Chatelaine
Bonny Cassidy
chatelaine
Chatelaine is a collection of poems whose personae, like a family portrait, resemble one another in foxed, latent ways. Its voices stalk across time and space, inhabiting genres of riddle, fragment, confession, lyric and ekphrasis, and returning to images of metamorphosis and possession. A chatelaine is the mistress of a castle or ancestral household, but in this collection’s elegant but unruly house mysterious transformations occur, dreams and hallucinations project strange apparitions and landscapes, words twist and turn, references to tradition go hand in hand with sci-fi special effects and cinematic staging. The place resounds with accusations and misgivings and scorn – and with playfulness and wilfulness and virtuosity too. And through these unsettled happenings, perhaps pointing to their source, the poems ask: who does this place belong to, and who will inherit it? Who lives here, and who comes as a visitor?
Reviews
Bonny’s poems often describe literally liminal states, as well as psychologically liminal states – on a threshold between dream and reality: kids strolling on a beach, memories of childhood and parents, the constant leaking into our brains of former moments.
— Gig Ryan
Chatelaine is a riddle composed of a mistress, her castle and ‘the heath of wilful words’, and when read both alone and alongside Cassidy’s previous work, shows how expert a changeling the poet herself is.
— Bella Li
Bonny Cassidy’s Chatelaine is visceral, layered and driven by word constructs in an innovative lexicon of erotic topoi, ready to be open to contemporary interpretative potential – previously unworked.
— A. Buchanan-Stuart
Shortlisted for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry
“Chatelaine by Bonny Cassidy puts the word centre stage. Cassidy’s poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, an interest in a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world of ‘noisy secrets’ in which ‘riddles multiply’ to generate a reading experience in which it is more rewarding to ask than to answer: ‘Question nearly everything, read it again,’ the poems command. ‘Why do you do this?’ and ‘who else owns your body?’ From pilgrims to daleks, a shimmering heath to a basement carpark, Cassidy tunnels in opposite directions – accelerating through time, dreams, myth and person – to stake a territory beyond the language of the familiar. The poems in Chatelaine coalesce in a dream in which Cassidy renovates the ancestral household into an audacious new architecture of meaning.”