The Tuesday Poem: Focusing On Tim Jones & “Angela Carter”
Angela Carter
And then your portrait on the back
so neutral and complete
standing full-length
posed I don’t remember where.
Eyes sky black
you stood unsmiling
suggesting there were realer worlds within.
Your books dealt much in mirrors
which might have led me to suppose
that you were one yourself
and I’d step through the flimsy sheet
that held you to your words
and turn and, face inside your face,
watch the empty space where I had been.
.
© Tim Jones
Published in Boat People, HeadworX, 2008. Reproduced here with permission.
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I first featured Tim’s Angela Carter in a 2013 series on ekphrastic poems — works that respond to a work of art.
As well as loving the poem, I also enjoyed Tim’s commentary, “speaking” to the poem:
“When I was younger, I went through phases of intensively reading the entire oeuvre – or as much of the oeuvre as I could lay my hands on – of specific authors.
One such author was Angela Carter (1940-1992), who is probably now best known for her late novel Night at the Circus, but whose earlier novels veered closer to science fiction. At a time when I was finding out about feminism, I found Angela Carter’s strongly but unconventionally feminist fiction both fascinating and challenging. The photo that made such an impression on me was on the back cover of The Passion of New Eve, her 1977 science fiction novel (though “science fiction” is a pale term to use to describe Carter’s lush, highly symbolic fiction) – and the poem reflects my fascination with the questions of masculine and feminine identity found both in this novel and throughout Carter’s fiction.
I get the impression that Angela Carter’s fiction isn’t as well known or widely read twenty years after her death as it deserves to me. If you’d like to know more about her and her work, check out this Scriptorium profile of her by Jeff VanderMeer, or this shorter 2006 profile in the Independent (UK).“
I have very much enjoyed focusing on Tim’s poetry again over the past few weeks. If you haven’t already had the chance to check the poems out, just click on:
Or visit his website: Books In The Trees.
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About The Poet:
Tim Jones is a New Zealand poet, author and editor who was awarded both the New Zealand Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature and a Sir Julius Vogel Award in 2010. His latest book, co-edited with PS Cottier, is The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry (2014).
For more, see http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/
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To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here.
