Love, grief, love. It’s their entanglement, this hard yet delicate necessity. Woven into memory, into moments of reflection and transformation. Spellbound, the debut collection by poet and multi-disciplinary artist francis aschoff, is abed with life, empathy and courage. Each poem is a story that breathes and cries, each artwork is a preservation.
Spellbound contains five sections: ‘The Heartspace’, ‘Milk Teeth’, ‘Earliest Memory’, ‘The Garden Store’, and ‘The Dreamscape’. In empathy and earnestness, these really feel like five sacred spaces. Each gains a tender yet confident momentum, seemingly disinterested in sweeping the floor on the way out. Collages, word art, dried flowers and many coloured pens, pencils and paints. francis’s earlier creations—some of them clearly signalling years gone—are carefully folded into this deliberate structure, nursing the past. This layering invites readers along for a journey into brave places.
This journey is physical, moving and breathing—not always with fear, it seems, but always willingly, despite all these pages hold. There is this remarkable hope encased within moments of great intensity. One only needs to look towards ‘Brought it / Broke it’ (opening ‘The Garden Store’ section), which displays an unequivocal strength—“reset your life like a Tamagotchi”, “You can’t play a game you’re not good at, but / when it comes to this warfare, you are always a winner”. Love can put you in difficult places. Maybe you don’t need to, but imagine being so full that you cannot hold any more, yet it’s such an effort to let go. But when you do—
Many pieces I sat reading twice, sometimes thrice, beginning again immediately after finishing. This speaks to the depth of francis’s writing, to the abundance and enormity of feeling. I recall my first readings of ‘Yellow Pages’, an ekphrastic to Sylvia Plath’s fig tree from The Bell Jar, responding to an overwhelming sense of indecision and loathing and horror. I think of ‘Jaundice: The Four Chambers of the Heart’, which I initially interpreted as a deep dive into a growing child’s universe, a space that is a nightmare, that is the strange vault of change and awareness beneath the skin. The feeling of sinking and destabilising is present in both these pieces. They come early in the collection—in ‘The Heartspace’ and ‘Milk Teeth’, respectively—seeming to anxiously anticipate, and attempt to fortify against, an uncertain future. This is a device that I love in poetry, especially when writing explores memory, capturing experiences that made far less sense at the time.
And in ‘A Swarm of Cabbage Butterflies’—at the end of ‘Milk Teeth’—francis asks the question:
what’s my earliest memory,
what’s a bad feeling
and what has attached itself to my bones
for a lifetime of haunting?
These lines particularly stuck out to me. They so clearly articulate a grasping, reaching into the past to find the sometimes intangible root of that thing. A pining to understand. What has held you back? This kind of growth and reflection comes with enormous difficulty, which, I think, a lot of people can resonate with. Again returning to Spellbound’s careful structure, ‘A Swarm of Cabbage Butterflies’ directly precedes the transition into ‘Earliest Memory’. This is a lovely detail.
I keep looking at the photo on the cover, at the child with a fairy wand and wings. It reminds me of that magical lens in early-2000s media, that anything is possible to a child. A place where we were taught that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not so complicated. Whether or not this feels true, francis has captured something—some great many things—deeply special. That child on the cover is so powerful. Spellbound encourages us to believe that love can conquer all, for real. Lines in ‘A Low Hanging Moon Reveals Itself’—“Dirt under your nails / teaches you about the soil you came from” and “They are going to love you anyway”—are, for me, some of its most prominent, considered moments. There is such a power in reclamation. There is such beauty in simply allowing oneself.
Spellbound, the debut full-length poetry collection by francis aschoff, was published by 5ever books. Beautifully launched at Unity Books Wellington on Wednesday, 19 November 2025, this magical book is now available in paperback format.
