The Sealey Challenge: Day 23

What Girls do in the Dark by Rosie Garland

The wall of the student residence in Khartoum / is painted with a red and white sign

Rosie Garland, or as she is also known in certain circles, Rosie Lugosi, has published seven solo collections of poetry. She’s been in a post-punk/gothic rock band (The March Violets) worked as an English Teacher in Sudan, and successfully battled throat cancer. Her debut novel The Palace of Curiosities won the inaugural Mslexia Novel Competition in 2012.

There will now be some fangirling, which I make absolutely NO apologies for: this woman is a force of nature. She taught me the basics of stagecraft and performing poetry back at the inaugural Mslexicon. It was, I have to say, like being given keys to a place you always wanted to play in, but other adults wouldn’t allow access because they knew it would make you uncontrollable. This collection therefore holds multiple, significant and hugely personal resonances.

Lessons from the Text

From the opening poem [Letter of rejection from a Black Hole] it is apparent these poems aren’t going to just welcome me, they’ll be sucking me through space and time to the Other Universe where choices aren’t restricted, and my freedom is truly liberating. Large swathes of this book speak to me in a language I have not encountered in anybody else’s books, and it remains my ongoing task to eventually collect all of Rosie’s work together, to occupy their own space on my bookshelf.

Whether it is the perfect economy of There is no there there, the acceptance of time and change on a cellular level in Goods to declare or the health-related terrors in Personal aphelion, the stuff of stars, mixed with infinite possibility is what holds this collection together. This is the poetry that I covet, wish I’d written myself and crucially has inspired me to do just that. Here are fragments of my own personality, recognized and accepted. It is okay to be what I am.

Poetry’s a massively subjective canvas, when all is said and done, but it is easy to point out the kindred spirits out there, good souls with true vision. Rosie’s work is unlike anything else I’ve seen and read, and I am massively, hugely grateful that not only does it exist but that she chooses to share it so willingly and openly. Here is a history, written in light and dust, willing the reader to join together stars and moments to unlock their own potential.

Will you read it again? I hope, not too long from now, to be able to read one of Rosie’s poems in one of my own poetry performances. Her influence on my work is significant and not to be underestimated.

Would you recommend it for me to read? Yes please. Go and buy it now. You will not regret it. THANK YOU.

Buy this Pamphlet from Nine Arches Press