Vampire Squid by PREMA ARASU is a debut poetry collection and a profound exploration of mysterious deep-sea creatures and the humans who observe them.
Read on for a sonnet.
ABOUT THE BOOK
You are what you see. The deep sea – home of the uncanny vampire squid – is fathomless and mysterious, but so too are the scientists who observe the creatures of the deep.
Written over three years during Arasu’s time at the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, the collection offers a tantalising perspective from their unique position as the only humanities-based researcher on a team of scientists. Full of wry wit and ironic scrutiny, Vampire Squid examines the relationship between humans and the deep sea as the poet places their colleagues under the microscope to draw attention not only to the teeming life beneath the sea, but the distinctive ways that oceanographer, geoscientist, taxonomist, marine biologist and geneticist interpret the same world through very different eyes.
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EXTRACT
Sonnet to a Fair Kraken
Shall I compare thee to a giant squid?
Thou art far greater and more tentacl’ d:
Rough waves stir the haemocyanic fluid,
In supernumerary ventricles;
Sometimes too close the hull of ships draw near,
And often do the sailors curse at thee;
With every cry of long-forgotten fear,
Thou sink into the deep abyssal sea;
But thine eternal darkness shall not die,
Nor lose possession of that which thou took;
Rest in thy bed of ancient polypi,
As I immortalise thee in this book:
So long as Architeuthis lives in thee,
So long lives this to sing thy squiddity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prema Arasu is a writer and academic at the Deep-Sea Research Centre at the University of Western Australia. Their research utilises transdisciplinary and creative methods to investigate the aesthetics of the deep sea.
Prema has a PhD in Creative Writing and continues to teach English and Literary Studies at UWA. They have published stories, poems and scholarly articles on the deep sea, video games, gender, weird fiction and monsters. In 2023, Prema’s fantasy novel, The Anatomy of Witchcraft, was shortlisted for the Fogarty Literary Award.
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