In the Skin House by Jeni Couzyn
The culmination of Jeni Couzyn's Selected Poems, Life by Drowning, was a new body of powerful, mystical poetry, including A Time To Be Born and The Coming of the Angel. In her latest collection, In the Skin House, she continues her journey of self-discovery in probing poems that are remarkable not just for their spiritual qualities but also for their tender lyricism and sense of wonder. The Sufi writer Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee calls In the Skin House Jeni Couzyn's own inner story: 'Her mysticism is neither abstract nor ascetic, but belongs to the school of lovers like Mary Magdalene... She does not deny the body, but embraces it and goes beyond its boundaries. She is a woman in the arms of her inner lover, surrendering to the mystery of the soul.'
When I think of In the Skin House, I think of the drawings of Paul Klee or the love poems of Rumi: of spirit tracks that must be followed intuitivelyIf, for something to hang on to, you were to try to read these poems as an amalgam of spiritual traditions - a bit of Western gnosticism mixed with Eastern mysticism - you would miss their delicacy, for the only way to read them is to submit to the poems themselves. They create their own language of discovery. -- Rosemary Sullivan
Jeni Couzyn was born in South Africa in 1942. She grew up in Johannesburg, and read English and Drama at the University of Natal. In 1965 she emigrated to Britain. From 1975 to 1978 she lived in Canada, where she published three books and became a Canadian citizen. She now lives between London and South Africa. Her first book of poems, Flying, appeared from Workshop Press in 1970, and was followed by several other books, including Monkeys' Wedding (Cape, 1972; Heinemann, 1978), Christmas in Africa (Heinemann, 1975), House of Changes (Heinemann, 1978), Life by Drowning: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1985) and In the Skin House (Bloodaxe Books, 1993). She edited The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets, published by Bloodaxe Books in 1985.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781852242541 |
| ISBN 10 | 185224254X |
| Title | In the Skin House |
| Author | Jeni Couzyn |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 1993-09-23 |
| Number of pages | 64 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |