Irina Kuzminsky

Irina Kuzminsky

 

A poet, dancer and singer, Irina combines an academic background (she travelled to Oxford on a Commonwealth Scholarship where she wrote her doctoral thesis on the Language of Women, subsequently being elected Junior Research Fellow in Humanities at Wolfson) with wide-ranging performance experience in Australia, Germany and the UK, including recitals, opera, dance, cross-arts collaborations and dance theatre. Throughout this she has steadily worked towards bringing her own creative work to a broader public. A highlight was her one-woman show Heloise Speaks, written as a verse novel telling the story of the 12th century lovers Heloise and Abelard from the perspective of Heloise. Irina's poems and articles have been published in England and Australia in Acumen, Poetrix, Caduceus, Arts and Academic Review, Devi, Women's Art Register and Dance Australia, and her poetry has been set to music by Kevin George Brown, James D'Angelo and Amanda Lee Falkenberg.Irina continues to perform and is currently workin g with ways of presenting poetry to audiences in combination with dance and music, her most recent project in this vein being Contemplations of the Feminine Divine.

 

Dancing with Dark Goddesses is her first collection, published by Awen on William Blake's birthday, November 28th 2009, as part of the Heaven's Gate festival, Stroud.

 

Sample Poems from Dancing with Dark Goddesses, Awen 2009

 

Speaking from Inner Roses

 

I'll speak now from inside the rose

And fold words into silence

My self I'll offer to my self

And I'll fill your volumes with a single glance.

 

Copyright Irina Kuzminsky 2009

 

Dancing with Dark Goddesses by Irina Kuzminsky

Invoking galaxies and stars

 

this body is

like many other bodies

Now naked lying

and not lying to your gaze.

Inhabited by forces only

dimly understood

Itself a guardian

of these

poor gentle flesh

naked to illness and time

naked to wind and sun

naked to word and truth

naked to metamorphosis

and given over to earth's destiny.

The wound is inevitable.

Therefore again be wounded and heal

 

by Irina Kuzminsky, from Dancing with Dark Goddesses, Awen 2009

 

Dancing with Dark Goddesses

 

The dance is life - life is the dance - in all its manifestations, in all its sorrow and joy, cruelty and beauty. And the faces of the Dark Goddesses are many - some are dark with veiling and unknowing, some are dark with sorrow, some are dark with mystery and a light so great that it paradoxically shades them from sight.The poems in this collection are an encounter with many of these faces, in words marked with feminine energy and a belief in the transformative power of the poetic word. Both spiritual and sexual, earthy and refined, a woman's voice speaks to women and to the feminine in women and men, often with the rawness of pain and betrayal ("Even Today", "This Voice", "The Small Betrayals"), but also with a resurgent strength ("Derelicta", "The Hungering Earth", "Dakini", "She rides"), or with the calm consciousness of simply being ("Mistress of the Elements", "Mother of Darkness"). The book charts a journey from the abysses of pain and separation from the divine "(Eyeing Death"), of sorrow ("Standing at Golgotha"), of centuries of suppression and the memories of it, but then reaches back out towards transcendence and love, both beauty ("Your Beauty") and lightness of touch ("Would Words Could Dance") showing us what this earth could be. The shock of pain is counterpoised by the joy of living and by the pure and ultimately triumphant dance of life.The poems speak of an openness to life, a surrender to the workings of love and a trust in the Dark Goddesses and their ways of leading us through the dance.

 

Published by Awen November 28th 2009