Poetry Shelf review: Sea Skins by Sophia Wilson

Posted: Thursday Jul 27, 2023

In 2022 Sophia Wilson was the joint winner of the Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets. That manuscript, or a version, now appears as Sea Skins. The poetry is a rich, layered offering for both ear and eye.

Poetry Shelf review: Sea Skins by Sophia Wilson | NZ Poetry Shelf

The title poem navigates multiple skins, along with tongues and teeth, ruins and ruination, illness and family, a spinning wheel, and a new poem that sets sail. It is the last poem in the collection but it is a perfect window onto poetry that builds bridges between the domestic and the wider world, the remembered and the uncertain, the catastrophic and the sad.

Notions of spinning feature in 'Amygdaloid Knots' where 'we' become yarn, raw fibre, neuroses, the smell of fleece. And it feels like the pronoun spins and shapeshifts through the collection as a whole, with the poet reflecting and refracting to embody we I or you or I. And always, there is the underlay of uncertainty and devastation:

We are bundles of raw fibre
spinning
uncontrollably

from 'Amygdaloid Knots'

The word that resonates more than any other for me is 'tongue': as a motif, a theme, a vibrant idea. Sophia is a translator and a poet so language is significant. We are what we speak, I am musing. We are teeth and we are talk and we are tongue. Multiple languages make an appearance, especially te reo Māori and Italian. The children's father's tongue atrophies as he loses touch with his native dialect, the linguistic bridge between parent and offspring impaired. Sadly. Achingly. And then, yes, the writer is dreaming in multiple languages, like foreign mouth pieces on the page that we may or may not hear.

I dream in diverse languages
and when I wake
my tongue is like a map.

from 'My tongue is like a map'

Take the word teeth: another connecting motif as it links nourishment to wound to weapon to food to chewing to body. Like tongue. Like poetry. Like I am musing the poem is teeth and tongue, like I am musing the poetry is also map.

In a section entitled 'Medical Records', disease becomes unease becomes procedure and diagnosis, in whiffs and hints, and then spins and speaks and recollects to draw in family, at the level of intimacy and divergence. I am so moved by 'A Family History in Porridge' where the narrator places the bowl of porridge on the figurative table in the form of a list poem, and we move from porridge that is detested to porridge that is prescription to China, fortune, aunt, eco and more. We move from this family member to that family member, from this wisdom to that ritual:

Celebration porridge:
raise yer parritch-bicker
lift yer kilt (strikethrough) chopsticks!

Sun-rain-sky porridge:
Peace in the oat
and in the Earthly Bowl

from 'A Family History in Porridge'

The terrific mother poem, 'Taking my mother to the beach,' is intimate, moving, sad. It is luminous with physical detail and has the incantatory drive that builds poetry. It is illness, it is connection, it is loss - both at a personal level and a wider global level. 'Heritage' can be maternal and it can be the beloved valley. Again there is the yarn (life? poetry? the world?) unravelling: the poem in which 'the yarn unravels / along with we / will / when'. And how crucial it feels when I read the poem embraces and presents 'the heart of the family'. So poignant, so resonant, so touching.

This is the poem that chose to end in a coma;
the poem resisting sterile light
and the unbearable silence of asystole

This is the poem that conjures the long beach
we loved to walk; the poem in which I take my
mother's arm and we face the ocean together

The land. How can we not speak of and for the land. How can we not write of and for the land? In this damaged and on-the-brink world? How can we write and speak of green fields and daffodils when our contemporary choices are unsustainable? Sophia weaves the thread, the weft and weave, of environmental challenge.

Sea Skins is a poetry collection that reveals and conceals, sings and mourns, challenges and lingers ... long after you have put it down.

Sophia Wilson is an Australian-born writer and translator based in Aotearoa New Zealand where she runs a rural property and animal refuge with her partner and three daughters. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies in Australasia and internationally, and won awards including the Robert Burns Poetry Competition, the Hippocrates Prize, and the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize. In 2022 she was joint-winner of the inaugural Flying Islands Manuscript Prize. More at here