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ARTEMISpoetryARTEMISpoetry is the bi-annual journal (November and May) of the Second Light Network, published under their Second Light Publications imprint. Members receive a copy as part of their membership benefits. Issues are available to non-members by subscription at £9 p.a. or as a one-off purchase at £5 a copy (plusp&p).
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ARTEMISpoetry at the Poetry Library’s digital archive
ARTEMISpoery (& Myra Schneider/John Killick’s Writing Your Self at the Bluebell Books blogspot
ARTEMISpoetry at Abegail Morley blogspot
Submission is open to non-members. We aim to publish new work, so submissions should be unpublished (by ‘published’ we mean: in print, on the internet or by way of media broadcast or on CD), and not ‘out in submission’ elsewhere, whether to magazines or competitions.
Editors for Issue 8 are: General & Artwork – Dilys Wood and Anne Stewart; Poetry – Myra Schneider.
Readers’ Letters are invited. Comments on the journal’s content or anything you would like to see discussed in relation to women’s writing. (max 100 words).
All submissions: submit paper copy initially to Dilys Wood, 3 Springfield Close, East Preston, West Sussex, BN16 2SZ. Please write "ARTEMISpoetry" on your envelope.
Poems by women of any age. Poems should be typed, or if written, then very neatly. Each poem should commence on a new page, headed "Submission for ARTEMISpoetry". Please SEND TWO COPIES. Do include your name with each poem and include your name and full contact details in your submission. Long poems are considered. Submit up to 4 poems to a maximum of 200 lines in all.
Contributors whose poetry is accepted will be notified by 30 April 2012.
Poetry Editor: Myra Schneider. Myra Schneider’s most recent poetry publications are Circling The Core (Enitharmon 2008) and Becoming, a long narrative (Second Light Publications 2007). She was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2007. Other books include Writing My Way Through Cancer (Jessica Kingsley 2003), and with John Killick, Writing Your Self (Continuum 2009). She has co-edited anthologies of work by contemporary women poets.
Black/white photographs or line-art, maximum of 4 pieces. We are looking to include a wide range of subject-matter and style … Paper copy to Dilys Wood (as above)
Contributors whose artwork is accepted will be notified by 30 April 2012.
Colour submissions for cover art – front and back – are invited for consideration for future issues.
For Issue 8 to arrive by 31 March 2012, members only. Please let us know about your successes, publications, forthcoming events or workshops that you will be running. Max 60 words including contact details. 1 item per category per issue. The 5 categories are: ‘Comps & Calls’, ‘Events, Courses & Workshops’, ‘Publications’, ‘Other News & Successes’, ‘Resources’. Submit Online or paper copy to Anne Stewart, 20 Clovelly Way, Orpington, Kent, BR6 0WD.
ISSUE 9: guidelines as above. Dates: Poetry by 31 Aug 12, know by 31 Oct 12; Artwork by 30 Sep 12, know by 31 Oct 12; Members’ News by 30 Sep 12.
Issue 7 … Focus on Dutch Poets
Contents:
INTERVIEW: ESTHER JANSMA interviewed by KATE FOLEY
AMBITIOUS POETRY BY WOMEN, Part 3: KAY SYRAD on Writing Politically
ASTRID ALBEN: writes about ∞
LIVING THE TRANSLATION: Kate Foley
CALIBAN DANCING: M R Peacocke on making and forgetting poems
LONG LIVE THE LONG POEM!: Myra Schneider
THE LIVES OF THE POETS: May Ivimy Badman, Alice Beer, Linda Chase
REVIEWS: Caroline Carver on Chris Considine;
Kate Foley on Kerry Hardie and Ruth Stone;
Ruth O’Callaghan on Fiona Sampson;
Anne Stewart on Waterloo Press Poets;
Dilys Wood on Gillian Allnutt, Ruth Fainlight and Louise Glüaut;ck…
and many more reviews
POETRY:
FEATURED POET: M R Peacocke
POETRY SELECTED BY JUDY GAHAGAN
Poems by: Jan Bay-Peterson, Diana Brodie, Caroline Carver, Anna Crowe, June English,
Daphne Gloag, Cora Greenhill, Jenny Hamlett, Helen Jagger, Gill Nicholson, Ann Phillips,
Ann Scorgie, Margaret Speak, Wendy Stedman, Anne Stewart, Jill Townsend, Alex Toms,
Margaret Wilmot, Glynda Winterson, Dorothy Yamamoto
ARTWORK: by Andria J Cooke, Kate Foley, Judith Kazantzis & Michaela Ridgway
BACK COVER: Featured Collection: Anna Adams Time-Pockets
We apologise for the mis-spelling of Allison McVety’ name in the contents list and in the review of her collection, Miming Happiness on page 37.
Editors, ARTEMISpoetry
Issue 6 Contents:
INTERVIEW: Pia Tafdrup interviewed by Ruth O’Callaghan
BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING: Jan Fortune-Wood & Alwyn Marriage
TAKE-OFF INTO A RICHER WRITING UNIVERSE: Alison Brackenbury, June English, Lynda How, Myra Schneider & Anne Stewart on getting into the www habit.
(full text of Brackenbury’s piece here) (full text of Stewart’s piece here)
GOING BACK TO THE FUTURE: Katherine Gallagher on AusLitFests
GOING DIGITAL: Alison Hill on ARTEMISpoetry recordings at the South Bank…
REVIEWS: Anne Cluysenaar on Mary MacRae; Ruth O’Callaghan on Pia Tafdrup & on Seeking Refuge anthology;
Myra Schneider on Penelope Shuttle; Penelope Shuttle on Katherine Gallagher;
Kay Syrad on Pascale Petit & Jo Shapcott; Dilys Wood on Paula Meehan & Fleur Adcock;
Gill McEvoy on Allison McVety, Ruth O’ & Linda Rose Parkes;
Linda Rose Parkes on Eleanor Cooke, Helen Ivory & Marilyn Longstaff;
plus many other short reviews by Dilys Wood
POETRY:
Winners, Commended & Shortlisted poems from the Second Light Poetry Competition 2010
FEATURED POET: R V Bailey
POEMS SELECTED BY M R Peacocke
Poems by: Anna Adams, Ann Alexander, Anna Avebury, RV Bailey, Elizabeth Burns, Caroline Carver,
Anne Cluysenaar, Catherine Temma Davidson, Jill Eulalie Dawson, Jackie Fellague, Rose Flint,
Kate Foley, Cora Greenhill, June Hall, Justina Hart, Jo Heather, Penelope Hewlett, Doreen Hinchliffe, Emily Hinshelwood, Alex Josephy, Jane Kirwan, Wendy Klein, Gill Learner, Kaye Lee, Jane McLaughlin, Gill McEvoy, Alwyn Marriage, Lyn Moir, Helen Moore, Caroline Price, Elisabeth Rowe, Anne Ryland, Margaret Speak, Anne Stewart, Shelley Tracey, Josie Turner, Sarah Westcott, Margaret Wilmot
ARTWORK: by Elizabeth Bell, Adele Davide, Judith Kazantzis, Sue Moules, Helen Rowan & Anne Stewart
BACK COVER: Featured Collection: Anne Stewart’s The Janus Hour
(extract from Editiorial) An embarrassment of riches? So many new collections and pamphlets by women poets are sent to us for review that we can scarcely keep up. This issue includes short and long reviews of thirty books by eight reviewers. We are also proud to carry articles in this issue from two enterprising women publishers, Jan Fortune-Wood (Cinnamon) and Alwyn Marriage (Oversteps).
Women’s increased involvement in poetry draws attention to paradoxes which often characterise women’s activities in previously male-dominated fields …
Read Glass Ceiling article
The deeper I go into Mary MacRae’s poems the more spacious my own world becomes. In her first collection, As Birds Do, it was already clear that this poet is fascinated by the packed, corrugated, wrinkled, layered, coiled nature of the world, offering as it does potential openings and unfoldings both within what we call material reality and also within our cells and synapses, the layers of human thought and feeling. A poem in that book, Visitants, commented: “how close unfold is to enfold”.
Inside the Brightness of Red, a substantially longer second collection, deepens that perception.
Read review
Sandgrain and Hourglass follows on from Redgrove’s Wife, the book in which Penelope Shuttle began to express her grief and disorientation after the death of her husband, Peter Redgrove. This new collection travels widely both geographically and in subject matter which is often treated from an unusual angle. Although its central theme is a continuation, the poet has reached a point where she is able to look more directly at loss and to trace the stages of grief. In The Keening she visualizes the body of her husband, scans it as it was when he was young and healthy and faces the fact “we’re no longer one flesh”. She ends the poem: “This looking is what is called mourning, / and this is how I have learned to mourn.” There is a sense of ritual and the last part of the poem has a biblical note.
Read review
Katherine Gallagher’s New & Selected Poems has been long-anticipated, but the wait has been worthwhile; Arc Publications are to be commended on this impressive volume of over 160 pages.
Gallagher inhabits her poems with ease and confidence. Like her magpie in her poem Homecoming, “sitting within its song&#rdquo;, she sits within her poems. This direct and resonant phrase is characteristic of this poet’s strongly individual voice. She possesses deep warmth and breadth of communication, her language is both winged and yet grounded in real and recognizable experience. Here are poems of familial insight, drawing on the rich resource of memory.
Read review
We apologise for an editorial error in ARTEMISpoetry Issue 5, page 23. In Fiona Sampson’s contribution to the article “Breaking the Glass Ceiling, Part 1” in her second paragraph, her given phrasing “BME [black and minority ethnic] writers” was incorrectly replaced by “BME [black, minority, ethnic] writers”. The full article, duly corrected, appears here.
Editors, ARTEMISpoetry
Issue 5 Contents:
INTERVIEW: Antjie Krog interviewed by Ruth O’Callaghan
BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING: Fiona Sampson & Eleanor Livingstone
AMBITIOUS POETRY BY WOMEN (Part 2): Myra Schneider & Dilys Wood
ON READING AND WALKING THE DOGS OF POETRY: Anne Stewart
REVIEWS: Caroline Carver on Jenny Hamlett; Wendy French on Bernardine Evaristo and Danielle Hope;
Penelope Shuttle on Elisabeth Rowe and Anne Stewart; Ruth O’Callaghan on Fiona Sampson and Wendy Klein;
Maggie Sawkins on Shanta Acharya, Joanna Ezekiel and Maria Jastrzębska; Dilys Wood on Sheenagh Pugh;
Kay Syrad on Siobhán Campbell, Imtiaz Dharker and Chase Twichell, plus many other short reviews…
POETRY:
FIRST PRIZE WINNERS, Second Light Poetry Competition 2010
FEATURED POET: Alison Brackenbury
POEMS SELECTED BY R V BAILEY: poems by Anne Ballard, Caroline Bath, Nikki Bennett, Anne Boileau, Rachel Burns, Anne Cluysenaar, Valerie Doyle, June English, Rose Flint, Maryann Foster, Frances Green, Jenny Hamlett, Maria Jastrębska, Paula Jennings, Hannah Hutchinson, Gill Learner, Andie Lewenstein, Liz Loxley, Gerda Mayer, Rosie Miles, Dee Rivaz, Myra Schneider, Margaret Speak, Martha Street, Daphne Schiller, Isobel Thrilling, Merryn Williams and Dorothy Yamamoto
ARTWORK: by Elizabeth Bell, Sally Clark, Judith Kazantzis, Helen Rowan, Dilys Wood
THE LIVES OF POETS: i.m. Clare Holtham (1948-2010); Mary Bourne (1939-2009)
BACK COVER: Poem and Painting by Mary Bourne
ROC: You live in a multi-lingual society with eleven official languages and five unofficial ones and, additionally, with English being the language of commerce and science. How does such linguistic diversity affect the poetry of South Africa?
AK: Our multilingualism is perhaps our strongest trademark. I find it highly enriching. I executed a project in which I translated poetry from these eleven languages into English, working with small committees on the best poems from each of these languages. But one is deeply grateful that there is at least one language in which we who have been divided for so long can find one another – although that is not quite true as English is very much the language of the elite, of those with better education and middle class prospects. It is also a shame that we didn’t incorporate the wonderful culture of the Dutch: speaking four to five languages and translating.
Read whole interview
(on Elisabeth Rowe:)
Restrained and thoughtful, her poems often convey the transient nature of our key experiences. I was particularly drawn to these lovely poems of the liminal, such as Casting Off, Shadow Selves, There Be Dragons and Dusk where “Light ebbs with the tide; / a serpent river uncoils / from the mud-flats.”
And I much recommend the classy and accomplished sonnet Love Letters: “They smell of things that have been kept too long.” Likewise the tender and measured Several kinds of ordinary happiness.
(on Anne Stewart:)
There’s a Finnish proverb that says ‘Better a bitter truth than a sweet lie’ – (Parempi pyy pivossa, kuin kymmenen oksalla) and the poems in Anne Stewart’s debut collection bear this out. Stewart does not flinch from the bitterness of the truth; her poems are fearless, muscular, flexible, staunch. They look at scenes and events from the past that are still raw; other poems move forward to whatever might lie ahead, with equal courage. Janus indeed presides over this striking collection.
Read the full reviews
The language is extraordinarily beautiful. It is a rich and evocative book and one I could not put down as the story unfolds in chapters each through the eyes of the different players. We grow to know, love, respect or dislike each person as their character evolves. Taiwo, one of the main players who leaves his mother and twin sister in Nigeria and never returns learns of his sister’s death months after she died. In Chapter 10, he thinks “Today I search my sister’s eyes like pebbles in a lake.”
Read whole review
Contents:
MY LIFE IN POETRY: Anne Stevenson
U A FANTHORPE, 1929 – 1930: R V Bailey
AMBITIOUS POETRY BY WOMEN (Part I): Myra Schneider & Dilys Wood
Never Accept Dilys’s Hospitality… by Ruth O’Callaghan
REVIEWS OF COLLECTIONS BY: Alison Brackenbury, Elizabeth Burns, Mavis Carter, Caroline Carver, Rose Cook, Barbara Dordi, Wendy French, Daphne Gloag, Marilyn Hacker, Lucy Hamilton, Sarah Jackson, Maria Jastrzębska, Pru Kitchling, Philippa Lawrence, Etelka Marcel, Lyn Moir, Sue Moules, Caroline Natzler, Rosemary Norman, Melanie Penycate, Lesley Quayle, Joan Sheridan Smith, Hylda Sims, Harriet Torr and Lynne Wycherley
and Reviews of Resource Books: Poetry Writing: The Expert Guide (Fiona Sampson) and Writing Your Self (John Killick & Myra Schneider)
POETRY:
FEATURED POET: Katherine Gallagher
WINNERS, Second Light Poetry Competition, 2009: Lynne Wycherley, Margaret Wilmot & Kay Syrad
COMMENDED, Second Light Poetry Competition, 2009: Suzanne Burrows, Anne Cluysenaar, Kate Foley, Clare Holtham, Pippa Little, M R Peacocke, Marion Tracy, Jenny Vuglar
POETRY SELECTED BY Alison Brackenbury: Annemarie Austin, Anne Ballard, Carol Beadle, Maggie Butt, Caroline Carver, Stephanie Conybeare, Rose Cook, June English, Sally Festing, Nicolette Golding, Janet Fisher, Judy Gahagan, Jenny Hamlett, Lynda How, Joy Howard, Helen Jagger, Kaye Lee, Jo Peters, Daphne Schiller, Jill Townsend, Josie Turner, River Wolton
Second Light Poetry Competition, 2009, Shortlisted: Ann Alexander, Dorothy Baird, Anne Boileau, Helen Lovelock-Burke, H Coffey, Margaret Eddershaw, Jacqueline Gabbitas, Mavis Howard, Gill Learner, Sue MacIntyre, Nancy Mattson, Jane McLaughlin, Rosemary McLeish, Caroline Natzler, Elisabeth Rowe, K V Skene, Dorothy Yamamoto
ARTWORK: Elizabeth Bell, Adele Davide, Rosemary Muncie, Janine Pinion; and Images and Lines: Anne Stewart
“I am not a nano-particle being fired through an interferometer;
I’m a living person whose outer and inner selves are intimately connected…”
Where to begin? Well, to be as up-to-date as I can, I’ll start by citing an article that struck me weeks ago, when I was sorting through old copies of The New Scientist. On the front cover of the issue of 15 May, 2004, was a headline, ‘Make me Quantum: How to be in two places at once’. Right away it occurred to me that ‘quantum’ or a ‘quantum feeling’ would be a good way to express the weird sense I’ve had as far back as I can remember of being at the same time myself and not myself, both here and not here. When I turned to the article, I was struck by the first paragraph’s likeness to a poem I’d written in the early ’80s. …
“Anton Zeilinger raps his knuckles on the wooden table in front of him. He thinks the table is there, passively sitting on the floor of his office… But he can’t be sure. ‘Reality seems to be immediate: I can touch this table,’ he says. ‘However, if you think carefully about it, all I have is information getting into my brain.’ ”
(‘Small Philosophical Poem’ follows in article)
… As for being in two places at once, here again I want to call on quantum physics for a metaphor. For although, in a classical sense, my life has proceeded normally from year to year, in a more mysterious way it has oscillated violently, circling around and back on itself between times of insight and creation and times of mental stagnation and misery. The life I have led as a woman, in short, often feels to me the same and yet different from my life as a poet. Like a quantum particle, I can exist in two places at once – though, let me hastily add, I don’t think being conscious of a double state is all that unusual. Nearly everybody dreams. And my ‘quantum’ life, which I think of as my ‘real’ life, certainly has a root in a dreamy state of mind, though I can’t imagine a dream causing me nearly as much hard, conscious labour as the writing of a poem. …
Read whole article Anne Stevenson at Bloodaxe Books
“ … among other things, England and Leicestershire and Richard III and hope, courage and gypsies …”
Many readers will perhaps already know the outline of UA’s life: how she began as a teacher at Cheltenham, later becoming Head of English; and how (much to her mother’s dismay) she gave up this respectable career to become clerk-receptionist in a small neurological hospital. It was in this apparently unpromising ground that the poetry began. And it began – as poetry quite often does – in the collision between expectation and reality.
She’d applied for the job thinking all hospitals were like the Radciffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she’d had to spend three months after a serious accident when she was an undergraduate, and where – once the difficult and painful bit was over – she’d rather enjoyed herself, convalescing along with other cheerfully recovering patients in the orthopaedic ward …
Read whole article
Contents:
RUTH O’CALLAGHAN INTERVIEWS MARILYN HACKER
WRITERS ON EXILE: Elke-Hannah Dutton, Gill Fothergill, Katherine Gallagher, Mary Hodgson, Maria Jastrzębska, Etelka Marcel, Sibyl Ruth.
THE BIG BALLADS (part 2): Hylda Sims concludes the case
FIRST WORDS … from crooked letters to the exhilaration of poetry: Anne Ryland
PUTTING A COLLECTION TOGETHER: Myra Schneider
REVIEWS oF COLLECTIONS BY: Gillian Clarke, Anne Cluysenaar, Judy Gahagan, Selima Hill, Emma Jones, Martha Kapos, Lotte Kramer, Ruth O’Callaghan, Ruth Padel, Geraldine Paine, Kate Rhodes and Women’s Work anthology (eds. Eva Salzman & Amy Wack)
POETRY:
FEATURED POET: Penelope Shuttle
POETRY SELECTED BY KATHERINE GALLAGHER: Ann Alexander, C R Barnes, Liz Berry, Nadine Brummer, Elizabeth Burns, Caroline Carver, A C Clarke, Eleanor Cooke, Kay Cotton, Clare Crossman, Margaret Eddershaw, Angela France, Rebecca Gethin, Helen Jayne Gunn, June Hall, Judith Kazantzis, Gill McEvoy, Jane McLaughlin, Denise McSheehy, Cheryl Moskowitz, Rosemary Norman, Linda Rose Parkes, Caroline Price, Sibyl Ruth, Anne Ryland, Daphne Schiller, Margaret Speak, Marion Tracy, Vivienne Tregenza, Catherine Whittaker, Margaret Wilmot
ARTWORK: Elizabeth Bell, Andia J Cooke, Adele Davide, Marylou Grimberg, Judith Kazantzis
MH: (extract from answer in respect of influences)
“When I returned to the United States in 1976, it was to the ebullience of American ‘Second Wave’ feminism, which included an efflorescence of women’s writing and publishing. It was then that I
first read the work of Gwendolyn Brooks and of Muriel Rukeyser in depth, discovered that of Audre Lorde and June Jordan, read Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh for the first time, and learned about
that book’s unlikely influence on Emily Dickinson. It was, in fact, in the context of feminist
‘re-vision’ that I began reading Dickinson in depth (which I do not state to try to politicise her work in any way.)
All at once, women poets were in the majority, not the minority, in my reading – and there were women’s bookshops where a sizeable selection of their work could be found, presses and journals publishing it, publishing literary criticism relative to it. It was more than ‘heady’ to discover that Marianne Moore had been a friend and mentor to Elizabeth Bishop, that HD’s beneficent companion Bryher had financed the publication of Moore’s first book of poems, and of Djuna Barnes’ Ladies’ Almanack – to know that women poets had supported and influenced each other’s work, had not each been an isolated token – information students and readers now take more for granted.”
Read whole interview
Contents:
RUTH O’CALLAGHAN INTERVIEWS U.A. FANTHORPE AND R.V. BAILEY
PAIN INTO POETRY: women who write about the flight from terror
WRITING FROM THE ROUGH: poems about grief
THE BIG BALLADS: Hylda Sims examines their appeal
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO WRITE A POEM? Myra Schneider offers an example
20plus REVIEWS: Valentine Ackland, Moniza Alvi, Janet Fisher, Rose Flint,
Angela Kirby, Mary Oliver, Pascale Petit, Caroline Price, Carol Rumens,
Isobel Thrilling and more…
SECOND LIGHT POETRY COMPETITION: WINNERS, COMMENDED & SHORTLISTED
POETRY SELECTED BY PENELOPE SHUTTLE:
Sue Aldred, Zeeba Ansari, Elizabeth Burns, Caroline Carver, Christine Coleman, Christine Evans, Ruth Fainlight, Victoria Field, Lara Frankena, Leah Fritz,
Cynthia Fuller, Rebecca Gethin, Maria Jastrzębska, Sue Johnson, Wendy Klein,
Gill McEvoy, Lyn Moir, M.R. Peacocke, Lesley Saunders, Myra Schneider,
Martha Street, Margaret Wilmot
ARTWORK: Elizabeth Bell, Della Chapman, Adele Davide, Judith Kazantzis
NEWS: "FIFTY/FIFTEEN" – Second Light prepares to celebrate their 15th anniversary
Pascale Petit is a far-travelled poet: already by the time her first collection of poems was published in 1998 she’d twice visited the Amazon basin, and this latest collection contains poems from California, Nepal, China, France… but her journeys are inward as well as outward: she is a seasoned traveller of the imagination and has like Orpheus and the Sumerian Goddess Inanna journeyed to the underworld and returned to tell the tale.
This collection confirms her as a major force in current British poetry: both intensely mythical and intensely autobiographical, and now moving out into a wider world carrying the fruits of those inner explorations. In fact I’d see this volume as a transitional one: my guess is that her forthcoming work will continue the outer focus that is begun here.
Read whole review
Contents:
RUTH O’CALLAGHAN INTERVIEWS FIONA SAMPSON
FRIENDS REMEMBER DAPHNE ROCK (1927-2008)
MAY WE TELL YOU WHO WE ARE?: We focus on A Touch of Malice, ed. Joy Howard, and other anthologies of women writing about their own lives
20plus REVIEWS: Annemarie Austin, Alison Brackenbury, Anne Cluysenaar, Kate Foley, Janet Frame, Jorie Graham, M.R. Peacocke, Stephanie Norgate, Myra Schneider, Pauline Stainer, Anne Stevenson and more…
POETRY SELECTED BY MYRA SCHNEIDER:
Anna Adams, Alison Brackenbury, Nadine Brummer, Maggie Butt, Valerie Clarke, Anne Cluysenaar, Kay Cotton, Beata Duncan, June English, Janet Fisher, Kate Foley, Berta Freistadt, Jacqueline Gabbitas, Mo Gallaccio, Katherine Gallagher, Daphne Gloag, Lucy Hamilton, Jenny Hamlett, Alison Hill, Angela Kirby, Lotte Kramer, Gill Learner, Mary MacRae, Gill McEvoy, Rosemary McLeish, Sue Moules, Janine Pinion, Victoria Pugh, Mary Sheepshanks, Kay Syrad, Isobel Thrilling and Merryn Williams
NEWS, POETRY PRIZES 2008: Rose Flint wins the Cardiff International, Sibyl Ruth wins the Mslexia, Anne Stewart wins the Bridport Prize… and many other successes
ARTWORK: Kate Foley, Judith Kazantzis, Janine Pinion
We learn, from the first of the two bracket sections which open and close Kate Foley’s new collection, that the Silver Rembrandt of the title is a mime artist performing outside the Rijksmuseum, clad in silver lycra…
The mime
bows to the kids,
conducts their mood with a shining brush,
paints the gilded air as it streams past,
Rembrandt is also Muse to Lily, the tough yet vulnerable protagonist of this verse novella (which forms the major part of the collection). Lily first encounters the great artist himself when her teacher sends a postcard of his Old Woman Reading back to her class from Amsterdam.
The young Lily is bewitched by the picture and immediately makes an emotional connection between the old woman depicted by Rembrandt reading her bible and Lily’s beloved grandmother –
it is a kind of photo of her gran.
Kate Foley uses a remarkable exactness and yet fluidity of language to depict Lily, whose story is one of damage and determination, brief joy, sorrow, beyond-sorrow; of the hard work of firstly claiming the self, and then mending the self.
Read whole review
