In the Skin House

The culmination of Jeni Couzyn's Selected Poems, Life by Drowning, was a new body of powerful, mystical poetry, including A Time To Be Born and The Coming of the Angel. In her latest collection, In the Skin House, she continues her journey of self-discovery in probing poems that are remarkable not just for their spiritual qualities but also for their tender lyricism and sense of wonder.
The Sufi writer Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee calls In the Skin House Jeni Couzyn's own inner story: 'Her mysticism is neither abstract nor ascetic, but belongs to the school of lovers like Mary Magdalene... She does not deny the body, but embraces it and goes beyond its boundaries. She is a woman in the arms of her inner lover, surrendering to the mystery of the soul.'
Rosemary Sullivan writes: 'When I think of In the Skin House, I think of the drawings of Paul Klee or the love poems of Rumi; of spirit tracks that must be followed intuitively. If, for something to hang on to, you were to try to read these poems as an amalgam of spiritual traditions - a bit of Western gnosticism mixed with Eastern mysticism - you would miss their delicacy, for the only way to read them is to submit to the poems themselves. They create their own language of discovery.'