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BOOKS: LADIES OF DIVIDED TWINS
FOREWORD:
From a second hand bookshop in Houston, Texas, I purchased a visually stimulating book about the similarities and differences between Eastern Siberia and Alaska - "Divided Twins" as it was called. The photographer and the poet that had produced it had filled this volume with wonderful anecdotes and glorious photographs of the people and places. I was drawn to the images of women, particularly the old Siberian ladies (babushkas) wrapped in layer upon layer of protection from the bitter cold. After a lifetime, the unforgiving weather of these northern lands had taken a toll on their faces. It also occurred to me at some point a little earlier, that some of my poetry had been about lonely unmarried women (see "When They are not Watching", "Grace" for example). I have no real notion of why I did this, only that I enjoyed the inventiveness, the black humour of distorted reality. It was the seed of this collection of poems about encounters with, and perceptions of, my opposite gender. These poems are my expressions of fabled or real encounters with the opposite sex either as family, wives, girlfriends, artistic influences, mere glancing blows or faces staring out at me from a book.
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From the book -
WHEN THEY ARE NOT WATCHING
Each day…
When they are not watching
she eats celery in the nude.
She sends herself emails.
She reads one chapter
from the New Testament
in a different accent.
Yesterday it was Revelations
Chapter five, in Glaswegian.
She cuts a flowering stem
before dark and lays it upon
the plumped pillow next to her own.
She sings hymns in the shower,
softly - to ward off psychopaths.
A string of garlic hangs
outside the bathroom door.
On Fridays she enjoys
a glass of iced amaretto
as she thumbs the single's page
of the local Gazette,
creating faces for names
that she will never call.
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Ladies of Divided Twins
40 pages £4.99
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Reviews of Ladies of Divided Twins
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Graham Burchell manages to set a scene of ambitious awareness and craft in his latest collection. His words haunt us with clarity and suggestion. Stark and emotionally rich. This book is a sublime addition to art and its author a notable voice in contemporary poetry.
Lisa Zaran; Contemporary American Voices
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Like Glowworms in July, Graham Burchell's poems flash their brief lightnings and draw us near. In Ladies of Divided Twins, his alternately sad, brilliant, torn, and tantalizing women are presences who strike fire with every glance.
Charles Ades Fishman Author of Chopin's Piano, Country of Memory and others.
Graham Burchell tells us that "this party is over," but for those of us who absorb these strong poems, the party is something we will eagerly
return to again, and again.
L. Ward Abel; Author of Jonesing for Byzantium and Peach Box and Verge.
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Burchell is unafraid to write his poems using variations of meter and with stanzas ranging from triplets to quintains to free verse to help capture the essence of the woman he is 'expressing'. The styles used are as varied as the women themselves, which both refreshes the text and helps to honour the importance of the message being conveyed. These women, Burchell seems to be saying, are organic creatures and will not be confined within the cage of repetitious four-line stanzas. The poetry should be moulded to who they are, and not the other way around. Elle's Competitive Nature, one of the strongest poems in the collection and perhaps thelongest, is written in a series of broken stanzas that scatter across two pages as we learn of her difficulties that come from having 'breasts and brain' too big for her body. Elle, 'strong willed yet brittle' has a strong fear of commitment, pregnancy, life, death. We emerge from the poem with a strong sense of this woman, aided in no small manner by the way in which it was composed, all jagged stanzas and broken lines.
Damian Kelleher for Four Volts Magazine (Click HERE to read Damian's full review)
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