Crossing the Mirror Line

Crossing the Mirror Line, the stunning debut from Judith Willson, explores doubleness; the unsettling symmetries of mirrored reflections, the magician’s disorientating art that ‘makes nothing appear’. Artists’ mannequins and watchful children stand at an angle to the familiar world; an estuary elides distinctions between land and sea. Like the eighteenth-century artists’ landscape mirror that reconfigured the relationship between the viewer and what is viewed, these poems are concerned with looking, how it selects and transforms what is seen.

Judith Willson grew up in Manchester and lives in the Yorkshire Pennines. She studied English at the universities of Cambridge and York, and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester. She has worked as a teacher and in publishing. Her work was featured in Carcanet’s New Poetries VI.