Almost Islands

"Almost Islands is a memoir of Collis's friendship with and regular visits to legendary poet Phyllis Webb--now in her nineties and long enveloped in the silence which followed her last published book in 1990--as well as an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, place, colonization, and climate change--the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing. "I go to see her because she is poetry's old crone and I am seeking. I go to her--usually three, four times a year--because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite--a 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 digressions--a book that weaves numerous themes together in a non-linear fashion. In part, it makes a literary argument: that Webb's turn, in the 1970s, from a failed poet about a European radical to the indigenous