What Does the Title, Thistle and Brilliant, Mean?

I’ve been asked this a couple of times at readings. Especially since the words are different parts of speech, and since I don’t always share the tiny title poem, I understand the curiosity. This poem sets the tone for the collection. Before it kicked off my chapbook, it was the lead-off poem in a spring themed edition of Midnight Circus. I love the cover of this journal, a nice watercolor of a skull holding plump flowers like a vase. That gives readers a clue that this is not going to be a lollipops and bumble bees treatment of spring. Then comes my poem to bring the point home:

Thistle and Brilliant

Sweet Thistle, purple
and green. It looks
almost furry
in the brilliant
rising light.
It makes you want
to take it in hand,
despite all you know.

Muppets are such liars.

Like most of my poems, this avoids telling a narrative story in favor of letting images make my point. Yes, Thistle was once a lover of mine, this poem getting born at the moment I realized that was a bad idea. The last line, make the prickly Thistle into a muppet, even more cuddly on sight, came much later in rewrites.

So, rather than my collection being love poems of adoration and longing, the reader knows right off the bat that these are poems of assessment and decision making, boundaries and negotiation.

In my mind, the narrator is the “brilliant rising light,” circling Thistle, flirting just a bit, keeping some distance. To me, they’re lovers/about to be/or not, thus Brilliant’s place in the title of the poem and the book. These are poems of the dance!

To order Thistle and Brilliant by Wren Tuatha, visit her page at Finishing Lin Press here.