The Golden Thread

By Amali Gunasekera

Blending the sacred and the everyday, Amali Gunasekera’s second collection The Golden Thread is a search for grace through the deep process of transmuting emotional trauma into peace. She takes up Muriel Rukeyser’s famous line: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ Her book’s central sequence, Nine [Miscarried] Methods, considers the challenge of asserting a woman’s equal status within a patriarchal objectified culture. Approaching the polemic or the existential with a gentle touch, this is poetry as lyric essay, mysterious and shapeshifting as sunlight on water. Formally, the poems explore the instability of the lyric ‘I’ and the addressed ‘You’. Often there is no static vantage point; instead, the ‘I’ and ‘You’ are verbs in a state of becoming. Their very unfixity reflects dynamic systems in the natural world where elements are constantly interacting and altering their natures. These poems also respond to Wilfred Bion’s notion of ‘Thoughts Without a Thinker’ and Carl Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’: through a rich symbolic system they simultaneously hold two dimensions of time; the linear Chronos of our material world, and the vertical Kairos or spiritual time. Thus, the field of this collection is holographic, in search of new co-ordinates, always beholden to something just beyond sight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781780375991

Amali Gunasekera

Amali Gunasekera was born and grew up in Sri Lanka. She works in the field of Archetypal Psychology. After living in Mozambique, Kenya and India, she is now based in Cumbria. Her first collection, The Lotus Gatherers, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016 (under her former name of Rodrigo). She was selected for Arts Council England's project Breaking Ground: Celebrating the Best British Writers of Colour in 2017. Her second collection, The Golden Thread, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022.

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AMALI GUNASEKERA

THE GOLDEN THREAD

Blending the sacred and the everyday, Amali Gunasekera’s second collection The Golden Thread is a search for grace through the deep process of transmuting emotional trauma into peace.

She takes up Muriel Rukeyser’s famous line: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ Her book’s central sequence, Nine [Miscarried] Methods, considers the challenge of asserting a woman’s equal status within a patriarchal objectified culture.

Approaching the polemic or the existential with a gentle touch, this is poetry as lyric essay, mysterious and shapeshifting as sunlight on water. Formally, the poems explore the instability of the lyric ‘I’ and the addressed ‘You’. Often there is no static vantage point; instead, the ‘I’ and ‘You’ are verbs in a state of becoming. Their very unfixity reflects dynamic systems in the natural world where elements are constantly interacting and altering their natures.

These poems also respond to Wilfred Bion’s notion of ‘Thoughts Without a Thinker’ and Carl Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’: through a rich symbolic system they simultaneously hold two dimensions of time; the linear Chronos of our material world, and the vertical Kairos or spiritual time. Thus, the field of this collection is holographic, in search of new co-ordinates, always beholden to something just beyond sight.

Front cover art: The Golden Thread (2021) by Daria Petrilli

AMALI GUNASEKERA

The Golden Thread

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Golden Thread was written between two places, Scotland, and Cumbria, during a period of deliberate silence I like to think of as my ‘Walden Pond’ years. We don’t often get the space and time to experiment with different levels of consciousness, and feel our own presence profoundly; Curwen Woods was the tranquil oasis that made it possible, and so my heartfelt thanks go to Judy Boddy and Thomasina Sandys for their warmth and welcome there.

My thanks are also due to the Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and Paul Farley and Matthew Caley for their editorial acumen. ‘The Great Pause’ was a commission by Ledbury Poetry Festival.

I dedicate the poems ‘Reading James Merrill at Curwen Woods’ to Judy, ‘Worry Doll’