POETS@KSP
Poetry by Shey Marque
REVIEW by Cassandra Atherton, award-winning prose poet and scholar
KEEPER OF THE RITUAL interrogates memory in thrillingly complex detail.
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Marque both revels in, and interrogates language, masterfully exploring the border been prose and poetry. The journal and photograph are two significant ways of recording experience and Marque invests these with a sense of the uncanny as the narrator superimposes herself over the unfolding narrative in a powerful ghosting.
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[The] ekphrastic poems are magisterial in their diversity and control of language. The poem ‘Plume’ which has the epigraph – ‘Femme qui Tire son Bas by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrect, 1894, oil on cardboard, 58 X 46 cm, Musee d’Orsay, Paris’, is a wonderful pantoum turning on the repetition of sensuous lines so that the poem, like the artwork, slides like a sigh down the page.
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Furthermore, as an extension of the ekphrastic impulse, Marque’s rich evocations of looking and what it means to be looked at, are never more poignant than in the poem ‘You Over There’.
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Keeper of the Ritual is absorbing in its obsessive and multifarious recordings of experience and identity. The poems are strong and graceful, evoking still life and the bustling but brief nature of existence.
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APORIAC
Finishing Line Press, USA, 2016
REVIEWS
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I wink, whisper behind my hand, confide in you my discovery
of that secret hiding place among the Bougainvillea. (‘Handstand’)
The poems in Aporiac ‘dance /barefoot ... in the street’ and they are never without music. They play with images and ideas, but the language is always alive, resonating with memory, with land- and sea-scape, with worlds seen through the eyes of a knowing child: that clear, honest account which is sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes amusing, but always perceptive. And through all the poems runs a strong thread of rhythm, of music and of language play. An exciting collection from a most accomplished poet.
Ron Pretty AM
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Shey Marque's Aporiac is awake to the extraordinary in our ordinary lives, ever sensitive to the changing nature of relationships and perspectives, and achingly conscious of the passing of time. Haunting and evocative, the poems in this collection tell small town stories that tread playfully and powerfully along the thin line between mundane and momentous. This West Australian poet paints suburbia and the sea brilliantly, each page deftly dusted with grass clippings and salty air. Aporiac is at once a delight and a disturbance.
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Bronwyn Lovell, Poet
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