Toupie a French word meaning spinning toy/top, signifies the collection’s themes: colour, movement and change.Toupie is Kathleen Bleakley’s seventh collection is a showcase of movement and change in Bleakley’s writing over three decades. ‘Kathleen Bleakley expresses poignant and vivid feelings for a number of family members and friends in Toupie but the omphalos in this collection is her life with, and deep love for ‘pling, her long-term partner, and photographer, who is in slow decline with lymphoma. The striking feature for me in this collection is her skilful and sensitive use of colour. She creates her own chakra-like system with her display of significant colours in a narrative that moves from earthly life to the astral, the afterlife.’ Joanne Burns ‘Dazzling and polychromatic, Kathleen Bleakley’s Toupie: new and selected poetry and prose, is a whirligig of memory and synaesthesia. In ee cumming-esque poems and prose, Bleakley uses fragments and fractured metaphors to explore the unreliability of memory and the poignant quotidian experience. Bleakley’s Toupie is a powder keg – it’s like ‘Watch[ing] fireworks cascade.’ Cassandra Atherton
