Colquhoun wrote poetry throughout her life and regularly published individual pieces, although she only published two slender collections: Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket (1972) and Osmazone eleven years later in 1983. Apart from two extended verse sequences, Diagrams of Love and Santa Warna most of her work is short and lyrical. In form, they are conventional. Colquhoun does not violate grammatical rules nor does she engage in the kind of semantic mismatches that can make automatic and other surrealist texts revelatory. The most difficult aspect to them is their specialist vocabulary arising from the many allusions to alchemical practices and the references to Celtic and druidic lore.
Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket
The eight poems in this collection form part of a series of twenty two poems – one each for the thirteen month Celtic lunar calendar plus nine for the pagan festivals that mark the year’s progression. The poems and accompanying drawings date from 1972, described by Colquhoun as “an important year for devotees of the Silver Crescent”. In that year the thirteen months of the calendar coincided exactly with their new moons.
Celtic history is an area where truth melts into druidic mythology. Tree alphabets, finger alphabets, ogham script and reconstructed welsh poems are the battle lines where historical accuracy vies with poetic truth and where the druids of classical antiquity meet the prophets, magicians and bards of the Mabinogion, the famous collection of welsh poems. The name of Colquhoun’s collection is a reference to the Hanes Taliesin, a poem in the Mabinogion in which the mythological hero Gwion/Taliesin who has accidentally drunk from the cauldron of inspiration and knowledge flees the hag Cerridwen. He keeps ahead of the goddess as she attempts to outwit and kill him by constant shape-shifting:
I have fled as a chain,
I have fled as a roe into an entangled thicket,
I have fled as a wolf cub (1)
In a further echo of alchemical transformation, she captures him, devours him, becomes pregnant by him and is delivered of him. Deciphering the meaning of this poem was Robert Graves’ initial insight into Celtic mythology, elaborated into The White Goddess, the book that introduced the tree alphabets into general awareness.(2) In her introduction to the volume of poetry, Colquhoun acknowledges this debt and also suggests links between the tree alphabets and the Qabalistic Tree of Life. The poet, as philosopher of the natural world, is everywhere. Her awareness has pervaded the universe, has been present in all things and at all events. She has acquired her knowledge by being what she knows and has risen above the confederacy of life and death.
Osmazone
Osmazone is a collection of short pieces, from rhyming verse to prose texts. (3) Although not published until 1983, some, if not all, of the collection was written much earlier, in the late 1930s or 1940s. (4) If there is a theme that recurs throughout the collection, it is that of the personal made public: the celebration of private parts and bodily functions. Never one to be coy or bashful, Colquhoun includes a poem about the anus, a short story in which a woman applying for a position in a modelling agency includes in her CV jobs in which she has modelled for enemas and gynaecological examinations. A short autobiographical text deals with her menarche, whilst a ‘found-object poem’ lists varieties of condoms. Alongside these are more conventional poems and prose pieces, including an Ode to Philosophical Mercury, a celebration of the female alchemical principle. It is clear from her article in Melmoth (5) that Colquhoun regarded ‘found poems’ as being a species of automatism and could be discovered embedded in the most unlikely of places.
Today, we might describe her subject matter as transgressive: an interest in the boundary between self and non- self and in those substances, such as bodily fluids, which cross the boundary. Although Colquhoun would not have used the term, transgression has become a focus of interest for a number of female artists. (6) In addition, transgressive rituals, for many occultists, are ways of overcoming the boundaries of the self and enable the practitioner experience the boundless continuity of the infinite.
Notes
1. Guest, C.E. The Mabinogion Penguin Books, London, 1976.
2. Graves, R. The White Goddess Faber and Faber, London 1948.
3. The title is from Huysmans, A Rebours, ch.14:
'Of all forms of literature that of the prose poem was Des Esseintes' chosen favourite… [it represented] … the concrete juice, the osmazone of literature, the essential oil of art.'
In a letter to E.L.T. Mesens dated 15th December 1939, Colquhoun mentions that she has just been reading A Rebours and compares herself with Huysmans’ iconic aesthete: “it seems to me that I am a Des Esseintes, but a Des Esseintes without learning and without money…his tastes are my own but I have not the learning nor the money to indulge them” (E.L.T. Mesens papers, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession no. 920094, 920094* , Series 1, Box 4 Folder 11.)
4. A portfolio of drawings was exhibited at the Mayor Gallery in 1947, described as illustrations to Osmazone. In the event, they were not used and their whereabouts is unknown. The volume as published has a reproduction of The Pine Family (1942) on the cover. The ink drawing that appears in the text is a reworking of a watercolour entitled Shell Fish that is datable to the 1940s.
5. Colquhoun, I. Notes on Automatism. Melmoth No. 2 1980. pp. 31-32.
6. Betterton, R. An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body. Routledge, London, 1996.
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