A poetry collection by Lydia Towsey
Ancestral interference, existential cacti and unsolicited advice from the dead.
Burning Eye Books
Explore the family trail
One spring, a ghost takes a seat at a kitchen table.
He introduces himself as Cayetano Romero. Mexican diplomat in Washington, DC, and London, amateur astronomer, improbable ancestor. He has crossed centuries for coffee. He has come to talk.
The woman he visits, Lydia Towsey, is an NHS worker, mother of two, cat-fancier and daughter of a nurse and a bus driver. She is more used to the living. The dead are another matter. But Cayetano is patient. He brings with him starlight, crossings, languages mislaid and questions.
Across a year of encounters, the poems in Coffee with Cayetano move through imagined conversations and sudden visitations, through monologues spoken by the overlooked women in the margins, through kitchens and courtrooms, buses and borderlands. Over four generations, in accents, silences and departures, class shifts. Countries tilt. Names change their spelling. The past leans in.
Along the way, other presences flicker in and out of orbit, from Ronnie O’Sullivan’s cool precision to Audrey Hepburn’s luminous poise, to the fierce and gentle chant of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze. History pours another cup.
Coffee with Cayetano asks what it means to come from somewhere and to find yourself arriving elsewhere. How do we carry the ones who made us? How do we live inside stories that began before we did? How do we continue — radiant with inheritance, crowded with ghosts, remade by love — when what we have lost is also what we are made of?
“Funny, irreverent and rude, thanks to her mum, god bless them both.”Mark Gwynne Jones
Lydia Towsey is a poet, performer and NHS worker, a mother of two, a cat-fancier and the daughter of a bus driver and a nurse. In Coffee with Cayetano she encounters her granddad’s granddad, Cayetano Romero, a Mexican diplomat and keen amateur astronomer.
Twice shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, Lydia has an MA in Creative Writing and is a self-taught ukuleleist in the genre of Les Dawson. She is of mixed English, Welsh, Hungarian and Mexican heritage. Her work explores culture, migration, class, gender and ecology.
She has performed everywhere from London’s 100 Club, the Roundhouse and the House of Lords to on the buses as Arriva Buses’ Literary Leicester Poet in Residence. She has toured the UK with Arts Council England support, both as a solo artist and with others, including her late friend and mentor Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze.
Her commissioners include the Guardian, the Royal Albert Hall, Kew Gardens, Apples and Snakes, Writing East Midlands, the Behavioural Science Public Health Network and the universities of Leicester, Birmingham and De Montfort.
Her poems have appeared in The London Magazine, Hearing Voices and Magma, in Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Raving Beauties, Bloodaxe) and in Candlestick Press’s Ten Poems About … series.
Burning Eye Books published The Venus Papers and The English Disease. Lydia’s third collection, Coffee with Cayetano, is about family, identity and a Mexican ancestor offering unsolicited advice from beyond the grave, with very little regard for personal boundaries. It is edited by George Szirtes and was supported by an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant.
Lydia is CEO of WORD!, a poetry organisation co-produced by an NHS trust that runs one of the UK’s longest-running poetry nights. She is community lead for BrightSparks CIO and founder and co-director of Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust’s Arts in Mental Health Service.
“Lydia Towsey’s effervescent poetry bubbles with wry observations and quick-witted delights. That isn’t to say her poems lack an edge; far from it, with their mix of sensual, serious and thoughtful subject matter; Towsey’s playfulness also belies an attentiveness to the sound and shape and rhythm of her poems, making them immediate, aloud and alive.”Jane Commane, Editor, Nine Arches Press
“She writes for a generation that must find a way. One of the new intriguing voices of her time.”Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze
“Absolutely spectacular.”Poet in the City
“Her work is a pleasure to read and a joy to watch.”Kevin Fegan, poet and playwright
“The talent and expertise Lydia Towsey brought to her creative writing workshop got us thinking about the ways in which we could build connection, personal wellbeing and unearth honest reflections”Mirela Neto, Senior Researcher, Magpie (creative behaviour change agency)
George Szirtes is a Budapest-born poet, translator and memoirist. His collection Reel won the T. S. Eliot Prize, and The Photographer at Sixteen, a memoir of his mother, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.
“Lydia Towsey poems are monuments to affection, intimacy and a sense of life that glimmers and dances as it goes. […] It’s an instinctive art born out of her wide and varied knowledge of people and of different forms of existing. Her exchanges with her Mexican ancestor, the diplomat, Cayetano (see the family tree) are a continued dialogue between a mysterious mentor and a young fascinated listener. […] It is what has entered and taken habitation in her imagination and sense of being. It is a form of joyfulness.”George Szirtes
Scott Bridgwood is a figurative painter based in Leicester. He graduated in fine art painting from Chelsea Art College in 1991, where Adrian Searle tutored him and he shared a studio with Chris Ofili.
After exhibiting at London venues including the ICA and Westminster Gallery, Scott moved to Rome, where he painted and taught at the British Cultural Institute for eight years. He has exhibited widely across the Midlands and won awards including Winsor & Newton, Patchings and Windows On.
Scott’s work has been featured in The Artist. He has collaborated with Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze and Lydia Towsey, and made the stage set for Lydia’s The Venus Papers. He created artwork for Coffee with Cayetano and its cover.
Arts Council England has supported Scott’s development as a writer and performer. He is an experienced participatory artist and a BrightSparks CIO associate artist, and teaches life drawing at the University of Leicester and for De Montfort University.
Scott Bridgwood’s artist website
See the book illustrations and archive photograph in the family tree
George Szirtes quotes these lines in his foreword.
I come from corner shops
with plastic bags of broken biscuits,
lottery machines that stand like Daleks,
and lean-to-shelves of magazines
that smell of ink and musk,
their covers sleek and slippery as lungs.Lydia Towsey
keeps a small white kitten
Lydia Towsey
in a hunter pocket watch
that hangs around his neck;
you’re running out of time
to become an astronaut,
he says, and smells of woodsmoke
as he rolls a cigarette
that he can only smoke
as he does not intend
to go to space. He walks
to the garage and back again
to hand me a copy of The Sky at Night,
then lowers his head at the thought of his love
selling his charts to a travelling salesman.
There is always the night and a man at its door;
he nods to the moon, smoothing his front.
The next day he brings me a pamphlet:
‘How to Be an Air Hostess’. I am five foot five.
The sky is not so high, he says;
the cat is never mentioned.
Standing to his right,
my mother is holding a suitcase,
its cargo of Pan Am exploding stationery.
Meanwhile the photograph
of Cayetano and the American senator
sits in a drawer somewhere beyond sight.
Have I thought about diplomacy?
And now he is stroking the cat.
It was night, that much can be remembered.
Lydia Towsey
Let’s say warm, roads empty, stars out.
There was a knock at the door,
my maid answered, someone here
with things to sell and did I have
anything I might not want? I led him up
the stairs and to the attic, where lunar
light fell in sheets on telescopes.
And did I feel much guilt as I helped
the man whose face I can’t recall pack
lightning rods and rolled-up charts
and compasses, most beloveds
of my darling’s pristine home?
How could you know, later tonight,
sitting on your porch, or in your kitchen,
wherever you might find yourself,
what passed between us
like long-lost light arriving?
What it might say?
after ‘No ghost’, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze
Matt is sitting beneath an arch, planting potatoes.
Lydia Towsey
You mustn’t put them too far down, he says, and
cover them gently, and he is sprinkling earth.
Elsewhere, Jean is sitting in a wicker chair
sipping rum and, though they never met,
waving to Matt from across a planted border.
How can you know when you will meet your
most important moments? Will it be that person
on the balcony, or the women you worked with
to flag down a bus and never see again?
The garden is lively and they are talking and bustling,
Jean is singing and Matt has stopped working,
and they are holding trowels and cucumber sandwiches,
holding shoes and folded documents,
walking backwards, all the way back into life.
A route through the book
Start with Cayetano Romero and Eva Haines. The family route winds through Mexico, the United States, Hungary, Sudan, Nigeria and Uganda, with Welsh roots and a stop in London before it reaches Leicester, where Lydia’s dad drove a bus. Hop on at any stop, or take the whole route.
Stop 1 of 5 · Lydia’s great-great-grandparents
Cayetano Romero, a Mexican diplomat and amateur astronomer, was born in Oaxaca around 1843. Eva Haines was born in New York in 1853. They married in Washington, DC, in 1869. Both appear in the collection, where Cayetano crosses centuries to join his great-great-granddaughter Lydia for coffee.
Stop 2 of 5 · Cayetano and Eva’s daughter
Josephine Romero, the daughter of Cayetano and Eva, was born in Washington, DC, around 1879. In 1899 she married Joseph Samuel Robert Towsey, an ostrich feather merchant, in Pancras, London. Josephine was Lydia’s great-grandmother, and her son Peter was Lydia’s grandfather.
The Peck family chart traces Josephine’s line through her mother, Eva Haines, back to William Peck and his wife Elizabeth. On that chart, Barbara Pierce (later Barbara Bush) is Josephine’s eighth cousin once removed. Barbara’s son, President George W. Bush, is Josephine’s eighth cousin twice removed and Lydia’s tenth cousin once removed. The elder President Bush, George H. W. Bush, is related to Josephine through his marriage to Barbara.
A family amuse-bouche
Lydia struggled to make George W. Bush work in a poem. America had much the same problem.
Stop 3 of 5 · Josephine and Joseph’s son
Peter Aloysius Towsey was born in Hampstead in 1915 and served as an RAF pilot in the Second World War. While stationed in Hungary, he met Illona Rostos, who was born in Budapest in 1921. They married two weeks after meeting. Illona was Jewish and converted to Catholicism as a condition of their marriage. After the war, Peter returned to work as an economist. His work took them to Sudan, Nigeria and Uganda, where they raised their two sons for part of their childhoods.
Stop 4 of 5 · Peter and Illona’s son
Paul Andrew Towsey, one of Peter and Illona’s two sons, met Margaret Edwards in London. Paul worked nights as a security guard at the British Museum, and Margaret was a student midwife and nurse at Charing Cross Hospital. Margaret had grown up with her Welsh parents at Victory Dairy, a corner shop and dairy on Portobello Road. They married and moved to Leicester to start a family. Paul had found work there as a bus driver. Margaret died while Lydia was writing the collection.
Stop 5 of 5 · Paul and Margaret’s daughter
Lydia was born in Leicester, the younger of two children. She is a poet and performer and co-directs an NHS arts in mental health service. She and her partner, Scott Bridgwood, have two children, Ruby-Rose and Mia. Scott created artwork for the collection, including the cover. Poet Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze was Lydia’s close friend and poetry mentor for more than 15 years, and godmother to Ruby-Rose and Mia.
Readings, performance & workshops
What begins as a conversation with Cayetano becomes an invitation to tell our own stories. Who are you sitting with? Who and what have made you, and who and what are still making you?
Programming enquiries
The UK tour of Coffee with Cayetano is currently in development and welcomes enquiries from venues, festivals and arts organisations interested in booking a tour date.
Opens an editable draft in your email app.
Publication-day preview
· James’ Bistro, Leicester
Lydia will compere the evening and share a brief preview of Coffee with Cayetano ahead of the full launch.
Signature event
An inclusive writing workshop led by Lydia and exploring ancestry, culture, birth family, found family and the people and places we carry. Participants can write, reflect quietly or share by choice. Follow the workshop with a live author performance of poems from the book, accompanied by visuals by award-winning artist Scott Bridgwood.
Each family tree stands in a forest. The workshop invites participants to explore their own stories, and the performance brings Lydia’s to the stage. Hearing someone else’s story can help us see our own differently. Together, the workshop and show make room for reflection, connection and shared wellbeing.
Workshop participants can also choose to contribute reflections, responses or writing. With their permission, Lydia will use their own words in a verbatim tour poem, and Scott will draw on their contributions for an accompanying artwork. Both pieces will grow as the tour unfolds, with the latest versions shared online and at each show.
Adaptable formats
Programme a reading with a conversation, or a writing workshop centred on the stories we inherit and the connections we choose.
In-person, online or hybrid delivery can be discussed, along with timings, access and technical needs.
Imagine a café table and an empty chair. Invite someone to sit there. They could be an ancestor, someone from your found family or someone whose story you carry.
What’s the first thing you notice as they arrive? What would you ask them? What might they ask you?
Choose any question that makes you curious.