Lava Lamp Poems

By Colleen Higgs

Colleen Higgs launched Modjaji Books, the first publishing house for southern African women writers, in 2007. Her first collection of poetry, Halfborn Woman, was published in 2004. She lives in Cape Town with her partner and her daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modjaji Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781920397845

Colleen Higgs

A woman reluctantly takes on the responsibility of putting her eccentric rebellious mother into a retirement home, and managing her care. She has her own daughter to raise and nurture, a marriage and a business to hold together, and her own psychological troubles due in good part to how she was mothered. my mother, my madness is Colleen Higgs’s diary of her mother’s last ten years. It is at once funny, harrowing, mundane, chaotic, and full of insight. It is a rich and moving story which unfolds through its characters like a novel.

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Reviews for Lava Lamp Poems

[judycroome_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The most striking thing about LAVA LAMP POEMS is the sense of intimacy.Higgs writes of experiences that are hers and hers alone: her father marinating fish the day he died, her young daughter’s perception that everything in the house (including the lava lamp from which this collection takes its name) is hers and watching her new-born daughter fight for her life in the Neonatal ICU. And yet every poem touches on an emotion, an experience, an event, that – but for a few altered specifics – could have been plucked straight from my life. This is because, in the recounting of her personal experiences, Higgs focuses on the fine details of reality, but also stretches across the minutiae of one woman’s life to tap into the collective pool of universal perceptions and feeling. One of my favourite lines: “My tiny alien creature alone, but not entirely: she’s attached to wires and tubes.”The vivid imagery of this line, like many others in this poignant collection, so perfectly contrasted practical aspects with feelings, that I could only gulp back tears at the depth of emotion so matter-of-factly expressed, and yet so tightly contained in both her heart and in the brevity of the words she uses.While her world is firmly set in South Africa (from Jeppestown to the Mount Nelson in Cape Town), the emotions, humour and compassion lift these poems to level where any reader, whether from Timbuktu or Tasmania, could easily relate to themHiggs’ strength as a poet clearly lies in her natural ability to carve out of her ordinary world a depth of meaning that touches the heart with all that is familiar.