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petite

This collection is a book-length sequence of poems of less than 20 lines each, exploring the range and depth of concise lyric verse to site the deeply ‘personal’ against ‘imagined’ experience, exploring the commonality of understanding across different lives.

Research questions focus on the short poem form: Is this distilled form robust enough to examine a wide range of contemporary subject matter? Is the impact of each poem enhanced or reduced by its placing in a sequence? What narrative virtues does it share with the photograph rather than the film? Can the process of refinement and crystallisation open out questioning and insight?

The work uses concrete poetry, sonnet and free verse to encapsulate the experience of a life, including exploration of the loss of a parent and the growth of children, distilled into a particular thought or impression. The poems focus on a strong central image to produce a vivid mental picture for the reader.

This book continues its author’s exploration of the short lyric as a form particularly suited to the pace of the modern world, and her previous work as a journalist and filmmaker in researching, visualising and sequencing the poems. It takes inspiration from the power of sonnet sequences, haiku collections and the short poetry anthology to experiment with the collective possibilities of short verse.

The poems draw on the short-form traditions of Emily Dickinson, the Imagist poets and haiku (particularly Basho) combined with the confessional mode of Plath and Olds. They develop these into a pithy, epigrammatic mode which combines formal and free verse, honed and crafted for clarity of expression, immediacy and accessibility. They aim particularly to engage non-poetry audiences embedded in a culture of sound bites, tweets and text messages. Poems from the book have also been developed into a choreographed dance piece.