Oh goodness, thank you so much for saying I've given it roots :-)

Yes, so much of it was political - the Plath, too; we read Chinua Achebe as a set text; and then there was Carol Ann Duffy, who while not political in quite the same way was the first person I'd read anything by who made me identify immediately, and hard, with the idea that I'm an abuse survivor. I genuinely think the GCSE poetry selection is astonishingly good - it was the point at which I fell proper in love with the form.

(Oh, and then the glorious glorious unseen poem on my paper - it was about prison, and it was a sonnet.)