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Helen Rickerby is the author of two collections of poetry: Abstract Internal Furniture<\/span><\/strong> (2001) and My Iron Spine<\/strong> <\/span>(2008), and recently had a sequence of poems, Heading North<\/em><\/strong>, published in a hand-bound edition by Kilmog Press<\/strong>. She is co-managing editor of JAAM<\/strong> literary magazine and runs Seraph Press<\/strong>, a boutique poetry publisher. She lives in Wellington, in a cliff-top tower, and works as a web editor.<\/p>\n To find out more about Helen and her wonderful poetry, you may visit her on her blog Winged Ink<\/a>. <\/strong><\/em>To read her guest post on the recently released\u00a0 JAAM 28: Dance Dance Dance<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, which she co-edited, click here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n About the Christmas Exchange:<\/strong><\/p>\n Basically, the Christmas Exchange comprises the poets of the Tuesday Poem Blog<\/strong><\/a> pairing up and featuring one of the other’s poems on their site—all in celebration of the Christmas and New Year festivals!\u00a0 I was delighted to be paired with Helen Rickerby<\/strong><\/a>, whose poetry I admire immensely, and even more delighted when I read the poems Helen sent me. I liked both of them very much but I have to say that Burning with Joan of Arc<\/em><\/strong> really spun my poetic wheels.<\/p>\n Firstly, because it’s very powerful poetically—this is a poem that packs a lot of punch! (Fittingly, of course, for Joan of Arc.)\u00a0 The power is achieved through a number of devices: the use of dialogue and ‘voice’;\u00a0 the spare language juxtaposed with repetition, particularly around “burned” and “burning.”\u00a0 We all have our personal prejudices and preferences as poets, and one of mine is a wariness of repetition: I find it tires very easily as a device, and risks boring the reader and dragging\u00a0 a poem into the banal. But in this poem it works perfectly—so much so that it was only on the second reading that I even noticed that there was repetiton.\u00a0 (At first reading I just went: wow.”)<\/p>\n I really don’t like breaking poems down—if they work as a whole then that’s good enough for the Lowe gal!\u00a0 And this poem definitely works as a whole. But because this is the Christmas Exchange I want to talk about\u00a0 a couple of other aspects that make Burning with Joan of Arc <\/strong><\/em>rock for me. For example, how quickly and effectively Helen creates the atmosphere of the poem through words such as “yellow”, “palm” and “scorching” in the first stanza; then the way in which she juxtaposes the macro story of Joan of Arc, her life and death, with the minutiae of the beach expereince: sunbathing and a conversation around sunscreen. The latter gives bathos to the former, but in such an understated way that as a reader you don’t see it coming—and even after it’s gone the effect is so neat that rather than flagellating over the glory and tragedy and injustice of Joan of Arc’s life, you are left simply with a feeling of satisfaction: for the poem well conceived and delivered, as well as for the “story” effectively told.<\/p>\n For those who might argue that it is not a NZ Christmas poem: of course it is! NZ Christmas is all about high summer, and beaches, and sunscreen, and Burning <\/strong><\/em>captures that perfectly.\u00a0 Given that Joan of Arc has been canonized as a saint, I also feel that it is timely to reflect that a festival that promises “peace on earth and good will to all” has many times delivered “not peace but a sword”—together with the stake, the rack, the wheel, and the cross. Not a reason to turn away from the promise that offers better hope, but an incentive, as individuals and societies, to strive harder to realise it in the world.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/rickerbyh.jpg.jpg\" "\\"rickerbyh.jpg\\"")
<\/a>About Helen Rickerby: <\/strong><\/p>\n