There is always a witness –
the trees whisper
and the clouds never turn away.
Ilisha Thiru Purcell’s debut pamphlet asks the question of how a body, be it human, water, land, or animal, can contain and live through what has happened to it.
Inspired by classical Tamil love poetry, akam poetry, the Tamil Poetics are transposed to the landscape of the North East of England with five distinctive landscapes created to explore trauma and love.
These are poems of aftermath.
 
'In her stunning debut pamphlet, Ilisha Thiru Purcell reworks and revivifies the millennia old Tamil poetic practice of Thinnai – the poetics of a codified landscape – transplanting it to her home environment in the North East of England. Her perfectly crafted, almost elegiac poems root trauma and recovery deeply within a landscape which acts not just as witness, but also as a canvas. For me, reading What She Said felt like coming home: not to a home I once abandoned, but to the comforting presence of the old within the new. An exciting fresh voice which plays with form and metaphor with breath taking skill, this is diasporan poetics at its best.' - Shash Trevett; The Naming of Names (Smith|Doorstop 2024) and co-editor of Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe 2023)
 
'The speaker in Ilisha Thiru Purcell’s powerful sequence contends with violence to the female body and the natural world…An extraordinary work of sustained witnessing of ‘before becoming after’.' - Heidi Williamson; Return by Minor Road (Bloodaxe, 2020)