Cow
‘Edgeless origami in an unfolding universe’
In Susan Hawthorne’s Cow, the main protagonist is a cow named Queenie, who is a wanderer in space and time, a witness to and participant in times of horror and bliss. Queenie is no peripheral cow, but a being at the very centre of the world, and of language itself:
Queenie is no fool she’s been around for a while
since the beginning of time
who spilt the milky star road?
who set the galaxies spinning? (49)
Structurally, Cow employs what is described in the first long sequence what the poet says as “edgeless origami in an unfolding universe” (7), handling metamorphosis, time shifts, tragedy and wry commentary with breathtaking ease. It is through the perceptive gaze and the knockabout humour of our guide that the poetry takes us to the mythical worlds of Greece, India and elsewhere without any sense of awkwardness or “scene-setting”. This is achieved most essentially through the voice of Queenie, the subversive and sometimes wary voice of nature itself, a voice enriched by the poet’s facility with the languages of Sanskrit and Ancient Greek.
At the beginning of the book, the farm child poet forms an almost transformative, totemic identification with the beast of wonder. After being frightened of the cow when small:
I have doubled in age and am learning
the internal properties of cow
stand your ground calls my father
as the biggest cow of the herd
breaks away and runs straight at me ...
I have found my cow inside
I have learnt the internal property
that she will give way if you stand your ground
stand your ground I say to myself
even the internal cow is impressed (2)
The cow becomes a way of seeing, of entering the creative universe, or as Hawthorne says, “the cow is at the limits of my thinking” (3). As a bellwether of fear and oppression, the cow can inhabit a fecund world of feminine paradise:
the poet says we roamed arcadia
spread out over the hills
and across the plain
wherever food was plentiful
we travelled with our daughters
close by our side
the bullocks we sent off after a time
their existence more solitary (57)
or she can be both a prisoner of and an escapee from colonialism:
cows came to Australia
with convicts
but there was no emancipations for good behaviour
from five cows have come millions
Indian cows the Zebu roam
the colony at Cape Town
like convicts
they escaped went bush
by the time they were found seven years later
their numbers had increased ten-fold
what happened to these five cows
in the seven years they went missing?
what is the untold story of these runaway cows
these fugitives from empire? (5)
One of the highlights of the collection, also on the theme of rebellion, is what cows and calves say, in which a violent storm is suggestive of the intimacy, restrictiveness and callow behaviour of family members:
thunder bolting at high speed
rolls across the corral
shaking it from roof to roof ...
through our mother’s breast a wave
in oscillation we rebellious youngsters
troublemakers unteachable bodytappers
make our own worlds achieving
well beyond what was imagined
Cleis whispers in that teenage tone
look what I’ve done (26)
As the wandering Queenie enters and reveals poignant scenes of history and myth, she takes her time to reveal her/the poet’s vision to the poet herself:
she took her time reaching my garden
a poet’s paradise at the end of the road
she had thought the market was tasty (13)
but once in train, this shape-shifting meditation on myth, history and language which Cow becomes has some memorable passages. Poems where etymology is embedded in image and voice are particularly strong. The passages involving Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana, are fine examples. What Sita says employs the meaning of the name Sita, the furrow or line of a ploughshare, (“the result of a cow and a plough”, 32) to connect with her voice and the very earth she inhabits and embodies:
history is one thing
you won’t find me there
you need to dig for me
you need to burrow
underground
follow the motherlode
the seams of soil and rock
bedrock and magma
burrow until you reach the centre (32)
Here, the tread of the cow reveals the beauty of myth, but in a fine narrative twist in what Queenie says about Sita, Sita is given a voice contrary to the standard mythical chauvinism, with her compliant self transformed into somebody who is enjoying life in Ravana’s compound:
… she stays on
at the mountain resort
with its beach views elephants peacocks
temples evening dancing
and good intelligent conversation (23)
after which she makes the most of her Rama-enforced exile:
she starts a school for the study of language
people come from lands all around
they tell stories
recite day-long epic poems
play music
dance and paint
finally life is good (25)
The “origami” technique of metamorphosis works well in such pieces as what she says about shadows, where an illuminated shadow of a painted cow itself shines with “the glittering lights/of Deepavali” (33), a festival connected to the Ramayana, and in what she says about Ereshkigal, who:
changed the world when she picked dirt
from under her fingernail like a
fletcher
plucking feathers to balance the arrow (38)
In the ever-expanding world of cow and journey, the cow becomes a maker of language and a maker of place. The wandering cow in what Io says introduces a deft piece of etymology:
until I arrived at the sea
at the crossing now named for me
Bosphoros cow bearer
I swam those black waters
reached the far shore (40)
As in what the linguist says and what the linguist says about Queenie, the traveller cow/ the poetic sensor, this bearer of sensibility and tragedy, this giver of language, of feminist interpretation, inscribes an etymology entwined with the earth and with nature:
I dig for language uprooting words
from the trail of historical
syntax across continents
down through tap roots
the shapes of letter and words
frizzing on the edge of a root (78)
and:
she was dancing over India
and out fell the languages
thousands of them written
in hundreds of alphabets (79)
Cow works best when the connection between nature, etymology and travel, between perception and rebellion, is apparent in the poetry itself. On occasion the language, particularly in the latter part of the book, is underworked, as if relying on the originality of the overall concept to get it through. But this is a minor criticism of what is a deeply original and entertaining work.
Susan Hawthorne, Cow. North Melbourne, Vic.: Spinifex Press, 2011. ISBN 9781876756888