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Timeslips

Anne Cluysenaar

Timeslips by Anne Cluysenaar
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • Paper. No pen. To mark
    the words beginning, might I
    move a leaf, a twig, a stone?
    Or let thought's memorial be
    traces in the cells, lighter
    than snow, more lasting perhaps
    than messages in pollen?
                         Distant
    the minds that made us. Sacred,
    our present, to their memory, the press
    of desire in us for futures.

    from 'Solstice', Timeslips

    The epigraph of Anne Cluysenaar's Double Helix (Carcanet, 1982) was from Anna Akhmatova: 'To keep alive the wonder of suffering/You have been metamorphosed into me.'

    This theme was explored in the ways a child develops and becomes. Cluysenaar is alive to natural and cultural conditioning, but also attached to 'the holiness of the heart's affections'. As the title Timeslips suggests, she focuses on slippages of time, in landscape, and between different ways of life and language. The imagination is continuously and unstoppably transformed, yet rides the flow of its metaphors into the experiences latent in everyday life. In earlier poems the slippages are intimate, between the generations and cultures of her own family. 'Timeslips' moves to a wider sphere of geological, evolutionary and historical change, concluding with the twenty-two poems of 'Vaughan Variations'. Here the life and Usk landscape of the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan provide themes for meditations on bilingualism, war, nature and the spiritual resources of poetic form.
    Anne Cluysenaar was born in Brussels in 1936. Her family came to England just before the war. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, graduated in English and French Literature and in 1961 became an Irish citizen. In 1987 she withdrew from full-time academic life to concentrate on writing and painting. She ... read more
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