Following the Ink
Helga Jermy
Publication date
ISBN:
December
2025
978-1-923248-17-5
About the author
HELGA JERMY is an English-Estonian poet, now living on the northwest coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. Poems and short fiction have been commended and shortlisted in major national and international prizes. Following the Ink is her fifth collection.
About the book
The writer of a zuihitsu follows the ink the way Matisse followed the hand. The Japanese form, presaged by poetic prose in Chinese, is a kind of lyric essay, an assemblage of fragments—description, narration, meditation, social commentary, manifesto, journal entry, travelogue, reportage and memoir; it is a collage, also, of prose and poetry forms—free verse, prose poems, impromptu, haiku, tanka, ideogram, tercet. Zuihitsu is a hybrid, and hybridity is one of its themes, the overlap and interconnectedness of things. It is fragmen[1]tary, discontinuous and improvisational; it is artfully imperfect, a response, neither too shapely nor too finished, to the nature of the real, the impermanence, wild order, and incompleteness of the world in human experience.
Such is the book Helga Jermy has made. Following the Ink is a poet’s day book of a journey through Japan, a touching and quietly profound consideration of belonging, otherness, modernity, youth and aging, the passage of time, the kitsch and the classic, and, always, love.
Using the form of a Japanese zuihitsu, Helga Jermy transposes the English language into something new. In Following the Ink, layered text becomes a live and mobile lens through which we see (and join) Helga and her daughter on travels through contemporary Japan, glimpsing its underlay of tradition, harmony
and postmodern tensions. With feathery brushstrokes, Helga makes a new kind of ekphrasis based on sound and movement, and the result is pleasing and beautiful: a travelling, vibrating geography, fresh and sometimes startling, always mesmerising. Reading Helga's poetry is a joy.
— ANNE KELLAS
In Following the Ink Helga Jermy identifies the reason she is writing, the reason why she travels; she embraces Japan and its islands of paradox, tradition, consumerism and globalisation. With her daughter she visits a country born on a rim of geological insecurity, where even “the dust has manners” and where wildness is “cultivated,” sharing tourist destinations, remembering former visits with her drummer husband’s band, on a musical cultural exchange. In an assemblage of prose, haiku and other forms, Helga creates a journal in homage to travel, culture, companionship. This is her zuihitsu, the disordered ordered, with joy, in language, in wonder, play, alliteration and humour, all stitched together by the season—autumn— and its colours, by delicious gyoza, koi and carp. Helga has an eye for every detail. Travel ends, where it mostly does, back home—in reality’s travails, a world in conflict, the familiar birds. But each rereading of Following the Ink will return us to the charged realms the book carries us, “this journey we’re on together,” within and without. Helga Jermy identifies the reason she is writing, the reason why she travels; she embraces Japan and its islands of paradox, tradition, consumerism and globalisation. With her daughter she visits a country born on a rim of geological insecurity, where even “the dust has manners” and where wildness is “cultivated,” sharing tourist destinations, remembering former visits with her drummer husband’s band, on a musical cultural exchange. In an assemblage of prose, haiku and other forms, Helga creates a journal in homage to travel, culture, companionship. This is her zuihitsu, the disordered ordered, with joy, in language, in wonder, play, alliteration and humour, all stitched together by the season—autumn— and its colours, by delicious gyoza, koi and carp. Helga has an eye for every detail. Travel ends, where it mostly does, back home—in reality’s travails, a world in conflict, the familiar birds. But each rereading of Following the Ink will return us to the charged realms the book carries us, “this journey we’re on together,” within and without.
—KIM NIELSEN-CREELEY
The tea house is discreet and perfect in the sun.
Everyone speaks in whispers.
A waiter seats us by the river, in shade; in the pattern
we do not want to be the flaw.