Unmaking Atoms. Magdalena Ball. Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-76041-282-1.
Mary Cresswell
Making atoms is a cosmic affair, loud and fiery (in the right atmosphere), electric charges approaching and combining before they settle down into their unique patterns. Unmaking atoms is a sad and lonely affair, watching energy disappearing bit by bit with no sense of order.
Broken artefacts and bottles
scattered beads
excavated
as broken promises
repeating fractals
material culture
can’t bring back my face
though you keep looking
(‘Artefacts’, 16)
Magdalena Ball gives us a fractured world, a world filled with shards of our former selves and a sense of disintegration (just barely recognisable as coming from our consciousness):
How will I
with all my limitations
deep in samsara
crawling on broken knees
find you?
Is the connection between us
me in this life
you in another
so tenuous
untethered by those bonds
we once thought permanent?
(‘Past Life’, 23)
These poems are a bleak recognition of grief and loss,
A perfect reminder
I didn’t need
of failed bargains
and broken promises.
(Irrational Heart’, 49)
For the first two sections (of the seven in the book), there is almost no colour, no sense imagery – mainly mathematical images, often of fractals repeating themselves over and over in an endless rendition of the poet’s grief and the unwillingness of that grief and loss to change shape:
inside fires burn
the bed might be inviting
but I force
myself further
into the great chaos
(‘Rough Ride’, 41)
Halfway through the collection, colours begin to appear: dawn colours for the first time ‘pink, blue, grey lights reflecting in/ winter emptiness’ (‘Walking into Eternity’, 62), the red of Mars (66), or ‘ … early spring/ just before dusk/ light fading to soft green’ (68).
The poet – suddenly, it seems – notices the world of the senses:
You’ll tell me I’m Garlic, the good girl
heady with the pleasure of service
(‘Shallots and Garlic’, 70)
and, on the next page,
the sweet acid tang
of absence and
wanting more.
(‘Silence; the coffee cup, the table’, 71)
But this seems almost against the poet’s will, this return to the living. ‘Most of Everything Is Nothing’ (74) begins with
I wrote a list in blood
taking my time eking out the fantasy
but ends with
nothing has changed not even me
a conduit of buzzing atoms
moving my kinetic heat
as I grasp an unwieldy red crayon
with the stubby fingers of a child
and begin to bleed.
The section ‘Robin’s Eye’ uses images from all the senses and – while still talking about grief and loss – does so in terms that reflect on the living world. Granted, the poet says, ‘Colour is a private sensation / anyway, like fear’, but in spite of herself she begins to come back
into this new space, charged by
discomfort
every day, it’s like a new start
into an old wound. (‘Old Wounds’, 99)
Throughout the collection, the poet shifts between speaking in an everyday vocabulary and in a mathematics / physics register. This is elegantly handled in a way that keeps both in play. Vivid descriptions of a concrete world still keep the mathematics alive above it, rather like a descant, because we don’t go far without some reference to the patterns and forces that shape this same world.
Various poems are tributes to other poets, either in that they are redactions of or they are built on quotes from Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich. These are placed effectively – in particular, the first three poems of the book acknowledge three earlier poets before launching, appropriately, into ‘Artefacts’.
I found this collection a bit difficult to get into – but it was worth the effort, making the vividly signposted journey from abstraction back into a three-dimensional world.
Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. She is a retired science editor and volunteers at a nature reserve and at a women’s centre. Her new book, Field Notes (a satirical miscellany) is due from Makaro Press, Wellington, in mid-2017.
