Black Caiman with Butterflies, Mama Amazonica and mental illness

 Mama Amazonica will be out later this summer from Bloodaxe, and I'm both excited and nervous. It's already available for preorder on Amazon! And the Poetry Book Society has selected it as their Autumn Choice, which is like a dream. Much of the writing of it was dreamlike, and came from my two trips to the Peruvian Amazon, and much of it came from the terrors of family trauma and mental illness, and a longing to make a book where I could love my psychotic and manic depressive mother. Mania, and depression – that old black caiman, haunt it, as in this poem 'Black Caiman with Butterflies'. The photos were taken by Brian Fraser, on the long journey up the Tambopata River, towards our lodge Tambopata Research Centre, deep in pristine rainforest only accessible by strict border checkpoints, no other lodge in the whole national reserve.

Black Caiman with Butterflies

Depression is a black caiman
lying on the sand,

mud-slicked from the deep,
impassive in her armour.

Nothing can get through to her,
she’ll lie there for hours, unblinking.

How to explain then
the appearance of butterflies?

Sparking flambeaux, snowy-whites,
at the corner of her eyes,

as if the beauty of the world has come
to perch on her, to drink her tears.

     (previously published in The Poetry Review)