Janette Stowell's poetries

CODE →  SMARTIES →  GULL → 

A gleeful malice revealing itself as simple life-ingrained
compassion is at the heart of Janette Stowell's poetry.

Things to note about her poetics:: —

— :: Narrative, rather cool, its first tensions do not come to a point. In this ebb (of a narrative, of a drama), a dry wry humour sort of shuttles us through misadventure, nastiness, dirty bits of life.

— :: Early in the magazine's history, Miss Stowell had experimented successfuly with what she called "cine-poems", wherein filmic scenes of varied connects and disconnects were conveyed in a distant voice often with the technical apparatus — camera movements, zooms, scene shifts — of film-making.

— :: Thinking of the narrative in "code" for example, as an extension from the cine-poem/synopsis technique — that these earlier poems were a way of narrating with objectivity, working through the problem in poetry of narrative until the cine-context was no longer needed. A new non-personal narration is what remains. Who and what, is being narrated, and how it is, is partly how these poems work. Miss Stowell has worked through the problem of narration, and found herself an area in which she is entirely capable.