Picture This......

Ilona Yusuf

Ilona Yusuf has been writing for most of her life and collection indicates the ease with which verse flows from her pen. Never studied, her poetry exudes a stripped down simplicity and an intrinsic honesty, stemming perhaps from the way she uses familiar experiences and everyday occurences in a determinedly personal manner.

Ilona writes in compact images. Her thoughts, though allencompassing, are nevertheless contained and this element of self-restraint gives great strength to her thoughts and therefore to her verse.

Interested in the redeeming features fo love, her verse is strong yet tender and she is not subdued by grief or despair. Instead she emanates an acceptance - sometimes whimsical, sometimes serious- of the vagaries of life and love.  Her demands of relationships are rendered with a universal and contemporary resonance that, whilst remining deeply personal, is unuually compelling and moving.

Excerpt

Citadel


do you think you know me
? buried beneath my
skins of secrecy

silence
was a mystery to me
until I learned
the comfort of its walls

for silence is a rampart
that holds strong
it’s the outpost of
the sanctity of my self
the cool river that
washes around the
citadel of my heart and
holds its dreams.


prism


I’m like a candle
living in parts
snuffed then lit
then snuffed again

I’m clear as lead crystal
magnifying the prisms
of our changing selves
in its chiselled cuts

then loneliness wafts through me
like the scent of roses
drying on their stems
a whiff caught then gone