Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
The grass never stops
Lynley Edmeades on Vana Manasiadis
Vana Manasiadis’s interest and use of history and mythology — grounded in her own biography — is a welcome strain to New Zealand poetry. Her reference to Greek and classical traditions, and her borrowing of forms from her poetic forebears, lets her cultivate a poetic voice relatively peculiar to these shores.[1] She holds an MA in Creative Writing — the standard currency for emerging poets in the English-speaking world — but her work has a scope much greater than the contemporary institution’s remit.