Lucia Sellars plays with text, fine art and moving image. Her writing has been published in poetry magazines and anthologies such as Utopia (Hesterglock Press) and Repeal the 8th (Sad Press). Her film work has been selected and screened in many Film Festivals around the world. You can see more of her work at www.luciasellars.org.

Introduction

The motion of poetry is like juggling. You pick a set of feelings and images, 

then raise them into the air, into the randomness of infinity. 

Then grab two realities and one ethereal substance.

• Lucia Sellars

As the blue planet rotates with a synchronised rhythm amongst the astral bodies of the Milky Way, and beyond; so, our hearts palpitate in a rhythmic configuration as we live in a world, that is – to live. That is to say, the action of movement from one step to the other, one second to an hour, is ´key´ in being, who we are and what exists. Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that “for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction”. 

Here, in terms of poetry, the art in itself as art can trigger a reaction in both the source and the receptor to the force. Where the source is the poet and the receptor the reader. The ´movement´ is not only experienced by the receptor but is also part of the creative process of transforming the poet’s´ imagination into tangible matter. We could say that movement is equivalent to ´a pathway´, a bridge, a tunnel, a river, a vein, that takes you from A to B…

Preview

if the line spoke

if the line spoke, 
it would not be literal, nor lateral.
it would wobble and stop, 
and become a final full stop if it had a choice.

if the line spoke, 
it would wonder where it started, 
and until when it has to go.

if the line spoke, 
it would be one colour,
a monosyllabic of solitude.

it would talk about its own ambiguity, 
of decisions it never took.
it would walk the moebius strip, 
it would tie things together in knots.

if the line spoke, 
its truth of creation and godless existence.
it would trace our bodies, 
it would trace our shadows and, 
everything that exists in time.

it would become a continuation of ourselves, 
it would be all and everything, 
from the beginning of time, 
from the beginning of breath.






to activate the verb----------the inadequate verb------------------------to misspell the verb-–----to leave it out of the leash--------- to stutter--------------------whilst the verb is action--------the action----------to stray the active verb from truth----------hide-----------torture it from its light-----tie it up------mouth folding echo pitch--------resonance----------waves------------to your hidden verb-------one to keep lost keys--------and darkness within-------those pre-emptive actions----shape the active verb--------let´s stutter-------lets inadequate the verb-----------do not verb out truth--------do not unravel common denominators---- to activate the verb----- the inadequate verb---------to not say it--------and disappear-----------when active-----------------------------------------------------------

                                            (verbs for loneliness)




Self – Inquiry


Socrates: Well then, what’s a human being?

Far away from definitions, 
We exist.
Breathing, what we call life, 
Inhaling, exhaling the body of silence, 
The constant witness of eternity.

The dreamers, see nor feel nothing
Whilst they sleep.
Though their musical visions are clear and concrete.

It is true, that faced upon luck, chance or destiny, 
I could be nothing from now and then, 
We could become invisible upon imminent death.
Subject always to the mercy of luck.

Our feelings and reason based thoughts, 
Those sighs and thinking vapours, 
Makes us, I, you, he, she, and we, 
And is not by separating the parts, 
But by looking as a united whole, 
That we will survive from our own selves.

Here, in the invisible tower of thoughts, 
Lays the source, 
Void of life and love, 
Though full of that which makes us God.

---

Praise for the Author

“Lucia Sellars’ poetry is full of strangenesses, both brittle and fluid. In this book, she has given us a subversive fairytale of the quotidian, an ontological menagerie on the move with errant moons. Here is time, suddenly, in dialogue with the line; there, the space between bread and breath. All in the corners of our asymmetries. The State of Moving is a place of immanence and immediacy, of the body and of language, in their various glittering possibilities and failures.” DATABLEED editors; Eleanor Perry and Juha Virtanen.

 “I really enjoyed reading Lucia’s book.  From the start “The State of Moving” leads the reader into a mysterious place of atmosphere and illusion.  I loved the procession from poetry to poetry prose and back to poetry again…safe in the hands of a truly inspired and skilled writer.  Lucia manages to momentarily stop a mad world from spinning and draw you closer to something very beautiful and very serene and wonderfully pure.  The State of Moving is a book I will read again and again.” Cactus Chilly; artist, poet and videopoetry maker.

“I was thrilled by the prose and poetry of Lucia Sellars since I first encountered it. Felt it fulfilled a thirst I didn’t know I had. Everything she writes seems in another mode of language that pulls and pushes me into wonder. Her poems and prose are like unique life forms that I encounter with delight. Ones that open my eyes and heart to the strangeness and humour of our humanity, mortality and everyday lives. This book is a treasure chest of ways to see the world afresh.” Dr Juliet Henderson; Senior Lecturer in Communication, Culture and Language. Oxford Brookes University, academic, artist, poet, and butoh dancer.

“How do you write about such a collection? It’s a trumpet in the forest, something unbelonging and strange, out of place, out of the ordinary and wonderful. It’s calling from a loving voice we know ( but don’t know). We feel nourished and fulfilled in the reading of it – it is word-food that only feelings can describe – it pulses through impressively with a depth of pain few can translate on the page with such skill and wit. The poet takes us via the instinctive bodies of animals, repeating sudden changes of daily life in an untitled circle, begging to reread.” Hilda Sheehan; poet and founder/director of The Big Poetry Weekend.

“The State of Moving embodies the ethos of pure movement, of flux. These are agile, swift lines and prose poems. It ranges from the quotidian to the cosmic.”Rose Knapp; poet, latest collection out with Beir Bua Press.