Anamnesis

By Iona Lee

Iona Lee’s debut collection charts the journey of the writer, artist and performer into adulthood. Written in a unique voice, Iona playfully toys with thematic devices in this entertaining exploration of art and artifice, absence and impermanence, truth and tale telling. Characterised by a deep love of language, its music and its magic, these poems reflect on memory, the future and other hauntings. Wittily observed, this collection is an attempt to connect the stars into tidy constellations, and to join the tiny, inchoate dots of self into something traceable and translatable.

Humorous and self-aware, gentle and philosophical, Anamnesis is written in the knowledge that in telling one’s life-story, one creates it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Polygon
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781788855730

Iona Lee

Iona Lee is a writer, of poetry and non-fiction, an artist, illustrator and spoken-word performer from Edinburgh. She has been a prominent member of Scotland’s live poetry scene for almost ten years, appearing on radio and television, and reading her work in venues and on festival stages across the UK and Europe, including Glastonbury, the Albert Hall and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Iona has been published extensively, in newspapers, anthologies and journals. Her pamphlet (Polygon, 2018) was shortlisted for a Saltire Award and in her upcoming debut collection was shortlisted for an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2022. Follow her at @ionaleepoetry.

Book preview

I

The first line thrown.

A tether tying me

to being.

TAKING A THOUGHT FOR A WALK

In art school I was told that Paul Klee described his studio

as being like a garden. At least – this is something that I recall.

When I was four, I watched the tattered bath mat reclining

like a gutted glove puppet on the cork floor and thought to myself

I will remember this – somehow, I still do.

I read somewhere that we walk through life backwards.

Words are not necessarily true just because they sound good. Nevertheless,

I believe in the poetry of that, like I believe in a painting’s horizon.

I have watched my home receding through the slow rear-view mirror

of a car. I know how distance causes scenes to coalesce and flatten – yet

some instants glint, distinct as streetlamps, don’t they?

So, for poetry’s sake, let’s say that it is true

that every morning, after breakfast, Klee would visit his studio

to see – in the subtle tilting of a new light – what each piece needed to grow.

Abstract art is meaningless as music.

For Klee, colour was mystical,

and over time his once depictive paintings disassembled