Transculturalism, Transformation and the Visual Arts in Contemporary British Women’s Poetry

Abstract

This article establishes the works of women poets in the UK, especially those of non-white and mixed-race ancestries, as major players in poetic ekphrasis. Ekphrasis has been defined as ‘the verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Heffernan 3). Building on the critical studies of the ekphrases by twentieth-century women poets, this article recognizes the increasingly multicultural landscape of contemporary British ekphrastic poetry and engages in detailed studies of the ekphrastic poems from Grace Nichols’s Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and Pascale Petit’s What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (2010). The two case studies demonstrate how women poets of non-white and mixed-race ancestries return to engaging with art from a diasporic perspective or art from a foreign culture and to exploring the potential and limits of art as a life-, self- and trauma-transmuting agent. The article simultaneously reveals the diverse purposes of ekphrasis in contemporary poetry, as seen in the ekphrastic practices of Nichols, Petit and other women poets.