“IF/ YOUR lover asks you to bite his tongue, Then/ do it/ Else you are alone and bloodless…” So begins Heidi Williamson’s poem If Then Else, in her debut collection Electric Shadow. A footnote explains that the phrase is a logic statement with “no scope for ambiguity”. Yet in this body of work Williamson harnesses ambiguity, turning logic into poetry.
Inspired by a residency at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre, Williamson’s poems move swiftly through a range of material: a Möbius strip is followed, and followed again; and Nobel prizewinner Dorothy Hodgkin’s hands are immortalised within a poem’s…
