Maureen Jivani at Mulfran Press
My Shinji Noon
The sequence My Shinji Noon first appeared in Insensible Heart. In this pamphlet, one of the first four in the Mulfran Miniatures series, the poems are accompanied by three specially commissioned illustrations by Jill Schoenmann. Launched with the other Mulfran Miniatures and Ashes of a Valleys Childhood by Lynda Nash at the Glanfa Stage, Wales Millennium Centre, 8 June 2010.
Praise for Maureen Jivani’s Insensible Heart
“Its taut poems, delicate in both their lyricism and rhythms, risk wider territory than most first collections, drawing on imagination as well as experience."
Carrie Etter
"From its opening poem in which a nurse holds a beating heart in her hand to the last where a young woman dances into the sea, Maureen Jivani’s first collection takes us from the personal and individual to the mythic and back again. Her poems often open with tremendous in-your-face directness and move towards a point where they leave you with a disconcerting sense of deepening possibility. This is work of great compassion worked out with clarity and wonderfully cool language.”
Christopher Meredith
"With surgical delicacy, precision and skill, Maureen Jivani’s poems take us deep within the body; she offers us a heart which ‘shivered like an injured bird’ in the narrator’s hands, and her poems effortlessly blend surreal possibilities with the visceral physicality of the human form. Her work shows what it means to be flesh-and-blood human – and, in the deliciously subversive ‘Lessons for Cubs’ (Remember a skinned bear may look like man) how closely human and animal species are connected. A compassionate chronicler of the ‘hopeless ghosts’ who occupy the uneasy territories between life and death, this is a stunning first collection which explores, and delights in, the poetics of medicine."
Catherine Smith
About Maureen Jivani and contact information
This is Maureen Jivani’s first full collection of poems. Her poems have appeared in the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Australia both online and in magazines including Frogmore Papers, The Glasgow Review, Magma, nthposition, Orbis, The Rialto, Seam, Smiths Knoll, and The Wolf. Maureen works for the NHS and is married to a doctor. Mulfran Press will forward messages for Maureen sent to authors@mulfran.co.uk
Insensible Heart by Maureen Jivani
Maureen Jivani’s poems explore the roles of art, faith, sexuality, aging, and politics in history and in contemporary society. She draws on her experiences as a nurse to reflect on the distortions which she has observed: loss of control, faith, body-parts, all feature heavily in her work. There is a celebration and dry wit in her poems too and a delight in the absurd. Ultimately it is the world of the troubled and the estranged where she most makes her poetry felt in concise, stark or surreal images; where nature is most revealed; where the undercurrent of love and fragility most pervade. Insensible Heart has been shortlisted for the 2010 £2,500 London New Poetry Award. The prize is organised by the London Festival Fringe in conjunction with Cegin Productions and Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour. See the Coffee-House Poetry web site for further information.
Insensible Heart, Maureen Jivani
66 pages, £7.99, ISBN 978-1-907327-02-5
[Available from Blackwells]
Lessons for Cubs
… in the distant past, humans and animals were
not as clearly distinguished as they are today.
Encyclodaedia of World Myths
Remember a skinned bear may look like a man.
Never take off your coat in company.
We are not only hunters but hunted.
Wherever possible cover your tracks.
Do not be caught out at small talk, or debating.
The philosophy of consciousness is a trap.
Growls will strengthen the oppressor's axe.
Keep this in mind. Even as parading on two legs
gains us height our nose will be further
from the ground.