SEKXPHRASTICS
Jane Goldman
(Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals; 2021). £12.00

With SEKXPHRASTIKS, Jane Goldman delivers a poetry collection that is at once a delight and a difficult undertaking. It is a dizzying whirlwind of feminism, of queer solidarity, of love and grief and fury and tongue twisters. This is a profoundly intertextual collection. To try and cross reference every allusion Goldman makes would be a project beyond the scope of this review. What shines through is the passion Goldman has for art and the artists who make it in Scotland and beyond. This is an artist so deep in the scene as to come out the other side and transcend it, weaving a well-versed, critical, practically all-encompassing celebration of art.   

kx: mortal osculation, elusive, intimate soma-chromatic space
:: phonics, orthographics in collisions, sing inky kicks in glitch
plosive slippages … :: k marks
itself, also universal play… :: x marks itself, also excess[.]

Perhaps the best way to try and explain SEKXPHRASTIKS is through the lens of the opening titular poem, which breaks down each element of the title. Beginning with “kx” we have an “osculation” in a “soma-chromatic space”, alluding perhaps not only to the gentle caress of lips in a phonetically similar kiss, but also perhaps to caressing that is beyond the scale of normalcy, that is non-reproductive… queer. Goldman showcases her playful command of sound, sliding dextrously between consonance and assonance. She lists various possible meanings of “k” and “x”, reflecting the amorphous nature of language and of life. From this very first block of text, Goldman introduces a theme of defying limits, key to the whole collection. The collection itself is not limited to poetry, breaking boundaries into seminar plans with ‘A Seminar Ritual for CAConrad’ by Jane Goldman and Colin Herd, and the script for a surreal ‘poemplay’,‘Revolution in Revon Street Revolt in Grubnide’.

sekx: a poetry that aspires to…the pleasuring erotic intimacies of sex…liberated
from the archaic sense of assigned binary biological reproductive categories.

Carrying on these themes of queerness and the rejection of static boundaries, we have “sekx”; that osculation problematizingthe term “sex” (both as descriptor and verb). Sexuality and gender feature prominently throughout the collection. In ‘Sappho 1’, Goldman calls for queer solidarity cheekily but also with fire: ‘calling all glitter arsed slay queen foam divas/meaning you you cunning wee cunts i-i beg you’. Later she critiques Scotland through a feminist, intersectional lens with cutting insight. ‘Fruitmarket Triptych’ is a response to the Edinburgh Fruitmarket galleries, but it also considers Edinburgh’s oppressed, from the modern-day homeless who ‘sleep every night/on icy streets’ to ‘the choked…the burnt’ victims of Edinburgh’s medieval witch trials. The section ‘Tutelage’, meanwhile, is a collection of poems on Goldman’s embodied experiences as an artist’s model, including the sweaty exertion expressed in ‘Triptych’: ‘Trickles chance from lip, pit, breast./Hot springs cool along my spine.’ The memories are sensual and intimate but not necessarily sexy.

ekphrasis: a rhetorical device that speaks…works of visual, plastic art…:: a
poetry on intimate terms with other works of art, where art is a verb, universal to
everyone living[.]

It really is difficult to convey the scale of intertextuality in this collection. It is a conversation: with local art galleries; with Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein as printed by Suzanne Bellamy; with violinists and dancers and the hundreds who everyday rub and reshape Greyfriar’s Bobby’s nose. Six poems are dedicated to the artist Caroline McNairn, remembering her in nights out, dresses, pieces of plastic and porcelain. The list of conversants goes on. In ‘New Beginnings are in the Offing’ Goldman writes: ‘Let us enlarge the idea of art/ let us make social sculpture’. This collection celebrates all creation, all art; it is a universal conversation.

tiks: …poetry spasms…poetry-making as lived, embodied, 
social experience[.]

The final piece of the puzzle. As I hope the analysis above demonstrates, SEKXPHRASTIKS is indeed intimately rooted in bodily experience. It is a living tapestry, connecting artists across all boundaries: time, place, discipline, class, gender, death. To read it is to enter not a quiet gallery but a raucous festival, exhibiting all of life as art.

Kai Durkin