Search results for ""Author Judith Willson""

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’.

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In 1878, in London, a woman served a prison sentence for deserting two of her children, a charge she denied. Almost nothing else is known of her life or that of her husband, a dealer in 'foreign birds and curiosities', who was himself a migrant. The two children vanished from the record. This is where Fleet begins, with elusive histories and lost voices. The title suggests imperial power, conquest, traffic in commodities (which in the nineteenth century included vast numbers of exotic birds). It is shadowed by other meanings: the fleeting glimpse and swift flight; floating memories, enigmatic and insistent. Judith Willson's second book of poems was written during years when migration and displacement have become central facts of the human condition. The collection works outwards from found text – historical documents, archive materials – into other places and times. In the silences of such records, their erasures and omissions, are stories that haunt our present.

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