Gold Digger
by Lisa Collyer
Gazebo Books
ISBN 9781763600935
Reviewed by ANGELA COSTI
Documentaries, literature, memoirs and oral storytelling projects have contributed to our familiarity with the intersectional identities of woman, worker and Italian migrant. However, these identities are further nuanced and enriched in Lisa Collyer’s second poetry collection. Collyer’s dexterity with archival sources, versatility with form, and distillation of memory is pronounced throughout Gold Digger. We are not merely introduced to personalities, rather we are engaged with the challenges these intersections have endured, including the struggle to eke out a living, smarting from the hard-edged rivalry of blue-ribbon competition, or being objectified by patriarchal hierarchy.
The book begins with an outstanding ‘Prologue’ poem, ‘The Grape Picker[s]’, which uses brackets to accentuate inequality, and kinaesthetic words to build an atmosphere of labour under burning sun and for unjust wage:
This heat sum is ripe, titled and tilled
[without consent] and hired hands are rarely paid
to re[turn].
………
This dry heat; beneath her frock, a micro-
climate trickles; her hands once proxied manpower:
that farm she’ll never in[her]it.
This poem’s final stanza ends with a striking image of gendered division:
this crow f[lies], cordoned to yield. The boss
shakes her husband’s hand but without
that salutary crush, we’ll never know the rugose
topography of a lady’s hand.
The dissection of ‘f[lies]’ embeds two associative aspects of disempowering dynamics: the need to fly from dishonesty. The bracket also has a visual impact, as it emphasises women’s imprisonment, which is further displayed with the handshake, only between men, and its fallout on women’s labour. The poem is an exemplar of feminist working-class poetics.
After the ‘Prologue’, the collection is divided into five substantial sections that glean an evocative line from one of the poems in that section. For example, the first section’s title is ‘… A Paradox of Composed Sweat’ and the third section’s title is ‘Ditch the Coquette’s Cloche…’. These phrases herald the intricate word play and research which upholds the collection.
Many poems in Gold Digger bring to mind the empathic perspicacity of collections by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). Like Rukeyser (1), Collyer’s poems have an indelible way of blending nonfiction account with lyrical acumen.
In Collyer’s dynamic ‘Volcanic Fed’ we encounter public and media transgressions towards female figures by way of the story of Anna Magnani. Magnani is considered to be ‘the overlooked “goddess” of Italian cinema’(2) in contrast to Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Isabella Rossellini. There is a deft use of apophenia by way of folding into the poem’s body the ordeal of the I Carusi (Sicilian dialect) referring to ‘six-year-old boys once indentured to work in the Sulphur mines’. The subjects, whether enslaved to film or cave, oscillate from dare to despair with each build of line:
She comes on too strong. Sacrifice
dear ones to placate the mephitic
breath of the goddess [Anna] Magnani
idols offered-up to an animal pulse
hustling amongst the slave class.
I carusi buckle under and wombs
bag-up hellfire. Bare-bottomed mules
moil for brimstone, too cavernous
to keep in olives and bread. Boom
then bust! She’s in your face
full-bodied, we climb her slopes
over-equipped and photograph
our risk-take. She’s public space;
the slip-side of a rock-fall and women
who smoulder.
On the following page, ‘Pit Canary’, amplifies the doomed existence of the wedded woman within a coal mining world. An astute mix of verbs and intentional alliteration hit home the dire financial struggle and the derogatory servitude to the royalty masters of the coal industry:
… The family kitty rests
on black lung for its bread ‘n’ butter,
her milk spelunking into the quietude
on half his pay. Try erasing slag
from a silk pocket; a winched wench
on your conscience.
Along with ‘wench’, throughout the collection there are deliberate sprinkles of words hoisted onto women, which are reclaimed or repurposed. Some words are:
‘Gold Digger’
‘bonnie lass’
‘a wifebeater’
‘slattern’
‘a bun in the oven’
‘Barmaid’
Attention to language is furthered with the braiding of Italian and/or Sicilian dialect in a number of poems. The bilingual intervocality provides for rounded, authentic studies of women as in ‘Pay Packet’. The working Italian woman tucks the hard-earned pay into her bra pocket, does her shopping for ‘mangia meat / cheap cuts’, has a ‘smoko’ with a cup of ‘Nescafé’, watches her ‘daytime soap’, and guards ‘her still small waist’ by stating, you can look, but you can’t touch ‘guarda, ma non toccarmi’.
The voice of working women are further exemplified within the immersive and polyvocal, ‘Hello Girls!’. In this two-page poem, the rhythmic interplay between the phone operators’ scripted text and their actual working conditions creates a striking theatrical reportage:
…
I’m afraid he’s not …
the customer’s always
my fault.
May I have your name, company and …
five lines lit
transition to next pink post-it
Thank you, nevertheless …
there’s no time for politesse.
Thanks for waiting. How can I direct your… ?
memorised extension
He will return your call when he gets … ?
lines two and four are lit
Thank you for waiting …
sell sanguine tone
who can I … ?
before they hang up
and the bear turns bull
…
Another highlight of Collyer’s work is her own interrogation of her lived experience as a child-free woman, an Italian descendent and her working-class upbringing. These insights are vivid and stark in ‘An Appendage’, ‘La Vera Pizza’, and ‘All-In’. In particular, ‘All-In’, mimics the poker game it describes by applying a rhythmic punch to each line, creating a complete portrait of desperate hope within the traditions of manhood and assigned family expectations:
…
A royal flush trumped but nothing
beat a full house. Uncle J. splashed
the pot, but D. bought home
the sliced white
even when the books were cooked
on the dog they bought
in five ways. Friday
was family night at the tracks:
a trifecta arch
of skinny canines—the façade
of our wog mansion
or little men riding high
at the trots, where we dreamt
of tying the knot
in a carriage one day
to boys with workmen shoulders.
Gold Digger is a fulsome collection of triumphant poems. Showcasing a cohesive throughline dedicated to unravelling the social, economic and psychological injustices women have endured and inherited. Biographical and autobiographical poems are interspersed throughout and create a powerful commentary of how the past is on repeat. The diverse array of forms deployed, including prosepoems and strikethrough/erasure poems, create a multi-layered way of highlighting mistreatment and abuse within failing work systems.
And Gazebo Books has delivered yet another enticing artistic cover as the collection is enclosed within the arresting visual art of Phil Day. The art is titled ‘Fix’. It seems like a gold spike is nailed into a pink wood/pole; an image which is in perfect alignment with Collyer’s penetrating portrayals and piercing juxtapositions.
NOTES
1. including The Book of the Dead, West Virginia University Press, 2018 and The Speed of Darkness, Random,
1968
2. BBC article, ‘You can’t grasp her or replicate her’: Why Anna Magnani is the overlooked ‘goddess’ of Italian
cinema, by Anna Bressanin, 1 October 2025
ANGELA COSTI is a poet who has also been commissioned to write plays and to work on polyvocal multi-disciplinary projects. Her recent poetry collection is The Heart of the Advocate (Liquid Amber Press, 2025). She reviews poetry for a number of journals, including Rochford Street Review, Cordite Poetry Review and Compulsive Reader.