Quirky, imaginative, original and immensely appealing, Jeanne Ellin's
poetry collection is packed full of lines you will find yourself reading
out loud to the person next to you.
Finding inspiration in things as diverse as a turkey sandwich, plastic
bath ducks, Trisha and the mythology of ancient Greece, Jeanne is
particularly struck by the way the old myths still mirror the truth of
modern women's lives. She subjects these myths to a richly humorous,
womanist, mass cultural reading, set in the world of celebrity, daytime
television shows and pop counselling.
Jeanne Ellin writes consciously as an Anglo-Indian, part of an
'invisible' group that has generally sunk its identity in a general
Britishness. She, by contrast, has used her work to explore her sense of
Indian origins, but finds her real source of inspiration in the ideas of
anomaly and placelessness, themes she explores both directly and
obliquely in her poetry. She writes of being 'cell deep... an elephant's
child', but also that 'home is a land / whose texture my feet have
forgotten'. But this sense of placelessness also offers the strangers'
right 'to a place at every table' and the challenge of living without
'family hand-me-downs', when each day must begin with a naked newness.
More obliquely, she uses the mythical figure of the merchild/merechild
to explore this sense of inbetweeness; and focuses, in the title poem,
on the pleasures and pains of transformation, where after 'a lifetime of
voracious consuming' the caterpillar suddenly finds itself as 'an
ethereal being' and complains 'I didn't sign up for this spiritual
stuff'.
Jeanne Ellin writes from an Anglo-Indian background, her experience
in counselling and industrial mediation. She lives in Huddersfield, West
Yorkshire.
