The Secret
***Poetry Book Society Recommendation***
***Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize***
Zoe's most recent poetry collection is The Secret. This collection considers the parallels between cultural tensions in Europe and the Americas, written out of Zoe's upbringing in Wales, an overlooked region of Britain, and her travel in Central America in 2004 and 2005. The book was completed through a generous grant from Academi, the Welsh literature promotion agency, and it was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK at the end of 2007. It went on to be a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and to be shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. It was also poems from an early draft of The Secret that won her Eric Gregory Award in 2003.
The blurb for the book says:
"The Secret is a book of mystery and magic. Opening on familiar ground retelling stories from the Bible, Celtic mythology, small-town rumours and urban mythologies – it gradually moves beyond its borders to narratives of Central America, drawing on figures such as the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, and the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo."
Available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
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Reviews
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Ian Gregson (University of Wales, Bangor) (appeared in ‘The New Women’s Poetry in Wales’, Agenda (44:2-3), also published online: access at: <http://www.agendapoetry.co.uk/documents/IanGregson-Welshwomenpoets.pdf>)
[Brigley] can quote male writers blithely making sexist remarks or declaring that ‘Woman is an object, sometimes precious sometimes harmful, but always different’ (Octavio Paz) and then turn those masculine texts inside out with her own version of an ‘écriture feminine’ which subverts such confident definitiveness with a questioning open-endedness that implies the instabilities of desire and therefore of identity.
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Victoria Haskins (University of Newcastle, Australia) and Margaret D. Jacobs (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) (in the introduction to Frontiers 28.1-2 (2007), p. xii)
Zoë Brigley's evocative poem, 'Trade', conveys how the domestic - in this case, spice - may have enabled women at home in the metropole to imagine the distant colonies. In 'The Armoury', Brigley invokes the conquest of Mexico mediated through a domestic scene: Malinche in the kitchen, cooking up an aromatic mixture of chillies, chocolate, and the 'white fat of men's eyeballs'. And her final poem, 'Equivocation', reminds us of that early, oft-forgotten experience of the colonization of Wales that would haunt all future colonialisms.
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Melanie Challenger for Poetry Review <http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/publications/review/>
[Brigley’s] ‘The Citadel’ is a poem punctuated beautifully by the Welsh language in a way that does not jar or overwhelm the poem itself – strikingly poignant at the midway of the poem with a shared word. Brain, we are told, means ‘crows’ in Welsh: each “stark bird-cry – a crack.” The poem features tower, fortifier and gaol: the Tarot symbol of chaos and destruction but also, paradoxically, of renewal. The word ‘crown’, repeated in several places, is a token of the State, imprisoning the word crow, pinioning the bird, “his hushed crowsong lost to a history”. Birds feature throughout this collection, from the native crow to the birds of Mexico to which our poet herself migrates, “as woman I must live as long as parrots so moult like them and change my feathers.”
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Bernard O’Donoghue for Poetry London <http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/>
[W]e were warned at the outset that this is poetry that prides itself in ranging beyond its own parish. And some of the updatings and relocations of Brigley’s sources are wonderful. Blodeuwedd, the “flower face” story from the Mabinogion, has a very effective modern parallel […] With a writer like Brigley who is uncompromisingly inventive in following her own intertextual course (a parallel might be Medbh McGuckian), the reader has to decide in the end whether or not they believe in the work on first principles. In The Secret, there is enough excitement and fascination to make that act of faith.
[W]e were warned at the outset that this is poetry that prides itself in ranging beyond its own parish. And some of the updatings and relocations of Brigley’s sources are wonderful. Blodeuwedd, the “flower face” story from the Mabinogion, has a very effective modern parallel […] With a writer like Brigley who is uncompromisingly inventive in following her own intertextual course (a parallel might be Medbh McGuckian), the reader has to decide in the end whether or not they believe in the work on first principles. In The Secret, there is enough excitement and fascination to make that act of faith.
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The London Magazine <http://www.thelondonmagazine.net/>
Brigley taps into a vein of medieval and mystical imagery that is both rich and disturbing. I love the strange Freudian romance of ‘The Jewel-box’ where the speaker claims: “my love is the thrum of the brown nightingale, for he sings / the bell of me.”
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The New Welsh Review < http://www.newwelshreview.com/>
A poet of notable intelligence and rare facility has emerged in Zoë Brigley. She charts a course of philosophical, emotional and factual exploration that establishes points of contact between the many Welsh and Central American women who feature in her work, and thereby brings them in from the margins towards a shared position of strength, from which this magnificent first collection meets its aim and more.
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The Warwick Review <http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/warwickreview/>
[W]hile Brigley is bold in her encroachments into cultural traditions that are not her own and in associations that she draws between them, any sense of trespass is annulled by her singular ability to lay claim to poetic form, in the same way that one lays claim to a cultural or literary identity, and to suggest parallels in unlikely places.
