Lava Lamp Poems by Colleen Higgs

The poems are cut with a bald, bare-blade honesty, a mind that makes unusual matches. Colleen fits apartheid paranoia with stubborn partying, then sums up an insane epoch in a sentence, One day the pool opened to all. This last line of my Yeoville is the ending of furtiveness, fear and zealous defiance. The book is an experience of heat, luminescence, and the wackiness of existence. It is the experience of being mesmerised, in confidence, no drugs involved, watching that lava lamp. Tracey Farren

The poems in Lava Lamp are compelling: at once conversational and uncanny. Colleen Higgs tells the truth but tells it slant, insisting on the singularity of everything that is familiar domesticity, marriage, motherhood, family. The sequence of poems set in Johannesburg is captivating. Finuala Dowling, poet and creative writing teacher.

ISBN 9781920397258