Tuesday Poetry: “The Woman Who Swims with the Jellyfish” by Janis Freegard
The Woman Who Swims with the Jellyfish
(Jellyfish Lake by Dorothy Cross, from ‘A Duck for Mr Darwin’ exhibition)
you can see right through them
99 parts sea to 1 part alien
…………………….her hair wafts out
…………………….moving in time with the water
there are thousands of them –
all gut and tentacles
pulsing through the sun-shot shallows
…………………….she breathes, keeps her chin up
they are upright, sideways
upside down
they palpitate
towards and past her
…………………….her tresses move like they do
…………………….valoop valoop
curious/ incurious
they brush her breasts
…………………….she floats amongst them
…………………….almost one of the flock
you can’t reason with them:
they have no head
…………………….she contemplates radial symmetry
© Janis Freegard
First published in Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland University Press, 2011)
Reproduced here with permission
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Recently I shared how much I had enjoyed Janis Freegard’s debut novel, The year of falling. Today I am delighted to bring you her poem The Woman Who Swims With Jellyfish, continuing my focus on poems that are broadly themed around the sea.
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Janis Freegard lives in Wellington, with an historian and a cat, and works in the public service. Her first full-length poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, was published by Auckland University Press in 2011. She is also the author of a chapbook, The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider (Anomalous Press, 2013), and co-author of AUP New Poets 3 (AUP, 2008).
Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas, including Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page (Random House, 2014), Best NZ Poems 2012, and Landfall. Janis also writes fiction, is a past winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award.
She has recently published a second book of poetry, The Glass Rooster, with Auckland University Press and a novel, The year of falling, with Mākaro Press, both in 2015.
To find out more about Janis and her work, visit Janis Freegard.
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Prior ‘Sea’ Poems include:
“Dover Beach” (Excerpt) by Matthew Arnold
“Breathing You In” by David Gregory
“We are more than half water” by Helen Rickerby
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part 1 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Seafarer” Excerpt from the Anglo Saxon poem (Anonymous)
How wonderful! I have recently had a lot to do with jellyfish myself. They have been washing up on my local beach. They are quite incredibly beautiful when alive. But not so when dead. And that see through thing that is quite stunning when you get to see them breathing. There is much to think about within the jellyfish radius.Thanks for this Helen and Janis. Another one of those serendipitous events.
Yes, apparently jellyfish get “trapped” in bays and inlets, which is why there is sometimes a high rate of attrition on local beaches. Serendipitous intersections of poetry and real life are always good, however. 🙂