Description
Crossing the Mirror Line explores doubleness, the unsettling symmetries of mirrored reflections, the magician's disorientating art that `makes nothing appear'. Artists' mannequins and watchful children stand at an angle to the familiar-seeming world; an estuary blurs distinctions between land and sea. Like the eighteenth-century artists' landscape mirror that reconfigured the relationship between the viewer and what is viewed, the poems in Judith Willson's first collection are concerned with the very act of looking, how it selects and transforms what is seen. Their landscapes are borders and boundaries, places shaped by the persistence of a past which still presses close to the surface, its meanings as unstable as the play of light. Objects disclose stories of their travel through `peopled time': poems `reach through thick folds into pockets / for a letter or a glove'.
* Crossing the Mirror Line explores doubleness; the unsettling symmetries of mirrored reflections, relationship between the viewer and what is viewed. * Poems are concerned with looking, how we select and transform what is seen. * Places shaped by the persistence of a past which still presses close to the surface; poems echo with stories and songs in which elusive histories are glimpsed. * Will appeal to readers with interest in local history, the persistence of the past, and its interpretation.
About the Author
Judith Willson grew up in Manchester and studied English at the universities of Cambridge and York, and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester. She has worked as a teacher and in book and journal publishing. She lives in the Yorkshire Pennines.
Reviews
`Willson's poetry takes us, in a dazzling flow of images, to lives which have the solidity of Central European fairytale with all the frightening reality of history behind them. Richly inventive in form and precise in tone, this is an amazingly assured debut collection.' - Elaine Feinstein
Book Information
ISBN 9781784104993
Author Judith Willson
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 8mm
* Crossing the Mirror Line explores doubleness; the unsettling symmetries of mirrored reflections, relationship between the viewer and what is viewed. * Poems are concerned with looking, how we select and transform what is seen. * Places shaped by the persistence of a past which still presses close to the surface; poems echo with stories and songs in which elusive histories are glimpsed. * Will appeal to readers with interest in local history, the persistence of the past, and its interpretation.
About the Author
Judith Willson grew up in Manchester and studied English at the universities of Cambridge and York, and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester. She has worked as a teacher and in book and journal publishing. She lives in the Yorkshire Pennines.
Reviews
`Willson's poetry takes us, in a dazzling flow of images, to lives which have the solidity of Central European fairytale with all the frightening reality of history behind them. Richly inventive in form and precise in tone, this is an amazingly assured debut collection.' - Elaine Feinstein
Book Information
ISBN 9781784104993
Author Judith Willson
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 8mm
