This Woman

This Woman is an extended praise poem reminding me a little of the Welsh bard's I am Taliesin but with more mystery adroitness and without a hint of his boastfulness. The language is strong rooted and engrained with womaness. I traced the rocks the veins of wounds and rush of streams with my fingertips. I heard her deep calls and followed her flights. Each poem an epiphany; the collection extraordinary. ( Abegail Morley award-winning poet.)Nancy Charley's joy in being a woman is as elemental and finely nuanced as the often surprising images rippling through these poems. This is a lyrical considered and inventive evocation of the complexities and experience of being female by a poet confident in the handling of form and the subtle cadences of rhyme and rhythm. ( Marilyn Donovan former Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year author of A Calculus of Balance: Poems after Piet Mondrian.)This collection challenges the geography of womanhood. The poet's voice is coloured with the language of violence but importantly her writing paints a portrait not of victimhood but of strength resourcefulness and quiet heroism. With form as fluid and ever-changing as its subject Nancy Charley takes a different two-dimensional framing of what it means to be a woman and tilts it this way and that shining light on secrets distortions bruises and cracks - but most of all showing womanhood with all its rippling layers to be a thing of enormous natural beauty. ( Louise McCudden writer advocate for LGBTQ and reproductive rights.)