This Woman

This Woman is an extended praise poem reminding me a little of the Welsh bard’s I am Taliesin but with more mystery, adroitness, and without a hint of his boastfulness. The language is strong, rooted and engrained with womaness. I traced the rocks, the veins of wounds and rush of streams with my fingertips. I heard her deep calls and followed her flights. Each poem, an epiphany; the collection, extraordinary. ( Abegail Morley, award-winning poet.) Nancy Charley’s joy in being a woman is as elemental and finely nuanced as the often surprising images rippling through these poems. This is a lyrical, considered and inventive evocation of the complexities and experience of being female, by a poet confident in the handling of form and the subtle cadences of rhyme and rhythm. ( Marilyn Donovan, former Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year, author of A Calculus of Balance: Poems after Piet Mondrian.) This collection challenges the geography of womanhood. The poet's voice is coloured with the language of violence but, importantly, her writing paints a portrait not of victimhood but of strength, resourcefulness, and quiet heroism. With form as fluid and ever-changing as its subject, Nancy Charley takes a different two-dimensional framing of what it means to be a woman and tilts it this way and that, shining light on secrets, distortions, bruises and cracks - but most of all, showing womanhood, with all its rippling layers, to be a thing of enormous natural beauty. ( Louise McCudden, writer, advocate for LGBTQ and reproductive rights.)