Sometime during the fourth century, in northwest China, a woman named Su Hui picked up her silk thread and embarked on an embroidery project. The result was an extraordinary work of visual poetry – a grid of 29 x 29 characters, shuttle-woven on brocade to form a palindrome poem that would become known as Xuanji Tu, or the ‘Star Gauge’.
Continue readingAuthor Archives: Marian Christie
Iterations of Emptying
‘Iterations of Emptying’ is shaped by the Sierpinski carpet fractal. It was first published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 11 Issue 1 (2021) and has also appeared in Poetrishy #1.
Farewell to 2021
As we approach the end of a year dominated by chaos, bleakness, and the ravages of the pandemic, it is difficult not to succumb to despair. We seem to be caught up in the ‘widening gyre’ of Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’ in January 1919, at a time when the First World War had only recently ended, the political situation in his native Ireland was dangerously unstable and the Spanish ‘flu pandemic was raging (his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees became very ill and almost died from the ‘flu). It’s hardly surprising that a sense of impending doom reverberates through the poem.
Continue readingContainment
The glass, half-full, is cracked. I notice this when I raise it to my lips and your face fractures beyond the rim. Sometimes we see what was not there before or what was always there but we were looking at the water not the glass, which slithers from my hands, hurtles to the ceiling and explodes. A thousand splinters glint around my head.
This poem first appeared in the anthology Dark Confessions (ed. Matthew M. C. Smith) Black Bough Poetry 2021.
Blood moon, visible
Who hears hyenas laugh beneath a wounded moon? We are small, man, small. Sweet taste of pears and your absent breath. Let go of unread books, of souvenirs from unremembered holidays. Switch off the news, the flames, the words. Look to the sky between the trees; windstill and clear.
This poem first appeared in the anthology Dark Confessions (ed. Matthew M. C. Smith) Black Bough Poetry 2021.
Aerial roots
This poem first appeared in the anthology Dark Confessions (ed. Matthew M. C. Smith) Black Bough Poetry 2021.
Circles within Circles
This poem first appeared in my pamphlet Fractal Poems (Penteract Press, 2021)
Conics and Kisses: Poetry shaped by Apollonius of Perga
I used to loathe coordinate geometry at school, mainly because we had to calculate, plot and draw the graphs by hand. My geometry notebooks were full of wobbly parabolas and ellipses that staggered uncertainly from point to point rather than flowing in one smooth, continuous curve.
Continue readingSungrazer
Reply
‘Sungrazer’ first appeared in Consilience Journal in June 2021.
Citizen of nowhere
He looked at me across the counter, pen poised above the form, and asked where I was born. We had made good progress up till then. Name, age, gender, marital status, I knew all the answers. But now: where was I born? A silence floated in the ice-white hall and wobbled outwards like a slowly blown bubble. My breath was going nowhere. He asked again – Your place of birth? – and the walls dissolved into sunlight, straggled poinsettia bleeding white, mealies roasted in mopani embers, crack of msasa pods curled beneath my foot. Somewhere in a non-existent country. He was getting impatient, I could see, so I drew my coat a little tighter round my self and scrabbled to release my breath. In my mental fists I held two names, one in the past and one in the present. Which one should I give him? I opened my mouth and offered the name that was on the palm of my tongue.
This poem first appeared in The Stony Thursday Book no.16, Summer 2018, edited by Nessa O’Mahony.