Segovia Amil curates the most macabre, decadent, Victorian-inspired images on her Instagram account, where she also highlights selected lines of her poetry. This social media presence has enabled her to begin sharing her art with a huge audience, quite like an R.M. Drake–though Amil’s poetry is inherently darker, attracting gothlings and deathlings alike. Women “who find a home in the shadows and the Underworld” have already found a home in her poetry.
Ophelia Wears Black, her debut collection of poetry and prose poetry, was released just four weeks ago. It is a self-described meditation on “our Yin aspect. Femininity. Passivity. The Moon. Shadows. Death. Negativity. Disintegration. The Unconscious,” as she so aptly states in her thorough introduction, which reads like an ode to, or a manifesto of, her own serpentine darkness. At the root of this darkness is the supreme snake, her muse Ophelia. Ophelia is a woman who is with her dead, who accepts her dead, and who draws them out.
The poems in Ophelia are captured in four sections: The First Blush, On Solitude & Abandon, Burials, and Blood of the Seed. Their themes move chronologically through a young feminine soul’s awakening, to a fascination with and acceptance of inner darkness and death, to the eventual descent into the netherworld. Innocence and the beginnings of seduction (by the body, by Death) are the poems found in The First Blush.
The incredible despair adolescence brings–first love, first heartbreak, confusion, and eventually being able to confront this suffering–is the theme of On Solitude & Abandon. Burials tells of “the people in this world who die while they are still alive,” focusing on intense loneliness and how to protect our darkness from the light-obsessed world. And finally, the “descent into the Underworld” culminates in the last section, Blood of the Seed.
Amil’s poetry is confessional. Her shadow self, her young Ophelia, is the “I” and “me,” the subject of her poems. Her writing calls upon the tradition of the female confessional poets of the 1960s, most notably Plath and Sexton. But unlike these poets, Amil is in harmony with her darkness. It hums through her but does not consume her. She also goes beyond the confessional form and elevates it by releasing the vague shackles of unrelated metaphor. Her “I,” her Ophelia, is emotionally available, even vulnerable, to her reader.
While Amil’s poetry eschews formality in favor of free verse, her poetry’s internal rhyme scheme is one of Ophelia‘s strongest attributes. Her poetry sticks and resonates upon the tongue, again reminiscent of Plath. She takes after Plath’s “liquid vowel sounds,” as the Philadelphia Inquirer once described the late poet’s skill for verse.
One of Amil’s strongest poems is “February,” an earthly embodiment of death. Below is the second half of the first stanza:
it is the month of
February which carries the remains, the debris, the decay-
and passes them into spring (into its laughing mouth).
The “a” sounds of “remains” and “decay,” coupled with the “o” and “ou” sounds of “month” and “mouth” serve to “carr[y]” the reader through the poem, through the cycle of death, into “March,” the rebirth, which occurs in the last three stanzas:
death before me, beneath me, behind all things.
gilded, ore; darkening as a sea darkens.
being dead-does the same,
fills me with a silence greater than a god’s mouth.
Till March comes
to suck the poison out…
The “ou” sounds resonate again, in “mouth” and “out.” Naturally, the reader is drawn to these sounds; we seek them out, just as we seek out patterns and symmetry. While Amil’s poems lack traditional structure, they are enchanting for the very same reason that Plath’s are: their internal darkness sings, and they ravish when spoken aloud.
For all of the skill that “February” displays, however, and all of the themes it echoes (birth, the silencing of death, the cycle of life), it is the poem “Monstrum” in the final section, Blood of the Seed, that so well captures the enigmatic, disturbing, teratological force that undulates throughout Ophelia. It is in “Monstrum” we find the reason for Ophelia‘s birth, and for Amil’s artistry:
It is the monstrous thing I love-
the hunchback, the demon, the conjoined twins.
For had I not been born and touched first by ugliness,
which one of you would love me?
Who here would read my poetry?
Visit Segovia Amil on her website.
