Women Twice Removed

"There is a powerful sense of ekphrasis in Christina Lloyd's poems. They interrogate representations of women through media as diverse as painting, sculpture, ultrasound images and the CT scans of an ancient mummy. Here is a concentrated, sometimes forensic, female gaze and voice at work. Each poem is an act of poiesis that searches and simultaneously conflates the boundaries of the actual and the imaginary. Her work commemorates and invokes, disclosing the multi-dimensional dynamic of the human sphere. These poems are both immediate and complex: acts of linguistic formulation that are sensuous, precise, rich in cultural traces, locations and forms of experience. They bring into play an invigorated sense of culture in which to be human is to interact with an evanescent present moment that encapsulates history, memory, future and art itself. Images cascade within apparently orderly poetic forms that seethe with restless energy and an acute consciousness. These synergies establish Lloyd as an original poet, a multivalent sensibility, an urgent voice that commands attention." —Graham Mort, author of Like Fado and Other Stories and Black Shiver Moss