"Transitionality, Memory and Creative Transmutation" in Fiona Perry's Alchemy

This essay examines Fiona Perry’s début collection of free verse, Alchemy (2020), from the perspective of archetypal psychology and attachment theory. It argues that alchemical symbolism, specifically nigredo imagery, serves to poetically explore the critical notions of change and transition as pedagogical spaces for developing a deeper understanding of life through memory, trauma, loss, and displacement. This process of learning through transitionality is also mediated by the widespread and expressively intensified occurrences of many symbolic, mnestically-loaded and affectively-biased objects of everyday use exerting the function, like Winnicott’s transitional objects, of psychic organisers and developmental facilitators in the most critical stages of the speaker’s process of personal growth. Moreover, they open up a transitional third space of experience, where the mundus imaginalis and the playful, poetic uses of verbal language act therapeutically as metaphysical intermediaries in the dialogue between conscious and unconscious, matter and spirit, time and eternity, the trivial and the sacred.