ABSTRACT
Looking to enter into dialogue with and assimilate the Jungian shadow and anima, the Cave Birds poems at every turn come up against the materiality of their own medium, the otherness of language. Julia Kristeva’s conception of the ‘signifying process’ – and in particular of the processes involved in ‘poetic language’ – as proposed in Revolution in Poetic Language holds further potential for demystifying C. G. Jung’s elusive concepts and for laying bare the appeal of these concepts for the poet. Kristeva conceives of the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’ as the two sides of the signifying process. The Crow poem ‘Crow’s Undersong’ anticipates Cave Birds. As its title indicates, the poem is concerned with the underside of the ‘super-ugly’ language of the sequence, and by implication the underside of language itself.
