Psyche & Imagination - Online Abstract
Psyche, Imagination and the Poet: The Poetry

Edmund Cusick

Edmund Cusick is a storyteller, poet and lecturer in Imaginative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University . He is winner of the Housman Poetry Prize (1998) and is current holder of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Prize (2005). In 1998 he was awarded a Jerwood writing fellowship. He is the author of two collections of original poetry Gronws Stone (1997) and Ice Maidens (Spring 2006, In press), and editor of one poetry anthology Blodeuwedd (2001).

His Doctoral thesis is a Jungian study of Nineteenth century Gothic and fantastic writers, chiefly George MacDonald, Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard and Edgar Allen Poe. It identifies some of the archetypal images which appear in remarkably similar form in the works of several different fantastic authors, notably two aspects of the anima: the Catwoman (heroines who are envisioned through feline and leopardess imagery) and the Stellar heroine (whose identity is expressed through images of the night sky). Elsewhere, he has written articles undertaking Jungian analyses of John Cowper Powys, Arthur Machen, and Mary Webb.

The poetry of Gronws Stone is inspired by the Welsh legends of the Mabinogion. Cusicks own poetry, giving voice to the men of the myths, is partnered with work by Cornish poet Ann Gray, who dramatises the experiences of the female characters. Cusick brings these Celtic myths to life with particular sensitivity to their spiritual content, and to their sexual elements, which explore the realm of sexual terror as well as of desire. The world of the Mabiniogion is one in which heroes are engaged in continuing intercourse with Annwn, the otherworld, a frightening and glamorous realm contiguous to our own. From this realm emerge magical beasts, immortal women, and terrifying monsters, and into this realm heroes fall, there to encounter ecstasy and desolation. The poems reflect this intercourse between worlds, being rooted in the Welsh landscape, yet opening to the presence of Annwn.

One of the most fascinating of the Mabinogions otherworld figures is Blodeuwedd her identity passing through incarnations as flower, tree, woman, and owl. In Bloeduwedd: an Anthology of Womens Poetry Cusick traces the continuing power of Blodeuwedd over the imagination of female creative artists. In his introductory essay Cusick makes explicit the link between the collective unconscious and the otherworld of the myth, using a Jungian paradigm to account for the Blodeuwedds renaissance.

Ice Maidens continues to develop and extend the themes of the previous books. The collections cover plate John William Waterhouses Hylas and the Nymphs offers an an archetypal image of the allure of the anima, and Cusicks poem Waterhouse, tracing the influence of images of the entrancing feminine over the male artist, offers an introduction to the wider themes of the collection.

In poems such as Vindolanda and Nana Cusick explores the association of spirtual forces within the landscape through feminine images. Other poems explore the glamour of the female image in the male psyche, and in particular, to points of confluence between the supernatural and the erotic, where the energy of fantasies, or of actual encounters, rises from both sexual and spiritual sources.

Elsewhere, Cusicks concern with legend and with landscape embraces a realm where the physical territory is simultaneously a land of mythic significance the high arctic.

Throughout, Ice Maidens demonstrates poetrys power to reach through surface of conscious reality and to express moments of epiphany, culminating in the arresting of conscious attention before images of the numinous.

Dr Edmund Cusick is a poet and Head of the Writing Dept at Liverpool John Moores University . He is author of two collections of original poetry, Gronws Stone (1997) and Ice Maidens (2006, in press) and has edited an anthology of womens poetry, Blodeuwedd (2001). He has also edited, and written a critical introduction to, a volume of Rose Flints Poetry Firesigns ( Salzburg , 2004).