THE ZIG ZAG WOMAN
Maggie Sawkins
A first collection of poetry by Maggie Sawkins.
Praise for The Zig Zag Woman
‘Maggie Sawkins draws brilliantly on extended metaphor and the surreal to explore painful relationships, mental illness and problematic situations. She writes both from personal experience and beyond it. Her inventive and highly individual voice is always authentic. The taut writing carries emotional weight and sends that shiver up my spine which tells me I am reading real poetry. This is a very exciting first collection.’ Myra Schneider
'I loved The Zig Zag Woman. Maggie Sawkins has a distinctive and beguiling voice. Her poems are tautly written, full of wonderful and strange images and heart-breakingly moving.' Vicki Feaver
'Spare, spacious and restrained.' Poetry London
'These poems recall the rich confessional poetry of Pascale Petit or the surreal psychodramas of Selima Hill, and herald a bold, truthful new voice.' Magma
'Here is a poet whose language is like a multi-coloured kite: she knows how to let it fly and swoop, but she never lets go of the strings.' Poetry Express
'The kind of confident, natural poetry where the reader is hardly aware of the craft behind it, where the rightness of the language speaks straight to the mind and heart. Each poem here delivers its emotional charge without fuss but with new insights into everything from the half-understood traumas of childhood to the process of writing itself.' Frogmore Papers
'Poems whose apparent simplicity of language and form convey complex emotional realities.' Artemis Poetry
'Observing strangeness is what Maggie Sawkins excels at. Reading her poems in this, her first full collection, lets us into her world with all its strange particularities, its "little bits of darkness that slip through", to share her view and to marvel at it.' The North
About Maggie Sawkins
Maggie Sawkins was born in 1953 and spent her childhood in Leigh Park, a large council housing estate north of Portsmouth. She began writing poetry at the age of nine after being inspired by her head teacher. Her first poems were published in Hampshire Poets when she was seventeen. After a series of office jobs, including three years with The Exeter Flying Post, Maggie returned to education and went on to gain an MA with distinction in Creative Writing. For the past twelve years she has taught students with specific learning difficulties at South Downs College near Portsmouth. In 2004 Maggie co-founded the popular Tongues & Grooves Poetry and Music Club in Southsea where she now lives with her husband, younger daughter and a growing menagerie. Flarestack published a pamphlet collection, Charcot’s Pet, in 2003. The Zig Zag Woman is her first full collection.
An extract from The Zig Zag Woman
Under a Stone
Leaf,
you no longer know
what it means
to be a leaf under a stone.
You’ve got too used
to the cold slab weight of it.
Absence of light
has turned you
into a wafer of veins
a leafshadow.
One skipping day
a child will come
and kick away the stone.
For a moment
you will lie there,
afraid of your own lightness
afraid of what you’ve become,
dazed
by the suddenness
of a white winter sun.
