Transitional Spaces:Constructions of the Modernist "I" in Miriam Waddington's Poetry
ISSN: 0211-5913
Year of publication: 2007
Issue: 54
Pages: 169-180
Type: Article
More publications in: Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses
Abstract
In her first books of poetry (Green World, The Second Silence), Miriam Waddington explores female identity and subjectivity from the perspective of what she refers to in her poem “The Bond” as the “Jewish me.” In these two books, one finds “the credibility of colloquial speech as an alternative to impersonal modernism” (Arnason). My paper is an attempt to approach the construction of the lyric “I” exploring the dialectic between inner and outer world —a transitional space where the subject engages in a process of transformation. In Waddington’s poetry the modernist lyric was a central means to explore a rupture with the old world (colonial and patriarchal) in her own textual terms