Claire Gaskin’s exploration of Ismene

PhD student Claire Gaskin is a Melbourne-based poet and creative writing teacher.

Her website introduces her poetry collections: A Snail in the Ear of the Buddha, a bud (shortlisted for the John Bray SA Festival Award for Literature in 2008), Paperweight, Eurydice Speaks and Ismene’s Survivable Resistance, which was published on 1st September 2021 by Puncher and Wattmann.

Here is an extract from the review of Ismene’s Survivable Resistance, by Dominique Hecq, Rochford Street Review:

‘[…] As in Eurydice Speaks, Gaskin assumes the voice of the voiceless in a contemporary setting. Here Ismene is a poet grappling with her traumatic past. The reader of her poems is in the position of witness. 

These are poems of memory and survival brought to life through beguiling lyric and dramatic telling. They bring a way of living, thinking, feeling and seeing in the aftermath of trauma into immediate focus and deliver emotional depth and resonance. Indeed, Claire Gaskin writes knowingly about life and not life, love and not love. She homes in on the importance of things that bring a family together and tear them apart […]’

(Read full review here)

There are two poems from Ismene’s Survivable Resistance available at Overland here.