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Winner of the inaugural Magma Open Pamphlet Competition 2018, judged by Magma Board members. Our editor Cheryl Moskowitz writes:
“The poems in Dear, can neither be classified as grief poems nor eulogy, yet they manage the intensity and ecstasy of both. These are poems of embodiment, evoking the presence of something which is disintegrating or already gone; they do not seek to mend what is broken but rather to see it absolutely in its beautiful broken state. As the title suggests, much of the writing is framed as a direct address to absence, centrally from a daughter to a mother with dementia – intimate but distant.
In this pamphlet Alice Willitts masters the language of transience. She is concerned with the real and the ethereal, the here and the not here. Here are poems about effects of forgetting in the natural world, climate change, extinction, disappearing, dissolution and the urgent need for regeneration.
Willitts calls herself a ‘plantswoman’. In Dear, she has sown the seeds of something truly special.”
Alice Willitts is a plantswoman from the Fens. After publishing Dear, with Magma, her first collection With Love, was published by Live Canon in 2020.
Supported by Arts Council England