This poem won her the National Poetry Competition in 2003 and in 2008 it was voted the favourite winning poem of the last thirty years.Sadly, Houdini's life came to an end after a nasty encounter with something far less thrilling. This collection examines the experience of being trapped and looks with energy and passion at the need to find escape. ‘The Full Indian Rope Trick’ is the title poem of her second, which is filled with images of miracles and magic. Her first collection of poetry, The Heel of Bernadette, was published in 2000. She currently works as a freelance writer, teaches for various organizations such as the Arvon Foundation and is poetry editor of Poetry London. She was the Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee from 2003 to 2005 and North‑east Literary Fellow at the University of Newcastle from 2005 to 2007. What do these paradoxes suggest about the speaker’s magical rite of passage? About Colette BryceĬolette Bryce was born in 1970 in Derry, Northern Ireland, though later she moved to London, Scotland and the North‑east. They complete the trick ‘First try’ and yet it also took years.
The speaker is both ‘long gone’ and ‘still here’. ‘Passers-by’, ‘caught by the sky’, ‘First try’ and ‘squinting eyes’ loop through the second and third stanzas like a coiled rope. The poem itself seems to lift into the air with the energy of its language and rhyme. What is it that the speaker is leaving behind?
The speaker’s rope is ‘caught by the sky’ and they climb up, repeating ‘goodbye’. Bryce starts her poem with reference to this challenge, saying there was ‘no secret’, ‘no dark fakir’ and ‘no footage’.
In the 1930s a disbelieving collection of magicians offered a reward to anyone who could perform the trick. He would cause a rope to rise up from the ground as he played a musical pipe, and his young accomplice would miraculously climb to the top. The Full Indian Rope Trick is a magic trick that was reportedly performed by a fakir – a wandering Sufi monk.
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