Archangel

Archangel uses the forgotten legacy of the sexed angels of the Pseudepigrapha to imbue a sense of the sublime into the figure of the female lover.  The poems in the cycle are an attempt to rescue feminine sexuality, and a vision of love and passion as suffering, from the clutches of a patriarchy that sullies fleshly feminine love and denies woman ownership of the shape of her desires. Caught in the strictures of material life the lover fixates physically and spiritually on the beloved as an Archangel, scripturally by definition a being without desire, to sketch the emotional universe of woman embodied as passion and loss.  The paradox investigated here mines the archetype of desire inscribed in an ‘othering’ language that underpins the situation of woman.  It writes itself both within and without tradition, gesturing to a thousand years of angelic palimpsest by the orthodoxy to mirror in feminist erotica the continuing excoriation of feminine beings without power or recognition in the realm of the sublime as well as the material.

“ An evocative, sad and delicate collection of poems. Shades of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, as the narrator screams and scratches at 'the petit bourgeois malaise that we all mistake for morality', 'the strapped down desires' of 'rolling greens, clipped hedges, and village fêtes, and at her 'down-the-plughole type of life' - that small domestic pain strung like a 'grey grease-stained, stinky-stale dishcloth over the tarnished lip of the sink'. The reader hurtles forward from the first poem to the last on a sensuous journey of heightened sensitivity, feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing - the words, the images are succulent, savoured - the poet determinedly sets out to contest 'the usual lexico-graphic fare of Anglo-Saxon f--kery.' The poems are, despite the anger, a passionate statement of continuing love for the Archangel, a reluctant understanding of his limitations, and a calm knowing that she - the narrator- is able to move on if she chooses. The after-taste is not one of despair but mourning, and a doleful sense of nascent liberation. ”

Gaele Sobott - October 22, 2011

Archangel cover image by Martin von den Driesch

Find more work by Martin here.