LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

JULIA COPUS (b. 1969) shares Catherine Byron’s tragic vein:

Is it

my destiny to wander this dark

forever, getting lost on the way? (Little Red-Cap)

She writes just like her, conversationally, with artful poetic devices hidden behind everyday speech. Her poetry communicates an absence:

it seems best now just to sit tight and not

open the door to anyone (from the poem one day my heart turned bad)

Maternity is the only communion allowed (Child). Love is as heavy a burden to bear, and the poet prefers

the sort of men

whose smiles I can endure without

surrendering my all to them (Hymn to All the Men I’ll Never Love)

In Defence of Adultery reveals a younger self, though, than the heroine of Catherine Byron’s poems. Julia Copus gazes at life with marvelling eyes and tastes it with a seasoning of words. A defining line might be, ‘We don’t fall in love: it rises through us...’

We don't fall in love: it rises through us

the way that certain music does –

whether a symphony or ballad –

and it is sepia-coloured,

like spilt tea that inches up

the tiny tube-like gaps inside

a cube of sugar lying by a cup.

Yes, love's like that: just when we least

needed or expected it

a part of us dips into it

by chance or mishap and it seeps

through our capillaries, it clings

inside the chambers of the heart.

Possibility defines the poet as one of the ‘vessels of the possible’. Her poetry refuses older devices and relies mainly on rhythms and values of common sentences. She claims to be artless and supremely natural, which she is to a certain extent. Considering though that it is the major Desperado achievement to turn the unconventional into convention, Julia Copus is a nonconformist who works hard at her revolt, who builds a house of verse for her need to be different from everyone else, just in the tradition of a good Desperado.

by VIC (Cristina Ioana Vianu)