Ovid wrote his famous stories of change just before he was banished from his beloved Rome and after travelling and observing many diverse and vibrant landscapes. He may well have visited and was knowledgeable of the Aeolian Isles where volcanoes cast molten lava into turquoise seas, whipped by the winds of the god who made his home there.
It was to these rapturous, Edenic and violently creative islands that JL Williams ventured to write the poems in this collection; poems inspired both directly by Ovid’s tales and informing the new story that emerges from the old – a post-apocalyptic vision of the earth where metamorphoses engender rebirth out of the ashen wasteland that man has made of the world. Ovid expressed the truth that to change is to survive, and this message erupts out of the poems in Condition of Fire, whose language and images strive to communicate in new ways the essential elements of myth, creation and the burning breath of being.
 | Jennifer WilliamsBooks by JL Williams include Condition of Fire (Shearsman, 2011), Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014), Our Real Red Selves (Vagabond Poets, 2015) and House of the Tragic Poet (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2016). She is interested in expanding dialogues through poetry across languages, perspectives and cultures and in cross-form work, visual art, dance, opera and theatre. She has been published widely in journals, her poetry has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, German, French and Greek and she has read at international poetry festivals in Scotland, Turkey, Cyprus and Canada. She was selected to take part in the 2015 Jerwood Opera Writing Programme, was Writer-in-Residence for the British Art Show 8 in Edinburgh with the artist Catherine Street and plays in the poetry and music band Opul. Williams gives regular poetry readings and workshops, is one of the Shore Poets and is on the Live Literature funded list of Scottish Book Trust Authors. She is the programme manager at the Scottish Poetry Library where she curates poetry events and creates workshops and professional development activities for poets. |
