This week we are delighted to feature the poetry of Linda Collins. A New Zealander, Linda has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with distinction from the University of East Anglia. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, runner-up in the Mslexia poetry contest, and a finalist in the Joy Harjo single poem contest judged by Pulitzer finalist dg nanouk okpik. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in bath magg, Lighthouse, Mslexia, and Cordite, among other; and is in anthologies including All Shall be Well: An Anthology of New Poems for Julian of Norwich (Amethyst Press) andA Palace of Verandas / Palácio das Varandas (Traça Editora, Portugal). Collins is also the author of a memoir, Loss Adjustment (Ethos Books Singapore; Awa Press NZ; and Beijing Guangchen, China), about the death by suicide of her 17-year-old daughter, who was herself an emerging poet (Voicing Suicide; Ekstasis Editions, Canada).
Her current writing projects include a lyric essay on displacement for a chapbook with Faction Press, Singapore; a collaborate poem to celebrate 10 years of Dunedin as a City of Literature; and a poem for an anthology of translation into te reo (the language of New Zealand's indigenous maori).
Her creative practice is informed by the line, "she do the bereaved in different voices", in Denise Riley's "A Part Song", within a framework of poetry that writes to and away from traumatic events. Collins' work is an inquiry into craft techniques and subject matter, including those of the Oulipo school, that create distance or intimacy with a reader, the tension of attraction and aversion within this, and how, in an age of overexposure, the quaint dance of reveal and conceal creates necessary space for a reader.
I was lucky enough to work closely with Linda on her manuscript A voiding in my role as an editor at Muscaliet Press (muscaliet.co.uk). Linda has a playful and lively attention to language and a sense for the properties of a poetic line that really come to the fore in this currently unpublished collection. The poems dance between a writerly joie de vivre and a sense of deep feeling, exemplifying, to my mind, Coleridge's idea that a really good poet needs both wit and sensibility. I regret that we have not yet been able to bring A voiding out for publication as a part of Muscaliet's award-winning chapbook series. However, I hope you will enjoy this selection of poems from A voiding.
things with feathers
My train delayed, I turn my back
on Woodbridge town centre, and set off along the riverside walk
in the hope
of revelling in my solitary self.
Broad-bottomed boats clink anchors like old wives
having a natter and a glass of prosecco. I wave, abstractly,
and around the corner in the distance there's a wave back
from a woman in a shocking
pink dress with feather boa trim, ballet slippers, a wand,
holding a box labelled Sleeping Beauty Costume, and at that fairy moment magicked
behind her come zombies and vampires,
oh, and a child with an axe through his head.
Sleeping Beauty in passing, in teacher voice
explains School Halloween charity walk. The children are quite safe.
Safe?! How do I proceed
through these lines of laughing nightmare-children?
A schoolboy Superman and his Robin rush up,
perhaps safety is reciprocal, a lone older woman
is quite safe; point excitedly to three fairies
by the reeds of the shore feeding white swans.
‘Those girls are swan-whisperers,’ they tell me with besotted awe. Fairies caress
white breasts at the heaving.
Teacher shouts, Hurry up. This way. The fairies are leaving.
Swans arch sleek necks
seeking last remains of Panko pixie dust. I brush something from the breast
of my velvet lapel.
A crumb? A tear? A feather?
I held a cygnet once.
to laugh like her The wind is blowing a story shaking up your silence scattering grains of black sand across the frame of memory a girl in a pink vest, skipping, humming, laughing child-pudgy fingers scoop white mussel shell or is the child the wind the eye of it? the eye of the whirlwind a whirling djinn of sand grains and shell bones across frames, stills still grainy frames celluloid strips edged in black sand the girl-djinn dancing laughing as waves clap the sands, wave-mist rising to the space in between sea tide sand & the safety of landfall singing her laugh-song to nearby rocks to waves wave in wave out all wave long the wave length of the wave long & longer into the crack into the hollows into the shallows of all life’s rock hollows hollows at the edge of the space between life & death sea sandstone the girl falling away & the djinn is laughing joy-laughter let loose from the breath of her breathing the breath of her the filling of her hollow the hollows of her clavicle heaving / laughing laughter, it will follow to laugh like her open your mouth feel the mist on your face the gritty sand under your toes surrender to the sea depart the land it is not submitting it is not losing be part of it grow or dissolve in that power the heart of it it is living in the in the midst of the missed a child lost years now memory a swirl of mist to laugh like her is to remember her open your mouth allow the wound to weep open your rictus mouth to the sky you live still though you, too, will die
flowers losing their heads
In the cemetery, daffodils butter-dust
grass above a once-body,
nourish the remnants
of a ‘gone-too-soon’; nature so busy rephrasing
dreary ‘here lies’,
into an emo tune
for adolescence,
with a nod,
yeah,
to Evanesence.
.
Petals scatter pollen
in time to wind gusts,
in time to four time,
wild-flowers are wild, are my wild-child, they flourish,
they flourish untouched.
In the cemetery, a cold snap snaps them, yet
they spring up,
they spring up.
Stems bend toward their lost heads,
unfettered blooms bounce
on the once-body
in time to wind gusts;
broken they bust solo moves,
strobe floor aglow, butter-dust, butter-dust.
never leaving The light linen curtains of summer have been drawn in every room and secured together with clothes pegs. Each bed is made, ready for arrival months or years from now. The skirting has been sprayed for earwigs, spider webs have been wiped away, though all will come back when silence settles. The tank water has been turned off and the last of it dribbles into the sink. The fridge still hums, the power stays on for the freezer’s bounty of stewed rhubarb, vegetables from the garden, bagged up, stiff, in a hope-chest prone to mould. Your writing shed has been closed up, sheaves of poem fragments filed under memories. Copies of your books are already dusty, you leave them that way. Suitcases have been dragged out to the car, a last goodbye is said to the girl in school uniform smiling aged fourteen in a photo above the TV, where Tibetan prayer bells loll on a shelf next to a souvenir from Raffles Hotel. You tell her to look after the place, its ghosts. The lock is turned at the back door, the security camera captures you giving it the finger. All the leave-takings of all the years climb into the car with you, they are eager for a change of scene. The speckled thrush you called Missus Busy-Body Thrush, found dead six years ago in the driveway, nestles in the passenger foot-well, quite happy.
Join us next time when we will feature something a little different: the Romantically-inspired sketches of artist Brenna Cameron Lopes. Visual media! Until then, stay frosty (but not too a-cold).