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The English Seminar

organised by the Department of English

The Body's Consciousness in Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin
by Dr Abigail Ardelle Zammit

Abigail reads a selection of poetry from her latest collection and explains how through its recreation of place, memory and desire, Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin has allowed her to explore the relationship between text, body, landscape and coastal geographies. Apart from the place poems, the collection comprises a long sequence that takes its inspiration from World War II as experienced by the Maltese (Rushing up to the Roof during an Air-Raid) and another sequence (You May Touch if You Like), which mostly speaks from the perspective of the Sleeping Lady, a Maltese fertility goddess known also as ‘The Fat Lady’ or ‘The Maltese Venus’. These poems are not nostalgic re-enactments of Paleolithic times but fiercely dramatic voices of the female experience in physical terms, exploring the poetics of body and consciousness.

The archive material from the war sequence coincided with the poet's own sense of self in connection to island cultures, the natural world, and the female imagination. The poems about the coast and the natural world set up the reader’s sense of what Malta and the Maltese people were defending in WWII; the closing poems of Rushing up to the Roof during an Air Raid are consolidated by the goddess poems, which in turn serve to illuminate the female-experience poems that precede them since they both speak frequently to the landscape.

Abigail Ardelle Zammit has been writing poetry since the age of eleven. Although her first verses were in Maltese, she now writes solely in the English language. In 2005 Abigail obtained a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Lancaster, following which, Voices from the Land of Trees, which takes its inspiration from Guatemala’s violent past, was published by Smokestack (UK, 2007). The poet Graham Mort describes her first collection as “a visceral and moving work. Angry and compassionate, Zammit’s own voice discovers an excoriating yet redemptive timbre, confronting oppression and suffering whilst remaining true to moral complexity and ambivalence.”

In the last few years, Abigail has had poems published in a number of British and Canadian journals including The SHOp, Orbis, Aesthetica, Freefall, Markings, Myslexia (the poem ‘Mġarr, 1940’ was a finalist in a competition judged by Jo Shapcott), Iota, the Peleton anthology as well as the online journals Drunken Boat, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Atelier and Golden Walkman. In 2013 Abigail won the Alan Sillitoe Poetry competition judged by George Szirtes. Two years later, the poem 'Sleeping Woman, Jilted' was longlisted in the Montreal International Poetry Competition.

Most recently, Abigail won second prize in the Sentinel (UK) Poetry Book Competition and consequently, her second collection, Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin was published and launched in London in December 2015. The judges Andy Willoughby and Bob Beagrie described Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin as “a sensual and passionate collection” which “makes the language sing. The poet shows a keen eye for focused detail that moves beyond mere picture-making into layers of symbolism and metamorphosis. Abigail A. Zammit displays a capacity for speaking through masks, shifting personae without losing a coherent sense of voice.”

Abigail holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing (Lancaster, UK), is a lecturer in English at the G.F. Abela Junior College and Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Malta. She has had workshops with various British poets and in October 2015, she participated in a British Council project called ‘Walking Cities’ with the Next Generation Poet Hannah Lowe.