her one night as she was hosting a panel show on travel. In the middle of a sentence, she stopped, got up and walked off the set. Eschewing public life, she devoted herself to poetry, and to various forms of meditation, hoping to discover ‘the meaning of this dislodgement that came upon me.’ Derided at first by the French intelligentsia, she eventually came to be regarded as a serious thinker and writer. She died of bone cancer in 2003, at the age of 54. The poem below was found among her papers after her death.

‘Don’t say soul:
You lack the long breath
deep-running vigorous line

Say only: ghost
Intermittent, disputed
half-whisper

of ignorant
fear-ridden
hope’

Pencil sketch.