This delightful book is a vivid celebration of nineteenth-century science – its passion for investigation, acquisition, collection and display – illustrated by the lives of Jane Catharine Tost and her daughter Ada Jane Rohu, whose taxidermy and curio business operated from 1860 until 1923.

Jane, her husband and four children, arrived in Hobart in 1856:

three months ’tween decks

and I cannot wait to enter

that cathedral of wild southern light

where the animals who have inhabited

my dreams, strange creatures –

devils and tigers, spotted cats

(12)

Two years later, a thylacine prepared by Jane Tost was photographed – the first record of one being photographed. Over the years, Tost & Coates (later Tost & Rohu) prepared a range of animals: birds, reptiles, marsupials, squirrels, snakes, a shipload of African mammals brought back to Australia by a big-game expedition. By 1872, they were based in Sydney; Ada Jane Rohu had joined her mother in the business. Taxidermy means “arranging skin”, and the word itself was invented in and for the nineteenth century, a word needed in the frenzy to pillage and preserve the forms of life Europeans were finding all over the world.

And a frenzy it was. This was the time of “cabinets” displaying helter skelter the loot of empire, and of museums comprising room after room of display cases, things upon things with little if any information about them.

Thylacinus cynocephalus was a mouthful,

too difficult to articulate, ...

Better to mount its robust tail

erect and purposeful, a mouth full

of poultry and to consider its still,

taxidermied potential.

(15)

Imperial greed for curiosities had no limit, and the collectors’ sense of humanity was a far cry (we hope) from our own. Tost & Rohu – a taxidermy firm! not a cemetery, not an undertaker, not a church – was approached about a specimen sarcophagus containing the remains of a New Caledonian chief and another time about the remains of a man unearthed at Gunnedah. We don’t know where either man ended up, but in this book Hannaford’s lyrical lament for the New Caledonian and a chant for the Australian honour them belatedly, years after their shameful treatment:

into the cold dark like a stone

carried clear and dripping

from a river, heavy and weighted

with the tarnish of plunder,

a Gunn-e-darr man, rising,

carrying his country as witness

to patternings of shame

no craniometer can measure.

(23)

Various of the poems are made up of groupings, but two main series stand out. “An Arrangement of Skins” contains eight poems inspired by biography and historical record, from the Ballarat Goldfields back in the day to a possum-hunter in the Tasmanian bush in 1972. At the very beginning, there is Jane and her cabinet-maker husband, new and young immigrants in 1860:

A warmth of breath holding beneath

woody scents of fresh resin, under folds

of hand stitched possum rug; seventy-two pelts.

It begins with an arrangement of fur, sinew, and skin.

(40)

Twenty years later, in Sydney, the daughter:

Ada turns the rug and surveys

seventy-two squares of skin...

Geometric designs wave, cross hatch, and circle

her eye as she considers cloaking the fur

on a mannequin for display.

(47)

The methods and materials of taxidermy are varied, and strange indeed to the ignorant, though there are a couple of poems which list the tools of the trade and some of their uses.

Both Jane Tost (in England) and Ada Rohu (with her mother) studied with the best and were seen at the time as top in their craft. In 1862, Jane applied to the Australian Museum in Sydney for work preparing exhibits (her profession was “Naturalist” on her immigration papers). She was hired, the first woman professional in any Australian museum, and received equal pay for equal work. (Full marks to the Australian Museum for this – well done, and are you giving equal pay for equal work today? I hope so.)

The philosophy of taxidermy – the mind-set behind the craft and some of the considerations which come from studying it – is shown in a series of six poems, “To a Taxidermist”. Unlike most of the other poems in the book, which combine description with Hannaford’s take on a nineteenth-century situation, these poems have a direct and contemporary feel, a face pointing only at us.

Here are the first few lines of all six poems, in order.

I

You who celebrate the dead and within death

revel in the enchantment of skin-folds. You

who stuff, arrange and preserve the essential rapture

of our new animal selves, cast in fur or feathers.

(24)

II

You who catalogue the catalogue of the undead,

the precision flensing instrument of death that strips

all from a creature but its name. ...

(25)

 III

You who understand the elasticity of skin as fabric,

who comprehend and curate the potential

of installation – the exterior world inside –

apply arsenical soaps, tincture of camphor,

to reveal the definitive articulation of a species.

(26)

IV

You who change profession according to the

seasons of a pelt. ...

(27)

V

You who belong to a long line of corpse-keepers,

embalmers, feline and ibis stuffers, mountain-top

sacrifice makers, hide takers and tanners, saint

venerators, salt rubbers, armature and mannequin

shapers.  ...

(28)

VI

You who sculpt the anatomies of concealment,

a feather artfully placed, careful surgical seaming

on the underside of torsos. ...

This poem concludes:

                                                Salvage is sleight of hand,

a too-late cautionary narrative of sorts, a tool-kit

to repair those we have damaged, a melancholic

chimera of sentient creatures who bark, squawk, roar,

and chatter in our corridors, on our continents.

(29)

 After reading this series of poems, I saw the entire book on a new level. Try reading these quotes as an address “To a Historian” – “To a Preacher” – “To a Poet”. Taxidermy isn’t such a daft subject-matter for poetry after all, when you are reminded what metaphor lets us do. But to what degree do we want to compare our poems to museum specimens? At the time, the strange creatures that Jane Tost and Ada Rohu assembled were more than loot; they were intended to encourage a sense of awe and wonder in people far away from the Antipodes, and doubtless they did just that. Now many of them are only a reminder of our own flaws. Are the awe and wonder gone forever, or can we go somewhere else to find them?

Hannaford keeps her own poems distinct from her historical notes which link the poems (catalogue entries for the 1893 Chicago Exhibition, newspaper snippets, lists of equipment, biographical notes), keeping the poetry in roman type and the rest in italic. The typographic convention also highlights the difference between the dry descriptive passages and the individuality of the poems themselves.

She has a scrupulous concern with her subject matter, its present shape as well as its origins. Some so-called historical material now popular presents the past as it might possibly have been, given a bit of retroactive tinkering – a technique I find at best a way of avoiding research, at worst a way of avoiding our own responsibility for preserving the facts of our history, a failure both ways. Fortunately, this is not Hannaford’s way.

There are eight pages of bibliographic material used in citations, as references, or as source material. This includes book and thesis material, newspaper citations, web sites listed in connection with specific poems. There is also a list of general reference materials. All in all, it’s a fascinating collection.

Melbourne writer Lisa Jacobson’s South in the World follows from her award-winning verse-novel The Sunlit Zone (which won the 2014 John Bray Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for many other national awards such as the Stella Prize) and is, I suspect, much-anticipated in Australian literary circles.

They say not to judge a book by its cover (or title?), but I was seduced and (having recently returned from a walk on the Overland Track) looked forward to a collection that might take me South and perhaps crack open a window on the experience of southness – life defined or drawn magnetically south, its particular geographies, weather, light, species and politics. As readers we might find that geographical “southness” in the title poem; yet in other parts of the collection this specificity is curiously absent. Jacobson states in her author’s notes that her poems are about: “the struggle to maintain a balance between those southern and northern poles by which we navigate the world: between ordinary living and the desire to transcend it, between earth and sky, body and spirit, descent and ascent, the real and ethereal, the mundane and exotic” (109). So in a sense it is the experience of opposition, or the need for “balance” that the poet seeks to develop. The collection as a whole evokes the desire or need for transcendence, to be more mid-ground, buoyed with life and its demands for our “full attention / as we pedal up the hill” (10).

South in the World is organised into five parts, yet I struggled to pin down the rationale behind the sequencing of poems. The scope of Jacobson’s is broad – mythology underpins many of the earlier poems in the collection. Poems about Angels (flight and earthly groundings) and God, segue into poems about horses, while others recall childhood, explore mother-daughter relationships and the trauma of divorce. There is even a sequence of Holocaust poems, which includes the haunting “Anne Frank’s Sister Falls from Her Bunk”, where readers witness Anne’s sister dragged dead from a room sounding like “water and dark earth” (36). With such a breadth of concerns and thematic concepts, I wondered if the many fine and strong poems included here may have seemed less disparate if organised more coherently, or at least differently.

What does it mean to be “South in the World”? The title comes from Jacobson’s poem of the same name which is about the Black Saturday firestorms that devastated towns such as Kingslake and Marysville in Victoria on Saturday, 7 February 2009 and killed 173 people (26). A recent article titled “Invincible Summer” by Rebecca Giggs (2013) in Southerly spoke of the yet unwritten history of Australia’s cultural responses to fire, and as I write this there are fires burning wildly in the Adelaide hills. Jacobson’s poem “South in the World” is a sequence of eight vignettes that embed this sense of opposition; the narrator is writing of Australian bushfires from a “distant city” and in “air distilled by alpine snow” (from Zurich) (26). As well as the desolation of fires, Giggs (2013) suggests that “Fires are of course, not all ruinous. See the green pick return; seed life germinated in the pyric blast. Far from snapping the tether between us and the landscape, fire – even the potentiality of fire – has the capacity to make us more sensitised to country, and bring us into a moral relationship with it” and it is this highly sensitised awareness that Jacobson evokes. As she writes, “the charcoal forest is greening” yet there are some that will remain “black and dead” (26), thus it is the same for those “who returned to see / the things no one should ever see” (29). The regrowth is our hold on hope, or the loss of it:

The people are the same,

unfurling from the stumps of hearts

or falling backwards into them.

("South in the World" 26)

Throughout the poem there is the spectre of Chagall’s Green Christ, a manifestation of “greening” as environmental resurrection:

The spirit takes flight as nails

sink into skin, the cross dissolves

into leaves, becomes a ring,

a hoop of gold rising above

tree-level

("South in the World" 26)

Yet Jacobson is wary of simplistic “loss of faith” narratives. Certainly her angels are “no match for fireballs”, but still there is hope in the miraculous emergence of new life –

is it too much to grasp the greening of things

that were black and charred?

("South in the World" 29)

With the final lines, “The body burnt and pierced floats/ ever skyward. Keep your eyes on it” those who remain are charged to observe “it” (29). “It” could certainly refer to the souls of the dead, but my reading is that we are warned against complacency; the potentiality of fire is an ever-present threat that waits to test our resolve; “it” hovers like an ember drifting across Eucalypt stands or, as Giggs (2013) describes, “it” threatens to ignite like Black Saturday reports of “flames [that] took hold mid-air, nourished on oil that had aerolyzed from the eucalyptus trees”.

Horses are a favourite motif of Jacobson’s. A vehicle for earthly flight, they also signify childhood memories and sexuality. Horses are strange, unknown animals to me. I vividly recall Anthony Lawrence’s (2002) poem “In a Limerick Field”, where a horse shakes itself with a sound “like a thick blanket being shaken” and the poet waits for “the dark / geometry of splayed and folded wings”, for the transformation of the animal into myth. So too, do Jacobson’s horses transform. Yet they affect the transformation of people. In the beautiful “On teaching My Daughter to Ride a Horse” the daughter is a “fire-lit child”, as she rides she becomes “another kind of creature; equine and winged” (9). Another, “Girls and Horses in the Fire” narrates the tragedy of two young women who “wreathed by flames and embers”, died trying to save horses in the Black Saturday fires (25). One of my favourite poems “Morning Ride” (75) (also, I discovered in The Best Australian Poems 2014) details a train journey where teenage schoolgirls are portrayed as horses. Everything that’s animal is deliciously “new-glistening” and alive here:

School girls whinny and toss their yellow manes

in half-wild herds on board the morning train.

I'll never be like that again. What’s quick

in them now slows in me, though I recall

their visceral scent, new-glistening, which makes

grown men and school boys shift, ambivalent

in their vinyl seats. The girls gossip and stamp

their black-laced feet. Some part their legs a bit.

Something's begun, some urgent heartstrong need

For root and seed that no old god can halt,

no worn-out creed. The train groans to a stop.

The girls get off in a flecked-skirt, skittish mob,

disperse. And yet, the taut wire of their want

persists; their sharp desire, its imperative.

(" Morning Ride" 75)

Throughout South in the World, Jacobson’s language is simple and direct. At times I believe this straightforwardness, the “everyday” of her subject matter works very effectively, it’s the “ease” Chris Wallace Crabbe mentions on the back cover. This is particularly clear when exploring relationships between mother and daughter. In poems such as “Sadness” (14), “Signs of Life” (15) and “Thoughts between Christmas and New Year” (78), this directness leads the reader to the intimacy and tenderness of love and its occasional misguidance:

I too was once a daughter

Pelting my own mother

With the still-hard berries

Of girlhood

(“Thoughts between Christmas and New Year” 78)

Here the metaphor of berries as the not-yet-ripe bitterness of adolescence work wonderfully and any mother or daughter may wince in recognition, as I did, upon reading it.

Yet in other poems such as “Walking the Black Dog” (65) the simplicity left this reader yearning for a more visceral, visual experience and a more complex engagement with the subject matter.

Jacobson often navigates difficult terrain in her employment of a mythic subject matter that distances the reader somewhere “between earth and sky”:

I am dreaming of you nightly now,

Galloping white and luminous

against the sky

(“Take Off”11)

I wondered at times, how do these mythologies of angels and flying horses become real for me?

Jacobson states in her author’s note that poets are guardians of myth and imagination, that they (we) are charged with “strengthening our connections with mystery and the eternal” (110). For me, the poet was most successful in this, most vivid and startling, when she was writing from a position that was clearly anchored “South in the World”.

My mother asked me this week, would you rather be a footballer or a poet? Why must there be a choice, I asked. There is, she said, and the evidence is there’s very few who have been both.

Where would you rather be, at Collected Works Bookshop on Melbourne’s busy Swanston Street with ten or twenty poetry aficionados, or at the MCG with twenty or thirty thousand football followers? It doesn’t matter, really, because wherever you are, you could have a copy of The Thin Bridge in your hand or bag, a book that will talk to you wherever you are, about how we are all, strangely, alive with “that earthly life, that miracle of being, that poetry conserves and celebrates”, as Denise Levertov (The Poet in the World, 115) has noted.

In 1865, Henry James wrote a preface to a new book of poetry by Walt Whitman, and his opening sentence went, “It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it” (Selected Literary Criticism, 1). My task in talking about Andy Jackson’s new book is not a melancholy one, and unlike Mr James, I am convinced that what I have been reading is poetry. It is poetry that does conserve and celebrate this earthly life intensely, insistently, and beautifully. If a city has enough poets in it, egging each other on, trying to outdo each other, then inevitably that city will give rise to the occasional brilliant poet, and occasional poem that has wings.

Andy Jackson is one who has risen, it seems to me, out of a city where half the population has chosen football and the other half has chosen poetry. Andy Jackson is special. He has proven this with his first collection, and now by winning against fierce competition the privilege of being published in this exquisitely produced Whitmore Press series.

So, I am not approaching this task with melancholy, and I won’t be making the kinds of comments Mr James made, such as “the frequent capitals are the only marks of verse in Mr Whitman’s writing”, but I am approaching this task of talking about Andy Jackson’s book with trepidation.

You might think that I am approaching the task of talking about this book with prevarication as well, and you would be right about that too. Let’s prevaricate a little further. Denise Levertov wrote that she “can carry burdens from forest to sea as sagaciously as the elephant”. Her elephant is the elephant of long treks, endurance and wisdom. We know that there are many kinds of elephants, and one of these is the elephant in the room. Let me read to you from a thin bridge about that elephant:

There isn’t much room left for us.

When we need to eat or collect

the mail, we inch sideways

along the wall, two-dimensional …

I thought I heard sobbing last night,

sensed your hand stroking the globe

of his belly. It’s not a dream

 

when I wake to feel his hot breath,

his trunk hovering over my body. He

nudges my chest and head, reverently

lifts my arm, as if it were a tusk, lifeless

(2–3).

Andy Jackson has a way of not only conjuring for us that elephant, with its monstrous comedy, but he tames it, he uncovers its curious existence both within and outside us. We are relieved, and we are strangely alive at the end, though the elephant has not left the room. The poem is a little longer than his usual one-page limit in this book. The elephant might not leave the room but it does expand across two pages in this tiny book, so short of pages.

The lines of free verse have the classic rhythms of English poetry, slipping between the iambic and the anapestic, across 4 or 5 beats per line, a line length long enough to have the dramatic or subtle stop along the way. I love the line and a half that goes, “little grunts escape our mouths/involuntary confessions” – for the way it turns the tables on us, giving us humans the animal sounds, but then suggesting that these are after all the stuff of poetry, the true confession that truly celebrate and conserves this earthly life.

All this of course is to avoid talking about the elephant. But after all, what would we be if we didn’t have an elephant in every room where we gather? We would not be the social, duplicitous, fearful, clinging and grunting creatures that we are.

The elephant might be the one Andy writes of so eloquently in those poems of his previous book, “Quasimodo”, “Among the Regulars” and “Mirrors”, his account of his first meeting with the MARFAN association of Victoria. But there are many elephants, all of them always jostling us, and that’s our comic tragedy Andy Jackson has been so acute about writing about.

Poetry raises the most pressing questions, often at a slant, or slyly, or even unwittingly. We know, as we have come to dominate the planet, all seven and more billion of us, that there is a growing sense of the imminent loss of ecosystems that gave rise to us. We are suddenly curious about that divide between ourselves and the animal world. Students are writing theses about it, novelists are turning out novels about it, philosophers won’t stop talking about it, and poets write poems like “A Language I didn’t Know”, where the poet sits by a waterfall and encounters a bird:

… clearly he has seen me and knows

my intent, standing now right before me,

 

having flown across a gulf of rock, air

and species. The silk of his black breast,

 

his eyes rivets of rust-red, wings

suddenly arms folded to barely conceal

 

something obscure we have in common.

He makes a sound like a stone

 

being dropped into a small, deep pool.

I try to make the same sound, feel

 

absurdly human, but straight away he walks

forward, like I’ve said yes to a question

(24–25)

The poem is a series of thin bridges in longish couplets on the page, and each line-ending hovers over a gap, as though the poem wants to tip us out of ourselves repeatedly. It is a clever and real poem. And it touches upon the melancholy knowledge of the insouciance with which we dismiss species after species from the planet and from our conversation.

There is one more poem I want to talk about, and that is the poem reflecting upon his experience of being sculpted, or of witnessing someone produce a sculpture of himself. I will leave you to find this poem in the book yourself. It is also, of course, a witnessing of anything that is sculpted as a self-portrait. Each poem we encounter is a form of self-portrait of the poet, we know that, and we look for the way poems do that. This poem plays delicately with the problem of consciousness and naturalness, just as the previous one did, and just as the one before that did. The poem is both melancholy and celebratory, both wholly in charge of its formal presentation of itself, and helpless too in allowing that light might fall from any direction and any source upon us. Again, the poem arrives on the page as couplets, a favoured form for Andy Jackson, and just when it might have been a sonnet, it offers one more single line, as if it just won’t be told what shape to take, but has its own mind.

This is a handsome book, and each poem in it is wholly itself. I commend it to you and I commend it to its life as book. Welcome to it.

“One swallow does not a summer make”

Upon opening the first few pages of Nicola Bowery’s third poetry collection, I was immediately touched by a twenty-year old memory of time spent in NSW. The bus tour out from Wollongong where I had gone for a conference to the University stopped for lunch somewhere at noon in the middle of an Australian summer forest.

as lichen

seduces the fallen log

(“untitled”)

And I recalled that day and that moment perfectly:

this land too straggly, ungracious

(“my space”)

and smelt again the bush, the eucalypts, the heat, the earth

under the rusty mantle of last year’s bracken

(“my space”)

One of the strengths of Bowery’s poetry is her felicitous use of imagery invoking our senses on almost every page:

A robin lands like a scarlet full-stop on the bowl’s edge

(“Bird bowl on a tree stump”)

 I hear only the king-parrot’s

pinpoint note

pricking the silence

(“here and then”)

 In the distance the weighty drone of a tractor

slashing paths

clickshots of stones and sticks

(“moments”)

only the bed knows

how each body writes on the other

delicate transcriptions in daylight and darkness

(“The bed”)

I pop the eggs against the roof of my mouth

with my eager spatula tongue

savouring the contrast of textures

(“Fine dining in Noosa”)

The first untitled poem in the collection bears in its concluding line the title of the collection:

so we are married to this ground

It is a beautiful, accomplished and stunning piece of work, almost a sonnet it contains only thirteen lines. Its successful use of repetition in each unrhymed couplet:

as lichen

builds through a skilful trellis of words to an utterly satisfying conclusion.

Two questions are important here. Firstly why is there in no other poem in this collection that comes even close in reaching nor equalling its excellence? Secondly in the structure of organizing the sequence of a poetry collection why is it placed first when the reader is going to look for and be disappointed that this superb single poem will not to be found again. As I was.

The collection is divided into three parts and the first section here is the strongest, Bowery’s poetic strengths are displayed best when she is dealing with insects, birds and animals. Her figurative language somewhat on show in this suite of poems of which “Huntsman spider” is amongst my favourites:

his toenails pale or dark

his demeanour comatose or watchful

for any of us who either fear, hate or love these creatures there is much to admire here.

Her series of poems on birds is good and her use of metaphor crisp and compelling. Bowery is a keen and sharp observer of nature and it shows in her verse.

Such a dapper acrobat!

His black purposive cap

the elongated curved beak like a surgical probe

the chestnut cravat low on the crisp white throat

(“Eastern spinebill”)

One poem in this early part of the book “On why there are more man poems on this particular shelf of companions in my writing space” is quite misplaced. It is a curious, contentious and quite confused piece and one that needs a good deal more thought and work.

In the second section, “a geography of marriage” the whole collection begins to not only lose its way but becomes quite bogged down. There are twenty-two poems here and each one is the same poem written over and over again. The relationship between Bowery and her husband deserves perhaps “Mug” and “The bed”, which are delightful but not more. If there is any relief in these poems, it is when she returns to the natural world:

It’s raining. Instantly the lichen sleeves

on the blackwood branches are swelling,

their pale mint-green luminescent in the gloom

(“Country life”)

and

corellas shout

the noisiest of birds

 

hardly credible how they bawl

megaphones in their stubby beaks

(“you’re shouting”)

The daily ritual of a marriage: work, arguments, anger, memories, disasters, love, porridge, absence, etcetera are all handled well enough and the poems are competent and agreeable but there are few surprises or fresh perspectives.

In the third part of this book “elsewhere” the poetry not only falters but fails to comply with the title and central theme of the book. My complaint is twofold: the unevenness in the quality of the poems and that these poems feel added on. They are occasional poems and don’t/can’t form any kind of satisfying sequence.

Bowery sets out in married to the ground to map a geography of terrain and relationships. To show the reader her world. That she loses her way or that she has not done enough work on more poems that bring this theme to life is a pity. I do not want to be taken “elsewhere” with poems that are tedious, lack direction and add nothing to the centrality of the book. The last three poems in the book: “watching rugby”, “dining out at Noosa” and “a Zen retreat” should not have been included. They are not poems. They are good ideas and in each case a first draft that need an enormous amount of further thought, work, and drafting, editing and polishing.

And thus I return to page 1 and read again these wonderful, delightful thirteen lines of verse and earnestly hope that Bowery has more poetry like this to come in the future. It is both an exemplar and an example of how good she can be. It is such a pity that nothing else represented here in this collection rises to its heights of excellence.

Helen Hagemann

Theories have been around for centuries. It was first thought that the world was flat, until Galileo proved the Copernican theory that the earth did actually revolve around the sun. Recently I purchased nail polish called Color Theory, and per se, was offered Bonny Cassidy’s latest collection titled Final Theory. In this work of free verse two main stories are evoked, but more importantly the poetry centres on the theory of “finalities”. Theory. There are several meanings to the word: abstract reasoning, speculation, an assumption based on limited information, a belief or principle that guides action or assists comprehension or judgement, even the branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice. Head spinning!

Well, this is how I felt after reading Final Theory.

The collection is divided into four parts and appears as four distinct narratives, each separate page without a title. Before outlining the content of this poetry, it is important to understand that the disastrous worlds that Cassidy captures in these episodes are written from an interrogative stance. It is certainly not lyric poetry, but more post-avant. As Adam Fieled (2006) writes “post-avant poetry is distinguished from other forms of ‘po-mo’ by its deliberate shying away from the directly ‘personal’, as well as its engagement with ‘morally motivated abstraction’”.

Did I write abstraction? Yes. Most of this collection is fairly abstract. However, it is for a reason. The post-avant poet’s main aim is to avoid the lyric “I” and as Fieled (2006) writes, “the poet employs ‘Negative Capability’ to express contradictions and oppositions, harmonies and discords, without affixing his or her identity to any fixed locale”. We do know however, after several readings of each section, that Cassidy’s finalities (harmonies and discords) exist somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, in New Zealand, Tasmania, Antarctica, and possibly the ancient Gondwana. (This information is gleaned from Cassidy receiving a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship and her trips to these areas).

It is tempting to delve deeper into this collection in order to understand the literal level of the poetry. However, in the light of the above that we are dealing with post-avant poetry, this is not possible. Instead, I am tackling this review by looking at each of the four sections in terms of binaries.

They are: birth / death – aesthetic / catastrophic – factual / mythical, with varying rhizomes.

In the foreword, these images set the tone for what is to come:

A camera tracks the ocean floor

(eating images, not colliding). And rests. …

 

A child plunges headlong into that valley

scuttling crud.

 

The camera is her dream tunnel. …

(1)

On the previous page, there is a quote from Lionel Fogarty’s “Scenic Wonders – We Nulla Fellas”: “Ranges and countless channels uninhabited’ /… ‘cones / knives, volcanoes borning a surface external / wave, rock over arid plains are not far from our base.” From Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen’s, How The Universe Will End, this quote appears: “Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening forever… on the long road from order to disorder.” Now we have some inkling of where this is going!

In Section 1, expect to be transported to the aftermath of New Zealand’s earthquake in the south island, possibly Christchurch and its surrounds.

Bucking

under

distant melt

 

[…]

 

an envelope of land

is opened and warm-skinned

cold-blooded ocean welling.

(14)

What is at stake here is the morality / immorality binary of this catastrophe. The land has been corrupted, as Cassidy writes, “see the little bastard coming to the fray. / An inkling child of oil and grit” (14). Yet, the “day glows” and on Steven’s Island the scene is inviolate:

                             … wren, piopio, huia, saddleback, kokako,

short-tailed bat, long-tailed bat –

who opened a gap and thudded through, back-first.

The place became

a host of wings, a fall of parrots. …

(16)

Section II diverts from the disaster caused by nature and the ultimate survival of the natural world. In some way we are carried forward (or is it back to Gondwana?) to where in “some future ocean our beloved proteins will / roll, perhaps finding one another, linked / by a theoretical wave” (18). At a guess, the binary in this section is either “obliteration / creation”, “or birth / death.” A child is involved and the poetry is mythical, strange, she comes:

  face to face with a rubber alligator

 

then wheels, seeing

the alligator dissolve as she grows:

 

byproduct, polymer-spun

and grasping.

(21)

The setting of the ocean with its water flowers and flushing weed is metaphorical. Cassidy appears to re-create the child’s life as a life saved and lived in water. It’s a slow letting go, but death is lengthened, perhaps not realised, until:

 … they’ve clustered on a corpse she snatches

at the crowd, fills her mouth, cancelling their fuss

with her fried tongue.

 

       But in the landscape of her head

      one lives on …

(28)

Section III introduces another landscape that hints of isolation but, more to the point, of being slightly inhabited / uninhabitable: “try to make its faces out: they’re deserted” (39).

Swerving from the valley’s head

pipes cascade silently

and divert

to a compound buried in slick white rock.

(43)

The two people in the narrative, rather than being “in the detritus of the old harbours” (6), are on “high ground” staring across a valley and in “one of the cars some kids / amped their dying stereo / so it shone across the valley” (39–40).

A biplane lifted from its beach and wiped up light.

           […]

          The lake rose, floating

          on the valley

          then deepened to a stop.

          Sailing peaks.

(40)

In Section IV, we return to the child / girl, although the “she” point-of-view of water-baby or survivor is unclear. However, certain aspects of the binary of factual / mythical are evident in this final poetry. The setting of caves, the ocean, the rift of ice, and “on the surface: canisters, their reels of punctured weed” (67), “the plastics she has loved” (66), appear as evidence to the aftermath of a previous disaster or catastrophe. The “she” person in the poetry also has an affinity with and appears to be floating in this fallible landscape.

Rummaging the hadal scum

she rips white clams from their roots

and sifts with toothless gums.

(69)

We could hardly believe that this character / child or super woman would be human, surviving hours below the sea, being flung high to a cliff face, and then have her “bellows grind through avenues of the last ice” (70). One supposes she is likened to a mythical character, similar to the Greek sea-goddess Thetis who had the power to change her shape at will.

Nose to sloppy ice

she gnaws –

a line draws itself

 

across her head

and silently folds

inward:

 

the thin zones inch

 

she rises

involuntary

(70–71)

Apart from the obscure nature of this radical poetry, it must be mentioned that the work has a foray of excellent poetic techniques: strong rhythm, imbibed tone, powerful imagery, a picturesque view of the natural world, a motif of photography (as real / made-up images) and unforgettable phrases such as: “to understand why the ocean ends / here. Drinking from the teeth / of the cliff” (25) and “down the rift / (past a rusted box, its long eye gazing into sludge)” (67). Final Theory might not be for all, especially lovers of lyric poetry, but for those who like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, post-modernist, experimental or post-avant poetry, it’s a challenging read.

The viewpoint of Rose Lucas’s Even in the Dark is respect for ordinary life and the pleasure in living. The poems find joy and hope in the simple things shared with family and friends, despite the challenges of life. Her poetry is more centred on the sphere of humans and culture than on the other-than-human. This is not necessarily intended as a criticism, negative for ecopoetics though the connotations of an anthropocentric perspective are. Two main threads of thought are important for an ecopoetic reading of this volume. First, the poems indicate acceptance that humans are just one life form among others: human dominance over the other-than-human is not an issue. Second, they embrace the connectedness between people, places and the other. For Lucas, the notion of a meaningful relationship with earth is significant.

The motif of change seems to reverberate throughout the volume. All life forms are inevitably subject to elemental forces that change the way we are and how we respond to our surroundings. There is uncertainty to existence; the narrator seems to tread a fine line between toughness and fragility, grief and hope. Poems such as “Monica”, “Qana”, “Bunty” and “Air France Flight 447” are about our vulnerability and the temporality of existence. Vulnerability is an unsettling theme that is, however, not restricted to the human domain. From the poem “Even in the Dark” (33) the leaves are falling “all in calm readiness for the onset / of small things – / say, a chink of pale light”; “the “shift and slip of change” continues at all times, even while we are unconscious of the process. Everything is equally dependent upon, and subject to, the creative destructive universe. This is particularly evident in the opening poem “Heat Wave, Melbourne” which begins with the death of a ring-tail possum from heat exhaustion (her suckling young alive in her pouch) and a man struggling to get his daughter to school in the “metallic” summer heat. The word “meanwhile” is pivotal to the shift in focus of this poem from the non-human to the human. Although the focal shift does seem somewhat disruptive, it points to a sense of shared suffering between the human and the other in a parallel existence. This locating of the self towards nature leads to a humbling that is a necessary requirement for an ecocentric view. Humility tempers anthropocentric reasoning.

Human strengths and weaknesses are revealed in particular through poems about pregnancy, birth, nurturing, illness and death. Lucas’s poems of this kind, however, form common ground for all living creatures. Each species is subject to the body’s engagements and responses which are ceaselessly adjusting to things outside themselves, things that are continually altering. A summary of our shared existence with other life forms is found in the poem “Window” (107) from the section of the same name.

See how all

things might be

 

refracted

     here

in this small round,

in this brief

threading

of a needle’s eye,

how all the waiting world

might be

     quilted

and unravelled here.

The here-and-now is framed, and “all things” at any given moment, might be crafted and destroyed regardless of their nature.

The section “Jacaranda Time” focuses mainly on reawakening and renewal which is also relevant for an ecopoetic reading of this volume. In the poem “In Vitro” (85), for example, provision is made available for grounding ourselves in both our own flesh and the flesh of the external world.

I dreamed you

      child

   skin sinew tendril of

hair,

long, long before

my body was the boat

you rode

on your strange journey

up,

and into daylight’s air.

Here the reader is allowed to experience the resolution of the tension between the inner and outer environment, a merging between consciousness and environment. In this section too, joy is found in new beginnings, in the “hard place of love’s beginnings” (from “Adopting” 98), and of the revelation of “unimagined patterns” (from “Mid-morning Café” 100). From the “humble poetry of the backyard, / this ceremony of daily love” we are given “the rich harvest of the basket” (from “Clothesline” 103). In appreciating the simple things and not knowing all the answers we find humility.

In some of the poems the poet’s concerns are directly ecocentric. “Summer, Back Paddock” (16) serves as one example. The humans come to the back paddock as “visitors”, albeit equipped with “gumboots, folding chairs, [and] aerogard”. This poem is not about property ownership or about control; the people come into the realm of animals and birds as witnesses. They quickly become as if enveloped within the biosphere of the back paddock. Yet the human and the other, as separate entities, are each allowed to exist as instinct decrees. As the poem evolves it appears that the humans are not merely external observers but are active participants. To achieve this outcome, Lucas presents a subjective stance to experience; it begins from within individual consciousness and engages with multisensory perception. A visual description is not the priority here. The sense of sound, for example, is employed by the poet to direct the reader away from the human and toward the other; the sounds of the bush draw the reader in and guide him/her into the presence of the creatures and the shared hush of night:

the final swoop and clatter of magpie larks,

the persistent plink of bell

      miners, or

willie wagtail’s last

   twittering display

across the wire fence –

this way, follow me, this way! –

      before

this becomes the place of the gutturals of

bushy tails,

eyes caught

      red

      in torchlight, and

the scrabble and swish of tiny

sugargliders riding the wave of

twilight air from branch to

      branch, across to

outstretched branch –

filigreed leaves

      silhouette

against the leaching day;

they stir and subside in

      sudden

eddies of wind.

In this poem particularly, the natural world is used in metaphor to unite our being with the world.

Human physical integration with the natural environment is not generally suggested in this collection. The poem “Lavender” (6), in the first section, indicates a longing to close the gap between the human and the other-than-human. Longing to do so indicates separation. In this poem, for instance, the narrator is explicit:

I want to gather up these warm sheaves

like a swaddled baby,

and sleep in the shade of a tree –

there we will grow,

      slowly,

    yearning together like the

feathered twining of

roots

deep and pungent,

dreaming of the bleached

     light of day

In “Country Swimming Pool” (8), however, there is a sense of human integration in the natural world rather than a mere longing to be one with the other-than-human. In this poem the narrator says:

I lie on the grassy slope

breathing

on my damp towel, and

feel the curve of the earth,

   its heavy flanks,

   the loamy darkness of the soil

drawing me down

Here the body seems to disassemble “in the long blast of afternoon heat” and it moves toward a sense of oneness with the earth. Embodied experience is enhanced by employing the senses. Involvement in the biosphere is “felt”. This poem in particular recounts an instant in which human senses interlace with ecological happenings.

Lucas’s poems navigate a path toward reverence for the natural environment of which we are an integral part. Readers can feel the “joy like sweet steady rain soaking / into the grateful soil” after a summer drought (from “Coming of the Rain” 21). One can imagine the grasses lifting their heads “listening – / their wet faces open to the sky”. The reader is invited to feel part of the circumambient world through the conjuring of a certain “atmosphere”. As expressed by Gernot Bӧhme when discussing a theory of perception, “the writer [can] demonstrate a high degree of consciousness as regards the means by which particular atmospheres can be produced” (125). I suggest this is what Lucas is doing throughout this volume.

In the last poem in the volume, “Learning Bach”, the instrumental is a metaphor for the regenerative power in the music of poetic language. The narrator says:

I begin to speak the elegant risk

   of this language –

precise, cryptic

where sound, its rush and

pause, breathes shape, can

trace the hover of pattern across

a black and white terrain,

its swirl of shifting possibilities

One “risk” for ecopoetic language is the interpretation of meaning concerning the other-than-human. Kate Rigby, referring back to Immanuel Kant, warns against assuming that the way in which things appear to us (arbitrated by our distinctively human senses and perceptual constructs) corresponds to how they actually are, thus assuming human superiority (9). I am suggesting that Lucas avoids that risk by opening her poems up to a “swirl of shifting possibilities” that are beyond human interpretation. She also escapes this assumption in the poem “There” (36). Here the narrator speaks of “the endless encryption of / open slope and the denseness / of leaves”: that “life’s puzzle, / pungent with Fall” is concealed within another kind of knowing. This notion opens the way for an ecocentric perspective. Likewise, the birds and animals in “Summer, Back Paddock” (16) are living out secret lives and conversing in language that bars unauthorised access. The human observer is clearly inventing meaning for the willie wagtail’s call in his last “twitting display”: “this way, follow me, this way!” The perceived need to invent meaning for other-than-human conversation acknowledges the impossibility of knowing.

Proactive environmental awareness is rooted in consciousness and conscience operates through the senses, the associative forces of which are feelings and emotions. Lucas engages the reader in this way. Her poems are responsive to the natural world from which we are inseparable. In a persuasive, polished and openly honest style, she presents phenomena, sensory perception and the aesthetics of the natural world to offer the reader a sense of belonging within that world. There is a distillation over time, place and space of what matters for environmental concern.

It is the quality of flow which speaks so eloquently through all the component parts of this catalogue cum exhibition by Kit Kelen, Professor of English at the University of Macau. Indeed, flow is so germane to the work, like a river running through and beneath it, that it is hard to really talk of components or any distinct and boundaried concepts at all – art forms, design, ideas all flow into each other.

The catalogue is from an exhibition Kelen held at the Macao Museum of Art in September 2014. The book is really an exhibition itself – a beautiful blend of image and text, seamlessly interwoven and aesthetically pleasing, as the visual and auditory sometimes are in lived life. Boundaries between genres, usually kept rigidly separate, have collapsed in Kelen’s work. Rather, these works are on an art-form continuum, with genres bleeding into each other.

Flow is a concept common to many cultures – both eastern and western. Qi, in Chinese religion, Prana, in Indian philosophy and religion; these are words for life force – that dynamic energy which is an essential part of any living thing. It is what I see when I look at Kelen’s abstract visual art – representations of aliveness; energy in the broadest sense. Bulging cellular and amoebic shapes could be life under the microscope, the miniscule brought close up. There are also many representations of what could be fluids in motion – swirls and eddies, deltas and river mouths.

This is the concept of flow at its basic, building-block level. But Kelen’s work also reminds me how playfulness is linked to flow by psychological researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He talks about flow as the quality of experience when one is so happily absorbed by a task that temporal concerns fall away, as in play and creativity. “Creativity”, Einstein in the introduction tells us, “is intelligence having fun”. Or as Kelen says:

sleep to dream,

wake to play

(45)

Kelen’s writing has a relaxed, improvisational quality; the mind has been let off its leash and is free to associate. He riffs, engagingly, cleverly on various themes. Dreams feature frequently, perhaps another version of the mind at play.

I was working

knee high in dream deeps

(95)

Or more specifically:

Got here in a dream – don’t know how to get home

The introductory translations are accompanied by small works by Kelen; his “Doodlescopes”. Doodling in lectures “to retain his sanity”, was how Kelen first got into visual art and they are intriguing, intricate works.

Many of Kelen’s aphorisms seem like doodles too, Kelen playing with language as he plays with colour and form – alert to the sonic as well as other connections and correspondences between words and concepts (mockers/makers, sacred/secret). His word-based work is short, pithy, playful. It is haiku-like, as in:

through these branches

possums climb down

from the stars

(47)

The other-than-human populate Kelen’s poems: trees, flowers, horses, doves, possums and pigeons. As he puts it:

on a day when you speak

 

just with all the other-than-human

members of the house

and of the air outside

(79)

His encounters with the elemental – stars, light, sky, earth, breath and cloud – bring more light and outward lookingness to his work.

Poems often penetrate to an essence:

From my door

Everywhere leads me

every way home

nowhere but the way

(25)

And from a few pages later:

Move carefully

call this your practice

embrace the pace

(27)

These pieces seem emblematic, statements of a life philosophy. You can read this in the text but you can also read this in the visual art. Even the title reflects this engagement – they are not pictures of any particular thing but of energy, bold and simple. There is a spiritual quality – in the broadest meaning of this word – even in the Zen koan-ish impossibility of the title as well as the meditative nature of many of his poems.

Embrace the poem

and squander the soul

(55)

And:

instructions for the use of a cathedral

 

observe

in the rafters

in the belfries

and in the loosened tiles

where words of prayer

have caught

One of the most striking elements of the catalogue is the quality of the design itself. From the first the book is beautifully put together. Even before you reach the main artworks, it is attractively and cleverly presented. The early pages are devoted to translations (English, Chinese, French, Portuguese and Indonesian) of wonderful catalogue notes written jointly by Dr Andrew Burke and Dr Carol Archer. From this first encounter you realise you are in touch with work that is intended to speak to an international audience. The cross-cultural element of the catalogue emphasises the relativity of Western/first world perspectives. Knowing that people, from worlds which are normally so far apart linguistically at least, will read the catalogue gives the book an outward facing element which is appealing.

Kelen has used a broad range of techniques and mediums; acrylic, house paint, ink and watercolour all feature. Additionally Kelen uses different techniques of application: brush, stick and spray can – each delivering distinctive and characteristic effects from the rough and textured to the fine and intricate. However solidly the works appear in the catalogue, Kelen’s work has an ephemeral quality – he is known for repriming already used canvasses, creating (and probably superceding) hundreds of pictures most days. So these works are doubly valuable for having been rescued from the river of time.

The main works feature a double page spread with text on the right hand side and images on the left. Most pages of text include five languages: English, French, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesian and Chinese – on the one page! I only read and understand English and extremely rudimentary French. Sometimes I had to search amongst the languages to find English. This meant that the other languages became more visual communications than linguistic for me, needing a different type of decoding. Sometimes the strip of text is so pale you can hardly read it – transforming even English words into a visual pattern rather than text. For a non-Chinese reader the Chinese script becomes another visual art design feature. The font is simple, sans serif.

Many of the colours are decidedly edible – raspberry pinks and watermelon reds shot through with swirls of pale fairy floss, swirls of cream. This work from the cover could be a strawberry mousse or flummery. Then there are auburgine, orange and tangerine combinations. There are primary blues and reds of a pure trustworthy hue. I took great pleasure in the quality of the colours in Kelen’s work and it seems that care was taken to reproduce them with verity.

Each page has been designed to accompany a specific artwork, the various colours of the text on the facing page are chosen to reflect, complement, contrast with the colours in the art works. Sometimes a word in pale text from one of the languages in huge font is placed along one of the margins. Sometimes the page is divided into two or more blocks of muted background colour. The design is so congruent with the visual work, languages bleed into each other, translations flow together. Aesthetics are paramount in the presentation – the thick quality of the paper – more card than regular paper.

My favourites are those which have been produced by marbling – a process whereby oil is added to a paint mix, creating a finished result which looks just like marble. These works in particular, which I’ll dub “Marblescapes”, are the epitome of flow, with colours bleeding and swirling into each other in an avalanche of flowing colour and form. If change, as Reinhold Niebuhr (amongst many others) tells us, is the essence of life, Kelen’s “Marblescapes” are a glimpse into the energy driving this change, paused and beautifully captured, in a moment of morphing.

Jill Jones is not a poet of easy answers. Writing about her last full-length book, Dark Bright Doors, reviewers used words like “unsettling”, “commanding”, “elusive” and even “haunted”. All these could also be used to describe The Beautiful Anxiety, along with confounding, delicate and, in Jones’ own words, “a poetry of remarkable absences”.

Introducing her work on her website, Jones says her poetry is “perhaps an abstract or ruined lyric, where ‘I’ has shifted from the centre”. Even in describing this approach Jones holds herself at arm’s length, but there’s no denying the skill and humility required to budge the speaker from their all too familiar place as a poem’s top dog.

Another of Jones’ strengths is her ability to create surprising, original images with simple, direct language. It’s not that The Beautiful Anxiety doesn’t cover familiar territory – loss, death, change and love are all here – but Jones draws a new map, through the freshness of her words.

“Misinterpretations / or The Dark Grey Outline”, from the first part of the book “O tasted and gone”, is just one example of this clarity and unpredictability. It begins:

I move through a slanting,

footpaths erupting roots through bricks

near the mad old bus stop.

I used to know what I was thinking,

now it’s a field, inside,

is it green, or grey water, horsing,

gridding,

heavens bent

through the fleck.

Reading a poem like this, there’s no room to glaze over and let the words slide by. Why “horsing”? And why follow that with “gridding” – a word that should be a noun but here seems to act like a verb? The poem is unsettled, unruly, and definitely anxious.

While anxiety is a constant throughout the book, this is not an anxiety of the hand-wringing, pearl-clutching type. It’s more accepting – an anxiety that realises how strange it would be to live without some level of worry in the world as it is now. “I’ve always been flaky, lost and shaky”, the poem continues, “but never ‘ponderous’ over my territory, / that takes planning”. Is there a note of self-deprecation here? Or perhaps a sly swipe at those who get bogged down in their own concerns? Either way, it’s this refusal to apologise for anxiety that gives the book its conviction and charm.

So where does the anxiety that runs through these poems come from? Much of the time, Jones is drawing on a sense of how small we are on an environmental scale, and at the same time, how huge. Nature is always hovering at the periphery of the poems, threatening to burst through and either cause havoc or remind the speaker of the havoc they’ve already caused. Lines like “the blue bag fills with supermarket krill” (from “The Weight”) or “Our staggering stuff in nested containers” (“Impermanent Tenses”) reference the routine environmental damage involved in simply going about daily human activities. In other poems, like “Whale Songs”, Jones addresses this explicitly (with a wry nod to the triviality of sport in this context):

All those blustering gentlemen, shining

balls on their whites, still can’t play

it straight in an uncomfortable clime

at the end of ages, as the whales approach,

now on foot and inconsolable, unable

to digest the folderol of the high seas.

 

The ice slides into disrepair and the acid city

finally measures the alarm.

This is one of the most direct poems in the collection (although no less wonderful for it – what could be more shocking than a whale that can’t be consoled, or a city so polluted it’s turned acidic?). More often, Jones relies on those “remarkable absences” to create meaning, proving that the words outside the poem are just as important as those on the inside.

In the second part of the book, “Wandering breath”, Jones takes this approach to the extreme by carving away all but the most necessary words, leaving behind poems of just a few lines. In fact, in some cases she forgoes using her own words at all: two poems are made entirely of words and phrases from Shakespeare’s plays, while another – “I Am, I” – is constructed of phrases from poets across history including John Donne, Amy Lowell and Marianne Moore. Even though this quiet poem deals directly with the first person, its use of found language again shows Jones’ unwillingness to place the author at the centre:

I saw the spiders, I struck

the board, I that have been

I, too, I wrote in

the dark

The third part of the book, “Which is being too”, shows Jones stretching into longer pieces and playing with closure without ever going so far as it achieve it. Again, nature is ever-present, watching and reflecting each move the speaker makes. In “The Spare Winter” cold weather is a kind of “balm” through a period of convalescence:

Each week the weather spirals

cold on the rails. The blue falls.

I’ve pinned hopes on a ticket away

closed my door on the Snowy winds.

The camellia gave up two flowers, alone

I write myself into mystery at the window.

I gather simpler things on the plate

and count the birds I’ve missed in the strife.

As Jones moves between first person and description here, she again reins in the speaker’s authority. The weather’s spiralling and the camellia’s giving up of those two flowers is at least as important as the writer at the window.

This levelling of the speaker and their surroundings is at its height in “Collect”, a longer poem that praises a part of our environment we rarely notice – dust:

Dust the everpresent

floats, sticks

makes up

making

unmaking

...

If you are heavier than dust

it does not mean more

The Beautiful Anxiety begins with an epigraph from Spanish writer Javier Marías: “You forget whole years, and not necessarily the least important ones.” This sums up Jones’ acceptance of the fact that any individual concern, event or memory is at best fragile, at worst destined to disappear. But the anxiety this impermanence causes does have a kind of beauty to it. We may be no more meaningful than dust, but we are no less meaningful either. We are partners with our environment – not the ones in charge.

Robert Adamson’s Empty Your Eyes opens with epigraphs from Augustine of Hippo and William Blake, together linking faith and seeing. A “rare object” from Vagabond, this collection is unashamedly focussed on the sense of sight, but this is sight both as it withdraws from knowing and as it opens to knowing otherwise. Faith, reframing both seeing and unseeing, and the eye, an organ open to the otherness that light and experience impress on it, are the unsettling themes of this small but “thick” selection of poems.

Adamson is well-known in Australia and internationally as passionate about poets and poetry, attentive to otherkind, especially birds, and interested in matters of the soul. “Listening to Cuckoos”, a poem of just five couplets plays with the repetition “two notes … two words”, and has the speaker listening for what seems an elusive meaning in the “utterance” of birds. Deftly, the poem invites the reader beyond the utterance to an uncanny presence evoked in the birds’ vocal performance:

... Penetrating the dark green

 

of twilight, the storm birds call, two notes, two words,

and cackle in the broken egged dawn, in the echoing light.

The “broken egged dawn” captures not only the colour of the sky, but themes that reappear in several poems: death and life, unmaking and making, here, in terms that recollect the birds (fertilised eggs may be broken in the act of hatching, but a premature breaking leads to death, while the broken egg of breakfast or baking signals a more complex relation to the birds that laid them and to their lives, fertility and deaths.)

Two poems presented separately here “A Poem without Birds” and “A Preliminary Sketch” previously formed the sequence “Via Negativa” for which Adamson won the Blake Prize for Poetry in 2011. Both poems have epigraphs from Emily Dickinson, holding together the themes of faith and sight: “My Worthiness is all my Doubt” and “What I see not, I better see”. The title of the first part of this sequence is not without irony, given the poet’s love of birds: Adamson is a marvellous photographer of birds encountered on his trips to the Post Office in his home area on the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. “A Poem without Birds”—a beautiful lyric in free verse addressed at times to a “you” (is this the speaker’s self-address, or an invocation of an other/Other, or something of both?)—moves from morning through evening. The poem begins by characterising the tree-ferns as waking and opening out “as sunlight dispersed a thick mist”. The speaker, the morning, or the tree ferns themselves, embrace a

… memory incised

 

with old phrases. Mouthing

words then uttering a sentence with your unfinished

breath …

This breath is taken up by the sound/speech of the rustling banana trees just as the visible breath of the mist evaporates. But the poem’s movement from morning to night is sudden despite the qualifier “gradually”. Perhaps the hiatus indicates that for the speaker dawn, dusk and even night, those liminal times, are the more interesting moments. As night arrives, the speaker is indoors where:

… In the skylight,

stars appear through the smoke screen from a burn-off

brilliant pin holes.

 

Stars are clustered trees, hung in the night sky.

Then the poem shifts to ask “Whose body, whose eyes?” and moves deeper into engagement with an other/Other, to address “the problem of suffering” which “expands forever”. Human domestic and other than human worlds intersect in a “cicada flecked with flour” and “the cat”, perhaps leaping to investigate the cicada, “illuminated by the / kitchen’s energy saving light bulb, / a Philips ‘Genie’”. The banality of the light bulb’s commercial name is undone when “Genie”, reminds the reader of the numinous world the poem evokes, the genii loci that inhabit morning and night in this place, as the poem expands at the end toward praise:

Life like a dirty wind blowing straight

through a snowy head, cat’s eyes, tint of fur, rustling wings.

Praise life with broken words

In the end-line parallels of “rustling wings” and “broken words”, and with the echo of “broken egged dawn” from the previous poem, broken wings are evoked and we are returned to the problem of suffering.

The following poem, “A Preliminary Sketch”, written in couplets, begins with images of human abandonment and presents the speaker as artist. The “scene” is like a drawing, “a charcoal sketch” into which the speaker walks, a landscape in which it is “difficult to move”, and where he has “forgotten the names of most flora and fauna”. There are echoes of Adamson’s “A Bend in the Euphrates”, the poem that forms a kind of prologue to his The Golden Bird: New and selected poems:

I use the murky river for my ink,

 

draw bearings on the piece of cloth, sketch

a pair of cattle egrets bully teal into flight.

 

The map’s folded away, I travel by heart now,

old lessons are useless. (XII–XIII)

In “A Preliminary Sketch”, the speaker becomes “part of the subject matter” of the sketch. Recollection of childhood experience of a religion of fear gives way to close observation of other than humans, and as answer to the question of soul—“What form, shape or song / might represent a soul?”—the poem concludes:

A stain of mist hangs above a black-butt,

brushed by the wings of a grey-headed flying-fox.

The problem of suffering is never far away. It appears in the broken lines and the “leagues of broken weather” of “Internal Weather” which begins with a focus on the body—“I dwell in this bone-cave        rocking cup of skull”—and later addresses human relation to its surrounds: “we live/at the world’s expense”. The poem seems to cross between internal and external weather, so that the speaker is enmeshed in his habitat: “I stand here/in a column of breath     mixed with fine dust from red-dirt”. Later more than human suffering is met in the concern with extinction, particularly in “The Great Auk Poem”, which recollects a North American tradition of nature writing in its reference to “Walden Ponds”, and shifts to give homage to Charles Buckmaster who edited “a poetry journal/called The Great Auk, published for a season/or two in Melbourne”. The great auk was a flightless bird that became extinct in the mid nineteenth century. Buckmaster, the poem says,

 … wrote for the lost forest

and opened new pages as he

walked the streets of Melbourne,

writing back the great auks, speaking of branches

to sing from, the growth rings

thickened our lives, he stretched himself imagining

the great shoals of pilchards

turning oceans silver with auk food,

auks returning in poems, swimming from the heads

of poets, into the tides of our words.

Yet, a poem cannot in reality bring back the great auk from extinction, but the invitation to imagine otherwise might be both a witness to the loss and a challenge to attend to those species presently in danger of extinction.

Several of the poems are dedicated to individuals, and touch in different ways on themes of human relationships with other animals (the possibility of “our second soul/as an animal spirit” arises in “Letter to Joanne Kyger”) and the relationship between space and time (“we need space without time” the poet says in “The Midnight Zoo” and “[d]ust and light again/maybe time, if it exists” in “A Poem without Birds”). There are poems engaging with the Christian writers Francis Thompson and Augustine and the personal cost of their writing. Of Thompson, the poet asks:

How much did it cost

for his pencil to curve

 

across pages? (“Francis Thompson, 1859–1907”)

before a limping fox passes, almost as question (or answer), unsettling the sparrows. Of Augustine and his first love Una, the poet writes:

There’d be no healing for anyone

Her absence was my wound—

The poem concludes: “I was fully aware there’d be no cure.” (“The Confessions of Saint Augustine”).

“Michael Dansfield in Tasmania” then addresses a failure of imagination, referencing extinction once again. The writing at this point has a sharpness which echoes the poet’s awareness that “James McAuley wrote/sharp lyrics here”; interesting images emerge: “he swings a metaphor/to make the tea” and perhaps an oblique reference to Kafka:

… The tent’s

gone stiff with frost,

on the floor his maps

await a torturer’s nib

The problem of suffering finds us also in the opening and closing pieces of the collection, two prose works that engage in different ways with the uncanny. The opening piece, “A Proper Burial” is perhaps more a compact narrative than a prose poem per se. Here the speaker recollects an encounter with an Aboriginal girl who is preparing to give a proper burial to two tawny frogmouths killed on the Pacific Highway beside the Hawkesbury River. The writing is perfectly pitched to convey the multiplicity of the encounter: the tragedy of road kill; the grief of the frogmouth which contributes to the second casualty as he investigates the broken body of his mate; an Aboriginal presence usually unobserved by the narrator; the alterity of the encounter for him; and the way the meeting impinges on the everyday—a Christmas gathering at home—rendering it uncomfortable, so that the narrator needs to withdraw at the end to his study. The final sentence, almost a cliché, demonstrates the power of the encounter to escape language. As a reader, I was left wondering if the vignette reported an actual encounter in the life of the poet, a dream, an imaginative depiction of being in Country, or perhaps all of these.

The final work in the collection, a prose poem “Empty Your Eyes”, from which the chapbook takes its title, is apocalyptic in tone. At first it might be utopian: “The suffering has ended. Empty your eyes, a new era begins. … Animals never seen before come out from the alleys.” The images are joyful. But the poem turns to a “banal parade” that “floats above the ash of iron filings” and we meet “[a] mother with a blue apron that frames her baby”; she “cheers at random” while “another child by her side trembles, astonished and fearful.” This juxtaposition of imagery is typical of the poem. Where one might expect angels to be beautiful, terrible and purposeful, we find “an angel timid and adrift in the midst of life”. Cheer turns to desolation. “A group of foreigners pass by, singing under bright umbrellas, their lyrics sleek and empty.” The poem (and the chapbook) close with a poignant image of “a boy with a thousand dreams” seen in the distance crying “because he feels he is ugly”.

The collection of twelve poems in Empty Your Eyes offers a window into the work of Robert Adamson and a serious engagement with themes around the question of soul in a world where humans are part of a more than human world. It does not preach an environmental activism as such, but rather offers ways of seeing and unseeing steeped in the poet’s own engagements with place, people, otherkind, writers and writing, and what might be called the “metaphysical” questions of faith and the soul. A poem from Adamson’s The Golden Bird “The Intervention” written for Ali Cobby Eckermann, begins:

When Yeats writes, Soul clap its hands

and sing, and louder sing, it feels tangible,

and yet a friend says we can’t use

the word ‘soul’ these days, but

then adds, all the more reason. (287)

Empty Your Eyes engages with the ways in which the speaking of soul might feel tangible, a speaking embedded in a life that is always already in relation.

Germaine Greer bought a block of land in degraded rainforest in south-eastern Queensland after “hunting for [her] own patch of ground for over twenty years” (55). Over the following decade she attempted to rehabilitate the rainforest back to its pre-European contact and settler state. She also recorded her observations of the place, its plants and animals, as well as the process of rehabilitation, both of which resulted in her recently published book, White Beech: The Rainforest Years. Greer describes not only how “the forest became my responsibility”, but also how “I became the servant of the forest” (1–2). Even though she “could call it ‘my’ forest”, she writes: “[I] never thought of the forest as mine” (2).

Later the relationship of ownership is reversed when she comes to the realisation that “I don’t own the forest; the forest owns me” (141). The process for Greer becomes one of letting go, giving up and reverting ownership, or, as she concludes, “giving the forest back to itself” (339). These formulations of “the forest is not mine, I am the forest’s” are a problematic cliché that does not address and unpack the complex interrelationships and interactions between people and place, humans and Earth in which each has affected and impacted on the other in habitat and human ecology. In fact, Greer does not have an explicit theory of ecology. How does, and indeed can, the forest give back to itself? What sort of agency does the forest have? These and other questions in environmental philosophy, Greer does not ask or address.

Yet rather than the forest being the central character, or main proponent of the narrative, it is a tree, or tree species that is the hero of its own eponymous story. In the tradition of good stories, “the hero of this story” for Greer is “a tree or, rather, a tree species”, the White Beech, which is “neither white nor a beech” (13). The hero is thus a shape-shifter who is not what it appears to be, or what it is named to be, perhaps like Greer herself, or perhaps how Greer would like to think of herself. This preference for the tree over the forest, for the individual over the community, for the small scale over the big picture, is symptomatic of a problem I see with the whole book.

Trees grow either individually or communally in forests. “The key to the forest’s survival” for Greer “is competition” (16). She goes on to describe, how:

Even as the forest trees vie with each other for light, they are protected from extreme weather, from wind and frost and parching sun [by other trees, I would add]; often they are bound together by vines. (16)

The latter part of this statement sounds like cooperation to me. Forest trees compete with each for light and for water but they also cooperate with each other against common adversaries and for common goals with other plants species for mutual support. Greer concludes that, “the more time you spend in a forest the more aware you become that it is an organism intent upon its own survival” (16). Yet an organism whose organs only compete, and which never cooperate, with each other is doomed to die an untimely death, whereas forest organisms and their organs live for hundreds of years. Greer reminds us that “the longest-lived and biggest creatures on Earth are not whales, but trees” (18). A marine biologist might demur that the biggest creature on Earth is the Great Barrier Reef.

Greer’s attempt at rehabilitating 60 hectares of “steep rocky country most of it impenetrable scrub” (1) was undertaken in the name of biodiversity which, for her, is “our real heritage” (3). She wanted (though she never articulates or theorises it in these terms) to conserve long-term heritage of native or pre-settlement biodiversity still present in some places in the remnant rainforest, whilst simultaneously eradicating short-term settler heritage bio-undiversity, such as weeds and feral animals, which destroy native biodiversity. In writing the book she says that if she has done so “properly it will convey the deep joy that rebuilding wild nature can bring” (12). The book is not particularly concerned by the paradox, or oxymoron, of “rebuilding” wild nature, nor with defining what “wild nature” is. Greer does not define the term. “Wild nature” may be considered not to be built at all, or to be built by indigenous hands. Nor does Greer discuss the extensive literature on the problematic concepts of “wild” and “nature”. The book operates within a vacuum in this regard. “Rebuilding a forest” (110), as she later more precisely describes her project, seems a more modest and less problematic descriptor or, perhaps “rebuild[ing] the original plant community” (112), though this implies the question of original for whom? For settlers?

In the prologue to the book Greer relates how, she “had all but finished the book” when she was told that the area had been poisoned “with the deadliest compound that man has ever made”, 2,4,5-T, that goes into making “the defoliant known as Agent Orange” (7–8). Greer goes on to describe how US forces used Agent Orange in Vietnam in what she calls “the most colossal onslaught ever inflicted on any natural system anywhere” (8). This is the closest Greer ever comes to a Carson-like critique of the military-industrial-capitalist complex and of the militarisation of civilian and plant life. Greer places 2,4,5-T and Agent Orange within the context of her own life story, but not within the history of military-industrial-capitalist manipulation and exploitation of chemical compounds, and of civilian and plant life.

Greer concludes later that “the much-vaunted equilibrium of the rainforest is actually a state of constant war” (240). This view reverts to the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as war against all and to the Darwinian view of natural selection through violence and ignores counter views, such as Kropotkin’s view of mutual aid, Benjamin’s critique of violence as the main driver in Darwin’s theory of evolution and recent work on Australia, such as Tim Flannery (1994: 15 and 84) who argues:

evolution in Australia is not driven solely by nature “red in tooth and claw”. Here, a more gentle force—that of coadaptation—is important. … It is cooperation rather than competition which has been selected for in many Australian environments.

Greer even sees “the rainforest symbiosis as an eternal war” (244) without seeming to be aware that the concept of symbiosis developed by Anton de Bary, Eugene Warming and Lynn Margulis is eternal cooperation and not everlasting war. Greer’s comments sits uneasily with her previous remark made early on that, as they have no sting, “the native bees are a perfect emblem of the gentleness of a country that, instead of lions and tigers, has kangaroos and koalas” (58). Nature in Australia is not so much “red in tooth and claw” as Tennyson said, and green in leaf and branch, but golden sweet in tooth and stinglessness.

Greer’s lack of allusion or reference to other environmental thinkers highlights another problem with the book. White Beech is underpinned by an immense amount of minute research into local history and individual species, but not into recent research into the Australian biota, such as Flannery. The book functions in a localised vacuum cut off not only from recent work about Australian biota, but also from environmental history, philosophy and science.

Greer’s account of “conservation in Australia” is over-simplified, for example when she claims that it is “largely a matter of pious intentions” (40). Try telling that to the thousands of volunteers around Australia pulling up weeds and planting local native species! Try telling that to the thousands of members of local conservation group, to their peak bodies in state bushland councils and conservation councils, and to national conservation societies! As an environmental activist and conservationist she seems to be largely a loner, not a member of a community of like-minded and like-acting people around Australia. She is certainly a member of the “Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme”, but the other human members are largely unnamed and invisible, as is much of their labour. Greer appears as a tree isolated from the forest, both her own and conservation in Australia and much environmental thinking. She is the hero of her own story.

Greer’s account of conservation in Australia is nevertheless valid at the legislative and law enforcement level. She goes on to argue, largely rightly, that “people are neither constrained by law to care for land nor encouraged and rewarded for doing it on their own initiative” (40). State and federal legislation that constrains people who own land of conservation value not to destroy those values is mostly unenforced except when large-scale illegal clearing of native vegetation occurs. Along similar lines, governmental schemes for people to care for their own land on their own initiative do not reward them economically, only ecologically. Greer critiques the Land for Wildlife scheme in New South Wales and her criticisms can be generalised to other states, if Western Australia is anything to go by.

Greer’s book seems cut off from the tradition of nature, bioregional and environmental writing, such as Carson, Leopold and Thoreau, and the ecological paradigm within which they operate. In White Beech her observations of the rainforest are primarily visual with little or no reference to her other senses and little sense of a multi-sensory engagement and embodied experience with the rainforest, such as one finds in these three writers at their best. Nor is there the prose-poetry that one also finds in these writers in which this multi-sensory engagement and embodied experience is expressed in engaging and moving language, and in supple and mellifluous writing. Much of the book either recounts long conversations or summarises bureaucratic reports, and includes throwaway critiques of what she calls “conservation bureaucrats” (246), who often work in highly politicised and under-resourced contexts, a fact of life for these people not acknowledged by Greer. Again the book operates within a vacuum in this regard and would have benefitted and been enriched by the inclusion of some sense of engagement with the tradition of environmental and nature writing and by being located within an ecological paradigm that could have more critically informed the narrative.

This is a story of two women on holiday, camping beneath the stars as they have done for the past few years. On the first night, they look back to

that first year grief-filled for our old dog  (6)

Although there is a new dog this year, a puppy keen for chasing and sniffing sticks,

on the other side of the river

a black spirit dog arrives

sniffing the Styx

she stands

looks our direction

wades in, drinks and leaves  (6)                                             

The first night they see “thunderclouds gather / on the horizon” (12), and “by morning the river has risen / six to seven feet” (14). The second night is peaceful and filled with the sound of birds. The third day they swim, and end the day with “fire warmth / and a star-filled sky” (22). That night, Woman 1 dreams of her parents drowning in mud.

The fourth morning they begin to worry. Wet and wet upon wet, and that night sleep is mixed with apprehension. The fifth day passes quickly and ends in musing:

quiet conversation

time just to sit

ponder

wonder

what the new year will bring  (36)

The sixth day brings disaster, the river is gone and the water’s edge is at the tyres. The car becomes hopelessly mired, most of the camp floats away, the dog has no sticks to chase, they huddle and hope. Two local men appear and pull the car loose.  The women try to dry out in the sun. The men have reassured them the road ahead has no problems. But it does, and they are stranded between two branches of the flood. Women and dog dine on sardines and try to sleep.

The seventh day they stay with the car, enjoying “the silence / the beauty of the bush / mountains / river” (101) and throwing sticks for the dog. A ute arrives with two other locals, brothers who come to work at the nearby mine. They offer advice and disappear, leaving Woman 1 in a maternal tizz over their welfare.

it’s a struggle

between the bliss

of this stream

and worry plagues

 

should we have stopped them

from going?  (138)

The miners come back the next morning on foot, and the women drop them off nearer the mine, next to one of the flooded rivers.

On the ninth day, the tone of the book changes entirely, from observations to an external narrative, with geographical specifics. The heat has become worse, the women shelter in the creek, and—like deae ex machina, a mother and her daughter drive up in their two cars, en route to Canberra. There is great shifting and pushing, maneuvering and intelligent cooperation, and suddenly everything is good, organised by the mother, who knows exactly how to do everything:

she knows this creek

knows the best way through

leads the way

now stuck but we are pushing

 

on the other side

she removes her

pale blue crimplene pants

only girls she says

is back to push if needed

 

next her daughter

in the second car

if she makes it

we’re fine  (153)

A limen is a threshold, a boundary—and the story is very much about boundaries, as the women work back and forth from one impassible river to another. They move from hope to discouragement and back again.

They move back and forth from isolation to being part of a wider world: until this point, the women are entirely in their own mud and river world—could be anywhere, Queensland, Death Valley, the Mountains of the Moon. The story is so intensely self-contained that I was surprised each time people (or cows) suddenly appeared from offstage. I had forgotten that the drama was happening on the threshold of civilisation.

A threshold implies a point of no return—one moment you are outside and the next you are not, even though what happens next is not always what you had intended. The women’s adventure teeters back and forth between pleasure and the possibility of disaster. Finally, they make it:

on our way

no more back and forward

between rising rivers

no more waiting

for sun or rain

or wind to turn  (160)

This, along with the very sparse structure of the book, puts me in mind of a Greek play, and I read the book as a classical drama. (I would really love to see it as a stage production or reading.) There’s a tiny bit of dialogue from the locals and the Day Nine women, but for the most part, we have two characters on stage alone: Woman 1 and Woman 2. They stand side by side, facing us and addressing us (not each other), and even the few words we get from the side characters are by way of comment, abstracted from anything like conversation.

And the Chorus? Well, that’s Dog. Not alas the black spirit dog of days gone by, but a Chorus-in-Training who at least has got the basic idea that her function is to keep us aware of the essentials. At the moment, sticks are her only essential.

I lie like a lizard in the sun

then move to the shade of the car

waiting for the next stick’s tip  (82)

Is there a moral to the story? In some ways, this could be a parable of our times, as the women (here and now, these individuals) appear as victims of their environment through no fault of their own. We keep skirting the edge of disaster, not quite taking the last, fatal step but (with no credit to ourselves) never quite ending up totally in the mud. The cow cockies pull them free—but that doesn’t work in the long run. The miners offer not only local connections but the possibility of a helicopter out (as high-tech as you can get here)—but that doesn’t work in the long run.

The pale-blue-crimplene goddess and her daughter lead the last charge, and the massed group does win its way through, a triumph of cooperation and human ingenuity—but it was pure luck that anyone came by in the first place. We can’t count on it all happening again next year. When everyone is down to earth, eating their hamburgers and giving the police a heads-up about the young miners, no one has really changed and nothing is any different.

I couldn’t spot a point of no return in this story, no one place where the women could have turned back and avoided the whole near-disaster. When I think of an awful future of a world bound up in changing water levels—too much or too little—I wonder if there often is no clear tipping point at all, no place we can point at and shout “stop”. If that’s true, we need even more to pay attention to finding

...the limen

that space between

water and sky ...

where we could

be on both sides of time

where

the birds

the ones that indicate

water is nearby

perch in

the eucalypts  (166)

Jeanné Browne’s paintings float and meander amongst the poems, bringing us lizards, birds, wonderful insects, tyre tracks writ small—or are they lizard tracks writ large? The birds are in feathered close-ups, entire portraits, or flying away leaving only tracks; at the end of the book there is a sketch of the river banks, giving a full picture for the first time. The pictures fit beautifully and add further dimension to the text, again moving back and forth in varying focus. The book is a joy to read on all sorts of levels.

XIII Poems is Jordie Albiston’s eighth collection of poetry and the first in the Rabbit Poets Series of non-fiction poetry. There is no particular theme to the collection, but the poems are marked by clear and generous sight that leads to an intriguing sense of alienation and compassion, grief and hope.

Bodies are ever-present in all their specificity and complexity, the source and form of visceral and emotional life, of interactions with the wider world, but reliant on words, syntax and form to communicate. The value of words weaves its way through Albiston’s poems, metaphors and vessels of a way forward, offering communication, the traces of history, showing misunderstanding, naïveté, grief, figuring forth a body, a land, and love.

In this focus on language and body, Albiston’s poems take us further into the ecopoetic discussion of the place of language. Does language, as part of culture, divides us from nature? Or, does the essentially metaphoric nature of language mean that it is embodied and embedded in the natural world? As with most debates of this kind, there is a way forward when the binary is fractured in some way, allowing for a third way. In the introduction to his book, The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language, Scott Knickerbocker writes of “‘sensuous poesis’, the process of rematerializing language specifically as a response to nonhuman nature”, of “operating from the assumption that humans (and their tools, including language) are both distinct and inseparable from the rest of nature”.[1] Albiston’s collection takes us into the grist of this conversation, working most powerfully within the tension of the unresolved.

“The Sea’s Pleasure” (22) plays throughout with the struggle to at once make sense of a new experience through words and to allow the body and heart to feel: that is, making sense in both of its meanings, where body and words search for a way of being within the confusion of something new, “the world going / up with me going down, this wordless calm”. Perhaps, then, the need for words is the danger, and must give way to the senses. But still, the poet looks to build “a boat that is better and stronger and more / than a thing which just floats”, a crafting, a poiesis that will not simply describe and thereby create a distance but will “ferry me to the New Shore”.

It is a search for all that words might do, might open up. At the creation of the world (“A Brief History of Love”, 20), the universe moved, but all was awkward: the “sun clunked”, “earth lurched” and stars barely began, until “the word love was spoken”. Only then was the world “finally right” and “things fell into place”. The spoken word echoes the Genesis account of God commanding each element of creation to come into being, yet here, there is no superior agent who speaks, separate from creation. It is as if, rather, the unifying and ordering power of love speaks itself, neither within nor external to the natural world.

And yet, words can be confusing, misleading, measures of the ugliness of propaganda, as well as expressions of a hopeful heart. So “Gallipoli” sets itself on the page in simple couplets of a soldier’s letters home. The first part, “The Landing”, unsettles with its mix of underlining, italics, capitals, ampersands, brackets, punctuation marks and enjambment. All of this embodies the excitement the soldier feels and simultaneously reflects the discomfort we feel at his naivete, because we know what lies ahead: “An / Adventure LARGER than Life”, “by cripes, I’m at the sharp end of its now!” (13-14). By the second part, “Lone Pine”, the words have resolved into consistent couplets that carry the unresolved experience of sober routine and horrific reality. A strange rhythm is established by the repeated refrain “I am writing…”, words and actions that have become the only way the soldier can moor himself to life (14-16). But words, like his hope, are not enough:

I am writing this as my heart stops a slugger & my feet keep running for

three more steps. We are not to record time or date or place but

 

it is August 7^th 1915. These are my words I am high in the

sky. … (16)

And death, in the third part, “Aftermath”, alternates between two voices of the soldier in different font styles. The first voice, in couplets in standard font, express ecstatic liberation from the horror: “as I burst into eternity…”, “as I soared…”, “as I flapped...”, “ as I bloomed…”, and the second, in italics, the final, consoling messages to those at home: “cry too for the turk / he too was your son”, “yes / a bone is a bone is a bone” (16). As this part progresses, the soldier’s tone changes. His initial relief at death shifts into grief for his mates, himself and all that is lost; he no longer flies, but hangs above Lone Pine and wonders “what I had become / and who in hell I one day might have been” (17). Simultaneously, his advice to the grieving in the alternate couplets becomes philosophical, apparently accepting, but quietly cynical:

when war returns / as war must return / gather together your most perfect men

give them a gun and two hundred rounds / give them a tot of rum   (17)

And his words, all those saving words that the soldier wrote? They are like his heartbeat:

when you receive this missive / read once / fold / put away / don’t look to heaven / we

are the lads whose letters stop / Gallipoli / august 7   (16)

There is no more now, but “bits of us” that “mingle / beneath the grass with bits of a thousand or so other chaps” (17).

In this final section the two voices, mirrored in the use of syntax, line break and font, disorient the reader from accessible narrative, create texture and dimension on the page; they retell and simultaneously shift away from the known narrative, drawing a single man’s story into a complex study of war and the soldier’s experience. Albiston’s technique of utilising and reorienting a familiar cultural trope is both challenging and compassionate.

The poem in the collection that makes most complex use of this tension between culture and nature is “Lamentations”, an extended cry of grief and commiseration at the Black Saturday bushfires in Kinglake in 2009. The title and form reference the Old Testament book of Lamentations, grieving over King Nebukadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem. The biblical book is in five parts, each one twenty-two lines and formed as an acrostic, to be read both horizontally, along the line, and vertically, via the first letter of each line; in this case, each line is the successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. A popular artform in ancient writing, it is seen less often now, and perhaps most often in children’s or humorous poetry, where the acrostic would spell a word or words.

Albiston’s poem makes use of the ancient poem to allow culture and horror, language and disorder, to sit in uneasy tension; although many may not know the poem in full, many of its phrases have become culturally familiar expressions of grief. Albiston follows the form of the biblical poems, even down to the intriguing switching of the letters p and q, the equivalent of the Hebrew letters in the original, though she writes four, not five parts. The orderliness and structure of the acrostic suggests a way that language and culture can provide the means to reflect on such horror.

Similarly, the poem echoes, and sometimes quotes, the language and imagery of the King James translation: “Remember her green, o! you that pass by: behold, see if there be any pain like unto her pain: recall your own sorrow, and magnify it: make of your own sorrow multiples of many: and multiply the many again” (36). On an emotional level, the archaic language and unusual syntax offers comfort in calling on a deep and long-lived cultural form of grief, providing ritual, paradoxically consoling in its distance from everyday expression. How does one deal with such enormity of grief, but to hear from those and share with those who have likewise suffered? Images echo the original: Kinglake is a “weeping widow”, “black is in her hair, and in her skirts”; “all her gates are desolate: her hilltops / sigh, her soil is afflicted” (35). The land as a woman is an ambivalent and exploited image, used by the Hebrews to speak of their dwelling place as God’s consort, one whom God loves and protects, but whom God can equally punish as a possession. In western culture, the land as woman is the language of the coloniser.

This literary and cultural heritage places the poem right in the centre of the nature / culture tension, which is right where the ecopoetic response to such devastating fires must dwell, and so Albiston allows the poem itself to carry the tension of that discussion. In part II, at a time before the fires, people come in cars, with children and baskets and turn, just before the shops, the bakery and the pub, to the natural beauty of “the palace of the queen of Kinglake”, “the tabernacle / of trees, the cathedral of green” (36-37). This is settled country, human habitation, perhaps colonisation, and there is a certain naïveté to the solace of such coolness: “Victoria sizzles: you clap your hands saying Kinglake is the place to be” (37). Yet if such critique is to be found, the depth of consolation and commiseration with those who suffered is never overwhelmed. In part III, each letter of the acrostic is extended to three-line stanzas, initial sounds and sometimes repeated words creating a soundscape of the horror:

O! we are its music: we are its terrible song.

On the wing of the fire, we sing out our terrible sorrow.

On the tongue of the fire, in the throat of the fire, we sing.   (39)

In part IV, human and non-human are irrevocably tangled: snippets from part II, of the joy and delight visitors felt in their picnics, are caught into descriptions of Kinglake, now the crone scratching in the dust. In so doing, they are transformed to markers of devastation:

look how she crawls like a crone in the dust

before the shops of kinglake               (41)

Here, the evocations of Kinglake as woman are heart-wrenching, full of pathos and despair, and yet, in using the image of the town as woman, humans are implicated alongside her; there is no grief like unto hers. And the careless delight of visitors turns to accuse them:

for our eyes have yet failed / in our watching we have watched for what could not save

us

you stop to snap shots    (41)

There is no direct blame for the fire itself, but a sorrowful, perhaps even angry reflection on the human failure to really see and understand the natural world beyond their own heedless pleasure in it. And now, the need to mark that “today is the day of the time between moments” (42).

There is much more that repays close reading in this slim volume of poems, especially on the question of the relationship between words and body, culture and nature. That “A Brief History of Love”, “Lamentations” and “Gallipoli” have their own musical expression[2] takes the conversation even further. And yet, in their own voice, there is wisdom and felicity in Albiston’s words.

Paths of Flight felt undecided as I first encountered it—at turns caught and contradictory, bent sometimes one way and sometimes the other, strung between and among competing ideas—but, in the end, seemed to achieve a certain balance and reconciliation, that was perhaps its destination all along.

There is a dynamic of tension and reconciliation in the poetry that can feel at some points like the poet is sending contradictory messages, unsure of what he wants to value with his words or the way in which he wants to use tropes to do it. Individual poems can certainly be read and enjoyed on their own, but for me the best way to appreciate the balance of contradiction and unity was to read it as a collection: from start to finish, allowing the progression to lead me on its own terms to an overarching interpretation or impression, rather than me looking for a coherent and single-note one from each piece. And, from the beginning, in retrospect, the title gives me a hint that this will be the way it is.

The “flight” of the collection’s name evokes sweeping movement, unrestrained and liberated, arcing like the black birds of Fischer’s Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize-winning poem “Augury?” in swoops and gusts that lift away from the ground, the page. As Fischer comments in the poem “Pedestrian”—his ode to the liberated movement of air—flight is the meandering, flowing and tumbling, lifting and eddying with the gathered leaves: flight is the dancing. Paths, therefore, are where flight is not; on the ground, paths are where, in “Pedestrian”, the park is not. And so, in the collection’s title, the paths both ground the flight and are somehow given lift-off by it. Because a path is a directional space, it has a destination, and prescribes a way in which to achieve it. It does not swoop in unselfconscious eddies like the air above it does, but rather traces on the tangible the way to walk—controlled, yes, but also comforting and giving purpose. The paths in a way give this purpose and tangibility to the flight, but by being traced in air are made light, like a liberating breath, and are seamlessly, invisibly connected to the surrounding air. One cannot, after all, see the edge of a path through air; one can only see it as it is made.

The name of the collection thus, for me, enacts the kind of tension that I find weaving through the book: one of seemingly opposing forces looping around and even occasionally appearing to undermine each other, yet somehow finding moments of temporary harmony. I would hesitate to say that the collection “resolves” in any kind of absolute or permanent way, because it is a journey rather than a state, and the movement that seems such an integral part of the collection—the movement of music, the movement of people across landscapes, the movement of birds through air, the movement of one line seamlessly to the next (one poem, “Walking Instructions”, eschews punctuation almost entirely)—would resist that. But a balancing emerges.

This is a tension that manifests in various ways—almost testing out possible resolutions before moving on to another and then discarding that, too. On the one hand the poems honour the “small” of existence: the birds, small and relatively frail members of the non-human community; within this, individual birds such as one owl, one hawk, two black birds, each given their own materiality and vitality; the radiant atoms of the sky, not as any great “dome of the infinite”, but as a simple primary colour with which one pair of eyes connects like a gentle hand touches a child’s back; the delicate structures of a twig, “touching the smooth current/of a mountain stream” (72); the steps that are imprinted, one by one, into the quilt of new snow. On the other, however, the poems are redolent of high culture and the intellectual theorising of the world: Rilke hovers over the words and appears explicitly as epigraph; European cultural sensibilities are evoked through references to Renaissance painting, sculptural snapshots such as Rodin’s “Thinker” and Brancusi’s “Bird in Space”, mythology and ancient Greek philosophy; and the mass spread of humans across the planet is mapped through poems referencing travels to Damascus, Provence, Germany and Australia. Similar tensions emerge in the contrasts of human and non-human; losing versus finding; the metaphorical against the literal—and even through form, with enjambment and flow against pause, stanza break and punctuation lacunae.

Some pieces seem more focused on the world of humans and culture than on that of the non-human or nature. The opening poem, “Portrait of a Thinker” (1), commences with an avian conceit:

His eyebrows are falcon wings

gliding on a constant current.

 

His metallic eyes take in the scene

dart to distant prey.

 

His nose is beak-like –

not the small busy beak of a sparrow

nor the ibis probing a garbage bin

afterwards, moving to a more geological metaphor with:

His face is wind-sculpted,

facetted like a crystal.

 

And his brow is steep and hard

not sandstone but granite, tall

But the referent object of all this bird-life and land is a sculpture of human art and high culture. The language therefore seems bent towards the reflection and intellectual processing of humans beings, diminishing the value of the natural world being used to illustrate it. Nature is the manifest content, but culture is the latent.

The direction of thought away from the apparent natural object also occurs in “Appassionata”, for instance—where a pianist going over and over his progressions has “movements/like an alpine stream continually smoothing/the stone”; and “We thank the clouds” acknowledges the elements, but in terms of the gifts that weather gives us, thanking the lightning that “splits the dead stumps/our hearts had become”, the mists for “hiding moments of our past”, and the “endless drizzling days” in the way they “incite us/to read a recommended book/forgotten on a dusty shelf” (60-61). In the final poem, “Diptych”, the sky is described as “the blue of a renaissance sky”, somehow subordinating the natural blue to that of the paint it aims to emulate (80).

This directionality is complicated at other points, however, where the natural is privileged and the human is the illustration of lesser weight. In “Corellas”, the birds are described as “ladies at a tea party”, “dressed/in white tennis outfits, strolling to the courts”: “A daintier sort of parrot – cockatoos/who read their Emily Post” (35). The marriage here of human cliques and class hierarchies is transported hilariously onto the smooth feathers and high-pitched “squeaks” of the Aussie bush. In “Augury?”, the title of which means a kind of presentiment of the future, the black birds observed by the speaker arc “more smoothly than figure skaters” and flip “far swifter than stunt planes”, bending thus our focus towards the singularity of their flight and away from the planes and olympians (74-75).

In the end it almost seems interchangeable, whether nature illustrates culture or culture illustrates nature, and the language bends both towards the natural and away from it. In “Early Autumn Morning” (64),

you see a eucalypt in the park

with torn clothes

dangling from its limbs,

and

a grey lamppost standing

at a corner like a lost giraffe.

while in “Dealing with Early Spring” (5),

A beggar cups his hands and pleads for change

while the sun gilds his palms and fingers

like a bowl possessed by Charlemagne,

standing now in a museum’s vitrine.

The tension between high culture and low culture is also exploited, in a way I feel I would recognise in the future as an emblem of Fischer’s style. One striking and, for me, enjoyable example is the progression of “Band of Cockatoos” through “Thoughts on a Walk by the River Sorgue” to the beginning of “Swift”. “Band of Cockatoos” (22) plays on the collective noun pun of the title to paint the group of birds as a punk rock band, starting off with plumage “a bit too white like/the polished teeth of salesmen,” but then breaking into havoc as they “open their gravel beaks” and

                        the lead

 

alights and hops along

a broken branch, flares

his pineapple Mohawk

 

while banging his head,

rends his jacket and insists

the members scatter

 

to the surrounding tiers

where they join

in a punk-rock cacophony.

The page then turns and moves to a reflective walk along the River Sorgue, and we are transported from an Australian backyard to countryside France, picturing high school graduates with heads full of knowledge and philosophising on the fate of ducklings who might, in the patchy fuzz of their feathers, have in their destinies “a form/other than that of duckness” (24). The third poem, “Swift”, then commences with a quotation in French—with no offered English version—from a piece by twentieth-century poet, René Char: “Such is the heart”, it proclaims upon translation, “if he touches ground, it tears him apart” (25).

My favourite parts of the collection, however, are split somewhat likewise: one, an overarching matter of style; the other, one specific line and its prosaic literality.

The overarching matter of style is Fischer’s use of metaphor. Yes, there are some moments for me that are perhaps too much—I do not, for instance, enjoy “Your Eyes” (66),

Your eyes are macadamia

that quickly sprout

under the pour of my gaze

as much as I might perhaps enjoy something either more subtle or more absurd. But I do, however, adore the “humming” of the sun’s radiance in “I can almost hear a humming”, which is so warm and luxurious that, “If it didn’t yet exist/this radiance would find a way/to create honey” (58). And I cannot quite picture the face of the man in “Syrian Desert” (44) from the features attributed to it through metaphor, described as:

            dry and cracked

yet tilled by the work

of renunciation – from

its furrows rise vast trees

abundant with flowers

and gliding the blazing gusts

firebirds alight in their branches.

But nor do I want to. Or need to.

The specific line that I will take from this book as I close it comes at the end of “Swift”, and this favourite moment is almost the opposite of the figurative turn of phrase that claims the other spot. “Swift” is a poem more narrative in style than many of the others, and it tells the story of an injured swift being cared for by the poet and his family. After finding the creature lame on the ground they nurse it back to health and, in the process, develop an intimacy that gives the bird something of the human and the human something of the bird. When finally released, the swift like a new baby stammers and trips its way into the air with the speaker racing after it, “obliviously/trampling seedlings” (29), but then—disappears.

Until nightfall we searched,

and still do not know whether you reached the sky,

or landed helpless in the next field.

Not only is this poem a privileging of the material self of one small, vulnerable bird—I read in it no grand allegory of the human condition—but it ends with the notes of trust, hope and fear that love is. Because that really is the heart of devoting ourselves to something: yes, to something as small in the great scheme of things as sitting down and reading a book of poetry from beginning to end, but also to those greater tasks of birth and the preservation of species, lands and cultures. We do not always know what will come of the time and care we have invested, whether the object of that love will reach the sky or fall helpless in the next field, but investing in something is in the end an act of love.

I find that Paths of Flight returns that love.

In her essay entitled “(Un)Belonging in Australia: Poetry and Nation”—one of several fine pieces in this issue of Southerly arranged under the title The Political Imagination—the scholar Lyn McCredden quotes at length from a poem by Ken Bolton, aptly named “Horizon”, in which he refers, by way of sardonic aside, to “history’s ironies, reversals/sarcasms so de rigeur” (47). Bolton’s rueful observation (from his 2006 collection At the Flash and at the Baci) gains a topical edge with regard to current political developments in the rapidly shifting realm of global geopolitics in 2014. According to recent reports, the beleaguered Portuguese government, struggling to contain further economic decline amidst mounting instability in Europe, has found itself dependent on its former colony, Angola, for financial security. The “ironies” and “reversals” in this instance point up the immediate political uncertainties (and, for many patriotic Portuguese, the confounding perversities) of the globalised economy in the twenty-first century, and, with a sharper emphasis, the wider and deeper complexities attending the constantly shifting notions of, claims to and ideals informing national identity in the present time.

Lyn McCredden’s excellent essay addresses the challenging subject of the political nature of poetry in contemporary Australia when, as the subtitle of this issue indicates, the “political” is viewed from the perspective of postcolonialism and diaspora. To discuss the relationship between poetry and nation is to consider the often-uneasy association between art and politics, uneasy for the compelling reason that for those advocating and practising art (very broadly conceived), the expectation or insistence that creative expression “be political” can only mean compromise of the presumed integrity of the artistic endeavour. To preserve art from the worldly demands of the state in this way is of course to rely on an idealised, perhaps otiose notion of artistic practice, as naïve in its romanticisation of the “saintly” artist as the insistence that all art is irreducibly political reductively simplifies the subtle nature of the interaction. As McCredden and her fellow contributors in this issue make clear, the effort to interpret and understand the dynamics informing the relationship between poetry and nation continues to generate as many questions as it does answers; or to paraphrase a comment the writer Daniela Kambaskovic reproduces in her lively and keenly thoughtful essay, “Breaching the social contract: the migrant poet and the politics of being apolitical”, the act of interpretation is and should be a "fight”.

The title The Political Imagination will itself raise immediate questions concerning the precise nature of allegedly “political” role and effect of the “imagination”. To talk, as several writers do in this issue, of “postcolonial poetry” is ambiguous at first glance: does this define and classify such poetry according to a shared postcolonialist politics—that is to say, a common identity determined by particular set of ideological convictions (a shared dogma or program)—or does it signify poetry written in the historical period known as the “postcolonial”? If the former, who indeed confirms and confers such an identity upon an otherwise varied, even disparate, collection of writers dedicated to honing distinctive and individual expressive voices? Critics might well be justified in making claims that poetry has the power to subvert powerful ideologies of the nation-state, but in actual practice, poetry is very unlikely to command the kinds of popular audience that cues up weekly to watch competitive cooking shows on mainstream television. This is to say, if to be political is to “bear witness”, then who is listening and to what actual effect? If the “political imagination” refers to someone other than the kind of person who is actively interested in the machinations of politics (whether for their own immediate ends or as a kind of anthropological subject of interest), then it must also be conceded that poetry in its very nature—that is, in its characteristic preoccupation with language in all its mutability and electrical intricacies, semantic nuances and expressive subtleties—is always to some extent at odds with the interests of an allegedly “political imagination”.

My selective use of Bolton’s poem in the above example illustrates the crux of the issue in terms of both the writing and reading of poetry. As poetry, Bolton’s observation is significant for its archly self-conscious unoriginality, which is to say that in the context of the poem he retails a cliché, albeit, a cliché smuggled into a kind of fractured soliloquy: “try to seize upon that greatness/which is available to me/ if it is available at all/(am I facing the right way?)/thru art./The view is/ quintessentially Australian, which is its/problem – for me – tho not classical/& with its history’s ironies, reversals/sarcasms so de rigeur” (47). This kind of “talk” becomes something of a comic contortion of self-deprecation, in which the poet answers himself (as it were) with a disarmingly rhetorical question: “I never wanted to be postcolonial/or colonial just modern which is/the joke on me – but who wants to be a category?” (47). Certainly, the theme of national and political (and politicised) identity is central in this statement, but the rhetorical question underscores the point in the most poignantly political terms: “who wants to be a category?”, indeed; and who presumes to design and impose such categories on another, poet or otherwise? Moreover, the poem also tacks across the subtly nuanced terrain of subjective consciousness and the intersecting modulations of performative voice and artistic persona, of perception and rhetorical “act”, and so resists the at-times narrowing political meaning the more insistent critic might wish to impose.

Such reservations are far less quibbles than important qualifications that to my mind confirm the strength and value of this issue of Southerly. Indeed, I think the editors David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon (with guest editors Ann Vickery and Ali Alizadeh) have assembled a timely and engagingly varied selection of critical essays and creative works in this volume. Importantly, the essays offer complementary perspectives on the vexed question of identity in its many (often contentious) aspects and understandings. In particular, all make reference to, and several work very explicitly and deftly through, the problems pertaining to postcolonial critical theory itself and, by immediate association, the very value and purpose of criticism at large.

In their editorial, Ann Vickery and Ali Alizadeh identify the point on which the debate pivots: the diasporic experience—denoting as it does the diffusive modes of “selving” proliferating across social, cultural and political boundaries—continues to press against the imperatives of what might be called postcolonialism’s “official” program, the insistence on sustained resistance to the monologic and hegemonic. As Ali Alizadeh and Penelope Pitt-Alizadeh rightly assert in their illuminating essay “Metapolitics vs. Identity Politics: (Re-)Radicalising the Postcolonial”, developments in critical theory over the last two decades “have highlighted the problematics of postcolonial theory and the limitations of tropes such as Indigenous or diasporic cultural identity” (57). In other words, the politics of postcolonial literary criticism as praxis—the prescribed modes of interpretation—are themselves directly implicated in the question of the political imagination. In concert with Alizadeh and McCredden, Lucy Van and Michael Farrell take up the issue in ways that are illuminating and revealing (if, in Farrell’s case, also somewhat faltering as a result of an overly cautious positioning with regard to various theoretical perspectives), whereas Timothy Yu, Adam Aitken and Peter Minter offer more animated and refreshing approaches to the subject.

There is not space here to convey the full range of debate entertained in the essays comprising this volume. Suffice it to say they are of consistently good quality in their scholarly rigour, analytical depth and intellectual vigour. The selection of creative pieces arranged to complement the selection of essays, and the choice of book reviews that closes the collection as a whole, work to complete the volume in a fitting manner. In this respect, Southerly continues to honour and fulfil its role as both an important forum for intellectual and scholarly debate on issues of immediate relevance and importance to the community at large, and a vehicle for promoting the work of writers, poets and artists in Australia.

As a river system that passes through seven states of the United States of America and parts of northwest Mexico, the Colorado River is some 2,330 kilometres long and a significant part of many people’s lives. It is the way this river winds in and out of people’s lives as well as its deviations, history, doubt about its future and overall its passage of water, that Middleton takes as her focus in Ephemeral Waters.

Rather than being a collection, Middleton has chosen to follow the Colorado River from its source in the Rocky Mountains to the point it peters out in Mexico through one long poem. While the book is divided into sections determined by the borders the river crosses, Middleton does not let this interfere with the flow of the poem, and rather uses such a device as a comment on the human-created arbitrariness of such divisions. Indeed the poem and the river cross such borders almost without comment, such as the divide between Colorado and Utah. The book notes this division, as do the margin notes which go from “I-70 / Colorado” to “I-70 / Utah” however the poem itself reads as, on the Colorado side:

this tabletop, frisking for the weak spot

water’s tread met sandstone

 

and river cut her way down

to road        Crossing the state line  (27)

Then on the Utah side:

                        the river

creeps from view while

road signs hint at what passes

 

for wilderness – No Services

for forty-something miles

Just the long, straight blacktop        (31)

Here Middleton uses the poem and the book divisions to make a thought-provoking comment about the way divisions are experienced. The human-created book marks the divisions between the states as significant, however the river and the poem critique these divisions. Further, Middleton lets the structure and layout of her stanzas change at will throughout the poem. Rather than relying on arbitrary structures to denote change, Middleton allows the poem to flow and change almost like a river. For a reader the changes seem almost imperceptible—just like the changes in the flow of a river—and lend the whole poem a vital sense of fluidity.

This idea engages with what Maureen Devine and Christa Grewe-Volpp identify as a key element of depictions of water. For Devine and Grewe-Volpp water is “a continually changing entity—sweet or salty, still or raging, frozen or crystallized or even evaporated, in the form of rain (drops), snow (flakes), sleet, hail, glaciers, icebergs, rivers, lakes, puddles, oceans, warm or cold and all the variations in between—challenges cultural perceptions of it”.[1] Devine and Grewe-Volpp identify the way in which water presents a challenge to ideas of singularity and stability. Further, they acknowledge the ways in which water is able to present itself in various forms without becoming unreliable. The sense of fluidity and change described here is essential to Middleton’s book, as it is this sense of fluidity that allows her to engage with the Colorado River fully.

As well as allowing the river to cross human divides in Ephemeral Waters, Middleton also examines the fluidity of a river through repetition and her use of punctuation. Middleton deliberately excludes full stops in her work. Rather, she uses stanza breaks and the blank space on the page to create a sense of pacing that gives the poem a lot of flexibility. This place-based poetry allows the very page itself to act as a place, as the poem becomes a river that picks its way across the page rather than being constrained by human ideas of punctuation pauses. Middleton’s use of repetition also reflects this sense of fluidity. The poem returns to certain themes again and again, retracing its steps. However, these repetitions of themes are not necessarily simple; rather each time they are introduced they are slightly changed. In this way Middleton engages with both the consistency, and the change, of a river. In this sense Middleton engages, through the long form of her poem, with how a river may actually operate.

The poem also does not ignore the other influences on a river, including the animals that live along or within it and the people whose lives it influences. Middleton’s margin notes contain repeated references to “Bestiary” which indicate parts of the poem that engage with the animals that are a part of the Colorado River’s journey. One example of this is the Kanab Ambersnail. The snail is named only in the margins, so its appearance in the actual poem is not marked by its name, only its presence. This allows it to enter the poem in much the same way it would appear to the casual observer or the river itself. Here Middleton describes the way in which:

Cling         cling again to Paradise

Cling through stab

through sweep of sunlight –

 

Canyon sings staccato throb

of hell-hot rock

while snail rims calamity

 

Yet snail still clings         amber as

the amber light of day

keeps amber vigil through the blight

 

through slight hours       creeps

slimy to cress and sedge

scrapes sustenance      clings to ledge        (77)

It is significant that Middleton chooses to depict all kinds of animals that appear along the river and not just those that might be initially obvious, or which might be the most appealing to a general audience. The Kanab Ambersnail is a critically endangered species that is endemic to Arizona and Utah and one of its three habitats is Vasey’s Paradise, a spring along the Colorado River. Middleton acknowledges this location in the margins of her poem but doesn’t let it intrude on the actual poem itself. In this way she allows the presence of various animals to wander in and out of the poem, much like they would the river, and leaves clues in the margins for readers who wish to follow up more about various appearances. Consequently, Middleton strikes a balance between depicting a place as it is, and allowing the reader to engage on a deeper level with the environment if they choose.

Sections of the poem also deal with the human history and development along the Colorado River. Middleton has sections that engage with Major John Wesley Powell’s journey down the river as well as towns that are now abandoned and museum exhibits. One particularly striking example of this is the sequence that describes the creation of Lake Powell. Middleton describes the process of the lake’s filling through the different years and how the lake is already a symbol:

and by the third year of filling the feeders have started to

feel it – the goosenecks

flooding – and the place

stands for elsewhere

Charlton Heston crashes

into water shuffles along till

he arrives at apes, while

year four sees calcium adhere to the sandstone walls beneath       (57)

Here Middleton describes the way Lake Powell was used as the setting for the movie Planet of the Apes and how this human created lake is already a symbol for “elsewhere”, a strangely concocted version of a place. Further this section is highly enjambed which reflects the constant filling of the lake and the way it transforms the place it occupies. Middleton writes this section as if it is addressed to the river, however she does not forget that this is an experience that has multiple narrators and follows this with a section from the point of view of the river itself where:

laden till the dam        River slows

restless body walled calling stilled

and quiet       River near to silence

 

yet sotto voce    lapping, never silent                 (59)

Here the agency of the river is recognised as even while the river is dammed it nevertheless is not a passive entity.

As a long poem Middleton’s Ephemeral Waters is well suited to depicting the Colorado River. The poem deviates and repeats like a river, but it also always flows onwards. Significantly, though, Middleton never tries to colonise the river by making it a poem or pretending to speak for it. Rather she lets her poem exist alongside the river as part of its environment, as a stream of words that take as their inspiration a river and pass this movement on to the reader.

Whether you’re a fan of his work or not, it is impossible to accuse Mark Tredinnick of creating art for art’s sake. He writes a poetry that is personal without becoming confessional, analytical in its use of introspect, seemingly cathartic but still delicately developed, unreserved yet gentle, perfectly balanced, and always deeply philosophical; and in his second collection Bluewren Cantos, Tredinnick masterfully straddles a difficult line between life and art.

For Tredinnick, poetry demands to be written and can’t be lived without. Take “Black Market”, where poetry’s place within the world is explored:

… Art, like love, wants to be

Made; poetry aches to be written.  (54)

This approach, this appreciation for poetry, for the sacredness of art, undeniably yields results: Mark Tredinnick creates art that is important and without surprise, his work is celebrated both here in Australia and abroad.

It has been several years since the publication of his impressive debut Fire Diary, and this book finds Tredinnick breaking new ground and further developing his signature voice and style in order to reach new heights. Like its predecessor, Bluewren Cantos explores shades of light and dark and writes of an existence where both Heaven and Hell are never far away from each other, and both have a place:

                                                        Perhaps these two days were

A night I had to die in, and now I’ve come back plural—

A hundred secrets made one flesh

(“Hell and Back [Again]”, 86)

The lines in Bluewren Cantos are long, as is the poet’s preference, filled with powerful natural imagery and personal reflections. The majority of these poems are based in Tredinnick’s home along the Wingecarribee River, southwest of Sydney, filled with birds and wild weather. The poet is a constant presence in the poems, and the place of the individual in the landscape is frequently explored and is one of the strongest aspects of his work. One of the most stunning places, handed to the reader through the use of beautiful imagery, is Hammock Hill, a place the poet visits often and loses himself in the depths of thought, going out and “hoping for the rest of me”:

This is my devotion, then: to walk sometimes

with the dog through the sclerophyll

Cathedral of morning.

(“On Hammock Hill”, 116)

Here the land and soul blend into one another and become the poetry’s music. By walking the land, Tredinnick finds his heart walking within it.

The fantastic opener “With Emily in the Garden” addresses the passing of a friend and the solitude of simply being, throughout the unpredictable day:

The morning is a soul admitted to itself,

And the room makes a perfect blind: I sit

At the window, neither in the world nor out

And watch rain fall through the anchorite

(“With Emily in the Garden”, 1)

The subtle balance of the lines creates a lovely music, where imagery can exist on the page beside experience. There is a sense of peace to be found in the silence between each line. Faith is a theme explored in the poem, as Tredinnick asks “how a god can flame/ with such temperate heat in the rain” (2), as light and dark coincide and beauty can exist beside pain, and the poet’s perception becomes vital in the course of mourning and memory, with a “darkness we grow accustomed to” (3).

Throughout the book there is that recurrent, age old questioning of understanding how good and bad can exist together if there is a divine world beyond us. Although this question is unanswerable in most regards, a poetry as deeply embedded in desire and passion as this, creates a more than adequate discussion.

The collection’s title poem is the epitome of the strength of Tredinnick’s work, creating a vivid exploration of the self and human emotion, progress and very existence. One gets the sense that he is delving deeply into himself as he constructs his verse, pulling out a hard-won beauty. Even through darkness, through the difficulties and loneliness of existence, the poet finds light and a further appreciation for the natural world.

I find myself reaching, these days,

towards everything, as if at once confessing love

And taking leave. The older I grow the more I seem

To live as if each moment were a subject

and my body were a brush; as if each day were

paper

And I were ink.

(“Bluewren Cantos”, 82)

Quoting Rumi several times throughout, Tredinnick explores his own world, his surroundings and his philosophy, where “living is longing” (82). The most powerful line, one which encapsulates his work, states that he writes “to make desire a practice” and “free [himself] inside time’s tough love” (82). This level of self-analysis does not stray from the dark, with the poet exploring the shadows of his own life, almost becoming lost, conscious of time and mortality, and allowing all feeling to seep fearlessly into his syntax. There is resolution however, or at least a sense of personal resilience, where art, namely poetry, creates a function for survival as “In art, as in love and weather, one’s mind is (in) one’s body again” and “all one’s longing a nest made empty by song” (83). With “Bluewren Cantos” being the beautiful and affecting poem that it is, and such a fine single example of his work, Tredinnick has chosen the perfect title for his second collection. It is a poem that demands revisiting and certainly one that lives in heart and mind long after.

Tredinnick’s poetry is important also, as his philosophy is universal; although the world is uncertain and filled with darkness, both internally and indeed externally, there is beauty and hope in that which we are willing to notice. There is an exquisite complexity to his work that is conveyed with deceiving simplicity, and the vast possibilities of poetic imagination are given full flight.

One cannot forget that Tredinnick was an established and respected writer and academic long before he was an award-winning poet. The eye of the academic is present in Bluewren Cantos, with each poem carefully formed and each line and phrase considered, but the poet’s sensibility and the voice of the naturalist always stands most prominent. This combination, one few have achieved, creates a wonderful and significant poetic achievement on both a critical and personal level.

Without any real question, poetry will always be a niche art form, and it will not ever be read as widely as, say, prose. But Mark Tredinnick, through his words and light, gives us the sense that for those who feel close to verse, who live their lives with and within the margins of books like Bluewren Cantos, poetry does and forever will matter.

In Flux, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa plunges straight in to a dense monologue prompted by the absence of various postcards that are lost, never written, never sent, forgotten, refused by a post office because of profanity, illegibly addressed and even a postcard swept away in a typhoon. The typhoon sets the scene. The location is Japan – where Jane lives. It’s summer – after the “Hello Kitty alarm clock” interrupts sleep and is instantly hurled across the room still shrieking its alarm in Japanese – “mada da ne? OKITE! – still asleep? GET UP!'” ... “somehow I manage to unstick myself from the crinkled bed sheets and stumble outside to the nearest sushi restaurant, where, being a vegan of course, I peel from the rice and then hurl the fishy parts until they stick to the restaurant conveyor belt. It’s so hot I assume I’ll be forgiven for this impropriety (and all the others) yet here come two unarmed guards wearing bright pink lipstick tight white skirts gloves and white hats, to carry me back to the oppressively humid street while I scream no, no, please, I am a political refugee from the violent country that dropped atomic bombs on you twice, the land of Rodney King, gang rape and Trayvon Martin”. She imagines prison life as time filled by a combination of reciting the complete works of Basho (though she can remember only one short poem) and listening to Morrissey. At the end of this anxious dream she cannot get up – not even to retrieve a possible missing postcard from the red letterbox. The reader knows the poet is in a predicament and surmises that she is going to try to write her way out of it.

The variety of form that follows the prose opening is breathtaking. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa once quoted Charles Bernstein saying “that a difference between experimental and traditional poetry could be that, in the latter case, one sets out to write about something, while in the former one writes and then discovers what the something is”.[1] Here she is applying the former. This book is disordered and its huge flood of imagery, ingenious observation, thought and feeling can seem, at times, overpowering but it is also always mindful.

Pages of tercets begin

walking my imaginary

dog pretending to make

dinner i avoid looking at

 

sad buildings because

the world has suddenly turned

quite somber

 and the resonance becomes a fragility and depression that is not completely turned from the world

orange butterfly

the terrifying self

continually windblown

 that develops reflectively in the next sequence –

A person’s resilience can be measured by the power to forget.

Full of screams and crying. Yours was. The park was a mass

of conflated jumping with intersections.

 The expatriate poet is clearly aware of her “foreignness” and that occasionally lends the tone a conscious detachment –

to not know what is foreign

a common state is far

people tend to appear absent

due to rearranging the words

if only the world

could be missing

Plumwood Mountain asks reviewers to consider ecology as a context. In Flux there is no separation between mind/poem/world or society/body/biota – the poems’ flow is inclusive throughout –

before the election / i tried

consuming

far less / if the world, instead of

being sometimes mere

beauty, spiritlessly /

triumphed / and (i was) moved,

but in the wrong direction / relation

of caterpillars to capsules and

capillaries / not cap

guns / of heroes / and

atrophy (of)

and as the levels of intensity of the poet’s self-aware, messy situation alter there is relief in a series of season-poems written in couplets. <spring> – “It’s time to start something new / like a headache that lasts for months”. <summer> – “Because the summer is delicate / we can deconstruct it easily”. <autumn> – “ ... falling leaves are another cover / for financial collapse”. <winter> – “A painting depicting a winter scene / may be better than the real thing”.

Then the scene and tenor switch or lurch into a longer discordant, hyperreal passage where the style is reminiscent of the Korean feminist poet Kim Hyesoon’s writing –

synthetic hair to whom scenery adheres

monster rerun i encoded my baby wow your sunburn is bright

try my wavy surfboard special one time offer two timer my

jonny baby after the toilet tissue of memory oh is exploded for

vacuum listen up teriyaki nobody knows the way to mars so

we go to kyoto and buy a tiny dour torch

for bulbous bassinet but let’s not play favourites oh

wrinkly ones i was just a fetus fetish garbled paint on wall

and your name is winkly miffy missy happy victim

USB midget babies fit in your pocket

This kind of totally readable glossolalia continues pacing the “breakdown” as it reaches a peak and takes on poverty, inequality and money and its relationship with power over nature, leading the reader eventually, though briefly, to think of Fukushima –

...              i may be radioactive iodine.  what

remains after the tidal wave    go ask father

 

nature.  somebody stole my vertebrae.  your

browsing is history.  we are

scientists after all.   i worry where my eyes will go

 

next & would like to move my hand across that

continent but stop myself

Further into this sequence the origin of the nuclear problem is mentioned – “... i’d like to touch marie / curie’s notebooks without gloves ...”.

There is a kind of purge that occurs towards the end of the book in a series of accounts of sexual encounters, some of which are extreme, violent, nightmarish and ugly – the destructive things that women experience. The dystopia of the poem reaches an apogee –

She began to lose track of time, of places, of people.

Earthquakes seemed to mimic her

moods and tidal waves washed away her thoughts.

 

Different kinds of radiation lead to different illnesses she read.

She began speaking a language no one else spoke.

 

At that time of course it was called the gay cancer. He had

warned her that he was

bisexual, after they had sex.

 

She had always hoped to be a drag queen, but ....

The poem begins to wind down – “The truth is I am allergic to everything red / and blue, and worry anti-depressants will ruin the sun’s / melancholia” – and it culminates in a slower, sad and beautiful set of tercets that seem to gather the debris after the storm –

in my rucksack hidden

in the self conscious air

where money may be time

 

white dust torn fields

meaning shrinks sublime

in the empty seat

 

at the drive in movie

the film I can’t see continues

my poem is complete to the extent I am not

and a little later  this extraordinary book ends –

once a lake

a simple knot for

a fluttering day

is creased

Unusually for Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, her chapbook-length poem, Wild Black Lake, is written in left-justified quatrains. As Flux demonstrates, in most of her books she uses various line lengths and a mix of styles that allow the poetry an unevenness. This one was written after Flux. It’s quieter, formally arranged and tidy.

Sometimes, the way we live – “in rooms we exchange air for air” – in artificially conditioned rooms makes us want to surrender, just give up – “[I wondered what / it would be like / to sink into that wide black ocean / and never emerge]” – but through careful perception this poem shifts from a general anomie-at-large into a reflective personal desuetude – “i become stone / enclosed by narration / hoping to melt / stem by stem”. There’s no doubt that things are awry – “an excerpt cluster / carp motionless in a pond / torn red paper lanterns / scorched flowerbeds” – but Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s precise imagery and knowing understatement provides an antidote to the defective.

Jane leaves interpretation open to the reader. I never know whether this lake – “weird black lake / territorial mimesis / exterior milieu / dialectic protection” – is actual or metaphoric but it doesn’t matter. The poem can be imagined as set literally lakeside, perhaps at a forested retreat and, although cognizant of crisis, it connects the reader to a protective space or anodyne state of being. She makes meaning via graceful minimalism in the face of a decayed world altered by human activity – “elegant bird / under automobile tires / replying eagerly / a sun sinks”. But there is no natural solution here – “smoothing of space / millions of morals / womb for words / see enclosed brochure”.

You can observe from here

that certain thoughts are eliminated

at the source. A dichotomy results,

permitting complex scientific research

and acceptance of delivered truth. (24)

These poems are about delivered truth and the language of deceit. Kathleen Flenniken, who is Poet Laureate of Washington State, writes from her experiences as the second generation in her family to work as a scientist at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Hanford Nuclear Reservation is on the Columbia River in Washington State (the top northwest corner of the continental United States). It was set up in 1943 to manufacture plutonium for bombs. It has since become—and continues to be—a dumping ground for colossal amounts of toxic waste, the largest in the western hemisphere. It has an equally long continuing history of (meaningless) government assurances of safety, both towards workers and their families and towards the physical environment, now and in the future. This combination is not unique to Hanford (see Chernobyl, Sellafield, Fukushima, for starters), but Flenniken’s special combination of scientific and poetic skills gives us a powerful and readable illustration of an ongoing disaster and official attempts to pretend nothing untoward is going on.

The poems are grounded in the author’s memories of the high desert landscape and of her family as members of a unique community. Here is the past, seen from “Rattlesnake Mountain”:

 Our families all came from elsewhere,

and regarded the desert as empty,

and ugly ...

 

I left the mountain half my life ago

to live among trees,

and now – an exile – I understand

 

what beautiful ghost rises up in the distance

in my dreams. Now I know

this ruined place is sacred. (5)

The poems are in a wonderful variety of styles: prose poems, concrete poems, lyrics and reminiscences. Some of them, like “Bedroom community”, are in the language of childhood and best friends:

... We pulled up our covers

while our overburdened fathers

 

dragged home to fix a drink,

and some of them grew sick –

 

Carolyn, your father’s marrow

testified. ... (9)

“Document control” is witness to the secrecy such installations require and make normal. “We don’t know what the documents contain. ... We are all dependent on what each of us knows.” (10) In “Song of the secretary, hot lab”, “... I learned/ to stare windows into my typing as my Selectric/ raced along at 74 words per minute.” (50)

“Green run” is not about the Columbia River and its salmon run, not about the sticky leaves of spring: it’s about an enormous deliberate release of radioactive iodine and xenon isotopes ... to see what would happen. Sixty years on, the results are still classified and may yet come frighteningly out of the night in the manner of tumbleweeds on a dark highway.

Governmental language is turned back on itself in “Redactions I–III”. In these poems, quotations from the Atomic Energy Act, Robert Oppenheimer, and the Atomic Energy Commission are blacked out to reveal a different story entirely. Redaction III edits an AEC reassurance to read “A trial and no peers”. We hesitate over the slightly unfamiliar “redaction” and don’t realise until too late that one entire meaning been thoroughly edited out.

Flenniken balances her own words against words from official documents. The former deal with everyday life, often a bright child’s observations of her surroundings and how very special it was to belong to a community of very special people doing their best for their country—even to the extent of full-body scans for every child in Marcus Whitman Elementary School:

Just once I peeked

and the machine had taken me in

 

like a spaceship and I moved

slow as the sun through the chamber’s

smooth steel sky.

 

I shut my eyes again and pledged

to be still; so proud to be

a girl America could count on. (16)

The six-part “Augean Suite” gives us the variety of voices Flenniken uses throughout her book. “II. Augean gray, 1954” is a matter-of-fact description of the awful:

... the click of my mother’s heels

as she pushed one baby in a carriage

and pulled another by the hand

through the nearby village in August –

as it snowed radioruthenium.

...

If only the villagers had asked

why 17,000 signs were erected

all over the desert to

Keep Off the Grass. (33)

In “VI. Herbert Parker’s statement to Congress, 1962” we are given the exact words of the Hanford site manager’s congressional testimony, a performance in which he uses clunky and supposedly erudite language to hide levels of radiation exposure behind “fashionable color terminology” (his phrase):

If we accept the principle of acceptable risk in radiation exposure ... we have only infinite gradation of gray ... I classify Arcadian gray as pure and clean for the relevant purpose, and Augean gray containing a reference to the well-known stables of history, and the middle range, if I may clarify that, as I recall Achilles, he was pretty sound but he had a couple of weak spots, one on each heel. (37)

The wording here converts the toxic into the heroic crossed with a lesson in interior decorating. A lethal radiation dose (which he avoids calling a shitstorm, though he means exactly that) is reduced to a colour chip you’ll find on any sample chart for your sitting-room walls—so relax, girls, it’s no big deal what we’re talking about here. (The “gray”, named in 1972 after a British scientist, is also an SI unit of measurement of absorbed radiation.)

All these word games—whose side is the language on? Everyone’s, of course, but who slants the words depends on who gets in first—as ad agencies know very well. Euphemisms have been around forever in peaceful and military contexts, and we can’t legislate them out of existence or even ignore them entirely. My own observation (after many years as a tech editor) is that whenever possible the defence industry opts for cosy domestic terminology. Missiles are stored in silos, just like corn; radiation comes like cod-liver oil in doses (not bursts or shots), not much fun to get down but good for you in the long run. Until about 70 years ago, drones always meant bees. Plumes are worn by knights in shining armour or colonial governors; now they are invasive releases of radiation into whatever fluid is around at the time. The title poem is shaped like a plume:

  ... (18)

Words which are legitimate choices in terms of the English language of science are, as well, loaded and blur the boundary between safe and unsafe worlds. Hearing comfortable and familiar words encourages us to accept whatever these words stand for in a new usage, and this acceptance helps us postpone the need to ask uncomfortable questions. We can never find out what names have been given with malice aforethought, but we can stay aware of the double layers.

Flenniken shows us how classical myth, which we accept and honour as part of our cultural world, is also used to support a new myth of unacceptable and immoral destruction. In “I. The fifth labor of Hercules” we start out with gods and heroes but end up somewhere else entirely, in a place the gods and heroes have ignored:

The stench hung over the valley,

palpable. Nobody

waded into the fouled stable

 

without drowning.

This gave Hercules his idea

to divert two rivers,

 

the Alpheus and the Peneus,

and sluice the filth away,

which he finished in a single day.

 

Then he slew King Augeus

...

No more mention

 

of the two gangrenous rivers,

the women downstream washing clothes

or their children bathing. (32)

This book vividly shows us how language varies as it is pulled back and forth for political ends, many poems playing off the difference between official and day-to-day language. Nuclear waste is a huge topic. So is what we do with words and what we let words do to us. Being honest with words is one of the jobs we can do as poets—not just figuring out what’s really being said but speaking out about it.

Life and Loss: Poems to Treasure

Anne M Carson has published a vivid, heartfelt volume of poetry, Removing the Kimono. This, the poet’s first full-length collection, demonstrates consummate skill in painting metaphor. With her keen artist’s vision, she sees animals, plants, landscape and human experience in a rainbow of colours from cocoa and ivory to light lapis.

In ‘The crucible’, Carson conjures memories of a mud-brick hut where she lived for seven years:

In the light of ecumenical candles, witnessed by foraging rodents,

my longing took the long journey of translation into practice

 

of the craft, the work. Other self-sufficiencies followed;

swinging a decent axe, stacking a sturdy woodpile.

 

I returned to the city, newmade, leaving the mudbrick cottage

to its fate. (15)

She revisits the cottage after it has passed through the crucible of bushfire.  This visual story is a cathartic meditation singing with profundity.

The person of the poet is prominent in this volume: in her autobiographical trajectory, poetic voice and artist’s perspective. The theme of the volume could be: emerging from the chrysalis of grief.  This happens most clearly in the title poem, ‘The dresser removes The Kimono of Mourning’:

The dresser’s hand and arm ripple around me.

I recall the movements in my mind’s theatre –

remember our rehearsals.

 

Back and forth, her hands are tireless,

eddying like wind over rice fields.

She is to empty

 

me of grief.  A dark spirit emerges – long

as obi. She is a noh dancer drawing

from my ears, mouth, nostrils

 

the colours of sorrow. A final red, arterial scarf

from the belly, drawn out, dissolving in ether.

She has removed

 

the inner and outer garments of

my bereavement. Unmade, I prepare to start

over, alone on tatami. (48–49)

As the footnotes explain, noh dancing is a ‘ritualised Japanese dance/drama concerned with the timeless concerns of the human condition’; obi refers to ‘wide and long pieces of fabric, often of a contrasting colour and design, used to secure kimono at waist’; tatami is a ‘woven floor mat’ (49).

This grand silk kimono, dark as midnight, may have had a precursor in the black silk dressing-gown embroidered with magenta lilies the poet donned when fragrant with lovemaking, in ‘The seduction of shaving’ (29–30). She grieves for her husband. His diagnosis with an unnamed fatal disease triggered their marriage (‘Partaking of the other’, 40). The poet reflects on the sanctity of her wedding vows in ‘Transubstantiation’ as she flies with her husband over Lake Frome on their Lake Eyre honeymoon (41–42). The tragic undertones give these love poems added emotive force.

The volume is divided into a prologue, parts I, II, and III, and an epilogue, each introduced by verse of another poet, from Basho to Rumi. Most poems are free verse.  Some are also narrative poems, for example, ‘The limits of Goodwill’ recounts the poet’s adventures in Germany.  That many poems relate to specific places is explicit in the titles of 29 of the 51 that appear in Removing the Kimono.  Others are dedicated to named people.  Many of the poems won prizes in former lives before publication in this volume.

Part II charts the poet’s bond with her husband from ‘Spooning under the Milky Way’ to ‘A lesson in … letting go’. Primal forces of love, sex, life, death and grief are portrayed here. ‘A lesson in … letting go’, the shortest poem in the volume, is striking because it makes a visual poem on the page and graphically describes a moment when human remains tether with the landscape.  As the poet scatters ashes in the elbow of the river:

All I can do is release you, trickle you into the tree-fringed

flow, let the water in its wisdom carry you away, let you

sink, white and ethereal, to the pebble floor. (50)

The lovers, in ‘Spooning under the Milky Way’, are ‘poised/ in the whirling night’ (27). Carson’s poetry steps in the lineage of Judith Wright for its power. For example, ‘Blind head butting at the dark’ in Wright’s ‘Woman to Man’ reminds me of the moth flailing around the darkness of the bed in Carson’s ‘To a flame’: ‘delicate caress on cheek,/ chest, the blunt butt of its head’ (38).  Wright’s ‘Cycads’ and Carson’s ‘Trusting the eloquence of seeds’ (53) both explore metaphysical questions and testify to the value of plants.

Carson’s skill is evident when she listens and introduces an aural element.  In ‘The sound of absence’ she achieves both high impact and subtlety:

 … I turn

aural. Sounds become equi-valent; rich,

 

intricately textured. The fridge’s groans and

shudders no less pleasing than the liquid

 

melody of the magpie or the whistle of wind

in the elm. ... (31)

Carson’s ability to find the poetic in the domestic resembles Irish poet Eavan Boland’s ‘Domestic Interior’.

The poet’s frankness means that this volume achieves one of the key purposes of poetry:  to teach us what it is to be human. The poet is also concerned with deeper metaphysical matters. Carson uses vivid word pictures and precise imagery to depict the wildness of humans. For example, in ‘Self-portrait’,

You can pour out the self you imagine real in the world

 

like you pour your body into the brine-warm rockpool.

Let light invade the body, the way the sun shines

 

through ruby panels in the black cockatoo’s red

tail feathers – stained-glass brilliant against the sky. (9)

The prominence of the person of the poet means that much of the collection has an anthropocentric perspective. However, this is saved from being exploitative by the beauty of the language and the reverence with which animals, plants and landscape are portrayed. For example, in ‘Heron ministers to the morning’, birds on the Yarra River are given human qualities:

… From his pulpit,

a heron ministers to the morning,

dove-grey coat, delicate manners,

 

so softly spoken the wind takes

his words, whisks them into ether. (8)

This poem also shows concern for environmental balance, as the heron-minister warns:

… – is there water

enough for migration? If the adults

don’t venture north, no elvers will

 

return to the Yarra … (8)

Carson’s verse shows, too, the breadth, sophistry and nuance of human culture.  ‘The Propinquity of the Past’ traverses the boundaries between dream and real life.  ‘Broken, rising’ draws on the six principal tones of Vietnamese language from mid-level to low-falling broken (64–65). Likewise, Carson mines the culture of Japan. The prologue is an unattributed story of ‘The Kiri tree and the girl’. The girl in the story does not appear to be the poet. The poet’s connection with Japan is not explained and remains a mystery to tantalise readers.

The title poem features the line ‘Torihada rises’ (48). A footnote explains that torihada means ‘goose bumps’ in Japanese. As this poem is in English, I would suggest that ‘Torihada rise’ were preferable and, arguably, would have more direct impact on the reader. This is the only jarring note in the entire volume.

Many of the poems are inspired by experiences in Australia.  But this is no insular collection:  pieces of Japan, Vietnam, France, Germany, Scotland, Iceland and Denmark can be found here.  ‘On giving away your old red scarf’ tracks the journey of a scarf, belonging to someone long-dead, from a rug shop in Marrakesh—once red as cyclamen, vivid as blood, faded now to palest rust (55). ‘The detective’s chair’ also signifies cultural sophistication. This poem stands out in the collection for its contemporary intertextual references. It spins a cracking yarn and asserts the importance of musing in chairs to solving cases. A sense of place from Edinburgh to Reykjavik and Copenhagen runs through this poem and culminates as Erlendur in Reykjavik offers his tired thoughts, his despair to the open sky. (59–60)

Carson depicts the dance between humans and other creatures. She shapeshifts from a fox to a woman in ‘Digitalis’ (76). Many poems simply feature observation of the animals, plants and landscape.  The act of looking is clearly very important to this artist-poet. She can even see story (in ‘Broken, rising’, 64–65).  The moon provides counsel (‘Compression’, 43–44), the riverboat cradles us to sleep (‘Songs of the mysterious river’, 34–35), her husband turns tawny and grows a pelt in moonlight (‘Turning Tawny’, 37).  The poet mines a treasure-trove of metaphors from flora and fauna: her ‘throat opens like a gull’s’ (‘On the ebb-tide’, 45), the elegance of a dance is ‘like brolgas courting’, she lugs a bundle of death around ‘like weighted animal skin/ through the years’ tundra, eating dirt and rock’ (‘On giving away your old red scarf’, 55) and trees ‘turn into torches’ (‘A body you cherish’, 54).  The crows are personified in ‘Corvid’ (7). In ‘On the ebb-tide’, the poet scoops up a gasping fish on the beach (between cuttlefish bones as she is squeamish about slime):

… The fish eye’s iris flares, registering

touch. We have the rudiments of communication (46).

The poet grounds moments of grief in more ordinary phenomena:  she walks through the cottage ruins in ‘The Crucible’ (13–16), ‘the air holds its breath’ (21) at her father’s funeral and she leaks ‘tears and fury’ (69) as she digs into the compost of the corpse of her first marriage.  Other losses are charted by the poems: the death of her cat and dog.  Michael Sharkey’s review of Removing the Kimono for Cordite compared Carson’s mastery of loss to Elizabeth Bishop in ‘The Art of Losing’. Both women offer immense wisdom.

Carson leads readers to the conclusion of her thesis that humans are wild (albeit sophisticated and nuanced) when, in ‘The lovely wild’:

 … A breeze falls

on my upturned face;

I inhale the lovely wild. (78)

The paradox of the wild being lovely rings through in the finale: ‘Oyster of the soul’, a poem replete with renewed hope. Carson demonstrates with a flourish her metaphorical skill; wattle pollen scattered over gravel signifies beauty and grit between two people turning to pearl in the oyster of the soul (81).

These poems are immensely enjoyable to read in silence and aloud.  I am longing for a hardcover version to hold and savour and hand down over the generations, and an audio version to play while going about life.  The breadth of subject matter and technique marks Anne Carson as a virtuoso.  She has made an eloquent, intimate contribution to Australian poetry.