Output details

Of Mutability

Of Mutability is a book about transformation. It investigates how poetry can explore physical and mental change and how poetry might embody that change in its forms and expression. The book looks back, most obviously through its title, to the traditions of mutability in poetry: Wordsworth, Shelley, Chaucer and Spenser. But the research dimension of this book is most powerfully demonstrated through the positioning of a changeable lyric ‘I’, and the way it questions its earlier, masculine influences, drawing on the work of the artist Helen Chadwick, whose groundbreaking exhibition of the same name was shown in London in 1986. Some poems reference her work directly, others use strategies influenced by her thinking to delve into the workings and positioning of the lyric ‘I’, and to develop a transformative poetry, which is permeable, fluid and often liminal.