Title: The Blue Dragonfly – healing through poetry
Author: Veronica Eley
Publisher: Hidden Brook Press, Ontario
grey blanket [from Prelude] earliest memory driving along a country road in the back seat wrapped in a grey blanket in the dark separation the side bars on the hospital bed two years old pneumonia fifteen-year-old girl raped police declare emotionally disturbed wrapped in a grey blanket taken home disturbed turbulent the waters the waves, the waves are big, mommy the cold, grey ocean is deep I lean against the railing of the White Star Cunard liner seven years old railings grey blanket grey, grey secret monsters [from Presentation] when I am dog tired deep down below an ambiguous voice declares itself blasphemous language often, with a highly sexual content pokes out its unseemly head to scream and thrash about language from a deep abyss dirty tributaries foul-mouthed monsters who live in my subterranean landscapes loud mouthed the desire to smash and hurt to feed the monster within to let out a little vengeful steam is the only way to calm the beast in some ways I live a life of pretence hidden shameful feeding the snake within with disgusting morsels the bodhisattva [from Altered States] she wanders through the streets a heart as big as the whole outdoors warding off criticisms from voices long ago dead how do you lose rolling the dice of compassion? the fashion in the 90s : to give politically/correctly the knife of deconstruction blasts beliefs, values, ideals the high-rise terminology -laden hierarchical transcendent, dualistic world crumbles (post -modernized) leaving us with No Thing, powering our appetites to violent pornographies karma equals Choice equals Action equals Identity where does this yearning come from? the bodhisattva’s loving compassion, undifferentiated interconnective, doing and undoing do we have any other choice? in our best dress our Sunday best our best frame of mind -- compassionate be I exist between myself and you mother [from Home] eternal mother conniving tributary peace strategies love and replenishment look to the sun the bare branches outlining our destinies reaching to the heavens rooted in fertile ground our arms reach upward bare, rough and brown the colour of the earth take care, dear mother look to the sunset the glorious colours I will be thinking of you
About the Book
The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry is a verse narrative of trauma and recovery, 120 poems organized into three acts: Secret Monsters, The Bodhisattva, and Mother. Distinguished by an intense affectivity of language, its poetry of metaphor, repetition, and internal rhyme, “rotating / like a wind chime / inside my body,” communicates a trance-like account of trauma, therapy, and personal growth. Resistance to Western rationality – camouflaging crimes of incest and rape – is a major theme. The poet’s encounter with an Indian psychiatrist heralds the discovery of “a comrade spirit / a healer” from another continent. In time, the poet becomes the bodhisattva herself, a compassionate witness to her own and the bravely lived stories of others, a “red trauma reverberating around the world.” Trauma theory links such suffering to creative language, re-invoking Aristotle’s conception of metaphor as uniquely bound to tragedy (to make the unspeakable speak). Is poetry and its poem then merely a “work of art”? Or is it a linguistic “magical toolkit,” with purpose to build a common, practical humanity free from pain?
About the Author
Born 1950, Manchester UK, Veronica Eley is an Adult literacy instructor, Toronto, 1994-2011, Master of Education, OISE-UT, Toronto, 2002. She retired inDartmouth, Nova Scotia, 2016. Her first book of poetry was published in 2021. – Poetry came to the author late in life through journaling and therapy (1998-2016), when she learned to “stream the inner spirit, the unconscious,” in a “fluid connection between my soul, brain, pen and paper.” Poems would give structure and pace to her feelings, sparking her “creative remembering” and recovery from trauma. Ideas of synchronicity and flow, an attunement to nature, and the stories of her immigrant and refugee students provided a rich support for telling her own story. The author’s family had migrated to Nova Scotia in 1952. Dislocation shock, charismatic Catholicism, and the metempsychotic memory of the cotton mills would repose themselves in the youngest child. A “trinity of traumas” personal to her would follow. Now the small-press publication of her book, aided by her acutely poetic camera, accumulates readers. The author declines interviews, as “the poems speak for themselves.”
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles
Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International
Borderless 