The fleeting image of a woman triggers memories of an abusive relationship, leaving a grieving speaker to reflect on the painful necessity of separation, in this hauntingly beautiful poem by Marina Scott.
For their Poets of Colour Festival, Matwaala 2021 brings together five prize-winning African American women poets – Dorothy Randall Gray, Cynthia Manick, Loretta Diane Walker, Marsha Nelson and Anastasia Tomkin. Here, Lucy Writers showcases their brilliant, moving work, which ranges from a celebration of Black motherhood through to the final moments of George Floyd’s life.
In her audio poem, ‘A Friendship Lost’, Lolly Spindler recalls the abrupt end to an important relationship and the feelings of shock, loss and loneliness that ensued.
In her poem, actor and poet Anna McKelvie cleverly employs the metaphor of a boat at sea to express the difficulties, uncertainty and camaraderie experienced during the pandemic. Here, friendship triumphs over troubled waters.
Susan Wilson explores the creative space of poetry, writing through grief and loss, poetry as identity, and words as ‘the hope in brilliant darkness of a flame’.
Kashiana Singh’s tightly knit poems, ‘Kindling healing’ and ‘The night spills’, explore night and day in all their haunting nuance and mesmerising movement.
Artist Michèle Saint-Michel fuses poetry and music with news reportage in her powerful audio piece, The Immortal Charlie Parker. In it, she recounts her experience of reconnecting with a childhood friend during the early stages of the pandemic.
Sleeplessness gives way to the dreamy promise of luscious fruits, beautiful bodies and fantastical lands in Elodie Rose Barnes’ poetry, inspired, in part, by Leonora Carrington and H. D.
Susan Wilson’s poems quietly and sensitively explore the range of feelings – numbness, pain and longing – experienced after losing a loved one, enacting within their poetic structures the motions and process of grief.
Yen Ooi’s poem, ‘Mother Tongue’, is a bold and resolute response to those who project ideas onto a person’s skin and fail to see the individual for who they are, in all their cultural, linguistic and ethnic multiplicity.
