‘Untamed grief often turns feral, runs wild’: Poems that reimagine histories and feminine agency

In Jennifer Robertson’s debut poetry collection Folie à deux, reimagined histories and feminine agency take centre-stage through a subversion of the traditional authorial “I” and a reclamation of the female muse as a central creative force. These poems resist the literary tradition of women as silent inspirations, instead granting them voice, desire, and agency. By dissolving the singular self into a polyphony of language, memory, and myth, Robertson allows figures like Marthe Bonnard, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and Mary Magdalene to step out of the frame and speak – not as muses, but as creators. Through synaesthetic textures and cinematic mise-en-page, Folie à deux becomes an act of aesthetic resistance and imaginative reclamation.

The Rückenfigur

Almost a decade has gone by and she’s still standing there: one part restraint, three parts mystery; the nape of her neck lit up, exposing the otherwise subdued blue and grey surroundings. Your eyes now vicariously touch her shoulder. She is perhaps reading a letter, it’s hard to tell, with her hands and face invisible. She prefers eccentric railings over grand, majestic façades, choosing to be shrouded in the shadows, someone who likes the frayed fringes of things: trellises, trespassers and troubadours.

She’s a Hammershøi enigma, a lexiphile, a connoisseur of words: archaic, arcane, invented. You send her a book of correspondences between two poets, this bit highlighted in parentheses:

“Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice boards, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase –
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?”

She laments the fact that people don’t like carousels anymore. And letter writing. Later, in the evening, you ask her what she would like as a gift from your travels. She asks for cadmium red and portable solitude.

Klimt’s Adele Dusts the Gold Off Her Alabaster Skin

She spells furnace incorrectly. Obsession can be many things: sacred, profane, and benevolent, like the colour yellow, like breaking a line

Yellow: an enjambment, a caesura, a pause.

Incisions are always yellow. What's the colour of Faye Wong’s dream in Chungking Express? Gamboge, ochre, citrine or smoky quartz? Orphan and giraffe yellow, she says. Then, there is the yellow that returns to town as a stranger, the amnesic yellow. She remembers the colour of smallness around the neck of a yellow-throated sparrow and the word Komorebi, a light that streams through the leaves in a Terrence Malick film – the spiritual yellow.

Yellow, the colour of Kafka circling like a moth around Malena’s letter. A light that burns his head, yellow: the dissipating flame yellow, the camouflage yellow, the fire opal yellow – as fervent as Rimbaud's breath yellow. A spider that travels a lot.

She remembers the dictionary yellow: glistening, bulging, curvy yellow. What strikes her is the ferocity with which one yellow colludes with the other, stripping everything down to the negligée – the language of insolence, like the time when Nicole Kidman gets stoned and talks about her obsessive, erotic fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick fills the bathroom with a hazy, dreamy blue; almost an irreverent stream of lapis-lazuli but she is all yellow.

A svelte lie entering the sun, unaware that gold melts at 1064.18 °C.

Mary Magdalene Touches a Gazelle

See that woman, holding her scarf clumsily, pale rust pinafore blowing askew –
who believes that sandstorms are epiphanies, and winds once nimble, now rustle in her ears, for a reason.

While the skies spume and spray,
her wind-swept eyes witness an anointed foot. The graphite withers. The vellum crumbles. Imagine a plumbago portrait restored
to black and white. A silent film.

Untamed grief often turns feral, runs wild. Becomes a gazelle.

The wild world would begin again,
like a sudden sighting of desert willows,
if she could touch him once –

a tactile summation of everything

that was so eloquently unsaid while speaking about the Sirocco.

Août

After Marthe Bonnard

It’s late August and she can’t remember her name anymore.
A man who paints the familiar asks her a question.

It’s a question that startles her.

He likens it to the end of a poem.

She slowly remembers the soft machinery of his hands,
the tension in his brushstrokes – a visitation more than a gesture.

She sorts the answers by serrated interiors,
records them by tentative nudes, gives them a provisional hue.

Each desire flickers, flourishes, combusts. It’s still a colour but not yet light.

A sea of starlings begin flooding the edges of her body.
She traces a sleepy silhouette of a dancing flame,

holds its bewildering wildfire in the small hollow of her palms
and whispers: cerise, claret, blush.

Excerpted with permission from Folie à deux, Jennifer Robertson, Paperwall Publishing.