Almost Islands

Almost Islands is a memoir of Colliss friendship with and regular visits to legendary poet Phyllis Webbnow in her nineties and long enveloped in the silence which followed her last published book in 1990as well as an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, place, colonization, and climate changethe struggle that is writing, and the end of writing. I go to see her because she is poetrys old crone and I am seeking. I go to herusually three, four times a yearbecause it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finitea long, slow embrace of nothing. If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality. This is a book of poetic, political, and philosophical digressionsa book that weaves numerous themes together in a non-linear fashion. In part, it makes a literary argument: that Webbs turn, in the 1970s, from a failed poet about a European radical to the indigenous artworks literally etched into the rocks of her local environment has both literary and political meaning and importance. Beyond this, Collis seeks to build upon and extend Webbs expansion of her poetic sense of the political, by proposing a political agent, the biotariat, that is both human and more than humanthis after following as many pathways as he can through Webbs own reading and thought. Finally, this is a book obsessed with the problem of Webbs not writing, its implications for a writer (me) whocompulsivelyprobably writes too much, and the wider social, political, and world historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.