KAZANTZIS, Judith

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Nationality: British. Born: Oxford, 14 August 1940. Education: Oxford University, Somerville College, 1958–61, B.A. in modern history. Family: Married Alec Kazantzis in 1982 (divorced); one daughter and one son. Career: Home tutor for the Inner London Education Authority during 1970s; poetry reviewer, Spare Rib magazine, six years; member Women's Literature Collective, 1970s; committee member and panelist, South-East Arts, 1978–79. Poetry editor, The PEN Broadsheet. Also artist: individual shows—Poetry Society Gallery, London, 1987; Combined Harvest Gallery, London, 1989. Address: 32 Ladbroke Grove, London W11 3BQ, England.

Publications

Poetry

Minefield. London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1977.

The Wicked Queen. London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980.

Touch Papers, with Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor. London, Allison and Busby, 1982.

Let's Pretend. London, Virago, 1984.

A Poem for Guatemala. Leamington Spa, Yorkshire, Bedlam Press, 1986.

Judith Kazantzis. Leamington Spa, Leamington Poetry Society, 1987.

Flame Tree. London, Methuen, 1988.

The Florida Swamps. London, Oasis, 1990.

The Rabbit Magician Plate. London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992.

Selected Poems: 1977–1992. London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995.

Swimming through the Grand Hotel: Poems 1993–1996. London, Enitharmon, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1997.

The Odysseus Poems: Fictions on The Odyssey of Homer. Manaccan, Cornwall, Cargo, 1999.

Other

Editor, The Gordon Riots: A Collection of Contemporary Documents. London, Cape, 1966.

Editor, Women in Revolt: The Fight for Emancipation: A Collection of Contemporary Documents. London, Cape, 1968.

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Critical Study: By David Herd, in Bete Noire (Hull, England), 14–15, 1992.

Judith Kazantzis comments:

I wrote poems all during my childhood and adolescence. Then there was a complete break until 1973 when reading Plath's The Colossus suddenly broke the resolution I had made not to be a writer; she offered a language I could understand emotionally and as a poet technically. It was painting, psychoanalysis, and feminism that set off my poetry in the 1970s, but underneath all was the simple experience of marrying and having two young children. So my first book makes reference to the claustrophobia and anger I was feeling then and was consciously woman centered, and my second book, more so, and it was wider in range and more confident. I reused Greek myth and also fairy tale. Contemporary issues were coming in more explicit forms.

In 1982 I collaborated in a feminist trilogy, and my next publications have ranged from consideration of public issues, including a special interest in Latin America and U.S. relations with Latin America, to love poems and to considerations of mother-daughter, mother-son relationships. Exile and distance, my relationship to countryside and nature and to city, time—all these were growing as themes. My Selected Poems illustrates this wide-ranging kind of development over fifteen years, influenced by much time spent in Key West and other parts of America, though my base is very definitely English.

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Judith Kazantzis is a poet who speaks with an intensely personal, informal voice about matters of general public concern. What is remarkable is her ability to manage such a combination without the need to resort either to full-blown rhetoric or to the confessional mode that seemed to proclaim itself as the quintessential voice of modern poetry in the late 1960s.

Kazantzis's first major collection, The Wicked Queen, was published in 1980, and the dominant characteristics of her work are already present in it in their full maturity: a wit that can be savage but that is deployed in the service of a quite justifiable rage at injustice, and a feminism that may at times be strident but with a stridency that is often necessary if one is to draw attention to what much of the world may choose to ignore. The themes range widely, from the stoning of an adulteress in Jeddah to a savage retelling of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood and from an imaginative reconstruction of the world of Queen Clytemnestra to the joyful, tender poem addressed to the poet's pregnant sister. There is a prickly restlessness about much of the writing, a willful, rebellious refusal to let go of a theme until all of its possibilities are exposed for all the world to see, appraise, or even jeer at if necessary. If the absurd posturings of men are often mocked, they are mocked deservedly, as in "Those Upright Men":

   I heard of a tribe where the men
                   held their erections all their lives,
   like rhino horns: each
   his own mascot before the main regiment of the body,
   gorgeous trophies
             painful to bump …

Kazantzis's next major work was the long A Poem for Guatemala. Here poetry is deployed in the service of popular protest, a time-honored tradition, of course. The poem itself is divided into such sections as "Duty," "The Morning Star," and "The Clinic," each chronicling particular instances of deprivation, injustice, and cruelty. Its rhetorical flights are gently persuasive:

   When will this land be free?
   And the villages be uncovered from the tractor tread and
   the flattened ranges of the loosened bull?
   When will the Indians sow their seed corn
   And the children grow tall in their parents' houses?

The poem represents a significant move forward for Kazantzis, from the imaginative exploration of particular acts of injustice, whether they be offenses of one kind or another against her own sex, often seen through the medium of myth, historical example, or biblical precept, to a new, more extended mode of political realism, which in this instance includes a profound concern for the ramifications of American foreign policy in Central America. As she explained, "This poem comes of a wish to honour the life-force and courage of Guatemalans living and dying in the current unnatural conditions. These conditions are not widely known. But among those of the Americas who live in exile either as refugees abroad or in their own land, the peoples of Guatemala, especially the indigenous peoples, figure in hundreds of thousands." Harold Pinter described it as "a major political poem … beautifully wrought, concrete, passionate … a most impressive achievement."

Kazantzis's later collection Flame Tree is also firmly rooted in the political realities of these turbulent times. Themes of individual poems include the threat to the world's rainforests, criticism of the Thatcher government, the miners' strike of 1984, and the Falkland Islands War. "His Little Girl Feeds Daddy" deals with the government budget. It begins,

             Here's
   a sight of the boar
   head in closeup, mounted
   Stuffed on a wall, relaxed
   before his tusking of
   widows, disabled, geriatrics …

The wit is savage, mordant, rollicking. The movement of the verse, as is the case with much of Kazantzis's poetry, depends upon the rhythms of the words chosen and the way they accumulate as the words are spoken; the formal patterning depends upon the spoken impact of the piece. It is free verse of a kind, but discipline has been imposed from the start by the choice and disposition of the words themselves, which means that the poetry is never slack, never lacking in taut control. What is admirable about her use of language is the imaginative pressure behind the words, the sense of urgency that comes from having one's subject matter sharply, unflinchingly in focus:

   Cop cars squeal, howl and gasp
   Across the grid pattern. In my sleep
   Huge worms fight at intersections,
   Clapping and batting their brazen wings …

Flame Tree swings from Europe to the Americas and back again, from childhood to maturity, from politics to the intensely personal concerns of friends and family, and all of this is achieved without force, fuss, or gratuitous rhetorical flourish.

—Michael Glover