At first glance, this is a book about birds. Read it again, and it’s a diary of shape-shifting where birds, people, and landscapes swoop and flit, worlds moving in and out of each other:

He sends me the last days’ photos, ...

We look so bonny and robin-round

beside her wren-bone frail.

She, still railing strong against

the determined flocks of starlings

roosting in her spine, liver, lungs.                  (63)

Sometimes the boundary between two worlds is as vivid as the edge of a nest:

Above the nest’s edge

beaks of baby birds

poke upwards

convenient

as handles on a shopping basket.                   (51)

 Sometimes the contrast is abrupt, when "The office worker makes a bird list" of cockatoos “raucousing around”, rosellas “looping the park”, a dozen birds in vivid motion, swooping and swinging ... but suddenly, at the end, “the day at the desk begins.” (5).

And at times there seems to be no boundary at all.

On the egg-blue edge of sky

swallows embroider baroque scrolls.

 

Flounces of callistemon blossom

perfume the air ecstatic.                                  (55)

These birds are above all independent of us. They flicker, swoop, dance, bustle, swing, rasp and flap. They charge back and forth in the landscape entirely on their own terms. Poets require a lot of work from birds: the stork, the bluebird, the albatross, carry huge burdens; ravens will never escape "nevermore", and twenty-one stanzas of "unpremeditated art" is a big ask for one small skylark. But here, "Open my window" (quoted in its entirety) everyone is free:

all the birds in my brain

fly out

some

zoom and pirouette

across the garden’s stage

confident of audience

 

some

glide smooth,

land on sturdy branches,

roost to converse

 

some

hop                  flitter

consider the window

take their own watchful time

 

all the birds in my brain

fly out              (23)

The world has more than birds. There are fish, seahorses, and the seductive "Sea-silver otter of sleep / swims to your side ... " (34). Trees hang around the park like sad party girls, removed in many ways from the animals (= us) who surround them with our bitter air.

See these paperbarks

leaning languid

against the bluestone wall, ...

creamy trunks

girdled by metal teeth.                          (35)

Elsewhere, "we are two ancient fence posts / leaning together" (9).

Some of the people in this book are almost in flight, just a few heartbeats away from the birds. Jenny travels to Italy, and in the Blue Mountains we watch "Two women in pastel, crimplene skirt-suits" who

hasten along the wheelchair-wide, clifftop path

holding hands,

holding on to human ...

 

after so many decades

within cream ward walls.        (10)

The collection starts and finishes with the last flight(s) of a beloved friend:

Jenny’s ailing,

the cancer’s called again –

determined to take her

for one final waltz.

 

Jenny’s longing

for the quickstep of travel,

for the Italy she’s never seen.

 

but on her return, she is

 

finding solace in the abundance

of her own backyard –

this bird-music all she wants

to accompany

her final waltz.                                    (7)

As long as we are alive, we shift shapes and keep moving. "An ancient restorative" suggests we

Walk the sea wind

release all bonds.

 

Gaze at the diving gannets –

become one.                            (56)

But like nature, we are not static and not benign:

Inside me –

the bright-brown bantam ...

 

Inside me –

the white-breasted sea eagle, ...

 

Inside me –

the angular heron, ...

 

Inside me – an aviary

alive with beaks and feathers,

soft cooing to soothe,

claws to slit open

your pale belly.                                    (60)

 This is a wonderful book, and Lynda Warner’s cover is just right for the moving words inside.

There is nothing predictable about Hazel Smith’s most recent collection, Word Migrants. Presented in five sections, Smith’s poems are a traversal of different states of mind and expression, with a strong link with world issues including social and political oppression, as well as various forms of exploitation, especially of women.

Structurally there is much to take in. Several poems have been constructed outs of remixed copy-and-paste fragments, taken from a range of websites, to reflect on issues of gender. The decision to remain childless and taboos about menstruation are highlighted in this fashion. In addition, Smith engages in a variety of wordplays throughout the collection. There are recurring lines scattered about the poems. Fragmentary free verse pieces appear alongside longer prosody, as well as more experimental, literal “cut and paste” sections. Central to this diverse representation is Word Migrants’ overarching focus on exploring and challenging borders between meanings.

Smith teases out this idea of destroying rigid structural formality in the later stanzas of “Choice”, splitting syllables down into ambiguous sounds rather than words in the final stanza. “Choice” directly and playfully shuns the process of pigeonholing a poet or work as one particular item; the poem’s speaker anticipates rejection from her audience should she present poems at a reading in a perceived “wrong order”. The conclusion here is that poetry must be dynamic, as to impinge upon it in the name of a particular audience manifests not only counterproductive self-doubt, but also censorship. Word Migrants is about expanding meaning, rather than confining it.

The role of the internet as a medium and melting pot of similar issues recurs subtly throughout Word Migrants. Poems such as “Feisty and Childless (an internet cut and paste)” are not only treatises on a woman’s right to use her fertility as she wishes, but also pastiches of online articles, forums, and academic publications. “The Bleeding Obvious (an internet cut and paste)” similarly takes up this challenge, breaking down general, persistent public squeamishness about menstruation by cutting and pasting the reflections of others on the topic. In both poems, Smith engages in a form of performative reclamation and echoing, creating almost a choral effect in seeking out and recycling these voices. The “I” in “Feisty and Childless (an internet cut and paste)” is multiple, and the importance of clearer, freer discourse on the topic of women’s biology amplified by this broader, more communal voice. Some of the most sinister and wrenching poems deal directly with women’s experiences. “The Women of Calama” and “Ubasuteyama” are striking examples here, examining the legacy of oppression and loss, linked with death and lack of comprehension.

At the same time, Smith explores the potential for misinformation and misunderstanding. Several poems deal with the surreal and the ambiguous, enacting a conflation of information and misinterpretation. The playful tones and lyrical flirtations of “The Wrong Tom Jenks” at the beginning of the next section, “Mismatch”, are quickly tempered by the more serious “Underbelly” and “Mix-Ups”. Fonts change and speakers are swapped, and the reader increasingly grapples to anchor meanings to intense situations. “Underbelly” is particularly resonant with the collection’s title:

as insistent as an algorithm

it pursues a strident pulse

has no arms but holds you in position tightly

 

shakes you up

but doesn’t shrug its shoulders

rarely listens though its ears twitch

exhales stale breath as if it were a fragrance

 

 

Made from syllables but not words. A not-language, a non-land.

 

The first time she performed it, she was overtaken by what she

had raised up, the accent she had adopted. Her eyes started to

dilate; the distance between the sounds and her collapsed.

 

The moment had found a migrant inside her and was pushing it

out. And a stranger outside was coming to meet her.

Finnish, Lithuanian, Welsh

but also the cut and pasting of passports.

 

She performed the language often, she inhabited it as home

but it never had the same effect on her again.

 

the child only a child myself 1960 clinging to her mother she’ll

be better off with parents who can look after her the couple much

older they had to be a Jewish couple only a child myself don’t

remember what they looked like didn’t realise the child only a child

myself they talked her in a single mother without money she’ll be

better off my aunt looking for her name in the wedding lists it’s

a terrible thing to take a child away from her mother my mother

wails the child only a child myself clinging to her mother’s dress

realised didn’t realise crying

 

 

 

Minutes after the train crash, he shed his clothes, wallets and

mobile phone. He walked away, shutting down thought or

expectation.

 

Hours after the train crash, the wish to reassign, the promise of

the not-yet-mapped.

 

Days after, a recycled ghost, he returns with buttered lies.

The life he has abandoned, his new adoptive home. (43-44)

The diversity of form and voice in this poem supports Smith’s careful engagement with historical atrocities, human impacts, and resulting states of transition and transformation. The delicacy of the human experiences here force language to bend and change. This sensitivity and adaptability is one of the strongest features of Word Migrants, especially in the gripping series of dementia poems.

Rigorously critical and deft in its delivery, Word Migrants is as compelling as it is shaking. There is a dynamism in form that beautifully matches content here, slipping between voices with sympathy and precision. Smith takes on some of the most serious historical and current world events and issues, as well as heartbreaking human conditions, with a critical and compelling tone that is as intriguing as it is diverse.

Tim Winton’s Island Home: a landscape memoir is a seductively impressionistic series of recounts where personal journeys into (predominately Western Australian) "wildness" are reflected upon and celebrated. Few writers of literary prose have such an ear for the sonic potential of language and for the juxtaposition of frailty and resiliency in so much broken goodness. Winton begins his landscape memoir with the following richly evocative orientation:

Black sky down around our ears, my son and I climb the stile in the frigid, buffeting wind. Hail slants in, pinging and peppering us. Neither the hedge nor the adjoining drystone wall offers much protection so we press on up the long, lumpy field toward the cottage and the waiting fire. (3)

Later in his memoir Winton is walking along a beach at Cape Keraudren, south of Broome, where he recalls:

I walk the flats at low tide. The first rays of sun sting my bare back. The outfalling sea has left a vast, ribbed field of sandy pools and rivulets like an abandoned kingdom. But up close the thin strips of water are busy with crabs and fingerlings, spider stars, bivalves. I stalk from one silvery fractal to the next between the wallows of skippers, the sandballs of ghost crabs and the mud-poots of worms. It’s a long, bare stretch of beach and it looks lifeless but the whole place pops and sighs and rattles. (82-83)

Such descriptive prose records, and praises, the delicate ecology that the writer finds himself in. Without becoming an encyclopaedic catalogue, the prose is a subtle blending of informed close observation and naming that testifies to a mindful respect and love for the natural world. Such celebration of the interconnectedness of all creatures and an approach to the natural world that is life-affirming, almost sacramental, in the way that it cultivates a hymn of communion with nature as a form of communion with God, is a feature of so much of Winton’s prose. As Winton writes:

Through swathes of reeds and sedges the steely surface of the lake appeared like the suddenly opened eye of God. Waterbirds rose from it in clouds. At the peaty shore everything hissed and trembled … We lit fires and fought them, felt the land heat and cool underfoot. Even the meekest of us went a little wild down there and we only came home when darkness fell and mothers began to bellow from every back step on the street. (42-43)

But if Winton praises goodness he is also acutely attuned to that which is broken and damaged. He acknowledges, “This country leans in on you. It weighs down hard. Like family. To my way of thinking, it is family” (23) and he knows that so much of this “Neverland” (14) as “wildness” is gone (43). With much irony Winton writes:

Year after year secret places disappeared. At the time this process felt normal and necessary, like growing up. After all, the bush was a scruffy nothing and we were civilizing it. (43-44)

So Winton describes his own journey to environmentalism, praising the work of mentors like Vincent and Carol Serventy, Judith Wright and Bob Brown. As he writes, “In the end I felt I couldn’t avoid being involved in environmental matters. The natural world has always been my prime inspiration. I felt indebted” (106).

Winton reflects that in Australia there are few “conscientious objectors to the war on nature” (95) as he describes the ambivalence that many Australians feel towards this progress. He writes that “the presence of wildness” is the “gold standard” (25) even as the “gospel of perpetual economic growth” goes unabated: "The land-clearing going on around us … was just a skirmish in a much wider assault that persists to this day" (45).

But Winton also situates his ecocriticism within a broader postcolonial context. Reflecting on this “war on nature” he observes:

All over the continent in the nineteenth century, as colonists began to attain a familiarity that wasn’t quite commensurate with their territorial gains, disdain for the first peoples and a suspicion of the "fickleness" and "treachery" of the new lands created a sort of siege mentality. Relations with indigenes became increasingly high-handed and martial, and even where clans were routed and "dispersed" by massacres, the rather wild-eyed, agro-defensive mindset endured. For the bulk of our history since 1788 Australian’s attitude to the land has been almost exclusively warlike. (91-92)

Reflecting on the origins of these commitments, Winton writes with so much delicacy:

In deep gullies and matted clearings where the shells of a thousand feasts crunched and clattered underfoot, I sensed a profusion of resonances I didn’t understand. It was like stepping into a room vacated only moments before. Everywhere unresolved events and unfinished conversations seemed to waft like the spider webs I could feel but rarely see. There were sorrows I didn’t yet connect with – the absences articulated by so many Noongar names for places, creatures and plants – for the moment I was caught up with trying to find a vocabulary and a diction to match the strangeness of the places I loved and the taciturn people who inhabited them. (130-131)

But his impassioned political stands continue to be the foundation underpinning so much lyricism: "I feel ancestral shame for the dispossession of this country’s first peoples [and] shame for the despoliation of their lands" (222).

Winton knows that “perhaps the simplest and most profound lesson to be learnt from Aboriginal lawmen and women is that the relationship to country is corporeal and familial” (229). And despite all the progress of recent years towards somewhat improving environmental management and limited recognition of Native Title reaffirming that “this earth is our home, our only home” (233) there is an urgency to properly acknowledge the custodianship of First Nations. This is because “the cultural expertise of traditional owners continues to be scandalously undervalued” (149) while the socio-economic crisis and "sorry business" within First Nations goes unabated.

Towards the end of his landscape memoir Winton writes that he hears of the passing of a close Aboriginal friend and mentor from the north Kimberley, Paul Chapman. Winton “remembers him asleep in the soft sand of a creekbed, shaved and handsome in the dappled shade, a man restored” (217). And this commemoration highlights for Winton the hymn of David Banggal Mowaljarlai: “When I’m on a high mountain looking out over country my Unggurr [life force] flows out from inside my body and I fall open with happiness” (217).

Sarah Holland-Batt’s collection is a thrilling, even gnarly, ride over and through the hazards of place and time. The beautiful and the dangerous swim shoulder to shoulder in this five part book, and are impossible to separate.

The first section starts with a poem describing the medusa, which "contracts with a heart’s pulse: / selfish, selfish"("Medusa", 3) and the last poem in the book ends with "the parry / of my heart’s stop: my life, my life" ("The Hazards", 90). In between the punctuation of these two heartbeats, we find poems set in Australia, South America, Europe and North America as the poet explores the hazards that confront us all. The exploration is not confined to one species.

Everything is damaged in some way in Holland-Batt’s poems. One of the most striking poems in the book, "Possum" ("after John Kinsella’s ‘Goat'’’) describes with great energy the

bitumen-mouthed growler, rough-throated traveller,
sneakthief scratching the floorboards, (38)

and the language revs up in order to describe this disruptive exclamation that lives amongst us, moving quickly between assonance and alliteration. Most of the poem is one long sentence over many lines, a kind of chase after the elusive essence of possum. The manic energy of the possum and the transition to "quick smear / of possum on the road" (39) emphasise the hazards of dwelling too close to those who would invent the death trap of bitumen, and other flat weirdnesses such as floorboards.

The inescapable connection between seeing and erasure is explored by the poet in poems such as "An Illustrated History of Settlement" in which the eye of a person contemplating colonial paintings is seemingly directed away from anything that might engender too much thought, almost outside the frame, by the gesture of "a man in the centre’" Yet:

On a far headland, two black men
stand warily, one holding up
a toothpick spear
as if to puncture the clouds’ drapery. (12)

That decorous "drapery" is a reminder of how history has been dressed to look attractive to the intended viewer, almost a kind of window display for those who want (and create) a soft, even cloud-fluffy, narrative of colonisation. (This ekphrastic poem was written in response to several colonial works, which are detailed in the notes.) "Toothpick" emphasises the attempt to minimise the presence of Indigenous people, and to render them into a minor irritation in the history so easily consumed by a complacent audience. "Warily", (a word that inescapably starts with the syllable "war") points to a different, less easily swallowed construction of the painting, in which ongoing dispossession and death are recognised. In which the "far" is moved to the "centre", or, at least, not miniaturised.

In "Beauty is a Ticket of Admission to All Spectacles", a dead bird, wrapped in newspaper, continues to command the poet’s attention with "the tyranny of its open eye" (49). There can be few more direct examples of the attempt to contain the wild or natural in language than that of a dead bird wrapped in the printed word! At once playful and haunting, this poem demands several readings. The beauty of the crow becomes available to us after the ultimate hazard leaves it still, and able to be more closely approached by the poet. The epigraph to The Hazards is taken from Brahms’s use of the German Luther Bible, 1 Peter 1:24, translated in the notes as "For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away." Here, the falling of the crow is the very thing that allows it to be memorialised. We know it (or attempt to know it) through its loss.

On my first quick reading of this whole book, what might be called a survey, I thought that perhaps there was too much geographical diversity; that the shifting locales were a little confusing. However, rereading the collection I was struck by the unity of the poems in dealing with he impossibility of perfection, whether in an image, or in love. The book is ambitious, and all the better for its wide scope, combined with inventive language and sometimes painful detail.

"The Invention of Ether" ends with the hideous image of an octopus tied into a knot by "boyish torturers", "hopelessly suctioned, unable to release" (85). Here the imagery of love is as far from conventional or pleasant as could be imagined. The knotted octopus is an image that this reader will be "unable to release" for some time, despite her best efforts to free herself. That’s one definition of a good poem; you just can’t leave it behind.

Like the seeds Holland-Batt describes in a macaw’s gut, festering, "heavy as history" (29), this book is not one to be approached lightly; there are some poisonous seeds of imagery amongst great flexibility of language.

I can’t recommend The Hazards enough. It continues to surprise on each reading.

Poetry of witness can come from other than battlefield trenches, blood and bombs. Katherine Seppings’ chapbook begins with horrific climate, both a heatwave and a firestorm:

When embers dance wildest,

enter vulnerable gaps, press against,

up, down, under, into the heart of homes

 

when a mother picks burning cinders

from her children’s hair

forces them screaming into the car ...  ("Firestorm", 2)

As heat and fire take over, all moisture disappears, and all life suffers from the drought. A roan mare, trapped for hours, is dragged to safety ... but only for a while.

Then, there were no words left

to explain the endless searing sun

or why she couldn’t stand. [...]

Tears, silent as the lack of rain, fell

until I knew how it felt

to reach the end, tethered.       ("The Drought", 5)

The poems move on, taking in more of the animal world (sheep in "Animal Liberation", 8-9) and geographical space ("Avebury", 11).

But it is not all a matter of temperature or climate. "Seville" brings people back into the equation (the kindness of strangers, when “All I could say was ‘gracias’”, 12) , followed by "Boat People" (“Who would come in a boat to these shores / girt by shark nets?”, 13).

By these two poems, presented one after the other, we are reminded that poetry of witness is a poetry of tension and of intolerable contrasts, not only wet versus dry but also what we pretend versus what we do:

we still need laws to end slavery

exploitation rationality

racism, sexism obscenity

hating each other insanity   ("Human Catastrophe", 15)

And at even closer quarters,

No one hears my shallow breathing

fear of taking a deep breath, existing.

 

Out in the world they think I am shy.    ("Family Violence", 17)

We are given a bit of hope by the possibility of faith:

Faith was a sixpence

wrapped in the corner of my handkerchief

 

[...]

 

Faith came to me

in the confetti of plum blossom,

 

[...]

 

Faith had taken root in the body of earth.  ("Faith", 18)

But faith here comes in very small pieces and at best is only a root, not a whole tree big enough to shelter under. We hope, and we have faith – and we write poems as we wander in wasted lands:

This place

cannot be named

that sets fire to the past

in need of light.

 

[...]

 

This landscape of truth

lava-flowed on journeys

through blood-kin conflict

across borders, toward tenderness

where I am bound

 

[...]

 

for the home

that does not break.   ("Where Poetry Resides", 23-24)

Although this is Seppings’ first poetry collection, she has published poems widely and is an accomplished photographer. Her website, www.katherineseppings.com, gives ample and vivid evidence to her commitment as a witness – not only with photographs, but also with words, as this chapbook so ably shows.

According to one of Australia's first professional anthropologists, professor A. P. Elkin (via Les Murray's essay on Indigenous poetry “The Human-Hair Thread”), Ted Strehlow, the author of the monumental Songs of Central Australia, was the only white person ever to learn an Aboriginal language with the fluency of a native speaker. The work of Ted and his father, the missionary Carl Strehlow, on the Arrernte people of the Northern Territory's Macdonnell Ranges, still informs much of what passes for knowledge of Indigenous Australia in the popular imagination, both in Australia and around the world. Journey to Horseshoe Bend, first published in 1969, is Ted's loving account of Carl Strehlow's final illness and death in 1922.

Carl Strehlow was a giant of the early settlement of Central Australia, a man of Mosaic proportions. Under his twenty-eight year tenure, the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg was among the most functional and productive (from a colonial Christian perspective) of the various Central Australian missions and under Carl's firm guidance, the local Indigenous people were converted and made "productive". Initially, Strehlow attempted to suppress the "paganism" of the Arrernte, but after several years he grew to appreciate Indigenous customs and protected sacred sites from white outsiders. Eventually, he visited several sacred sites and though he longed to, he refused to witness any ceremonies, as it would have been tacit approval of "paganism". He began collecting Arrernte songs and myths and translating them into German. By the time of his death, Carl was revered as an honorary elder and the mission congregation practised a relatively comfortable synthesis of Lutheranism and Indigenous custom and culture.

According to Ted:

[Carl] Strehlow was too much of a man to stoop to spying tactics in order to keep himself informed on the living habits and morals of his dark congregation. He spoke with scathing contempt about one of his fellow missionaries on a different settlement, who had walked around in the aboriginal camp on dark nights, ineffectually trying to hide his lantern behind his overcoat, while snooping around in the hope of catching offenders against the church's moral code. In Strehlow's opinion, a minister might well have to be a stern disciplinarian, since he was a responsible servant of the Almighty. But God was no friend of spies and snoopers: these were men on the pay-roll of Satan. (87)

Even the hardened white men of the interior respected Carl, as they did few other religious leaders. He put in hard hours of physical labour, was a generous host and didn't skulk back to Adelaide for the excruciating summers. He wasn't, “one of them low bastards what shakes hands with you only to get close enough so's he can smell if you've taken a nip from the old brandy bottle”, as one stockman puts it.

In 1922, after ten years in Hermannsburg without a break, the Strehlows were planning a holiday to Germany when Carl fell sick with dropsy and pleurisy. The closest medical treatment was in Oodnadatta, a month away by horse and buggy. The Mission Board refused to send a car to collect him, citing cost and difficulty, though at least three vehicles had previously made the trip to Hermannsburg. Appeals for help were made to John Flynn, the South Australian premier and the Federal Works committee, with no result. A car-owning member of the Lutheran congregation at Appila, south of Port Augusta, offered to meet Strehlow as far north from Oodnadatta as he could go.

The family set out from Hermannsburg on October 10, 1922.  With every turn of the wheel Strehlow's pain grew. Along with the pain he pondered his desertion by the church hierarchy in his hour of need. Most painful of all, he pondered the silence of God. To say that Carl dies at the end will not spoil the read. His death hangs like a prophecy over the story from the opening pages. For fourteen year-old Ted, his father's last trip was the first time he had travelled south of the MacDonnell Ranges and the experience was clearly seminal. After his father's death came schooling, Adelaide, Germany and the polite society in which he never felt at home.

Journey to Horseshoe Bend is something of a catch-all book, part memoir, part hagiography, part history of the colonisation of the Macdonnell Ranges. There are fascinating digressions on mission politics, the fate of the Central Australian horse-breeding industry after the Great War and of course, Aboriginal culture and customs. Stories of totemic sites pepper the narrative as the party pass them by and Strehlow reports these stories with the same tone he reports the stories of his fourteen year-old's Christian faith, as if they are simple facts.

Children of missionaries rarely belong fully either their parent's or their host nation's culture. Journey to Horseshoe Bend feels like the book that Ted Strehlow had to write in order to create his own identity, not German nor Australian, nor Arrernte, but a strange blend of all three. It is interesting that Strehlow eschews the vertical pronoun, and instead refers to himself in the third person as Theo.

The prose of Journey to Horseshoe Bend is unspectacular, yet charged with necessity. The effortless movement between hard historical fact, Aboriginal myth, the hardship of buggy travel, the  gorgeous landscapes and questions of God, give the book a mythical veneer. Strehlow achieves the grand spiritual effect that Gerald Murnane, another poet of the interior, always seems to just miss in his novels. The difference is that Strehlow draws on facts, whereas Murnane thinks he has created them. The final paragraph of each of Horseshoe Bend's thirteen sections contains a reference to the stars, as do the final lines of each section of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Hypocrisy is a constant theme. Of the Arrernte (Strehlow uses the outdated appellation “Aranda”), Strehlow writes, “they never failed to comment on the brutal manner in which the white men so frequently maltreated their own animals. These dark folk had not yet fully grasped the fact that, generally speaking, civilised man normally associates dignity only with power and money.” (111) The hypocrisy and stubbornness of the Lutheran hierarchy is contrasted throughout with the practical compassion of the desert people, both Indigenous and European. Strehlow, the unbending Lutheran, in his final hours decides to leave a sizeable portion of his tiny estate to cover grog for a night for every white man in Horseshoe Bend.

Strehlow's final hours are the inverse of Tolstoy's Ivan Illich. Strehlow loved and obeyed his God all his life, yet finds his faith wavering at the final moment. He struggles with the most humble and hardest of all prayers, "thy will be done". Faith, disbelief and the quivering in between is still the greatest drama in human life, for from decisions about faith all other things flow. The final hours of Strehlow's life in forty degree heat under a groaning tin roof, misunderstood by his family, abandoned by his church and perhaps even God, are riveting.

Ted Strehlow provides spectacular insight into the nature of faith and reason for the desperate to hope:

If Christ himself ... had been forced to cry out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", then it was clear that there were dark moments in human suffering that could crush the faith of even the strongest of men. Not that these men would, even in such moments, doubt the existence of God. Far from it. Paradoxical though it might sound, their overwhelming despair would spring from their belief in the existence of God. Their anguish would stem from their conviction, that although God existed beyond any doubt, He was deliberately refusing to listen to their prayers and that He had deliberately broken off all links between Himself and them. (234)

The afterword by Dr. Philip Jones, the Senior Curator in Anthropology at the South Australian Museum, provides a startling dose of realism that complicates the allegorical neatness of Horseshoe Bend. Yet the sheer emotion of the book shines through. No father could hope for a better commemoration.

Anorexia Nervosa presents as a visual drama that exceeds the boundaries of language. It fascinates and repulses, hence the Current Affairs exposés and sensationalist memoirs—Marya Hornbacher’s manic Wasted and Portia DeRossi’s Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, said to be something of an eating disorder manual. Google “anorexia recovery” and you’ll find thousands of links to tales describing the pain of walking away from this most deadly of diseases: anorexia nervosa has a mortality rate of 20%, higher than any other mental illness.

As there are a range of texts that catalogue the “spectacle” of anorexia, so, too, the subject attracts a variety of readers, from the gawping public, to the concerned friend, carer or partner, to the individual sufferer, hoping for comfort and a cure. Indeed, the anorexic devours books on their condition, a possible textual substitute for food, in their efforts to comprehend and outwit its tenacious hold. The force and persistence of anorexia eludes not only the slack-jawed public and the eating-disordered person’s frantic personal networks, but the sufferer herself.

In the collection, Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright uses the essay form to explore her decade-long experience of living with and confronting anorexia nervosa. The vehicle of the personal essay has been recently enriched by a slew of female writers’ discussions of embodiment and suffering—Rebecca Solnit, Leslie Jamison and Lidia Yuknavitch—to name just three. Wright’s essays on hunger are an addition to this fearlessly insightful group of women writers. In Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams—the narrator, not so much investigative journalist as metaphysician of suffering—strives to articulate the empathy she feels for her subjects, while castigating herself for overcoming more minor experiences of [dis]ease. She frets that her project is voyeuristic, that she narcissistically exaggerates her own discomforts in an attempt to identify with the men and women whom she interviews, and the narratives that she weaves from their painful confessions.

This is not the case with Wright, who, in ten essays—set in hospital, Colombo, group therapy, Berlin, and in the land of reading—trains her fierce intellect on reflecting upon her eating disorder, divulging from the first paragraph her residency on the planet of the dangerously unwell. This may seem like a flippant observation, but, as a fellow inhabitant, I interrogated every one of Wright’s sentences for evidence that I might identify with her experiences. Did she possess the street cred of a serious mental illness? As her kin, the text’s psychological environment was an important gauge in determining the commitment of my reading, informing not only my intellectual engagement, but my emotional investment in Wright’s story.

Deciding that Wright’s voice passed the test of credible suffering, my next round of sceptical enquiry provoked the question, is she well? Has she recovered? Has she found a cure? The narrator’s position on the spectrum of health and sickness meant a lot to me. I needed to know if I could trust the intimacy of her writing, the unflinching honesty of her descriptions of sickness, the insights she served up with respect to her beguiling and confusing beliefs and behaviours. For, as Wright discovers, anorexia, and mental illness in general, is a slippery sort of being, endlessly inventive in its narratives and plots, its devices and strategies, to secure the sufferer’s unwavering attention. The network of suspicions, beliefs and fears that eating disorders create multiply inside the self like a virus. Its promises and rewards wriggle their way in, silently reproducing at the level of moment-to-moment thinking, such that one’s former self, by incremental changes in conviction, cognition and action, is gradually replaced by an alien not-self.

An example of anorexic-thinking is provided by Wright, in a statement she repeats several times in Small Acts’ opening essays. Admitting there is a problem in her relationship with food, in the weight she has lost, Wright seeks therapy, firm in the belief that she isn’t a real anorexic: “I spent years determined to stay on the outside. Because I wasn’t, I was sure, one of those women” (20). In the essay “In Hospital,” in which Wight joins an outpatient programme for anorexics, she is placed in close contact with, “One woman (who) hadn’t had a bath in seven years…another would spend 800 dollars on groceries and seven hours vomiting each night … one would eat under-cooked chicken … in the hope she’d get salmonella” (22-23). In the narrator’s belief system, she is a special case, not really anorexic, her problems stemming from the involuntary vomiting eating causes her. She has myriad allergies, causing her to lose weight from narrowing her diet to a restricted range of foods. In the essay, “In Increments”, Wright reflects: “Sometimes I think that my physical illness, together with my personality, the length of time it took for the doctor to find a diagnosis while my body and brain adapted to malnutrition, were all together a perfect storm that broke, at some point in time that I’ll never quite pinpoint, and left this devastation in its wake” (74).

As a reader, my bulldust antennae flickered. That’s a lie! I shouted in judgemental silence.  You’re still sick. I trotted out my experiences of somatic illness. In the past year I’d suffered panic attacks, several of which were, to use the nineteenth-century terminology, undeniably "hysterical". One presented as an epileptic fit, which sent me to hospital, after a "reaction" to psychiatric medication I didn’t want to take. Another manifested as a somatic heart-attack, which came on after being given a piece of devastating news. The pain was felt in my body, my thoughts and emotions weirdly detached. I know intimately, the mystery of how one’s convictions—delusions?—can cause havoc in the limbs, digestive and endocrine systems. Wright’s refusal to recognise her eating disordered behaviour in the rituals and obsessions of the women in her outpatient programme reminded me of the protests of another anorexic, whose story I read online, a classics scholar at Cambridge who fervently believed she was not one of those women either. The scholar regarded eating disorder sufferers who were hospitalised with scorn and revulsion. As far as she was concerned, so long as she could sit exams (despite an increasing inability to eat), she’d not taken out a mortgage in the suburbs of the unwell.

In the same essay, “In Hospital”, the narrator further reflects, somewhat paradoxically, that she also “bore [the anorexic] women a strange kind of witness; a split kind of witness … where I didn’t want to be involved, didn’t think myself included, but couldn’t help but recognise myself reflected in the stories they told” (23). As a first step, Wright becomes a researcher in the discipline of eating disorders, collapsing the subject/object divide, surrendering her attachment to her anorexia to become a kind of double observer, recording and cataloguing the obsessions she’s developed around food and eating; her ritualistic behaviours before eating; the torturous feelings that arise following a meal. Like a diligent student, she reads up on the literature, uncovering studies on the effects of hunger on the body and analysing recovery statistics. She bravely admits her loneliness, isolation and confusion. Yet, several years after admitting she has an eating disorder, she has been repeatedly hospitalised. Despite therapy, programmes and the overturning of denial, despite months of hard work, most frustratingly she has not recovered. Intellectualising her behaviours and beliefs, thinking her way through her eating disorder by way of rationalisation, by measuring, recording and noting, appears to be an impoverished means of attack. “The horrible irony”, observes Wright, “is that eating disorders only happen to people who like definition and delineation, who like clarity and knowing where they stand, part of the process of moving past the illness is to learn that recovering can only be undefined, slow and without schedule, and riddled with mistakes and mess and temporary measures” (77).

A therapist advises her to get out of her head and “into [her] body” (144). She learns that her confusion and frustration are “important, generative”, and that she must stop “trying to understand, … stop narrating” (144). Strange advice for a writer who uses research and reason, analysis and synthesis, to arrive at clarity. About two-thirds into Small Acts, a noticeable shift in the narrator’s preoccupations becomes evident. Having taken her counsellor’s advice, Wright begins to explore her external environments, the worlds beyond her meticulously examined interiority. She writes of flatting and drinking, of enjoying lunches with her mother. In the essays “Books I” and “Books II”, she unravels the protagonists'—in Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children and Carmel Bird’s Bluebird Café—experiences of eating disorders, discussing the socio-cultural and familial networks that contribute to the characters’ unremitting sense of being a misfit in their communities, not to mention their very skins.

“The average time for recovery from an eating disorder is said to be seven years—the same length of time it takes for all of the cells in a human body to be replaced” (130). Without pinpointing, as Wright claims early in the book, the moment when her eating disorder began to take pathological hold, there is also no specific jolt of revelation, of epiphany, which picks her up and flies her towards wellness. Letting go of the stranglehold of anorexia is an incremental series of small acts, thoughts, and choices towards other people and activities, away from her alienated, isolated self. Wright realises that her belief that her illness was a case of her body letting her down—the unforced vomiting, the myriad allergies—might not be the whole story; her powerful intellect may also be implicated. As a reader, I finally breathed out, my vigilant search for lies and side-stepping come to a close. I began to marvel at Wright’s achievements, in both her text and her recovery. Small Acts inhabits the unstable territory of sickness with such verisimilitude, parts of the collection read as if she still lingers in these deserts. The narrator bears witness to the many stages in reconstructing the set of oneself, both within and without, the frame of serious mental illness. Wright’s remarkable narrative empathy, self-reflection and control, in turns lucid and cringingly vulnerable, gives hope to the afflicted sufferer and to the warily desperate friend, partner, carer and medico.

Small Acts navigates the island of mental illness, its most arresting topography the force with which it denies its victims self-acceptance, ease and a safe place in the world. But, as Wright notes, anorexia serves a purpose. The disease shores up vulnerability and uncertainty, it delivers a sense of agency and control. Hunger puts an individual on high alert, intensifying her sensory experiences and attenuating her consciousness—for reasons of survival, prolonged hunger is a crisis, which must be dealt with prior to every other need—and yet, paradoxically, the anorexic’s resistance to this biological demand rewards her with a sense of mastery and superiority, over her own (and others’) weakness and lack of will.

In concluding, Wright observes the fragility of her humanity: “I’m terribly afraid of living like this, sub-clinically, long-term. I know that I still have to fight hard for my own health, but also that sometimes I still don’t want to. I miss the simplicity of illness sometimes. Because the more acute pain is in trying to get better—and it’s a pain that’s chronic too—and in stripping away the protection, the insulation, the certainty that my hunger gave me” (173). Small Acts charts a metamorphosis in tiny increments, the damaged self undertaking the task of sloughing the disguise of mental illness, an unfathomably powerful rival to imperfect authenticity. Like Psyche’s ants’ job of winnowing enormous piles of grains to undo Venus’ bewitchment, the tentative steps taken in Small Acts produce a rare elegance and determined gait. Wright is a superb writer with an uncommon courage and will; her essays on hunger are an extraordinary gift.

A.D. Hope once applied the metaphor of ecological imbalance to the writing of poetry. Just as a sharp decline in one species will effect the others around it, Hope speculates that

neglect of any of the great forms by the poets affects the practice of all the others. The introduction of a new literary form, if it becomes popular, may seriously upset the whole traditional balance of literature. Moreover changes in social structure, in education or in belief, outside the field of literature, may destroy this balance in such a way that certain traditional forms fail to command respect and cease to be practised. This, in turn, weakens the respect for others, for the different forms support one another. One after another the great forms disappear; the remaining forms proliferate and hypertrophy and display increasing eccentricity and lack of control. A general erosion of the mind proceeds with more and more acceleration. A desert ecology replaces the ecology of the rain forest. The forms are few, small, hardy, and reflect the impoverished soil in which they grow. If the process goes a little further a point of no return is reached; sand, clay and naked rock present a lifeless and inhuman landscape where only minimal forms of life persist. (Hope 2002 [1974], 1–2)

Stephen Edgar, then, as perhaps the only Australian poet to write only in fixed forms, is a conservationist (though certainly not a conservative). His decades-long commitment to rhyme and metre puts his work at odds with much of contemporary poetry. Exhibits of the Sun, Edgar's tenth collection, contains fluid and musical verse that demands to be read aloud, which Edgar himself does well.

Edgar creates his own forms, and sticks to them. In “The Trance”, a typical Edgar stanza unfolds.

Without surprise,

The sun displays its gorgeous jewellery

Across the spread

Of harbour, as it heartlessly arranges

Over the bluffs and bays of Middle Head

 

The silken trance it's spun and shed.

Edgar's poems provide what so few, free verse, concrete and language poems provide: aural pleasure. Lacking the aridity of Philip Larkin and the stilted syllable counting of some noteworthy Australian formalists such as James McAuley and Hope, Edgar is warmer in his thinking and gentler with his cadence. Though at times this looseness leads to extra labour for the reader. Try to work out  what's going on in the opening of “Saccade”:

They have no sense of what they're looking at,

Unless the object moves.

(Or so he's read; who knows if that's the case?)

A painted bird's an empty analogue

To the oblivious cat.

And it is not his still familiar face

So much as that distinctive gait which proves

The master to the dog,

Who frolics for him like an acrobat.

Poetry doesn't have to be easy, of course, but this is heavy going. By the time you look up the definition of "saccade"(a small, rapid jerky movement of the eye, according to Merriam-Webster) and wade through the poem picking up and examining the nouns and articles a few times, you've lost interest. But when Edgar straightens out his syntax the results can be breathtaking, as in “Morandi and the Hard Problem”. Edgar pins the central mystery down, using the awkward bottles  from Giorgio Morandi's famous still-lifes as his springboard.

How could such simple objects know so much?

This web of everything that is the case

Is nothing, we are told, but matter,

Dissolving ever downward from the clutch

Of common sense to scatter

Among the primal mesh of time and space

 

While round their tables the philosophers

Knock heads and strike the board to break the seal

That locks their own hard problem: how

A subject that can know itself occurs,

What process could endow

Mere matter with the power to wake and feel.

There is perhaps no way to finish off a thought such as this without getting devotional or nihilistic, and Edgar cannot be faulted for not sticking the ending. “Nothing's more abstract than reality” and “What do I know but my experience?” What indeed? Pure subjectivity is the modern malaise. From our cognitive prisons we are able to question even the existence of others and if they really deserve to be considered. God can square this circle quite well, if we let God, and if human beings are just matter, where does poetry find its resonance?

In “Let Me Forget” Edgar juxtaposes a contented suburban man's life with the stranger being tortured to death by his criminal next-door neighbour. It is facile to draw a lesson from the mere proximity of evil, as Edgar tries to do. Evil occurs everywhere and at all times. The professional in the poem has no idea what is happening. The sentiment of the poem is saved by the second-to-last stanza:

Behind that door, past comprehension,

Beyond imagining, the universe;

The laws upon

Whose unknown code the selves that you rehearse

From day to day are based; oblivion

In the absence of transcendence, Edgar can only purvey oblivion, which is of course, where everything under the sun ends up. Edgar's stock in trade is ineffables. He writes like a Buddhist Tennyson, agonisingly aware of the folly of all action and the transience of all things, yet compelled to shout its beauty to the skies in the strongest rhythmic language he can find. When humans kill God, we must attach God's agency to something. Edgar, like many others, grants it to nature:

Almost as though the sky

Were sentient and desperate to persuade

The town's pre-occupied inhabitants

To pause and lift an eye

…

And a moon perhaps? A far

And saffron-flushed exhibit of the sun

Balanced on that outstretched and weightless power,

A swirling upright spar

Of cloud, like an ornate Islamic tower,

Is capped with the crescent moon and one faint star.

The show is over that was overdone.

 

You lift your dropping jaw.

Such an extravaganza staged above.

So much superfluous effort to impress.

Whatever sky you saw,

However swept and bare, would do no less,

And its clear depths of night would overawe

Your sense and call up something much like love

The pillowy nihilism of Exhibits of the Sun is in the end defeated by the beauty of Edgar's forms and rhythms. And that might be the most important purpose of poetry. In that moment of creation no poet can be a true nihilist and if the work is resonant enough, neither can the reader.

Edgar has been reviewed extensively and I won't stray from the consensus. He is a master at what he does. We tend to think of nature as a chaotic realm, separate, as far as we can make it, from human order. The wind blows where it wants to blow and the rain falls where it wants to fall. Much eco-poetry seems to try to mimic that alleged chaos, with free forms, words scattered across the page like hailstones, and enjambment like a flash flood. But nature, too, has its fixed forms. Similar latitudes all over the world have similar climates; different species of animals from different continents fill similar ecological niches. Adaptive radiation divides a single species into many.

Edgar proves that formalism is evolutionarily viable. When read singly in magazines Edgar's poems punch through the desperate wordplay and strained significance that characterises so much contemporary poetry. When read in a book alongside so many others, the effect of each individual poem is diminished. Though formal, Edgar's poems lack the compulsive memorability of some formal poetry. It is hard to avoid memorising, say, Edna St. Vincent Millay's lyrics. Edgar foregoes the primary use of meter and rhyme, as a mnemonic device. What sticks is the atmosphere and the lyrical focus Edgar brings to his subjects. One feels that Edgar could make anything into a poem if he perceived it slowly enough, and for once that seems like something to hope for.

Humans underestimate nature's resilience at our peril. The time-worn rhythms of formal English poetry have a way of sneaking in through the back door. The American formalist poet Dana Gioa has delightfully pointed out that William Carlos William's famous harbinger of literary modernism, “The Red Wheelbarrow”, is actually two lines of perfect blank, not free verse. Not that there needs to be conflict between formal and radical (and all modes in between). All are welcome to the fruits of tradition and the hybrid vigour of selective breeding programs. As Czeslaw Milosz wrote, rhyme and meter “can ... be used like ice, to freeze decaying meat” (1981, 190). Yet, at a time when so much verse reads like cut-up prose, we can hope the leaves that fall from Edgar's trees will prepare the ground for lusher forests.

Melissa Parke, politician from Western Australia, signed the Fox Petition and wished they had permits for fox desexing and vaccination in Western Australia. Melissa Parke, MP, it seems, would have also approved of that other Fox Petition, after which this collection of poems is named, one presented by Charles James Fox, an eighteenth-century Whig politician. Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, Fox petitioned for the rights of all people, so the dust jacket tells us, including freedom of speech and habeas corpus. Thus, Jennifer Maiden links the 2 main themes of these poems: politics and "biosecurity".

The highlight of this volume of poetry for this reviewer is five poems which see politicians in dialogue with dead mentors.  In "The Possibility of Loss" Mahondas Gandhi shares orange segments and sips of fresh goat milk with Barack Obama.

Gandhi shared an orange, to explain: "The problem

with a just war is that you have to win.

My philosophy allows the possibility

of loss, indeed it welcomes

losses, sometimes as a reason to go on."

In "Victoria and Tony 6: The Famine Queen", Sir Anthony Abbott jumps to Queen Victoria’s defence, as usual, saying "Oh, Ma’am, no: You are always my source of nutrition." While in "Victoria and Tony 5:  The Hunter", the Queen, having woken up crossly in Canberra declares: "You have unprotected the poor and the wild geese, whilst knowing yourself as one. Yes, we can pray, but the only prayer of a hunter is the gun."

In "Hillary and Eleanor 11:  Maintenance is Power", Hillary Clinton shares her chintzily-decorated black armour-plated van with Eleanor Roosevelt. This odd couple makes us laugh at the ridiculousness of politicians. These poems have sombre notes also. In "Diary Poem:  Uses of Xenophobia", Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts Manus Island in the same space as the German Jews. He counsels his protégé Kevin Rudd:

"Except again that there wasn’t a problem,

let alone a sane solution … young friend,

could you have said that?"

Later, the two "sit together in a quiet impasse that Kevin finds more soothing than an easy absolution".  In "Sumptuous Light", Pericles wakes up next to Alexis Tsipras and opines on democracy:

"… It is not

the work of the man in the market,

not the work of the patriot. It

spreads below us in dancing pieces, through

dark trees to sumptuous light."

These poems are brilliant political satire. The poet deftly deals with complex political situations and uses humour to deflate heavy topics such as human rights, poverty, war, drug smuggling, foreign aid, religion and international relations. These poems are free verse and their strength is deft execution of a clever concept rather than poetic beauty of imagery or form.

"Biosecurity" and the link between xenophobia and the way introduced animal species are treated in Australia is another theme in the collection. The apogee is "The Honourable Carina Monckton and the 'pregnant, pet-and-small-child-eating' South American Boa Constrictor Released Accidentally by Police on the Queensland Gold Coast".  The Hon Carina Monckton rescues a snake being pursued by biosecurity officers. She finds him in Gold Coast bushland, "tightly wound around a wet lantana".

And the snake thought:

Yes, she may yet take me back to

A bigger jungle full of singing things.

He

Slid into her basket like a picnic.

She covered him in patchwork, carried him

Past Biosecurity, smiled like a fox.

Unsuspecting, they

Warned her about bites and germs in general.

She

Nodded with solemnity.         On her plane

To the private air-field in Colombia

She had rented from some Escobar, she patted

Her speckled co-pilot, kind.                Back

In the rain-limp Gold Coast, officers

Giving up the hunt, leafleted slow

Letterboxes, hammered up a sign.

This poem is hilarious satire which shoots a poisoned arrow into the heart of excessive bureaucratism and "biosecurity".

George Jeffrey and his sometime lover Clare Collins feature in 3 poems and Clare in another one. Two of these are set in Greece. "George Jeffrey 18: George Jeffrey woke up on Kos" is replete with contemporary references such as IS, Frozen the motion picture and Syrian refugees. Maiden skilfully layers metaphors, producing comic effect. Early on in the poem, the Kos Police Station reminds Clare of the palace in Frozen. Clare reminds George of Elsa in Frozen.  Seven pages later:

Soon, museumed

out, they hired a car for Old Pyli,

to meet a refugee in a tavern on a mountain

on the way up to a castle in cold clouds.

By the poem’s end:

Kos

Harbour as they returned to it was a special

Radiant rainbow from nightclubs, the lofty

Police station on its water bone-white and pure as a phantom castle.

There are also irreverent touches in this piece. George, Clare, Adnan a refugee and Rima the Syrian translator sit at a table "with its checked starch tablecloth, new wooden chairs glowing blonde in the blonde glowing air". A statue of Europa being carried off by a bull was "elsewhere". A statue of Artemis is described as a perfect oxymoron, in the divine Greek fashion: she protects suckling animals but hunts and kills them.

The poet evokes the senses to create atmosphere: George, Clare and friends watch a goat

… pick his way down sheer

ancient masonry, kicking back cool pungent

soil in the glare of a sudden, bone-bare

moon.

The goat later leads them to a broken church with moon-bare columns – another example of layering of metaphors.  This poem runs to more than 15 pages and sits on the border between poetry and prose. It has more of the tropes of storytelling than poetry.

Maiden began her first George Jeffrey poem from her 2005 collection "Friendly Fire" with George Jeffrey waking up in Kabul. She applies this device, of characters "waking up" in specific locales with specific people, to begin ten poems in this collection. Maiden also plays with this device at the tail end of "Diary Poem: Uses of Xenophobia":

Perhaps you’d like to witness

Clare wake up in Nauru now:  as she might:

Xenophobia rules unlimited islands.  You

and I have not forgotten habeas corpus.

Fox metaphors feature in 5 poems. A number of similarities exist between poems in this collection and "Foxfall 3: Significance" from collection "Friendly Fire" (2005). The last words of Charles James Fox appear in both "Diary Poem: Uses of Xenophobia" and "Foxfall 3:  Significance". "Once I Met a Fox" and "Foxfall 3: Significance" both refer to Asian mythology and to meeting a fox on a road. "Diary Poem: Uses of the Female Duet" refers to C. J. Fox as the poet’s favourite politician. One line in "Foxfall 3: Significance" reads "CJ Fox is one of my heroes". It appears that the poet is recycling her own words and concepts. Is this deliberate? If so, why did the poet do this ten years after the first fox poem was published? Recycling might be good for environmental preservation but for a poet it is not original and leaves this reader’s appetite for fresh poems unsatisfied.

The poems bravely tackle politics, bureaucracy, especially of the biosecurity kind, hypocrisy and tragic matters such as Gillian Triggs’ report on Refugee Children in Detention, Clare’s murder of her 3 siblings when she was a child, Obama realising the futility of shooting Bin Laden and animals burning to death in a boarding kennel in a bushfire in the Adelaide Hills. This reviewer is impressed by the contemporary references in the poems, for example, metadata legislation, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership struggles, refugees in Greece and the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The Fox Petition was first published 2015 from the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney by the Giramondo Publishing Company. The speed with which these poems have been written and published is impressive. The trade-off against this is, however, that the volume appears to be "light on" in terms of content.

Greece seems to have inspired Maiden to write the best metaphors in this book. "George and the Holy Holiday" is a long vignette or snapshot with one compelling metaphor: "the foaming sea lace like the edge of blood after a knife goes in". It meanders, stream of consciousness-style to an eloquent end. In "George Jeffrey 18: George Jeffrey woke up on Kos", Clare "puts on lipstick the pure rose of an Aegean sunset". In "Clare and Thessaloniki":

Like glued sovereigns,

The pirate ship neared the shore,

Lighting the protestors like Zeus

Fucking Danae in gold rivers.

In "Sumptuous Light",

…        Syntagma Square

Whose gleams were like a thousand plankton

In a sea with sumptuous light …

However, some imagery is obscure.  For example, "Death by Dissonance", the first poem in the collection, fails to deliver. "Orchards" ends with a metaphor about cherry blossom that eluded this reviewer. "You only get one go" ends with a fox metaphor which seems unclear.

Some exquisite interactions between humans, animals and the landscape are described in "George Jeffrey 18: George Jeffrey woke up on Kos".  George looks

… down over

A half-natural, half-human scaffolded ledge at

A calm white goat feeding horizontal several

Metres below him.

Later in this poem, Rima

plainly needed to go to earth, some spot

In which to crouch and recover.

Eight or perhaps nine of 17 poems could be classified as ecopoetry.  For those that are not ecopoetry, animals and plants exist to portray the private realm, for example, the cherry orchard in the Adelaide Hills where Julie Bishop grew up. Many of the poems convey wisdom. For example,

any institution seems more powerful than human love or loss

("George Jeffreys 17: George and the Holy Holiday")

lights and voices of days end were now more solemn

With tasks done in tiredness, opinions

simpler near to sleep

("George Jeffreys 18: George Jeffreys woke up on Kos")

However, this is wisdom about the human realm and is therefore anthropocentric. The political poems are activist in the way they tease the bastions of power: politicians. The biosecurity poems are activist on ecological matters.

Three poems are diary poems. Each diary poem is free verse. One – "Uses of the Female Duet" deals with sisterhood, feminism and modernity. It is both political and poetic and its crisp language traverses public and private spheres.  In one anthropomorphic anecdote, Maiden's daughter Katharine imitates a cat. Indeed, the poet leaps from one subject matter to the next like an agile feline. The poem’s final words

My favourite politician

Of all time is Charles Fox and indeed she [Melissa Parke]

seems fitted above all I see to sign

that lonely Fox Petition.

do not relate to female duets. Therefore the poem does not end strongly. However, this may be a deliberate conclusion to a stream of consciousness style poem. The ending of "Uses of small dogs" is stronger: "the truly biosecure: all mercies now interdependent as species". If a poetic form is to give a poet a structure, a diary poem seems to be an invitation for random reflections. The result is somewhat slapdash.

This volume features tantalising poems of brilliance. However, overall, there is something lacking.

The image on the cover of Like a Beggar alludes to wide, curling ribbons, light on the outside, but dark within, as if each one calls the viewer to look more closely inside the outer shell that these shapes create. It is both beautiful in its fluidity and grim in its depths of darkness. And it is entirely appropriate for the collection within, the third collection of poetry from Ellen Bass, currently a teacher in the MFA program at Pacific University. The epigraph from Rilke sets a similar theme of darkness and light:

But those dark, deadly, devastating ways,

How do you bear them, suffer them?

— I praise.

The first poem, "Relax", is in many ways an exploration of those few lines. It begins, "Bad things are going to happen" and lists a series of disasters: the mundane (someone will throw "your blue cashmere sweater in the dryer"); the inconvenient ("you’ll lose your keys"); to the breaks in relationships and lives ("Your husband will sleep / with a girl your daughter’s age"; "Your parents will die") (3). This combination of extremes makes the list, and the disasters both humorous and sympathetic: we know that a shrunken sweater can be replaced, but we can easily feel it as devastating. That is our humanness.

"Relax" goes on to tell a story from Buddha, of a woman hanging by a vine on a mountainside, caught between a tiger above and one below, as mice eat away at the vine and death approaches. She notices a strawberry nearby and eats it: "taste how sweet and tart / the red juice is" (4). We will die, bad things will happen, but we can nonetheless savour what the world has to offer, and even more so if we recognise our mortality.

This is, then, a collection about settling into being human, humbly and like a beggar. It explores the struggle and search for honesty and real sight. In "Prayer", Bass describes herself walking up from a subway in a dress "like vodka", her lover looking upon her as if she was "an underground spring" and adds

I want to stop wanting to be wanted like that.

I’m tired of the song the rain sings in June,

the chorus of hope, the ravenous green,

the earth, her ornate crown of trees

spiking up from her loamy head.

There are things I wanted, like everyone.

But to this angel of wishes I’ve worshiped

so long, I ask now to admit

the world as it is.        (53)

 

This desire for "the world as it is", both human and natural, becomes the touchstone of this collection. The poet’s own desire to be wanted as more than she is, is of a piece with the tendency to romanticise nature; looking only at it as transcendent prevents us from seeing it as it really is. And perhaps more profoundly, it is language that can separate us from nature, most specifically here in the use of anthropomorphising metaphor: the song, the ravenous green, the crown, the loamy head. The human attempt to express the wonder and power of our world through the very things that are most intimate to us—our bodies and our desires—is as old as gods and myth, but Bass suggests that what seeks to draw us closer actually pulls us away from truly seeing "as it is".

Her comment here is not so much about language itself, but a particular kind and use of language. Perhaps too, the issue of language goes both ways—that of metaphor that veils the particularity of being human, and that of figuring the natural world in human terms. So the kind of language we use is important to the kind of seeing we do. Her unflinching gaze at the ordinary things of everyday life is a celebration of what life can be, and shows us that it is possible to see pain and decay, not simply as an abstract observation, but in its particularity and detail, in its intimacy.

Humans are creatures, part of the natural world. As Julia Enszer writes: "Bass recognizes and reflects a vibrant ecosystem, which includes both humans and non-humans in dynamic, continual interaction".[i] But in so doing, she does not claim a simple kinship with the natural world; there is a pervasive sense of the process of losing, rather than loss, of yearning to feel unity with the natural world that is not always possible. "The World Has Need of You" traces the fluctuations of emotion ("suspended between the sidewalk and twilight"), in response to Rilke’s comment that "everything here / seems to need us" (46). Bass says "I can hardly imagine it", and yet she seems to glimpse it briefly in the sight of a boy riding by on his bicycle, his white shirt "flaring / behind him like wings" (46). The natural world doesn’t need us, "the ocean doesn’t care" if we do good, and yet it seems that in our sensitive observations of nature, we can participate in the relationship of all things:

when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,

the earth, ever so slightly, fell

toward the apple.    (46)

This is not science as control over the world—after all, "We know too much / and too little" (46)—but the capacity to recognise and appreciate nature. Here, it is not the law of gravity that the apple demonstrates, so much as the reach of the earth, the embrace of all things.

For humans, the contemplation of nature evokes emotion, both affirming and painful. Celebrating the "brilliant band / of icy crystals" that are the rings of Saturn, the poet is aware of its impact on her: "this small, temporary body, / my wrinkled brain in its eggshell skull", but also her "tunneling blood, breasts that remember / the sting and flush of milk" ("Saturn’s Rings" 5–6). Without pause, the puny and the fragile are of a piece with her body’s capacity to sustain and give life. And just as she stands beneath the stars, recognising their beauty, she sees the "choreography of ruin, the world breaking / like glass under a microscope": "poles of the earth / turning to slush", the impact on animals of global warming, their suffering to serve our desires (cows "ankle-deep in excrement"), the conjunction of human despair and glittering technology ("Saturn’s Rings" 5–6). When we look at nature mindfully, nature looks back at us. This is one of the most beautiful and painful qualities of this book, the words of celebration that draw the reader on, and at the same time make one want to look away from what they show. "What Did I Love" tells, moment by moment, the visceral horror and pleasure of killing and processing chickens in words that are confronting in their apt richness, the chickens fully drawn, even in death. Time and hunger stop; Bass loves it all, and then:

I loved the truth. Even in this one thing:

looking straight at the terrible,

one-sided accord we make with the living of this world.     (32)

Interspersed with these more weighty poems are those of such humour it’s tempting to quote the whole thing. "Ordinary Sex" celebrates the physicality that perhaps most closely reminds us of our creatureliness, and in its ordinary familiarity, without the usual metaphors of transcendence: "If no swan descends", "if the earth doesn’t tremble", "if my mother’s crystal / vase doesn’t shatter …" and "leaves of the city trees don't applaud", it’s "okay".  Instead, it is "the same old thing" in "the same old way" that offers more:

And then a few kisses, easy, loose,

like the ones we’ve been

kissing for a hundred years.     (38)

Another of the sheer delights of the poems is the detailed observation of all of life—from the spiralling stars to her son standing on his chair by the dinner table, "his tiny penis / poised above his plate" ("Nakedness" 11); from the shell stuck to the down of a dead baby bird to her mother’s dying body; from the soil she digs when planting seeds to a baby bat nursed by a friend’s breasts.

This is a collection to read and consider carefully, that reminds us of our responsibility to the world in which we live—not as masters but as fellow creatures. Bass suggests that our contemplation of nature enlarges us, but only when we come aware of ourselves, like a beggar. On the back cover, Marie Howe comments, "The poems know what they contend with; they don’t flinch. Then they sing their joy." Exactly.

When receiving poetry collections for review, I generally research online to find other reviews in order to gauge that particular reader’s response. In this instance I was not disappointed to find several written by most noteworthy academics, including Edric Mesmer from the University of Buffalo USA, and Antonia Pont a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University. Both writers appraised the work in an in-depth, contemporary and erudite way. Pont felt obligated as a reviewer to mine the work for its narrative / aesthetic arc and themes, while Mesmer explored its tethering muliebrity. Muliebrity! Wattison’s word in her description of 1950s women. (32)

While I agree with other reviewers that Terra Bravura is a difficult book to read (perhaps it’s the esoteric phraseology), I tend to explore the poetry from the personal point of view (the lyric ‘I’) often looking for a grassroots, emotional engagement. As I wended my way through its rather dense 140 pages, Wattison’s epilogue on the last page caught my eye. Whether this is a single poem or an addendum to the work does not matter. Here is a charitable look at an aging father with dementia that we come to know in this family auto / biography in verse.

I show him photographs I have had made from some of his slides. He doesn’t recognise my mother on a beach from their honeymoon, but then the placename brings forward a memory of being there, years earlier, and watching a nudist, wearing only a towel draped around her neck, walk from her cottage every morning down onto the beach for a swim, then she’d walk back. "You could set your watch by her", he says, grinning.

Lately he has begun to wake distressed, looking for "it" – "Where is it?" He doesn’t know what "it" is. Only that it is lost.

Only that it is lost and also there, like a woman walking and melting into the sea, at regular intervals, 60 years ago, and now, with fondness. (136)

Poets and their fathers have been a major connecting subject in poetry, from Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings, Robert Bly, Robert Burns, and César Vallejo, to name just a few. Poems about fathers by their poet daughters are even more interesting and Freudian linked. Anne Sexton’s poem "'Daddy' Warbucks" reveals a subliminal subservience to a powerful father, while Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy" reveals the father as a vampire and a Nazi who tortures and attacks her individuality. Gale Swiontkowski in her study of Sexton and Plath writes that both poets use the word "Daddy" as opposed to "Father" to show a familiar affection and need, while undermining and challenging the patriarchal and hierarchal structure of "Father" as head of the household. In the Oedipal dilemma, both daughters are "compelled to defer their position as victim to escape the subordinate role … as with their enduring mothers" (Swiontkowski 2003, 27–28). It is through poetry that Sexton and Plath form a controlled and creative response to the affluent and powerful, but destructive and predatory father (Swiontkowski 2003, 29).

Wattison’s poetry, although a dense and obscure narrative, nevertheless deals in part with the archetypal relationship of father and daughter. For the purpose of empowering, not victimising herself, Wattison moves away from confessional poetry towards the symbolic and if not actual, to an equality of father and daughter through the mystical power of poetic language  – "I do not tire of this combative bloom … he tilts at the enemy / I am not it" (38–39).

There is a candid nothing of our dynamic.

We are graduating foreground

to a flowering azalea.     (115)

…

 

The father-eating folktale

is a solarised crop

of subject and infinity.      (116)

…

 

This time he waves

as I appear through the gate

as though I wouldn’t see him,

a fluttering poplar, standing

in the garage,

Ach, du, Daddy                 (119)   ("after Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’")

Throughout the work, the poet conveys her empowerment by using various memes such as intertextual and artistic references, authors’ quotes, and symbolic ants, swans, mice, chickens, dogs, cow and fox. The fox appears symbolic and similar to Ted Hughes’ "The Thought-Fox", that is, "the animal’s body as invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously in the dark". This might also be that stalking presence (or it may be real!). Nevertheless, using an analogy of "aloneness / to have no other in view" from Jennifer Rutherford’s The Gauche Intruder, this "being" in the poem appears predatory.

It slowly slunk towards me, weaving low,

eyes at a distance, fixed.

 

I have seen it before,

it has stood at a distance,

 

now it sits at my feet rocking, squinting,

 

leaning its shoulders into my legs,

throwing its head into my hands.

 

(What to do with such threat?

I am painfully awkward,

What to do?

 

It smells of grassfire and soil,

Its eyes running, closed.

It demands intimacy.)          (75)

 

There are bursts of emotional relevance in Terra Bravura. Wattison’s "Daddy" becomes a victim of old age and dementia and the poet becomes beneficent. The father, as muse, can and will inspire her creative mission.

At 80,

 

he is deafened and seduced

by the brutal world of women.

 

He will not speak of Martha

or point to her in photographs.

 

He likes to give sprays of orchids

to women as they leave –

…

This delicate flamboyance

which evolves from orchis,

orkhis,

"testicle".                       (55)

In this family history there is a complex descendant line fraught with problems. When the poet searches out the grave of her grandmother, Johanna Elizabeth Martha Kalisch, a dominance and violence is engendered on both sides.

I try to fathom her

in her burst knuckled,

Pre-Raphaelite,

predestinate

terra bravura.

The hint of red in my hair

is hers.

Infamous for grotesque maternal punishments

spoken of only as interrupted,

shocking jokes;

their punch lines plaintive.

Her brutalised son,

his brutalised son.         (12)

And of Martha (mother/stepmother?)

I am descended

from half-mad women.

Women who raged

and languished,

took back

grains of wheat

from ants,

sprang to unconscionable violence.

…

I think of the inflective slurring

of the junkie at my door,

crying at my misunderstanding

of her question,

her simple request,

her defeated apologies.        (15)

While this book is an archaeological dig into the past and the woes of the present, I felt rewarded after my reading for its contemporary relevance of family baggage (something we all own), as well as its experimental array of images and metaphors, for example: "Whoever named this wild mountain a cradle / knew the tilt of it (75). And almost a Steinism: "A photo of my mother / and her sisters / and their mother / and her sisters / and their daughters / and their mother / in 1960" (32).

For those looking for a more accessible work of lyric poetry this volume may disappoint. However, I believe many female poets who wish to write about taboo subjects such as incest, family abuse, miscarriage, social inheritance, gender power and control, and so on, might take several leaves out of Sharon Olds’ works. She offers erudite and masterly poetics into the controversial subjects that mostly affect women.

Terra Bravura certainly covers the brave territory of family archetypes, albeit challenging to compose them clearly. This is my only criticism as I would have liked to know more about these characters, especially the stumbling presence of Martha (19). This work may stump any beginner reader of poetry, and as for this reviewer, unfortunately it has been a difficult passage to understand a very interesting, complex family.

Unsettled relations

The Vagabond Press deciBels series chapbooks are small squares, picture-frame size. A friend asked me whether I would review a few of them. Attracted to their titles, I chose Ann Vickery’s The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon, Maged Zaher’s Love Breathes Hard and Angela Gardner’s Thing and Unthing. As is indicated, love is a trope in the first two while the third explores human frailty in an uncannily ersatz world. Loss of dignity is an undertow in all three.

Vickery’s Pocketbook presents as a guide that archly advises readers on seduction rites, opening with “Swoon in miniature; or, The Youth’s Pleasing Instructor”:

Rules of induction: flirt openly

with random honey babes. Underscore tortured past.

Be your own peacock…

Just to be clear, always keep your options open.

Nothing says cavalier quite like a wink.

my little life and all the birds     (12)

This poem includes an old-fashioned Neckclothitania diagram, instructing readers on how to fold a necktie alongside catalogued intersections of oppression via antiquated aesthetics. The narrator wonders: “what happens muse-wise / in the mired process of enchantment?” (7) Painting a convincing caricature of the self-centered philanderer, Vickery juxtaposes this figure with the nightmare of omniscient capitalism, and an awareness of the inevitable cost that comes with both partaking in it and resisting it.

The awkwardness when a woman refuses

to take the iron in a game of Monopoly.     (8)

This erudite Pocketbook’s attention towards ongoing subordination of women to men is a sour leitmotiv endowed with wit in “Epic Spin”:

Beautiful cliché! I would unpick you

if not so enamoured of your miniature affects

Snow rugs, some tugs. The series begins prematurely.

A tragic cycle: sois belle et tais-toi! (22) (look pretty and shut up!)

Failure of complementarity in love relationships is an associated preoccupation. Feeling her way through “the ever-burdened earth” (20), Vickery’s attention turns towards the consumptive dimensions of romance. In addition to critiquing the micro-conditions of oppression within “free-market” hetero-normative relationships, Vickery attends to the conditions of slavery on which they rest: “I find myself all replica with made-in-China / sundry affections. See, Susie, how I sit so pretty, / pursuing le petite vignette.” (8) In “Another Chardin in Need of Cleaning (after Frank O’Hara)”, for the narrator: “Forearmed is foredefeated” in the face of “a spragged illusion that had me forever” (30). Earlier, this illusion is appropriated as display by “incorporat[ing] all the spoils in the world as splashbacks” (8).

Neoliberalism’s diktat that we sell all of ourselves is taken for a ride by Vickery, whose ludic verse entertains its ruthless enactments of avarice from positions of patriarchy. The possibility of redemption from the “dickybird world” (12) is presented, however. In “Autumnal Hook”, the narrator wonders:

What if Persephone remained a hard woman?

An ethics of care turned towards oneself. Love’s

harvest, the halves of intimacy in these latitudes.

A climate of change revealed as a cycle of constant

return, how to reconcile, farm my inadequacy

for yours or simply distract …

Cross-dressing Orpheus to your Eurydice,

I discover I want as a mode.     (20)

Perhaps the only way out of this inequality, in which women are conditioned to serve others, is via an “ethics of care turned towards oneself”, beyond the need for male valorisation. As the climate changes, this must involve a shift away from an anthropocentric pattern of exploitation to post-anthropocentric possibilities of ethical care. This approach would no doubt prove some relief from the “[b]umper bar wind-bags” that “continue to sail along the sweet nothings / that tax the heart’s constitutional” (22). In the Pocketbook’s penultimate poem, “un4seen Fxs”, wordplay fiercely exorcises the pitfalls of amorous texting:

Typographical err Or makes me live you more

peach day; all the fruitiest

salad days of my unastounding youth

fresh firm to touch, sluice running rivulets

down my hum-dingers

leaves of green a sticky miss. Wilt. Upturned fascia to cuss,

my inner coast dealings on display,

here they are 4 all 2 cc. Can I

whistle profanities to you if my mood autocorrects

song to joy always as

sing tomboy

and says you are a shit?

…

Love looks more and more like louvers

when you try to sms this heart and find only glasnost.     (44)

The typographical errors enact a series of double or triple entendres: “louvers”, for example, is the cousin word of “jalousies”, for “jealousies”.

Akin to Vickery, Maged Zaher’s Love Breathes Hard grapples with the turbulence of infatuation and whether it can lead to love. Again, the personal and the political cannot be separated. In this poet’s foray into hankering – for what is not, but might be – emptiness persists in a confession, providing readers with a testimonial to a contemporary loneliness.

In different bookstore corners I wasn’t really looking for books. I was searching for a gap in the world.     (12)

Divided into three parts, the book is composed in free verse and sentences flow into one another parenthetically across the pages, occupying them lightly when confronted by excess.

I carry my body over the distance between home and work (I couldn’t save the streets from myself). Then I log on to some website with images to sexuallise. Love is inaccessible here. We have – instead – a future to build.     (13)

In a tinder-ready landscape where sex is easier than ever to access, love might be readily confused with it. Zaher is conscious that love, as a signifier, is a magnet for readers’ projections and is alert to his particular lover’s discourse. The intimate spaces created by love become sites of praxis – love becomes a verb, an active loving-to of which Irigaray has written – eschewing ownership. Rarely readymade, love is an uneasy enterprise that must be cultivated, regardless of infatuation.

Chivalry is a matter of bleeding: we start to negotiate and I step into your driveway. Sex becomes less coherent, like sleep, adolescence, and hunger. We discuss hunger but feel the particular intrusion of loneliness.     (19)

Otherness remains a bridge to be crossed but never surpassed, collapsed, or trespassed. Rather, the bridge is to be negotiated and respected. The poet subject and his muse are altered, “shattered and rebuilt on the image of each other” (19). Their exchange of otherness de-colonises their engagement and collapse is averted in favour of a wandering back and forth. This negotiation instead of consumption might be extended to our relations with reality, which must be cared for: “We looked after reality, it wasn’t supposed to turn into wine” (17). By privileging “reality” over the intoxication of “wine”, the narrator/poet guards against solipsism. There is no completeness; there is instead unfinished business. Love persists, hangs, as an approximation and becomes a practice of satiety in the face of lack.

I was satisfied with street noises, I catalogued them as I navigated the consequences of my body.     (17)

Thinking post-anthropocentrically, treading lightly, even when love breathes hard, is perhaps what is most required of us humans at a time in the history of the planet, in which earth is changing and becoming uninhabitable to increasing numbers of life forms. As he allows the texture of his yearning to breathe, the narrator accepts the mess of “street noises” produced by the industrial world of consumers and simultaneously takes responsibility for the consequences of our bodies in their vulnerability on this world.

The moon, being the ultimate voyeur, watches nothing. My wound is the trees. I sit quietly and study Marxism.

The architect constructs our shadows. We create a night without aesthetics.

The revolution calms down. We learn to be contained by the world.

I am finally able to administer your absence.     (25)

Absence does not leave, and must not (cannot) be filled. The poet sits with emptinesses generated by projections, amorous and political. True generosity towards the future, wrote Camus, consists of giving our all to the present moment.

This is for you, and for nothing. The erotic is waiting. It is in the description and the yard grass.     (26)

In part two, correspondence between the poet and his beloved assumes an informal, epistolary quality.

Hope you had a lovely visit to Seattle.

Can I write you about how special it was to share this intense moment with you – can I write you about the loneliness that is not being touched and how I am amazed you can do it – can I write you about the fantasy of love that was triggered when we met?

Asking permission, Zaher conveys consciousness of projections as distinct from the other’s reality he approaches. What does is mean to love? Poets such as Rilke and Rumi famously explored love’s vagaries and are often invoked to talk about the subtleties of a non-possessive intimacy. In a similar vein, the narrator rejoices in the bridge that separates himself from his beloved and, at every turn, in spite of existential loneliness, declares his commitment to do the work of its crossing and re-crossing.

I will honour all your boundaries, the physical and the virtual. If you want me to, I can disappear and not bother you at all – but I feel it IS a waste to do so –     (29)

Later, as he emails his beloved, the poet finds himself wanting to “sign this email with ‘sending you love’”. In his “fit of truth” he finds himself unable to do so and sends instead “tons of admiration and affection. xoxox” (32). By resisting amorous declarations, the poet reinstates loving as a process that accommodates reality: “On another note, keep me posted about job search nightmare.” In contrast to Vickery’s anatomy of infatuation, here love is presented as a way of taking responsibility. The temptation to escape is resisted without giving up on desire, enabling love to exist outside of acquisitive relations of exchange.

In part three, the protagonist reassures his muse:

This is not about seduction.

It is about hanging out

Tonight

While surrounded by capitalism

It rains

And we call it love

This continuous threat of collapse.     (42)

Delusions produced by capitalism’s unsustainable pathway towards collapse are memorably conflated with the fickleness of our digital avatars and projections: “Feeding our devices electricity they produce imaginary lovers” (47).

If a central concern in Vickery’s and Zaher’s chapbooks is humans’ inability to master intimate relationships, in Angela Gardner’s Thing and Unthing, it is loss of control of all human grasp of life on earth. As analogue is replaced by the digital “cascade of information” (34), human agency is called into question. The first poem of the collection is called “The Road”. A road invites us to follow it. As non-places, roads transport us from one place to another. Stalling somewhere between Jack Kerouac’s quest and Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale, on Gardner’s road movement lacks direction. Hampered by “rain or … static between radio stations” it is slowed by “sloppy” steering of a car which transports a “ship of fools” and “proves a dog uphill”.

At home nowhere in particular, humans aggregate aimlessly on roads, remnants amongst the earth’s detritus. Unable to manage their environments, weather and technology conspire against them. The “cold bites down / eats into skin” and the high tide “obsessively collect[s] … it throws up / a headless seal / plastic bottles / a car tyre”. Anthropomorphised here, the car, weather and ocean prove more potent forces than the thingly animals whose purchase over them is enfeebled and oblivious as they “make beer rings on formica / and look out the window” (13).

This loss of control to unthingness is reflected in fragmented concrete poetry:

we

drive

down

then we drive across

then

we

drive

down

some

more

It is not possible to have faith in a sense of future: “It is the end of the road.”

As deterritorialised, disembodied bodies, how do humans find subjectivity in an age of techno-capitalism? How do the biotechnologies, and our attendant neuro-scientific consciousness, remake us? In a world in which mental illness is readily attributed to the mis-firing of synapses, rather than to emotional or structural factors such as inequality, isolation and loss, poems such as “Zero Sum [a mechanical soul ponders its existence]” extend the implications of this predicament:

algorithms [regulating

and inhibiting] how relative at evening

how circadian in its sudden inverse proofs

Atoms cruise the scaly circuitry. The visual

system lights up dubstep

giving spatial coordinates to memory

electrochemical brain-states of the cortex.     (15)

Emotions here are the product of a particular biochemistry, rather than having their roots in human relationships. In this way, there is little to distinguish humans from their technologies. In a world in which technology reigns supreme, humanity becomes a peripheral inconvenience:

While the body is incoherent, frayed to negatives.

Language a limit, edge to motion

:oh! the inefficiency that biology

may idly thumb its own prosthetic needs. (16)

Once referred to as the house of being by Heidegger, language here is a “limit”, a use-less and inconvenient sticking point, just another thing among others. Likewise, the idle thumbing of a device – indeed, our devices have become prostheses – reinforces the feeling of impotence. There is nothing for us to do here – we could “discuss gestalt / and dialectical materialism / if we could be bothered” (11). But why bother when the “weather will turn to crap later”? (13). The fetishisation of things, of the material over the immaterial, and the ecological destruction that capitalism and its concomitant master-slave dialectic have brought to bear on humanity is at a dead-end. And the relation between things and unthings remains unsettled and unsettling. “Printing now” (34).

For over 50 years and across 20 volumes, Robert Adamson’s poetry has illuminated lives and forged a seminal path in Australian literature. His acuity of vision, delicacy of image and nuance, his technical skill and perhaps above all his ability to take a reader to the very edge of what we know about ourselves, the very edge of what it might mean to be human – these capacities are evident once again in his most recent collection, Net Needle.

The motif of the needle is literally and figuratively woven throughout this set of poems. It is sounded in the dedication to Adamson’s wife, photographer Juno Gemes, his 'heart’s needle", in the Yeats epigraph of the "needle’s eye" as the narrow space through which the "roaring" stream of life passes – and it is resounded in the practicality of the needles which are used by fishermen to make and mend their nets, catching the abundant potential of the waters. A multivalent image, the needle thus becomes synonymous with so much of the poet’s own task: to catch – fleetingly – as best as one can, the abundance and complexity of life, contracting our attention to the specificity of the thing, the image – and then having the grace to let it go. Not everything can be caught in such an open-weave mesh, so there is inevitable loss and failure as well as the open spaces of possibility. But the poem, like the needle, strives to "mend", to refocus our attention on the specificity of the world around us and on the sometimes fraught, sometimes rich passage between inside and outside, the looker and the world which is considered.

The image of fishing draws together a number of threads in this collection. On a personal level, it evokes the poet’s childhood, in particular the memory of his father and the rough fishermen of his boyhood. As we hear in "Net Makers":

They stitched their lives into my days,

Blues Point fishermen, with a smoke

stuck to their bottom lips, bodies bent

 

forward, inspecting a haul-net’s wing

draped from a clothes lines. Their hands

darting through mesh, holding bone

 

net needles …

they wove everything they knew

into the mesh, along with the love they had,

 

or had lost, or maybe not needed.

If poetry is metaphorically akin to net-mending, it emphasises the importance of everyday survival and the provision of the emotional "livelihood" required to live and even thrive. As "Net Makers" suggests, the making of both poetry and of nets is a liminal activity, operating at the cusp of the life of the individual wielder of the needle – a site into which they "wove everything they knew" – and a point of connection to human communitas as well as to the external spaces of rivers, oceans and the creatures which live within them. The net, shaped and maintained by human intention and design, has the capacity to reach into a space beyond the human, in ways which can be challenging, exciting yet also fearful. In "The Shark Net Seahorses of Balmoral", for example, the net is a place of beauty and promise for those brave and curious enough to explore  the territory it defines:

The shark net was a hanging garden under the tide,

beaded seaweed, marine fern, black periwinkles

Here, however,  as well as providing a window onto an "other side" of beauty and wonder, the hanging net delineates a "protection zone" with the capacity to shield the human from the non-human and the elemental, the "dark fin" which might always emerge and threaten.

With the light touch of the lyric poet, Adamson funnels the gaze of the reader onto the specificity of the world around us: for instance, in "Summer", "In garden beds humid air / clings to the stalks of poppies"; or the aural detail of "Listening to Cuckoos" with its "downward-ending notes that pour through a falling of night"; or the attention to evocative, visual detail in "Dorothy Wordsworth":

Wisps of smoke, lamplight on manuscripts.

Pages fanned across an oak stool.

The imagery, along with line lengths and enjambments, functions to slow the reader down, draws us into an alertness to self and to our relationship with a world which is both recognisable and radically different. In this sense, Adamson’s poetry brings the reader into a heightened awareness of the world and its nuances – human, natural, sentient – opening up the possibility of an ethical interaction with that which is beyond the self.

This level of attention to the world and its implications for positioning the self, is most explicit in "Via Negativa, The Divine Dark", Adamson’s 2011 Blake Prize-winning poem. The poem opens with a focus on the observation of the natural world:

Banana trees rustle,

 

a first breeze arrives, bringing the perfumes

of the ebb; watermarks down on the mudflats begin

to disappear.

The gaze in the poem then shifts up and out through the skylight where "Stars are clustered trees, hung in the night sky", evoking philosophical, even spiritual, musings before coming back down to the immediacy of the image, of what lies at human eye-level:

Whose body, whose eyes? Look

up into the heavens: the problem of suffering

expands forever – dust and light again,

maybe time, if it exists.

 

On the table a cicada, flecked with flour,

opening  its dry cellophane wings.

It is this movement – in and out, like the breath, or down and up as we look up from the specific to the breadth of the infinite – which provides the "mending of nets", the bridging of gaps we have been longing for. In this drive to stitch and to mend and to weave, the poet describes himself as "back on the river, [where] my boat plows through the fog":

I’m looking hard. What form, shape, or song

 

might represent a soul? What words, paint, or mud

resemble such an intangible glow?

The business of poetry is about such mindful looking, about searching for the words to heal the rifts of perception, the gaps between self and other, self and world. "Praise life   with broken words", "Via Negativa" exhorts; in the absence of certainty and the impossibility of closure, it is this which Adamson’s poetry can offer us.

As has been evident across Adamson’s oeuvre, much of the attention which the poet pays to the external world has settled on images of birds, especially along the littoral space of the river. Not only is this attention part of a drive  to wake the poet/reader from passivity and into engagement with the world but it also highlights the point of interaction between the human and the strangeness and intrigue of the not-human. In the "The Kingfisher’s Soul", a poem of love and tribute to Gemes, Adamson makes this clear:

Clear birdsong was not human song, hearing became

Nets and shadowy vibrations

In the prose poem, "A Proper Burial", the poet describes coming across two tawny frogmouths hit on the road, and the indigenous woman who arrives out of the shadows to make sure they in fact receive a "proper burial". This poem is an exploration of the unsettling nature of this encounter with difference – a disquieting glimpse into the unknown lives of the tawny frogmouths and the moving details of their death, as well as recognition of different cultural ways of responding to the human-bird nexus. The birds represent a state of difference that cannot be assimilated or turned into the human language of the same. "This episode, though that’s hardly the right word, has never left my mind", the poem concludes, suggesting the irresolvable "gap in the net" which this experience of human/non-human contact has made visible.

This sense of the almost talismanic or spiritual nature of the non-human creature – or perhaps of the human encounter with it – is also suggested in the prose poem "The Whiting". Returning to the motif of fishing, the poet catches the whiting and brings it home to share for dinner. Having consumed it – "hardly enough to satisfy, but sweet" – the "familiar shadow" of a cat enters the scene, and the poet is immediately able to identify the "spirit of the whiting … alive in our new pet". Even when the non-human creature is consumed, and drawn into visceral engagement with the human, its alterity remains, continuing to speak as it morphs into still more different forms, always requiring acknowledgement.

The image of the net encapsulates the possibility of presence as well as absence. It embodies both the meshed threads which prevent or at least slow down the permeation from one side to another and it is also the open spaces between – the inevitability of the permeable. These spaces, a little like a peacock’s tail, also reinforce the image of the human eye and its business of framing and looking, and of the net of poetry which harnesses the familiar and the unfamiliar currents of life, albeit momentarily, to be witnessed by the eye or the imagination of the reader. In this sense, the poet will always be "mending the net" – identifying gaps and the irreducible, striving to bring the human gaze onto an acknowledgement of the roaring stream of life.

Mary Cresswell’s exceptional poetic and scientific background come together in the technical and environmental orientations of her latest poetry collection, Fish Stories. Cresswell herself denotes the origin of Fish Stories as primarily based on one poetic style: the ghazal. Such poems are usually composed of at least five couplets and no more than fifteen, with a recurring rhyme scheme. However, Cresswell’s project assesses how these limitations can be pushed and manipulated, critiquing at which point the ghazal style ceases to exist in such cases. Fish Stories is intrinsically linked with this notion of restriction and resistance, growth in the case of adversity, and a lingering focus on survival.

Numerous animals, birds and environmental areas feature across the collection. Psychology and sociology are comfortably linked, and the overall impact is lively, engaging, and overflowing with imagery. It is difficult to select a few key poems to feature; there is so much going on, and on so many levels, across Fish Stories. However, an excellent example of Cresswell’s critical and creative playfulness can be found in the poem “Eine Kleine Kammermusik”:

Yes, I’ve heard about the vacant chambers of my mind.

Are you here because you hope to fill the vacant chambers of my mind?

 

Perhaps it’s love that brings us here tonight. Destiny, perhaps,

not just a cultivated chance to fill and limber up my mind.

 

I’ve spoken long with Professor Freud. He knows of course the most

efficient way those pesky little chambers should be mined.

 

But nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. I find it handy, though,

when I wish to riddle through the embers of my mind.

 

Absent and alone, I read – I write – I tap my foot and listen

as sonatas and fugues still the quaking tremors of my mind.

 

Each dawn a raven returns from the trackless deeps

with a feather to thrill the vacant chambers of my mind.

 

Or must it be you alone, dear sir, you and only you to enter

and fill my vacant chambers? Did you think I wouldn’t mind?

 

I trill and chortle from a vacuum – I sing from unseen branches –

call it what you will, dear boy, and keep your vacant chambers.

 

My space is mine.        (23)

Cresswell venomously engages with Otto Jesperson’s theory that women’s minds have “vacant chambers” in which they can accommodate new information swiftly, while men’s minds are already full of information and therefore slower.  Critical wordplay meshes well with the restraint of the ghazal structure, as the speaker cleanly displaces and dismisses the weight of such a theory. As with much of Fish Stories, references to birds and more natural environmental spaces feature as means for escape and self-control, as well as reassessment of oppressive exterior forces and ideas.

However, Cresswell simultaneously demonstrates a strong sense of respect for natural settings and features, beyond what they can offer her poetic speakers and personae. Poems such as “Timberline”, “Magnetic North”, and “Escape to the Southern Ocean”, for example, all highlight more ominous or uncertain human relationships with the world around. Layers of human thought and means of making meaning recur throughout Fish Stories, as Cresswell plays references off one another. Poems frequently demand further reading and research to more thoroughly unpack their implications, but at the same time the language used is accessible and vibrant. There is a broader desire for understanding and collaboration with the natural world, especially in poems such as “We are the Ocean”:

The tide drags out as the moon demands,

anemones close, disguised as rubble.

 

The shore is too rocky for walking

so the children wait on the beach.

 

Satellites count down: ten, nine, eight…

high-altitude contrails quiver and swerve.

 

Drones meander through layers of sky

marking the spot marking the time.

 

We cluster and wait in the thinness of darkness.

The children’s footprints lead into the surf.              (103)

Human engagements occupy a liminal position in this setting, yet are intent on creating access points. Technology and nature do not clash, but surround and circle one another, waiting for an opportune moment to unite. The process is ambiguous and has a hint of foreboding to it, but at the same time is a clear necessity.

Cresswell’s interest critiquing barriers and delineations, as well as the danger of assumptions recurs thematically throughout much of Fish Stories. The poet’s playful tone frequently takes on sharper edges as her speaking personae shift between wry frustration and keen observation. The structural demands of the ghazal style are not there to be railed against or to skew each poem to follow a set path, but instead bolster the speaker’s engagements. Fish Stories is both immersive and deeply critical, attached to the natural and human worlds, and constantly looking for passage into new modes of thought.

Rob Wilson’s Free Will and the Clouds has already attracted many admirers. “These poems are constructed like little chapels”, says John Hawke. Michael Farrell likens the work to “a cloud in tight black jeans”. Martin Duwell adds “impressive” and “engaging”, while Graeme Miles says the work has “solidity and consistency”.

Tempting as it is to try to find new ways to praise this book, reviewing it for Plumwood Mountain presents a more interesting opportunity. These poems are moving and interesting on their own merits, but considering them from an ecopoetic standpoint—looking at how they approach environments, touch on ecological issues and rank human concerns—is a particularly satisfying way in.

Those familiar with The Red Room Company may have already encountered Rob Wilson in a short video created as part of the “Unlocked” project—an initiative that invites poets and hip-hop artists to run creative literacy programs in prisons. In the video Wilson explains his relationship to poetry simply and frankly: “I just always wanted to write books. I was shown poetry at a very young age and I always understood it.” Wilson goes on to read “Superman Goes Crazy” over the sound of a correctional centre loudspeaker. The poem shows Wilson’s ability to take the apparently mundane and distil it into something with renewed power:

That winter, when he had left his son in the forest,

his wife had been moving furniture late into the night.

It had been a lean year

and she watched the armchair burn in the wheezing dusk.

 

There were three of us in that house that summer.

And by the start of footy season,

we were all silver bones in the wet forest.

 

Superman goes crazy

because he sits

and thinks about it in the dark

like anybody else.

“Superman goes crazy” is one example of the way Free Will and the Clouds grapples with the relationship between humans and their habitat. The human characters here are obviously significant—we have a father apparently abandoning his son and a wife working alone at what feels like a futile, grimly solitary task. Then a trio of people become “silver bones in the wet forest” in the space of a few months. So while these characters appear central at first, it turns out there are even larger forces at work—the forest, the “wheezing dusk”, and the dark that surrounds Superman as he quietly loses his mind.

Along with this contrast of human players with their powerful, sometimes malevolent surroundings, Free Will and the Clouds also explores the tension between environments that are “natural” or nonhuman, and those we build up around and against them. “Fortune Favours the Moron” contrasts these two environments in its first few stanzas:

A door swings

a little loose on the hinges

and dumbly flaps back

into its jamb.

 

And mountains

ugly like days

swim past you.

Both the door in the first stanza and the mountains in the second carry some sense of inevitability, even emptiness. The door swings in a pointless way, seemingly without anyone involved in opening it. Then the mountains, so often relied on in poetry as icons of strength and reliability, are “ugly like days”—a masterful expression of numb, daily repetition that can sap beauty from even a mountain. This poem’s “you” stands by passively, watching these ugly mountains “swim past”.

“Facing East” is another example of how Wilson explores the tensions between human and nonhuman forms:

In Sydney, you can see the storm

arching high, hunched prone

after riding low up the coastline.

 

The black-wet streets here

squished thick between

your carpet box apartment and mine.

Again, the human presence is pushed to the periphery, living in “carpet box apartments” on “squished” streets. The storm, meanwhile, travels ominously up the coast before “arching high” over the city, taking over the Sydney skyline.

The poems I’ve drawn out so far might suggest Free Will and the Clouds is somehow gloomy, and I may be about to make matters worse by adding that death is everywhere in this book. When death is not on the horizon or hiding nearby, it is standing in the centre, often intertwined with the foreboding sense that the environment we inhabit is not on our side. Blood, ghosts, sickness, people who have died and people who are about to die all appear regularly, creating macabre dotted lines between the poems. “Sitting Still All Summer” is a particularly frank example that reveals Wilson’s humour:

Everyone goes to heaven. Happy?

Lengths of wire are laid out side by side

on a mahogany hutch.

It’s heaven, but a fish filter hums.

Death in the movies

is somewhat similar

to death in a dream.

You’re falling fast.

You feel your body die mid-air

slowly

like sheet ice cracking.

The first line has the same faintly exhausted tone carried by the swinging door in “Fortune Favours the Moron”. The implication is that easy solutions are there if we are silly enough to reach for them, but the accusatory note challenges readers who might be looking for these solutions in Wilson’s work. “Better look elsewhere”, the poem warns. “We’re moving into more difficult, more interesting territory.”

The second stanza shows Wilson’s tendency to interrupt readers’ expectations as often as he can. It takes a few moments to accept that those first few lines are actually talking about “death in the movies” rather than a real death. To further confound matters, this death happens mid-air but “slowly / like sheet ice cracking.” The mind reels trying to reconcile these impossibilities.

Yet despite the tendency here towards difficulty, futility and death, Free Will and the Clouds is actually far from pessimistic. In fact, Wilson has achieved something not many poets grappling with these subjects can manage. His work is actually at its most comforting—and ultimately uplifting—when dealing with its most difficult themes.

The book begins and ends with two elegies, both obviously deeply personal and disarming in their sincerity. Rather than focus on these, let’s conclude by considering lines from the second last poem in the collection, “Tribute to the Newly Dead”:

There’s a kerfuffle in the tectonic plates.

There’s blood on the steering wheel

and black static on the radio.

 

If you had a map you might find us.

I carried her deep into the soft music of the forest.

Wrapped her face in railroad lantana.

Like many others in the collection, this poem is bracingly honest even as it twists to avoid straightforward statements. And as his language twists, Wilson finds unique symbols to express the senselessness death so often brings with it. Using a gentle word like “kerfuffle” to describe the movement of tectonic plates only underscores their devastating power. There’s no explanation for the “blood on the steering wheel” and the radio has nothing to offer but “black static”. The mention of “the soft music of the forest” is a rare hint of this environment as something more than a dispassionate onlooker, but this moment of coziness quickly passes. Finally, the woman’s face can only be wrapped in “railroad lantana”—a plant that may be abundant, but is never appreciated.

Wilson clearly enjoys rousing readers out of laziness by shunting them between apparently unrelated and often unresolved ideas, but he is not playing high concept games for the sake of cleverness. In finding new language for the things we fear—banality, loneliness, and the fact that our surroundings are completely disinterested—Free Will and the Clouds does something good writing does best. It takes away isolation, and offers ways to express things we hesitate to name.

Diwurruwurru: Poetry from the Gulf of Carpentaria is a small offering (24 pages of poetry) but it is the concentration, I am sure, of many hours work. Collaboration takes time; work with remote communities takes time; poetry takes time. But in this case it has been time well spent. Diwurruwurru is enjoyable, eye-opening and powerful, and presents us with a possibility and a vision of contemporary life. This is not Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria in poetry, but more like a vernacular Aboriginal English re-presented. It is work to welcome not simply because it gives us an acutely non-dominant language but also because it does away with the conceit of liberal authorship by virtue of its method. If the animating energy and translation point is Phillip Hall, there is a strong sense of the communal here too. And that, in and of itself, is important. This is to say nothing of the aesthetic charms of the work, of the strong and appealing covering of new territory that takes place with insight, clarity, humour and strength. These poems are narrative poems of daily life that often talk about going bush, singing and family.

Consider, "Gudanji Gem":

millad mob not saltwater mob

like dem yanyuwa mob

us gudanji mob, dis millad country

an you come drive in mudika long way

out bush an us show you dis lagoon

it long long way you know

dat devil devil dreaming

you don’t climb him or dance

da night dat ngabaya bin stay

an he chock you like tis

you drive long long way past him

past barramundi dreaming swallowed

in mine an you see high on ridge

where freshwater kangaroo bash

dat saltwater one dat where millad country is

us mob sing dat place wid ceremony

an lagoon big country full

taddle, long-nose, fish an bush turkey

water lily, makulu, bush plum, onion an yam

you bend roun’ unda massacre hill like dis

– dem cheeky whitefullas call him dat –

an up a track past dat skull creek

in da cave a baby blackfulla bone

tis sung to stone like crystal memory

dem poor old people do teach us to sing dat

A whole world is glimpsed here in a language all its own; a language that if not approaching Creole plays with historical registers of "blackness" – think of how people talk in Gone with the Wind (most recently re-packaged by Vanessa Place); think of Jamaican poet Louise Bennett; think of the London based Linton Kwesi Johnson, too. This is a transnational blackness from the US to the Caribbean to the UK. "Devil devil" is simply one word that has global frequent flyer points. The poem has internal reference also (to "Garrawa Gem" and "Yanyuwa Gem", which are on the immediately preceding pages). But one notes the importance of us and them (the fundamentally different saltwater/freshwater epitomised by the fighting kangaroos); the dismissiveness towards "cheeky whitefullas"; the closing endnote of old people and singing which brings with it a self-deprecation of this inferior art; the laundry list of bushtucker. This is life in the Gulf, with story and wryness, power and uniqueness, too. And the other poems in the volume do not disappoint.

The reigning paradigm of deformed realism, seen most clearly in new offerings by Giramondo, from Beesley to Cassidy to Wakeling to Farrell, needs to be considered anew in light of Diwurruwurru. In other words, realism is contextual. If your reality is powdered milk, green can, goanna, then of course the poetic expression of that is going to differ from the halls of the academy where the latte is held in hand. If the daily life and the lineage of influence is an endogenous song, myth and story tradition rather than Ashbery and O’Hara then the context of intelligibility is going to differ. So in that sense Diwurruwurru reads as foreign to the person with a limited, if hegemonic and understandable, notion of what is "Australian poetry".

It can be used then to destabilise our assumptions of the possible "here" now. When I visited the Gulf I remember meeting Murandoo Yanner and Alexis Wright, amongst many others, on country. I have spent time in remote places in Australia (Pilbara and Kimberely in the main) and consider a number of Aboriginal people my friends and family. However, the Gulf has a different texture. Diwurruwurru is located firmly even as we can draw similarities between it and a great many other places. It is as exceptional as it is representative and we need similar volumes from right across Aboriginal Australia.

If "Poetry" has a centre, has a dominant mode of being in Australia, it is still as pale, male, stale, sure of its place. In that way, the dominant mode shares a ground of certainty with Diwurruwurru. But the question here is of legitimacy and claim. This is not to deny the being of occupation, but to highlight the lineage and trajectory of sovereignty and recognition. Australia will always be contested, and not simply on account of race relations, but because there have always been competing group identities. The Western Pilbara, which is the country I am most familiar with, has seen enmity between Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi people far more intense and long standing than any more recent grafting. Think, too, of the freshwater and saltwater divide in the poem quoted above. And that should not be forgotten; Indigenous autonomy should not be forgotten; and to always view things through a lens of the nation is to some extent a colonising gesture that betrays a narcissistic whiteness. Diwurruwurru challenges such a perspective by being its own thing. Rather than fight in the way Ken Canning, Lionel Fogarty and Natalie Harkin do, Diwurruwurru focuses on its own set of practices, its own territory, its own way in the world, which suggests a centre of belonging that is capable of resisting, if not ignoring, "Australian" occupation.

Required Reading for Derivative Managers

Luke Beesley’s Jam Sticky Vision is a work where one can find solace and solidarity, challenge and entertainment. This is not solace in the mindless mindfulness sense, but solace in the sense of balm, of solitude, of vision. That vision is at once informed by a network of metropolitan works (Ashbery, O’Hara, Tagore, Stein, Matisse, Joyce) and popular culture (film and music principally), which might tempt the critic to misdiagnose the work as modernist, or even po-mo. There is nature too, albeit not Romantic. How then to categorise the work? I do not want to propose a designation here, but to read Beesley’s work in the aegis of this journal and think through it ecologically. In that way there are interruptions by sky ("A Thousand Characters"), by animal ("Snail Clogged in the Clay"), by plant ("Broken Onset Circles"), by mineral ("Op Shop"), by water ("The Master"). There are also a few dogs and birds thrown into the wordplayful mix. But it is not poetry to categorise easily as any particular thing, for it intersects with a variety of contemporary interests. It is then, of course, of our time.

Consider "Tamarisk / Astor":

If not for the ocean then for circumstance or time

 

And if not for time, and time’s circulation

then up-drafts that keep a hawk

nourished or dissipated irritation

 

necessary in a lengthy

acquaintance or drive

 

If – for his serious beginning, shade unbroken,

walking out past the markers along the cliff edge,

the ‘nature’ walk, then – we concede

something has happened to beauty …

 

Jules Olitski spraying canvases

Olives far too salty in the dream of adolescence

School with a love-bite on the neck

–       blood summoned and confused as tricked pets

 

If not for every accident

then the assumptions, coincidence, fortunes

 

coins grow weak in old wallets or in the

depths of a car seat as things quieten beyond

articulation

One notes the litany of techniques – anaphora ("if not for"); image ("updrafts that keep a hawk", "love-bite"); sweet rhyme (canvases / adolescence; neck / pets). One relates to it too – in my real life coins are indeed lost in the "depths of a car seat". But one also notes the messages: money is "weak"; nature has been inverted comma-ed; there is the portent of "things quieten beyond"; the reference to New York abstraction (Olitski and the submerged Gerald Murnane of the title); the Proustian recall of school. From abstraction, from this poem itself, we must concede "something has happened to beauty", something has happened to nature and this poem sees that, witnesses it by its wry and knowing form and comfortable style.

I only want to draw attention to one other poem in the collection, though there are a great many that warrant reading. It is the second section of "How Will I Know When I’m Home?", the poem reads:

ii.

There was no leaving the house. The house was there. It wasn’t immobile, wholly, but an address beyond pencils and creamy duck-feathered coloured paper. The letter box clasp always swung open in the wind and we lived there and found our mail sometimes on the lawn, or snail-bitten. I couldn’t leave, this day, but dug my way out of the carpet enough to pack a lunch in a silver tiffin and think of the largess of the egg or the eye of the hen on the shiny blunt end of a 2B pencil. When it was typed up I decided to go checking the train times. I was, of course, unlucky and had to kill a good twenty ducks using an old table cloth. It was a turquoise business but the time looks you directly and I was eventually at the five-to-twelve, walking alongside me, and I hopped in. I had left the whole house there frowning by the street in grey daysky inclination. I read the essay at the beginning of the New American Poetry to try to orient myself to the second half of my thirties. I won’t call it late but I will the train to skip stations and I did it for enjoyment and the editor also said this. But I didn’t believe a word. I just felt the great book in my right hand like my house unread all afternoon if not for robbery or repairs. Our shed, which was only a paragraph or so, long ago, was tidied into a whole dissertation. He even had to remove a piece of grass, ingeniously, I didn’t know where to learn. Feathers everywhere. Embarrassing! We shared a coffee when it was over and he had two sons and seemed to know everything with a sly curl of the shifting spanner. We went back years. I was twenty eight. I had breathed between two shoulder blades and falled into scrub, destroying my chin off a bicycle. We waited for ages at Flinders Station. I hid the cover of the book hard against my left pocket. We turned the page and I went out of the train and up escalators which were tracksuit-top zippers and seemed fine across the tramway pedestrian bikeway, arriving.

Like when you move a home, one you have lived in all your life, to another continent there are a lot of boxes to unpack here. Density is our friend though. Allusion is our friend. Rather than point out the wordplay, the shifting sensibility, the references, as I did for "Tamarisk / Astor’, I want to point toward what Ben Etherington noted in his article "Marlon James and the Challenge of the Creole Narrator"– namely, sometimes a prize bestows aura on a novel, conversely sometimes the novel is necessary to keep the prestige of the prize going. In this case, criticism, my criticism, cannot do justice to the poem. Criticism is not up to the task of text. This is simply because I want the text to be.

So, I would recommend simply re-reading the poem and sitting with it.  I don’t want to instrumentalise poetry here – Beesley’s work is a beautiful, powerful, wonderful thing in and of itself. But if one is trained to think through poetry, to slow down, to apprehend "difficulty" in form and style, to read this particular poem, then maybe one can learn to approach the world with a better sense of its complexity, interconnectedness, wholeness, circularity than when we are simply taught didactically and in a straightforward manner. Poetry, this type of poetry, this poem, then is a harbinger of light, a moment of life on a dying blue planet. And for that, we must praise Beesley and the world in which he lives and writes.

The poem "<echo poetics>" appears as a form of prologue in Joritz-Nakagawa’s new work, Distant Landscapes (10). The title augurs a continuous rumination on and mirroring of the field of eco-poetics. Desire, danger and the shortcomings of seeking harmony with perceived separate ecologies, especially but not exclusive to the non-human, are pivotal to the verses that follow.

The forest and yearning to return to it drive Distant Landscapes. “I become the tree tho it does not become me” (10). The poetry cycles through longing and joy, abandonment, disbandment and terror, ever questioning: From whence did we come, and how to get back? Is there any possibility of safe haven in the forest, and was it ever secure in the first place, in the “happen stance” of our existence (68)?

Nature is threatened by that within and that without. That within is also nature. In the early stages of the book, an owl tracks and eats a rabbit. That without is not necessarily perceived nature, or healthy for an environment. Within the urban landscape there is a “leaf trembling on a road / incomplete extinction of consciousness” (34), showing human existence as being both of nature and separate from it, and therefore a threat to it and itself. The leaf intrudes on the constructed world, an "incomplete extinction of consciousness”. Whose or whats consciousness? Nature reminds the urban landscape that it has always been there, though is threatened (a single leaf, trembling). The non-human habitat lies below the human, and now sits tenuously atop. Remembrances of a world beyond roads and traffic lights occur for the human observer (47). Accordingly, the consciousness of belonging is not completely extinguished – possibly from either perspective.

Alternatively, belonging seamlessly to all, predicates higher levels of consciousness. Owls instinctively hunt rabbits. The chosen rabbit (a motif throughout) instinctively knows it is prey. Do we decide which element of our existence we are? Human survival is so often disembodied, “beheaded” from the sources of life (61, 65); the probability that enough instinctive consciousness exists to rejoin it, or for it to rejoin us, is scant. Recall, the speaker “become[s] the tree tho the tree does not become [her]” (10). Is it impossible for us to become that from which we are derived? These are questions which Joritz-Nakagawa brings to the fore. We are sources of violence and agitation. Chaos and despair power our cycles and ruin the cycles of nature. But also sources of love. Also hope.

And the forest has its own cycles.

Whorls (12, 53) on our fingertips identify us, and those in the rings of trees determine their age (14). Once the whorls are sighted in trees, they are no longer living. The phantom ache of ringless fingers, as we miss that which is not present, while yet bound to that which went before us, which still exists among us and we among it, is evoked.

married with a tree ring

at the end of the food chain

premature spiral

artificial coma      (14)

Which end of the food chain is not stated. It could be humans, but also trees depending on perspective, and either group at either end: Humans, confident that the world was made for their “happen stance”, pillage sources around them, ultimately relegating themselves to the bottom of the food chain as sustainability is forgotten. The future repeats in nature’s design, and also in the bloody-mindedness of forgetting to be part of sustainable nature (“future as repetition and decay”, 16). Spirals on a tree will appear from human causation, the tree dies and we measure its life, yet can we ever count all the trees? (14). What is the cost of turning forests into a commodity?

We leave our fingerprints, unique and destructive, and the earth leaves its patterns and whorls upon us. There is a wish to reconverge, though the memory of convergence is perhaps just a dream. However, when the forest learns the language of poetry a connection occurs between speaker and nature (47). Contrarily, as the poem, "<echo poetics>" states: “[t]he poem finally decides to accept the reverberations of the forest” (10). Maybe this is evolution, as the action taken in the body of the text is the speaker's decision not to write poetry “until the forest [begins] to think in verse/ the forest began to think in verse” (47). This arrangement could stem from human conceit, in that “one cannot enter the mind of the forest” (21) and “[i]t’s impossible to know the forest’s prerequisites” (10), though the speaker desires such.

These, too, are human presumptions. However, once ecology outside of the poem is accepted, rather than the reverse, inclusion in a larger system occurs, though poetry is still a linguistic construct. This recognition of the forest’s resonance appears within the first few pages of the book. Contradiction lies in the subsequent text, but the word “finally” foreshadows the whole (10). For the speaker, once the forest begins to think in verse, it gains rhyme and meter but also draws silent until it stops thinking (47–48). Cessation of thinking in verse might return the forest to itself.

Does thinking in verse encourage the loss of self and the merging of true self, or the opposite? The forest is lost to the speaker before this merger, or maybe it always was (35, 47). Aspects of poetry are to blend rhythms and words with observances and small perceptions of truth. Yet, as integral and aligned as it is with the Romantic notions of nature governing our being, words express thought, linguistics govern expressions, and these ideas are explored throughout the poem. Is the act of creating poetry part of a oneness beyond human, or something that defines and excludes us from non-human existence, and it from us? “[N]othing can be constructed /    during a loss of language,” (26) though when words are found the “contagion of the forest         becomes textual” (27). The forest cannot exist without words, and when words are found, they destroy the forest. Once it stops thinking  – stops being defined – it again becomes a forest, at least according to this poem’s semantics (48).

The verses stand like lines of trees, though they scatter and grow dense at times. Below the trees lies the fallen litter through which we “burrow” “to find a real world / beneath the fictitious ones” (9). From the opening pages, subterranean images are induced; a plump rabbit revisits grass it has already eaten (10), burrowing can lead us beyond the surface, the hairy legs of an animal are apparent to observation and experience (11). A lonely rabbit is perhaps eaten by an owl (15). The same animal, though configured differently each time, leads us through scenes like Alice trailing the white rabbit, or encountering the Mad Hatter – nature in urban clothing, humans and trees alike. “The forest [makes] the temple / obsolete”, yet we make the temple, thereby making the non-human obsolete, by trying to better that which already exists, as materials and space are needed for construction (16).

The rabbit which the owl ate is enticed back with representations of nature’s litter within the myriad of meanings that word contains:

i start to create the rabbit’s shroud out of

an old pillowcase picturing

flowers and shoots of grass i put shreds of

carrots inside

 

but cannot live in the forest without the

rabbit damn the owl

 

(I dreamt I bought a tiny patch of grass

in the city for 100,000 yen)                         (19–20)

Refuse (litter) can attract the rabbit (part of a litter), and litter can beget litter, and litters can beget litters, but can it raise the dead? This passage, the rabbit itself, and later images of the speaker’s run-down mother (52–53), remind us of nurturing patterns in human and non-human environments. The speaker emulates them when she attempts to attract and honour the rabbit, to provide herself and it with comfort. Yet the author also brings values of a materialistic society, and the history of a less than supportive childhood (48–55). As we forget our nature, or our relationship to a natural habitat, we forget how to look after it and ourselves. Despite collecting items for building a structure in the hope of remembering, housing and attracting the rabbit, the speaker cannot break the code of the forest (21), but like Alice, falls into it without comprehension and is unable to truly enter.

(the forest fades) (or i do)         feel myself falling

in the encrypted forest

matched by a violent wind                    mirror neurons

impossibility of entering the forest                   (21)

Conversely, the speaker is completely the forest and the forest a “mirror neuron”, or the "<echo poetics>" which inform the whole piece. Illustrating either hypothesis, she decides to become like the rabbit, “ ... eating the forest, starting with a /    small patch of grass/ the rabbit did not eat        costing ten thousand /    yen” (21). Concern with making a possibly artificial patch of grass, and twice mentioning varying property costs illuminates ventures to recreate nature through commercial/constructed means, and of literal consumption of the forest. A sense of longing and an ersatz representation of what it might mean to  blend more easily with the non-human develops in the poems.

Small things, female things, children, breaking-down, broken down, boneless, broken-bone bodies contribute to the forest’s litter, both as victims and nutrients. The forest is phallic and sometimes threatening, paralleling the personal and urban environment. (40–47). Outside the forest, the broken are sought for lovers (51). Within the forest, small things are as necessary as larger, though they might get entangled and plucked from a human’s hair (24). “It’s impossible to know the forest’s prerequisites” (10). Do we act like the owl, or like the rabbit? The speaker “cannot live in the forest without the rabbit”, considered eaten by an owl, but also considered possibly lonely, possibly enjoying himself, a connoisseur of a few blades of grass (18). If there is room for the vulnerable rabbit in the forest, there is room for vulnerable us, othered us, female to the hegemonic male, the different aspects of us (18–19). The rabbit and the owl, dead dogs and the flowing rivers: does the urban therefore have a place in the forest? The human?

The urban landscape, the non-forest, has a life and rhythm of its own, leading to death and dampening, not to regeneration and violent eruption. Death in the forest serves the purpose of regeneration, continuance. The owl survives. The rabbit does not. Within the poem, death in the urban landscape serves the purpose of others – it takes away from the cycle of life, not adding to it: dilapidated shopping malls like patches of grass (51–52), people in dead end situations (50), dead-end streets (50), cloudy thoughts prevent us from seeing the sky (64), our head in the clouds, our head in a terrorist’s grip, severed from our body with a ceremonial sword (61).

We may want to be the tree, but can we ever become so, having distanced ourselves from the earth where it grows? Maybe to become so, we need to be people first, and recognise humanity, rather than splintering it further with disassociation and disconnection. Burrowing beyond our representation and definition of treedom, we remain dependent upon the earth’s cycles, as much as we disrupt them. Understanding them achieves personal connection, though not guaranteed survival.

Images in this text are recycled, reused, though possibly not reduced, as Joritz-Nakagawa explores (im)balancing human existence with the non-human. Within the poem looping images, their evolution, adaptation and deformation into points further away from, and returning to, what must always be a manufactured point of origin, add to beautifully layered writing. The story of our existence, and the speaker’s existence, and the existence and non-existence of things beyond and from the worlds we inhabit, and all the questions and observances stemming from that, encapsulated within it at points of convergence and rejection, bring the “Distant Landscapes” of our being, and non-human being, maybe that one step closer, at least in understanding, whilst recognising that despite human wishes and desire such landscapes remain at least an arms-breadth away. 

A Beautiful Lie: Les Murray, On Bunyah

This beautifully presented book is a “New and Selected Poems” gathered round an intensely evocative and intimate experience of one rural valley, the poet’s “home district of Bunyah”. As such it is an important, celebratory, contribution to the growing body of place-based literature.

Throughout On Bunyah Murray displays an accuracy of observation and naming that testifies to a mindful respect and love for the natural world. In “Dead Trees in the Dam” (70), Murray develops a wonderful juxtaposition as he celebrates the colour, movement and sound of the birds that visit a stand of dead trees over the course of a day. These are trees that appear as “castle scaffolding tall in moat” and “flower each morning with birds”. Murray’s poem delights in an accuracy of observation and naming as he captures the “resident / cormorants with musket-hammer necks”, “the clinician spoonbill”, the “twilight herons”, the “pearl galahs in pink-fronted / confederacy”, the “misty candelabrum / of egrets”, the “stopped-motion shrapnel / of kingparrots”, the “wed ducks”, magpies, the “high profile ibis” and the “big blow-in cuckoo crying / Alarm, Alarm on the wing”. This major Murray poem of praise to the natural world reminds me of mid-twentieth century Australian poet, Grace Perry’s “Ibis on the lake” (1976, 65). In her poem, Perry reworks the Arthurian myth of the lady in the lake and “the sword lost long ago in water” as she celebrates the wild water birds that visit a stand of dead trees in a lake. Perry’s poem concludes:

Teal ride at anchor under willow trees.

Ducks unroll scrolls of shadow in their wake.

Let us be unemotional as the ibis

nesting on the island in the lake.

 

Long ago the sword was lost in water.

The surface drowned the memory of blood.

Still the samite arm, the solitary bird

flames white against dark skeletons of wood.

This now overlooked poet deserves revisiting.

In “Two Rains” (38) Murray evokes a richly intimate knowledge of place in the way that he captures Bunyah farms caught in the “patched blue overlap / between Queensland rain and Victorian rain”. The southern rain might be “absorbed / like a cool, fake-colloquial, drawn out lesson” but it is also described as being like “our chased Victorian silver”. While the Queensland rain is “lightning-brewed in a vast coral pot” that “disgorges its lot / in days of enveloping floodtime blast / towering and warm as a Papuan forest”.

In “The Grassfire Stanzas” (46-47) Murray describes a farmer busy with winter fuel-reduction:

August, and black centres expand on the afternoon paddock.

Dilating on a match in widening margins, they lift

a splintering murmur; they fume out of used-up grass

that’s been walked, since summer, into infinite swirled licks.

The burning attracts kestrels and hawks that “teeter / and plunge continually, working over the hopping outskirts” but as the farmer burns: “the green feed that shelters beneath its taller death yearly / is unharmed, under new loaf soot”. This is a fecund world (if poor in economic terms), so in “The Broad Bean Sermon” (24-25) we are told that “going out to pick beans with the sun high as fenceposts, you find / plenty”:

 Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness

– it is your health – you vow to pick them all

even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

Such celebration of the interconnectedness of all creatures and an approach to the natural world that is life-affirming, almost sacramental, in the way that it cultivates a poetry of communion with nature as a form of communion with God, is a feature of the Murray poem of praise. This is poetry that sees goodness in the world and is content to praise what has been made. The drawback with such an approach, of course, is that:

only small things may come to a head, in this

settlement pattern   (46)

 Thus, as richly layered and beautiful as the hymns of praise may be, what is omitted, what is bandaided, is often like a splinter to a reader more attuned to ecocritical and postcolonial values.

In his foreword we are told that “the native name [of Bunyah] is given as meaning bark, the essential building material of ancient Australia” (xi); but Murray does not take this word etymology as evidence of Indigenous settlement for we are also told that Bunyah was a “convenient trackway between the coast and sheltering mountains’”(xi); that such a fertile and sheltered valley, with permanent fresh water, is viewed as having no previous permanent custodianship by First Nations beggars belief. Ironically, as Murray himself writes:

accused of history

many decide

not to know any    (134)

And in “The Grassfire Stanzas” Murray writes:

Humans found the fire here. It is inherent. They learn,

Wave after wave of them, how to touch the country.     (47)

The custodianship of First Nations should not be written of as just another invasion of pristine wilderness and Murray might like to write of his family’s Bunyah occupation as having begun in “the Eden of the country” (96) and in “Bible times” (36) but it did not; it came after Indigenous peoples (and only at the cost of their dispossession).

This book is a beautifully layered paean to a rural valley and the people (non-Indigenous) who now call it home. Murray finds so much to praise and celebrate and his lyrical imagism is (almost) irresistible. I find myself so much in love with Murray’s writing (but also disquieted by it).