This new collection of poems by Marion May Campbell furthers her lifelong interest in form, stretching to breaking point the potential of poetic language.Marion May Campbells poems do not languish they do language. Language where it crackles and contradicts, refuses to be standard or teeters on the edge of paradox, like the gift that is poison in another tongue. Tracy RyanThis new collection of poems by Marion May Campbell furthers her lifelong interest in form, stretching to breaking point the potential of poetic language. She stages language as trickster, traitor and seducer, flamboyantly connecting and wiring the circuitry of desire, just as it silences and slices. One moment, it stutters, teetering on the brink, and the next it transfigures loss in radiant dreamscapes, restoring ardour amongst the ruins of allegory. languish is Campbells eleventh book across the forms of fiction, poetry and critical theory. Her writing is always charged by a poetics of feminist contestation.languish is Marion May Campbells most fiercely ambitious collection to date. In it, Campbell gives us splendid, numinous poems about language and its intertexts conceived with the mind but set free through the senses. She explodes the borders of genre and implodes the margins of desire. Questions of power, passion, mortality, and suffering animate this trilogy. It is sheer joy to feel the physical and intellectual command of the mercurial shiftings of tone, the rippling reticulations of canto, stanza, line, phrase, phoneme, tropism and silence. Dominique HecqReading languish I found myself in a smoky, all-night habitues bar - a sort of Cafe LAmour - eavesdropping on lucid-dream conversations between the writer and the world of her Western cultural elders, ghosts, lovers and language itself. In other words engaging with a profound and confronting personal intertextuality. This woman, this Marion May Campbell, asks the question of writing - is it the only way to keep the wounds of memory open? As she strikes another self against this flint of the other she lays bare the coddled myths of her moral delicacy and the nakedness of her need as she almost begs for a textual intimacy that might free us women from the labyrinth, the prison, weve made for ourselves we cannot be dreamed back together, we willed the dark page turned. Yet, there is the possibility that, the Venus of Willendorf will be the body of our making fashioning her from the dream dough and from the dream yeast she rises. Kathleen Mary FallonHere are poems of surprising agility and erudition from a poet with a uniquely dramatic intelligence. No reference is too far or too wide for her effervescent voice and her intense, inquiring and challenging considerations. Marion May Campbell speaks into and against positions as different as limits on the lustful body and the political abstractions of climate inaction, in registers that are always of the word, always of the world. Her poems are also personal, she opens then explores a Venn overlap of identity, speech-act and psyche. If this is bravura work, then her many prose poems are lyrically trippy and beguiling. Campbell is a magician. Philip SalomAmid early twenty-first century crises I think of Campbells texts, creative and critical, as lifeboats, hovercraft with air-borne capacity, passenger-full and powering-up for a new creative departure. Moya Costello
