The Blue Dragonfly

Healing through poetry

By: Veronica Eley

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Paperback | 12 September 2023

At a Glance

Paperback
206 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.12

Paperback

$39.75

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About the Book

The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry is a verse memoir in three parts: Secret Monsters, The Bodhisattva, and Mother. Distinguished by an intensity of feeling, the author's poetic language - "rotating / like a wind chime / inside my body" - communicates a trance-like account of trauma, therapy, and post-traumatic recovery. Resistance to Western rationality - camouflaging crimes of incest and rape - leads the poet to a fateful encounter with an Indian psychiatrist, "a comrade spirit, a healer." The drama of their interaction - his compassionate witness, her poetic response - releases her story, and the "blue dragonfly" emerges. Taking flight, the poet travels down "back roads" of her mind, finding in her past a synchronicity with the bravely lived stories of others, a "red trauma reverberating around the world." In the end, she leaves dark landscapes behind, choosing to take up company with other comrades of the sky, dragonflies and hummingbirds, angels and eagles, sun, moon, and stars.

About the Author

Veronica Eley was born 1950 in Manchester, England. Raised in Dartmouth and Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, she moved to Toronto where she worked as an adult literacy instructor from 1994-2011. She retired back to Dartmouth in 2016. The Blue Dragonfly, published July 2021 (re-published September 2023) is her first book of poetry.

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