’Sea Between Us’, the third Nine Series anthology brings together the work of poets Catherine Gander, Georgia Hilton and Anna Kisby.
In ’The Pelican’ Catherine Gander describes how the bird folds ’the mythspan of her wings’ as she waits for ’time/ to unruffle the sea’, an image that becomes eerily prescient in its description of the work of all three poets. Each unfolds their own ’mythspans’ throughout the collection. Georgia Hilton invites us into the mind of ’Cinderella’ who contemplates drowning ’just downstream / of the Curraghower’ and of the ’Harpy’ who turns ’the cold black penny / of her eye upon the world’ and Anna Kisby evokes memories of ’Americana’ where on the ’Edge of the freeway, weaving like a drunk man, someone is lost’ while at the Vermont State Fair a lion-tamer ’pushed my hand clean though the bars, held it there while the lion took a lick.’
These poems examine our place in the world, not just physically, but through shared histories, myths, stories, place and understandings, declaring, as Catherine Gander writes in ’Self Portrait as a Flood Plain’ that
This is what happens when a landscape
is both bed
and confluence source
and floodplain one body