Crossing the Mirror Line, the stunning debut from Judith Willson, explores doubleness; the unsettling symmetries of mirrored reflections, the magician’s disorientating art that ‘makes nothing appear’. Artists’ mannequins and watchful children stand at an angle to the familiar world; an estuary elides distinctions between land and sea. Like the eighteenth-century artists’ landscape mirror that reconfigured the relationship between the viewer and what is viewed, these poems are concerned with looking, how it selects and transforms what is seen. Their landscapes are borders and boundaries, places shaped by the persistance of a past which still presses close to the surface, its meanings as unstable as the play of light. The poems echo with stories and songs in which elusive histories are glimpsed, fragments remembered in the deep strata. Objects carry stories of their travel through time concealed within them: the poems ‘reach through thick folds into pockets / for a letter or a glove’.
