Border Voices Poetry Project Manager, Jack Webb's blurb of The Undertow
You are holding a rare book of verse in your hands. The Undertow is a book of interlinked poems which begins on the Aegean coastline, the childhood home of the poet and the location of Odysseus’s legendary kingdom. We understand that both the poet and the ancient king went on physical and spiritual Odysseys. In Emily Bilman’s book the falcon and the falconer do hear each other finally. We also meet the beloved other, walking together with the poet, then far away, until “the tide, stressed with the sea’s energy, (brings him) back to (her).” The lover in the book is the mysterious other around whom the poet’s verse spirals in a sacred Yeatsian gyre. Emily Bilman reminds me, at times, of the fascinating Mina Loy, a poet who was open to “the divine tension, the giving of form to the unarrestable flux of life.”
REVIEWS OF "THE THRESHOLD OF BROKEN WATERS"
Emily Bilman's poems are of astonishing power and intensity. She is forensic in her descriptions, startling in her imagery and the depth of feeling she conveys is almost frightening. Some of her poems explore - without the slightest trace of sentimentality - her relationships with her father, her son and her husband. "Malaria sweated my husband's body into a rainforest./Mosquitos seized his skin, raided his blood/and he convulsed like stung tuna on the line" ("Malaria"). But there are many subjects here - with hidden connections and strange resonances. In "The Present", she perfectly describes the act of writing a poem and the pleasure it provides: "The present prolonged is wondrous delight". In "The Screen", a poem about watching a TV programme on the concentration camps, she captures not just the horror but a sensitive viewer's reaction to the horror: "...I was, at once,/Inside and beyond the mass of bones..." Her poems are enriched by her affinity with the natural world and her deep knowledge of the arts. I know I will read this book again and again. by Duncan Fraser
by Prof. Mindy Kronenberg, SUNY Empire State University in New York
I first became familiar with Emily Bilman’s poetry while working on an international project on Ekphrasis, poetic interpretations of visual and aural artistic works. I was struck by Bilman’s skillful distillation of large ideas in precise and eloquent language, finding poignancy and a sense of intimacy in responding to abstract art. The Threshold of Broken Waters contains five sections of poems that traverse natural and emotional landscapes, honors the birth of poems and children, and celebrates the transformative power of living life wide-awake.
The transformations of poet/woman are evident in poems that revel in literary and corporeal experience, an almost breathless, but important metamorphosis. In “Momentum” (6) the poet shares:
I rise into my breath and remark
A caterpillar’s change into a monarch
As it inflates is diaphanous wings for heft
And waits before it glides with the draft.
Into my lung’s labyrinth my breath curls
To become the voice that unfurls
Into a poem whose tears fortify my identity.
To merge with the world’s fury is insanity.
“Gravida” beautifully presents the journey of a pregnancy, with its buoyant spirit and exuberant sensory awareness. The poet begins: “As the fetus grew in me among my body’s/ Hills and grasses, I grew as euphoric/ As the sprawling ochre-and-white winged alpine/ Kite on its wind-torn trajectory off the beaten track.” (7)
The sound and effect of Bilman’s language is a pleasurable discovery in each poem, some with attention to alliteration and sibilance. In “Palimpsest” (13) the echo and vision of love persists, a message to a beloved delivered with wistful musicality:
your voice gifts me
posies of pine and parsley
and your fragility
the poem’s potential
your soul’s palimpsest
on the scraped paper
In “The Electric Eel,” (19) a battle of wills plays out underwater, the drama sliding along each line as prey and predator become established. We witness a dance of risk and survival as
The eel slithered out of the rocks, its sinewy body
Sinking deeper into the plankton-filled sea
Swarming with translucent crustaceans
We then see “its supple serpentine body” burrowing
“Into the sea-silt to be concealed…”
Sensory, imagistic description drenches the page in poems of illness or grief, joy or astonishment, deftly combining the visceral and cerebral experience of being human. From “Malaria:” (33) “Malaria sweated my husband’s body into a rainforest./ Mosquitos seized his skin, raided his blood/ and he convulsed like stung tuna on the line.” In “The Tear-Catcher” (27) we read that
The salt-taste of my tears
bears memories buried
in the corolla of a flower,
in the odors of my childhood …
In “Father’s Sweat” (29) she conjures her father’s essence: “The scent of crimson-ochre apple pulp/ fermenting in the fireplace, reminds me// of my father, standing on our balcony, …” And there are lively, whimsical, and joyous scenarios whose narratives can nearly be tasted, as with “Greenness,” (71) which becomes a verdant mouthful for a group of cows (and the reader):
…
near the river clattering their mouths,
talking of greenness—lime, fern, mint,
olive, sage, moss, pine, cedar, juniper,
seaweed, teal, aquamarine, chartreuse—
shades of greenness toying
with the sea-breeze imbibed
with salt, brine, and iodine,
the hues of the evening
that soothe my breathing.
Each poem in The Threshold of Broken Waters is a revelatory piece of a collective narrative of rites of passage and momentous events. Taken together, they present an evolving portrait of a poet determined to give homage to both the contented and confounding episodes of an aware woman’s life. Bilman states early in this journey in the poem “Reseedings,” (3) “The poem’s aura grants the reader/ Anchor, insight, and awe – ” This becomes evident from page to page.
The Threshold of Broken Waters
by Emily Bilman
Matador/Troubador Books 2018
An Appreciation by John F. Webb, the Director of The Border Voices Poetry Project in San Diego, California, USA.
You are a true poet. There are pieces of great beauty throughout your book. But I am intrigued by the overall structure of the collection which is Blakean - joy etched with the acid of sorrow.
I thought that in the first poem, or very close to the beginning of the book, it is powerful that you directly address the reader as your co-wanderer in this journey as Olds did in "Material Ode" and Eliot did in "Prufrock" and "The Wasteland." You have crafted a remarkable book. Thank you.
A Review by James Knox Whittet, President of Suffolk Poetry Society
In The Threshold of Broken Waters, Emily Bilman explores the most transforming experiences of human life and the indelible traces they leave on our memories in which birthing becomes a metaphor for writing. For a woman, giving birth is a transformative experience and many of the poems are about the joy and pain of giving birth to another ultimately unknowable being. The metaphor of pregnancy is extended to tackle the contemporary issues of water as a rare resource and the current migrations that dispatch refugees on new shores.
Just as a woman gives birth to a baby, a poet gives birth to a poem with all its attendant joy and pain and its ultimate mystery. In the words of Emily, she becomes the voice which unfurls / into a poem. In poetry as in life, one enters through one threshold which leads to another and another, rather like the character of Judith in Bartók’s opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle who opens one barred door after another, dreading what she might find but unable to renounce the human need to search for what is most true, whatever the cost. Only through such courage and persistence can one achieve those rare moments of transcendence.
One of the sections is entitled A Formal Feeling which reminds the reader of Emily Dickinson’s great poem with it’s unforgettable opening lines:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions . . .
It’s only after we go through those life-altering experiences and achieve an emotional balance that we can begin to explore the deepest questions of existence. There is the sudden memory of the poet’s father waving to bring (her) back to the safe shore. The book contains another moving reference to Emily Dickinson as though the vicissitudes of time itself had, at last, been overcome and the poet’s watch stopped at eternity. Out of all the struggles which many of the poems in this collection enact, there comes those unexpected healing shafts of memory, perhaps the richest of all our human gifts as revealed by Marcel Proust and Emily’s poetry.
The Threshold of Broken Waters has consistent sensitive perspicacity and tight-wovenness. It's a great pleasure to read. Clive Scott, Emeritus Professor of European Literature
The Threshold of Broken Waters contains another moving reference to Emily Dickinson as though the vicissitudes of time itself had, at last, been overcome and the poet’s watch stopped at eternity. Out of all the struggles which many of the poems in this collection enact, there comes those unexpected healing shafts of memory, perhaps the richest of all our human gifts as revealed by Marcel Proust and Emily’s poetry.
James Knox Whittet, President of the Suffolk Poetry Society
A REVIEW of "RESILIENCE" BY WALLIS WILDE-MENOZZI
Emily Bilman's latest collection, "Resilience" carries an original voice instructed by literature and life. Her lexicon brims with experience tempered by links to the past and the uses of art. She is lavish with sound: "an intimate voice held, hummed, hidden in the hawthorne bower." She compounds words in myriad ways to make images: "orchid-wombs," "blood-dolphin sea," "grit-rocks." Her subjects breed new connections between worlds: "asbestos germ-dust," "mercury drops," "spinal-kiln," "mosaic-waters." Her clear eyed intelligence uses these compounds to create tiny islands of traction in poems that range from personal loss, to love, to themes of recovery. Her best are intriguing invitations to read them again and to nod in agreement when bravery and beauty appear.
REVIEWS by Isabel HUGGAN
Just a brief note to thank you for the generous gift of A WOMAN BY THE WELL and RESILIENCE. I've had some time now since coming home to read your poems, and am struck by how they are informed not only by cultural and personal references but particularly by your clear love of language... alliterative, robust, imagery-rich and dense with allusions as well as providing colourful descriptions of exact moments or scenes. I think perhaps my favorite is THE LITTLE BLUE HERON -- it is not a complicated poem, but it is quite wonderful, and evocative of the creature and that moment. I like poems that serve as brilliantly taken snapshots that refer to more than the image within the photo.
You are fortunate that in both cases, the publishers of these collections have done excellent work, really handsome books that present your poems beautifully on the page. Congratulations!
APPRECIATION by a philosopher
I greatly enjoyed reading this article titled "The Objective Correlative and T.S. Eliot's Combined Personae as Tiresias-Narcissus in the Waste Land", by Emily Bilman Emily Bilman, published by The Battersea Review, edited by Ben Mazer.
Surazeus Simon Seamount, Philosopher
http://thebatterseareview.com/critical-prose/241-bilman-eliot
A REVIEW OF "RESILIENCE" by Bruce Kauffmann, Poet
In Resilience, with her wonderful use of language and imagery, Emily Bilman weaves through the poems with her skilful use of metaphor. Each section of this poetry book reminds us that our own capacity for resilience endows us with the power to survive trauma. As we survive tragedy or misfortune, we begin to evolve personally and grow spiritually. In these poems, the poet pens an understanding of compassion and the connectivity of each of us to each other and each to all, as in ‘Everyman’ – “we are everyman / our eyes shine / like lamp posts / our words are / thwarted angels / each word, a gift”.
Both literally and metaphorically, the poet draws upon a humanistic premise that extends from the mythological dimension to our contemporary values, as in ‘Daemons’. Here can be found the wisdom that swells from an understanding of our struggles in the continuity of time – “my-daemons-in-chaos / vie with my synapses for ideas linked / to metaphors as an old poem / is joined to a new one and I circumscribe / new symbols on words...”
The poems in this book show that the poet herself, has been in those hollows of isolation and solitude and risen from them as can be read in the title poem ‘Resilience’ – “As I entered the tuff-earth’s / Dark recesses, came in and out / Of her damp caves where I saw…” to the final poem, ‘Transfiguration’ – “The woman singing with her desert-voice / transformed the sky and the sand / and the nomad sitting by the barren bush / into one seamless immensity…”.
It might be noted, at least in this reader’s eyes, that the six sections of this book, “Resilience, The Stairwell, Everyman, The Tempest, Faust’s Controversy, Transfiguration”, are not dissimilar to the well known stages of loss and grief. Like Faust to whom the book refers, we have to surpass evil impulses to reach resilience. The modern Faust defies death through the power of resilience. In the process of reading this book, the reader attains not only an existential resilience in his own understanding of man but a personal metamorphosis.
Bruce Kauffman, Author and Poet
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
An Appreciation of "A Woman By A Well" by John K. Coleridge, Esq.
In the context of this collection, by the time we reach “Crushing”, we are alive to every word and totally engaged in each poem. The poem, entitled “The Stranger”, inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”, skilfully follows what might be called the S.T.C. line while retaining the poet’s own methods and material. “Well” is full of music. I also very much admired the “The Mirage” and had particular pleasure reading “My Maybe Poem”, “The New Wind”, and “The Birth of Images”. Music again. The last poem brings us back to a very satisfying creative conclusion and to the next re-reading just as it would be with a worthwhile piece of music.
John K. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's grand...grand...nephew,
a great teacher and a poet himself
8.XII.2009 in Norwich, England
A Woman By A Well : A Self Portrait by Emily Bilman
A BOOK REVIEW by James Knox Whittet
This is an interesting and often moving collection of poems by the only member of the Suffolk Poetry Society who lives in Switzerland. In these poems, the writer explores the deepest and most mysterious aspects of herself and we the readers are assisted in our own self -explorations. The sense of exile from the world and from oneself which Emily explores, goes all the way back to that most potent and enduring of myths: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Like Edwin Muir, Emily convinces the reader that this expulsion from paradise was not all loss and that exile can deepen human perceptions and can lead to a breathless sense of freedom. By confronting danger, we can experience more fully a sense of being human and alive. In other words, we needed to be expelled from Eden in order to help us grow up.
Emily is a widely read poet — an increasing rarity — and the book abounds with references to T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and so on. Indeed, one of the finest poems in this collection, a free verse sonnet, is inspired by perhaps Coleridge's finest poem, Frost At Midnight. This poem is dedicated to a friend of Emily's, the late John Coleridge who lived in Norfolk and who was a descendant of the great poet. This poem is entitled “The Stranger” : we are so often strangers to ourselves and one of the principal benefits of reading poetry is that it helps us to get to know ourselves better.
. . . that other stranger, once
behind bars, who helped free the troubling
stranger in me, helped me make
the inkling of a song into
a home-pledged poem given
to the pure in heart like the frost's
crystal ministry secretly growing in me.
There is a subtle weaving of the words of Coleridge and the words of Emily like a delicately woven tapestry which we all must weave in order to create a mirror image of ourselves like a woman gazing at her shifting reflection in a poem entitled
“Well” :
My water-image whispers back at me;
my curiosity is a well-spring dug
deep by my scanning senses . . .
Scanning senses with its pun on scanning is a wonderful description of how the sensibility of a poet works. A poet scans the world with minute observation: Thomas Hardy described himself as one who notices things. At the same time, the poet scans the lines flowing from his pen in order to make memorable the images which have been captured.
In a number of the poems in this collection, one senses a constant striving to cleanse the windows of perception, to see the world with a dazzling clarity as if viewing the everyday world for the very first time. In the words of a Scottish poet, to glimpse the marvellous in the mundane. It's so easy to lose sight of the sheer strangeness of the physical world which we inhabit. In the poem, “Washing” we read:
Bent over my body like an icicle
hanging down a cave, I wash myself
to utter cleanliness. . . .
Sometimes the language in A Woman By A Well can appear rather precious and archaic but one comes away from this book with a heightened sense of the complex nature of selfhood and wonder at the world which we inhabit.
Written for Twelve Rivers by James Know Whittet
President of the Suffolk Poetry Society for the Journal of the Society
A WOMAN BY A WELL : A SELF-PORTRAIT By Emily Bilman
Reviewed by Brian E. Wrixon, Editor and Writer
Emily Bilman is more than a woman with a message, more than a talented poet. Through her poetry she embodies the strength of womankind and gives voice to that strength through her writing. Her powerful message comes alive in A WOMAN BY A WELL: A SELF-PORTRAIT. This is the kind of book that one wants to read several times, because each trip through its pages builds and adds to the portrait of the woman by the well. Each reading of the book unfolds more and more about her and what drives her onwards. We get to know her and through her, we get to know ourselves. Careful readings will help us reach the ultimate conclusion that the poet is speaking for all mankind and not only for and about women alone.
Though the message flows from the heart and the pen of a woman, do not assume that her manner of speaking is gentle or soft. Quite the contrary, it is as if we are listening to Queen Boadicea or Joan of Arc rallying the troops with sword held high. Her language is strong and powerful and we are forced to pay attention to what she says. Sometimes we tremble at her words, sometimes we are awe-‐inspired. As the poet describes herself,
BROKEN SPEECH
I am your breached city-gate,
broken when your armies marched
against me with their dark martial
guts. My words, transpierced
by your blood-breaking bullets,
are synchronous with your blood-threads.
Like a deal on the death-market,
you sacrificed me to your alienated
self, made my words into blood-offerings,
waiting to be resurrected
outside the city gates.
Bilman’s poetry is divided into five sections, AWARENESS, THE FIGURES OF EXILE, PRIMAL SIGHT, SYNESTHESIA and THE BIRTH OF IMAGES. For the most part, the poet speaks to us in the first person. Each section of the book adds another layer to the poetic canvas, as the narrator paints a picture of herself
and reveals her inner nature to us in this self-portratit. She holds nothing back, is generous with her use of colours and is bold with her brush strokes. Her vision of herself and our understanding of it comes alive on her word-painted masterpiece. At times she is as careful as a realist – at other times as unrestrained as an impressionist. But always she is an artist who captures and retains our attention. This is a portrait of “me”, she seems to shout. Look at it – know me – and know yourself by knowing me.
The poems in AWARENESS read like a chapter from the Old Testament. We see the woman and her partner duped by the serpent and expelled from the garden. Tradition has always held that the woman was the cause of the rift between man and god. Rather than becoming the historical scapegoat for the fall from grace, Bilman’s heroine becomes the champion of mankind. She makes the best of the hand dealt to her and rises to overcome all odds, even death. The woman/poet becomes the voice of her own kind and of mankind, and through her words shows us her strength and leadership.
In THE FIGURES OF EXILE, the narrator asks us to journey with her through time and to observe closely as she demonstrates the evil around us and the power of mankind in the face of adversity. To do so, she uses a series of mythological images and metaphors from the ancient world, the ravages of the Black Death in the middle ages, the modern day horrors of the ghetto and the Holocaust, and the stark picture of the Twin Towers on 9/11.
One particular poem in the section entitled PRIMAL SIGHT, introduces to us her ultimate challenge, her most powerful enemy – death. In DEATH, YOUR TRAITOR-HAND she writes,
…Death once
lowered me into the stone-room
of my dream-sonnet. In the morning,
I woke distressed, frail, and fearing,
like a lithe wind-blown wraith,
pre-possessed by love and death.
We discover that it is love itself that gives us the power to conquer death and Bilman, as poet/human/voice, shows us how she has used love to overcome her own personal losses. It is as if she is telling us to go and to do likewise. She has shown us the way forward.
In the section called SYNESTHESIA, she introduces the concept of interconnections. The theory for which the section is named, holds that the stimulation of one pathway in the senses or the brain leads to the involuntary stimulation of a different pathway. With “colour synesthesia”, those who experience the condition see letters or numbers as coloured. The poet writes:
SYNESTHESIA
A sacrificial Eve, her ductile body
turned tiger, escaping through
the urban underground, she enunciated
her poems with the steel precision
of her female fawn-voice.
Green, yellow, orange,
red, cerulean blue,violet,
ultraviolet ‐ the sun’s spectrum
shone on her face in a language
I could not understand but
whose music moved me.
Four stresses and a falling
note ‐ she shed her water-words
like a reverberating fountain and
her rhythm transformed her face
with the colour-waves of the sun
oozing softly through the pines.
And finally in THE BIRTH OF IMAGES, the narrator explores fully the subject of her poetic interconnections. All poetry is about connections, the ties that the poet has to people, events, places, feelings, things animate and things inanimate. Poetry is the expression of those connections on paper. We all have connections but only a true artist, in this case a word artist, is able to paint a picture of those connections that we the viewing public can stand back and admire. In this final section, Bilman shows us that she is one with nature, as is demonstrated in the various images drawn from nature which she paints for us. She takes her power from nature and uses it to stand tall and to speak loudly.
Emily Bilman has done a wonderful job describing herself in A WOMAN BY A WELL : A SELF-PORTRAIT. But she has done more than that. Through her example, she has given us a roadmap for the journey through life. She has taught us how to be strong in the face of adversity. As she concludes in POETRY,
I recollect the primeval rover’s
timely forward thrust – standing,
striding, walking, writing.
We hope to see more from Emily Bilman, a very talented poet indeed.
Brian Wrixon
Reviews by Pulsar Poetry, UK:
A Woman By A Well:
"It is a pleasure to discover a poet who writes with such beauty and depth of insight. Her language is dense with metaphor, images layered and reflecting on each other to advance the thought, observations piercing and precise. Bilman writes about her experiences of love, death of a lover or lying on a beach, but her meditations always reach towards the shared experience, the universal."
Resilience:
"There are some wonderful lines throughout... a good collection, and one that many can enjoy. Beautifully written."
Top Reviews
Praise for "A Woman By A Well"
5.0 out of 5 starsAmazing verse!
By koti on July 3, 2016
Format: Paperback
Really enjoyed this collection by a truly gifted writer of verse. As a relatively newcomer to poetry, I'm surprised by how much can be said with such few words. These poems bring to mind H.D. and Kazantsakis, love the use of hyphens throughout.
5 out of 5 stars by Melinda Cochrane on May 30, 2016
A wonderful magical ride through time and space. True Bilman style and form, which leaves the reader in a beautifully crafted metaphor each and every time. I am always amazed at her skill with words. True poets are rare.
5.0 out of 5 stars"Existence in place, in time"
By Bruce Kauffman on January 29, 2014
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
In this powerful and moving collection, with her passionate and ever-observant eye, Emily Bilman weighs both the world around and her place within. Within the covers of "A Woman By A Well: A Self-Portrait", she paints herself within the landscapes of love and death, nature and longing, exile and loss. In the book's reading we not only better understand the panorama of tragedy and ecstasy in the world she sees, but in reflection our own.
5.0 out of 5 starsTHAT SECRET, SOUGHT-AFTER VOICE
By John F. Webb on February 8, 2014
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
These poems whisper to the reader's soul.
The range of styles is extraordinary, signalling a poet who has studied her art long and well. But in all them -- from the simple but profound diction of "The Sibyl" to mosaics like "The Serpent" or "The Stranger" - that quiet voice continues to whisper, a companion long sought for, offering insight and consolation.
Jack Webb, director
Border Voices Poetry Project
[...]
4.0 out of 5 starsFour Stars
By John Yamrus on March 8, 2016
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
I finished reading this today...it's strong, confident and well-crafted mainstream work.
