There is a minimalist elegance in the cover design of Alexis Wright’s new biographical tribute to First Australian visionary and leader, Tracker Tilmouth. The book cover features a black-and-white image of an old Akubra in its bottom right-hand corner set against a plain white background. The name of the book, Tracker, is in glorious ochre. Alexis Wright’s name is in silver and is, therefore, linked to the grey tones found in the hat. The Akubra is now more often associated with the aggressive elements of right-wing politics. This book offers both confrontation to, and comfort and protection from, such dangerous interests. Tracker is another essential read from Wright: its subject is a charismatic leader, political thinker and entrepreneur; and the book itself is a model for a new type of biographical method. The hat of the cover once crowned a superlative force and intellect.

Wright begins her project with the following question: ‘How do you tell an impossible story, one that is almost too big to contain in a single book?’ She begins her reflection on this question by offering the following thoughts on First Nations identity:

In all honesty, an Aboriginal writer would admit to being hard-pressed to understand all the nuances and depths of differences, or what is really in the heart of another countryman’s or countrywoman’s song, the deep inner spirit of their traditional country, and its full significance in our world. You cannot. Too much has happened. Too much about this country is never resolved, and this is also what has shaped us. And we learn to guard what we know too much. (1)

Wright notes that Tracker Tilmouth was ‘one of the few brilliant statesmanlike leaders we have had – one who stayed close to his own people, and who really had the capacity to push back the boundaries for much of the action that shapes how we think and have thought about our times’ (7). She also observes that ‘there was nothing normal about [Tracker]’ and that ‘a Western-style biography would never do for someone like him’ (7). She highlights that ‘the problem with creating this book was the question of how you would write a story about someone who challenged all expectations’ (12). But this was a challenge given to Wright by Tracker himself: ‘I want you to write something for me, Wrighty’ (12). So how has she approached the task?

To answer this question, Wright went back to Tracker: ‘Wrighty, I just want to bookend this. Let others tell the story. Let them say what they want’ (12). And so Wright, together with Tracker Tilmouth, began to develop a new kind of strategy for writing a biography:

This was how Tracker envisioned this book, which he wanted to call The Unreliable Witness. He was simply saying what our mob say time and again, Let people have a say. Let them tell their own stories. Let people speak for themselves. This is a reasonable response to a lifetime of confronting the legacy of our stories being told and misrepresented by others, as has been happening since the arrival of the First Fleet. Tracker made stories happen in reality. For him, stories were for changing reality at whatever level it took to make something happen. These were not stories that could make people live happily ever after, they were stories to make people’s lives better by making a difference, and along the way, to create amazing memories. (12)

Wright calls this biographical method a ‘collective memoir’ as the stories in Tracker are told from many points of view: 'This book helps to explain some of [Tracker’s] ideas and his significance as a leader of his times. There are many voices in these pages. The contributors were all chosen by Tracker. He wanted them to tell their parts in the story.' (12)

Wright concludes her introductory essay with the following celebration:

Tracker the phenomenal life force with great intelligence, quick recall, plenty of vision operating on multiple fronts, had a precise insight into whatever political or commercial states of play were happening in the Aboriginal world across Australia. He had it all in his mind, and being anywhere near Tracker in action was like James Joyce once saying, of Finnegans Wake, this was going to take them a hundred years to figure out. (15)

Part One of Tracker is called ‘Trying To Get The Story Straight’ and begins with Tracker’s compulsory removal from his family at the age of two, and his childhood spent in a children’s home on Croker Island. This section of the book is a powerful example of the new biographical method that Wright and Tracker Tilmouth have developed for telling this story. It is a searing interrogation of the racist values that made the Stolen Generations possible. But in allowing parallel memories and stories to exist side-by-side, while it does document the personal devastation that this government policy caused, it also highlights unexpected and original viewpoints.

In the memories of William and Patrick Tilmouth (Tracker’s brothers) and in such friends as Peter Hansen, a picture emerges of the child Tracker as a good-natured rascal: a ‘Dennis the Menace’ (69) and ‘cheeky little bastard’ though ‘very intelligent’ (73). These stories of joyous mischief and adventure are powerful testament to childhood resiliency. But, remarkably, the reflections on what it was like to live ‘inside’ the Stolen Generations is not only provided by First Nations people. A major contributor to this section is Sister Lois Bartram. Bartram was the housemother of the cottage where Tracker and his younger brothers were sent to live. And as adults the Tilmouths remember her so fondly: she was ‘a good lady’. And a tiny lady, she was only tiny. She put the fear of God into all of us’ (33); ‘she was brilliant’ (33); ‘she was just an amazing, amazing, amazing woman’ (34); ‘she was a really good role model and staunch as anything. She lived her life in honesty. She was a very sincere, honest person. Righteous’ (34). So, from the beginning, we are positioned to value the point of view of someone who worked for the church organisations in administering this government policy of the compulsory separation of children from their families. This does not justify or excuse the scheme, but it does give an unexpected viewpoint. Sister Bartram says of the 1950s, when she was helping to run these children’s homes, that ‘there was no talk of a Stolen Generation. Not just the term but the fact, and I was completely ignorant of the fact that Aboriginal children were compulsorily taken from their parents’ care, and put into institutions’ (32). Sister Bartram also relates how:

I was twenty-five when I went to Croker. It seems young now but I did not feel particularly young then. I had done general nursing training and mid and infant welfare, and when I did infant welfare we had to read a book by John Bowlby which was called Maternal Care and Mental Health. He knew what he was talking about. His work was about the effect on children when they are denied maternal care right from birth, but also the over the years too, and it was really disturbing. It explains a lot of things I think, as to how people get into trouble in later life and so on. And it really hit me as to what dire effects it can have. That affected me greatly and I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to go into childcare for children who for some reason could not stay with their own families. (31)

The way Wright allows these narratives to exist side-by-side, valuing all points of view, is remarkable. Obviously, not all people who worked in the system were as loving and generous as Sister Bartram, but her experiences of working for this terrible program adds to the achingly intimate response that this memoir documents on the Stolen Generations. And despite the Tilmouth brothers’ luck in being cared for by someone like Sister Bartram, in adult life there were still the tragic consequences of growing up separated from family and Culture: legal difficulties, substance abuse and suicide attempts. In later years, when Tracker learnt the truth about his separation from family, he returned home: 'Getting back to Alice and getting back to Central Australia, it was extremely difficult finding out where you belonged. It was difficult because you did not know where you came from.' (82)

From such disadvantaged tragedy, Tracker Tilmouth worked tirelessly to become a dynamic leader who advocated for First Nations self-determination, creating so many opportunities for land-use and economic development. But this biography not only celebrates the life of a remarkable Australian, it also points the way forward to a new type of biographical method, one that esteems First Australian storytelling, tolerance and magnanimity.

Poets have always written about rivers, from early classical Chinese poets two and half thousand years ago to seventeenth century Japanese zen poets to twentieth century deep ecologist Beat poet Gary Snyder and many others since. It's been a poetic topic for aeons. Increasingly rivers have become the site of multiform destruction of urban and rural communities devastated by the rampaging speed of careless hyper-industrial development and climate change. This has driven poets to become more psychogeographical than nature-loving. Australian Kate Middleton's Ephemeral Waters (Giramondo, 2013) follows the course of the Colorado River in North America. Contemporary Chinese poet Yang Jian's Long River (Tinfish, 2018) registers lost environs – a dead pig floats in a river that no longer flows through the mountain that is no longer there. In 1999 Brisbane City Council funded the production of a mixed media CD Blackfellas White fellas Wetlands (Poetry and music from Boondall Wetlands) by B R Dionysius, Liz Hall-Downs and Samuel Wagan Watson. Two decades later, living and writing in Brisbane, Jake Goetz cites Dart, UK poet Alice Oswald's 2002 book-length poem about the Dart River in Devon, as an influence. But I don't think any of those poets have so consciously used the Situationist technique of psychogeographical dérive to write a river in the way Jake Goetz does in his four poem sequence meditations with passing water.

Dérive – so what is this curious word? The late fifties' Letterist International's Potlatch journal gives some of its resonances. Its Latin root derivare means to draw off a stream, to divert a flow. Its English descendants include the word 'derive' and also 'river'. Its whole field of meaning is aquatic, conjuring up flows, channels, eddies, currents, and also drifting, sailing or tacking against the wind. It suggests a space and time of liquid movement, sometimes predictable but sometimes turbulent. For the Situationists in Paris in the 1950s the word condensed a whole attitude to life, an ethic of drifting. The practice of dérive is more than just an urban walkabout. It's a practice connected to the discoveries of the qualities or elements of any block of space and time.*

So, to the Brisbane River – the old, old, long winding river that passes sluggishly through the capital city of Queensland after a 344 kilometre flow from the north at Mount Stanley, on the Great Dividing Range, before merging into Moreton Bay. The river, as Goetz records, is known by the indigenous peoples as 'Maiwar'. I searched for its meaning and found that 'Dandiiri Maiwar' roughly translates as 'meet at the river'.

This sequence of poems combines effectively into one long work. It begins with an artful and sometimes heady prologue set at Kurilpa on Brisbane's South Bank – 'tensing its liquid body / the river carries / the syntax of the city / on its back' (3). A passing ferry is filled with Chinese tourists 'grasping for eternity / in a camera / posing like mangroves' (3). The cars moving along the roadway across the river are likened to 'glistening metal bees / pollinating the CBD' (3). As the irregular lineation cascades down the page the poet becomes reflective, critical, observant. All kinds of people move through or into the stanzas. They're walking, exercising, cycling, going to or from school as, occasionally, the poet speculates philosophically, even quoting Feuerbach on truth and profanity and connects the idea to the various activities, behaviours and appearance of the passers-by, under 'the wind that is a hand / that brushes the hair / of jacarandas' beneath the corporately branded city buildings 'Suncorp / SANTOS       Telstra / mercure // ... two Germans / and their idea of a "ganz furchtbar" city' are 'watching a myna being dragged / across pebbles by a crow / that navigates the red innards' (4–5).  Nature, red in tooth and claw. The haughty phrase ganz furchtbar means something like 'entirely dreadful' or 'totally horrible'.

The prologue is a rush of situational imagery and thought that becomes mildly glossolalic

in being human and from a nation

on a groaning earth

that fluctuates like an excess of alcohol

in the stomach     in pulsating lights

exploding stars     exhaust wielding cars

trails of lava of history of piss of crac

king rocks that slide into water

finding comfort

in the all or nothing equation

of the universe

the passing water

of Maiwar of Brisbane

on which so much depends

(6)

Moving smoothly around in time from the past, from then to now to now and then, the poem encompasses geological change like volcanic eruption and the splitting of ancient Gondwana, as well as recent histories like ticket-of-leave convicts and the 19th century arrival of the so-called discoverer, the New South Wales Surveyor-General John Oxley's ship against an imagined cinematic backdrop of  'the smoke of the Jagera’s fires / rising up ' (7). The Jagera and Turrbal people are the custodians of the land where this work was made. The scene is set for the poem-to-come.

The poem's predominant elements are collage and subjectivity. Collage of this kind was one of Laurie Duggan's techniques in his influential book-length poem The Ash Range, about Gippsland, Victoria, in 1987. Here, as Jake Goetz drifts, records, reflects and reports, the work becomes a kind of documentary that's been deliberately distanced from dry academic research and stretched organically into a complex artistry. Goetz also uses poetic devices like graphic stanza design or mimetic visual lineation to quickly impart his content. In the 'Note on the Text' he says:

The intersection of texts ... relates to the process of writing being the most central aspect of the poem – to form a river of language constructed out of the river's language – intertwining my physical and mental digressions with its movement, history and surrounding environment to challenge the way one might write about a specific place. Ultimately I feel this makes the poem move haphazardly: between being immersed in a subject, and one's inability to be anything more than relative to that subject; of building a myth around a place, and being unable to do anything more than negotiate observations; of grasping, being unable to grasp; of not being obsessed with perfection, but living (writing) and its creation. (64)

The Brisbane River often floods. The section 'Highgate Hill to Hamilton / The Flood of 1823' opens 'on Gladstone Road / iron roofs glisten / in the sub-tropical sun / a canopy to a forest / of dead trees dissected / by cement streets / a suburban photosynthesis / in the South Pacific' (9). Here Goetz reminds us of a recent ecological personification in our region:

New Zealand’s Whanganui River

granted legal status as a person

after 170-year battle

flowing 145 kilometres

from the Central North island

to the sea …

This legislation recognises

the deep spiritual connection

between the Whanganui Iwi

and its ancestral river

(10)

Then he returns to the local and the public bus he's riding 'chucking exhaust / into the very structure / we could never erect' (10).

Over three decades ago, in his influential book Dissemination, the postmodernist philosopher Jacques Derrida contended 'we find ourselves unable to represent "place" itself except by metaphors'. This certainly still occurs in romantic 'nature poetry'. That is poetry of 'place' that registers a kind of psychopathology where the psychological is imputed into the landscape. The consequence of Derrida's and others' postmodern insight allows the people who appear in meditations with passing water to speak for themselves and permits the poet a scopic investigation of the ancient and recent culture of a living, messy as well as productive, bounteous waterway.

Climate change, the northern coral reef, and John Oxley's record of surveying are woven into the poem between cascading stanzas. Oxley notes the river's mangroves and its muddiness, its abundant molluscs, its topography and its extent. These paragraphs' typographics are made with spaces that form the shape of a river running through the text. Then Goetz again returns to contemporary signs – birdlife, discarded beer bottles in the mud, plastic bottles – then he turns the poem towards the past with headstones in a South Brisbane cemetery recording the fates of various people including 'Patrick Kenniff, Australia’s last bushranger / Ernest Austin, the last man / to be hanged in the state / and Elen Thompson, the only woman / ever hanged in Queensland' (16).Then he moves back to contemporary memory via verbatim quotes ' … the river got dirty after the war / before it was as clear as the surf at Coolangatta / it was green like the ocean water' (16).

Aboriginal 'history' and recent struggles for rights, recognition and sovereignty are threaded throughout the poem – sometimes highlighting complications of different local lore and local law. Goetz presents a 2017 newspaper report:

Calls to remove Aboriginal flag

painted on major intersection

Residents recently woke

to a huge Aboriginal flag

painted on the road

at the intersection

of Vulture and Boundary streets

Uncle Sam Watson said those responsible

were expressing their anger

at indigenous people being forced

out of the area by gentrification

A Queensland spokesman said

it was hard to enforce the law

on Aboriginal land

“it is an offence to graffiti council roads

and infrastructure

but it becomes convoluted

when it comes to Aboriginals

who are considered the traditional owners

of the land.”

(18)

Halfway through the book doubt creeps in to Goetz's process -

perhaps the negation

of knowledge   of progress

of the fixity of things

is what this poem is after

(did i ruin it?

(did this?

not the place

or the poem

but the myth)

the country as myth

)

(29)

The poet's recognition of the problem of 'myth' is integral to his process of making poetry and opens a space for thinking through any methodological quandary. A few pages on, after tackling a brief history of water frontage property, Goetz is again writing beyond doubt –

by the real Pinken-ba (New Farm)

‘place of sea turtles’

storm clouds low and thick

hold the sun

turn water a deep green

and still     in the distance

Meriton protruding

into language

as the prolongation of colonisation

into language as change

to emancipate the imagination

and realise the relation

of l

a

n

g

u

to pl a ce

g

e

for ‘us’ and ‘them’ to evaporate

like vomit in the sun

to be water in unison in this creation

where to do nothing but comprehend

our continuity

(33)

With the ever-present city's Australian flags on high-rise buildings and its developments looming over the poem, Goetz's dedicated surrender to the haphazard affords a probably unintended yet distinctly smooth interspersal of the historical and the contemporary. Queensland's particular old architecture, ship building, Scottish coal ships arriving in the 1920's, cyclones bringing steamers in to port, ancient mineral deposits becoming a quarry, the bridges – William Jolley, Kurilpa Walk and Storey – where 'between 1990 and 2012 / 88 suicides have been recorded' (31) are ingeniously patched in alongside river breezes, mythic Aboriginal dancing eels, sport – Darren Lockyer, captain of Brisbane Broncos rugby team – together with Brisbane poets Liam Ferney, and David Malouf 'calling / from the windows' of a Queenslander to flying foxes and possums (24), along with a Cancer horoscope predicting 'an outing that you thought as purely educational / may prove to be fun' (26) – 'an Ibis atop a palm tree / surveys the city––Meanjin / 'a place shaped / as a spike’ (27).

The book has a coda – 'The real unDiscovery (Sydney to Brisbane)' (55–61). Jake Goetz is making his journey, in this case, a plane flight from Sydney to Brisbane. Above the Blue Mountains he imagines the journey back into the early nineteenth century via the tale of a Mancunian brick-maker convict, Thomas Pamphlett, who, since his transportation, has continued a life of minor crime and subsequent punishment in the New South Wales colony. He absconds and is caught various times before he is eventually employed, with three other ticket-of-leave convicts, on a boat carrying cedar from Newcastle to Wollongong. The boat is caught in a wild storm that continues for days, causing them to drift without sails in a direction they suppose is south. Without a compass they steer via the sun. They have no water and drink rum for a fortnight. Dehydrated and deranged, they spot land but decide to stay clear when they see 'the natives around their fires'. They drift even further out into the ocean. One of the convict sailors has died. After brief considerations they reluctantly throw him overboard. Having been lost in the Pacific Ocean for around three months they find a bight with a fresh water stream. The surf there is rough so they set their boat adrift then jump into the waves and struggle towards shore. They believe they are south of Port Jackson but they've actually landed on Moreton Island (Moorgumpin). Assisted by local Aboriginal people they borrow a canoe and cross Moreton Bay (Quandamooka) to pre-white-settlement Cleveland in the hope of finding Sydney. These three ticket-of-leave men arrive 'on the banks of / a large river' in June 1823 preceding John Oxley's entry to the Brisbane River by six months.

The Tiny Museums by Carolyn Abbs is a long-awaited first collection. As a colleague in the same writers’ group, I have to state that while I am somewhat biased, I am more than happy that Carolyn persevered with her poetry in a long membership with Out of the Asylum Writers Inc., Fremantle, and in Shane McCauley’s poetry class. More importantly that her hard work has been recognised and awarded a highly-commended by UWA Publishing. In my reading of the collection’s impressive eighty-one poems, I have not been disappointed.

It is often a long journey to get to this point of having a first collection; the magazines and journal subscriptions one has to belong to, the insurmountable rejections slips, entering major and lesser-known poetry competitions and then the kudos that finally your poetry is being published! Abbs has, to her credit, major publications in Writ Poetry Review, Westerly, Rabbit Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, The Best Australian Poems 2014; a series of poems, ‘Different Hemispheres’, in Axon: Creative Explorations (2015); in the Australian Book Review, print, online, and in a podcast as part of the ‘States of Poetry Project’ (2016).

While the poetry in this collection is a reflection of growing up in the south of England, of childhood memories, of family past and present, there appears to be an overarching premise to the work as ‘a feminist text of embodiment’. It is not surprising that as an academic (she holds a PhD from Murdoch University) Abbs would be familiar with feminist theory on marriage, motherhood, pregnancy, gender issues and in particular the binaries of the mind / body, home / away, and past / present. The whole collection is intrinsically visceral, sensually rich and embodies art, photography, life and nature all as one entity. In ‘Above a Seedy Flower Shop’, the bride (et al) is an apparition while the old wares of the shop hint at weddings. The artist Rodin is mentioned further in the poem.

A spray of whitish flowers anemones      roses      campion      forget-me-nots stuffed in a vase      as if hurled by a bride      and caught by a girl with cautious hands.

(64)

In relation to Abbs’s poetry as embodiment, I cite an online article titled ‘The body / Embodiment Group’ which states:

In the feminist critique of the mind-body and the dualistic counterparts: male / female, culture / nature, public / private, human / animal, there is also an ambition to counterbalance and transgress the dualistic thinking present in both scientific explorations and disciplinary boundaries. The body has become a veritable hot spot, marking itself as a boundary concept that forcefully disrupts given disciplinary identities and fields of investigation. The body is a locus where nature and culture meet and it refuses to accommodate a distinction between these two terms.

Abbs’s poetry does not set out to make itself a hot spot of feminist theory, but there is a sense of the body / mind binary being central to the way the poetry moves the reader from past to present, from home / away,  to nature / culture. The visceral aspect in the work is extraordinary, the five senses, richly rewarding. And because it’s poetry, it has the ability to go beyond the literal level to deeper investigations.

In ‘Tulips in Black and White’ there are themes of death and loss. The bodies of tulips are symbolic to the body of a premature baby or a mother’s old skin.

Sadness overwhelms me in this circle of cut flowers; some face me, plead for help, but if I were to cradle one tulip-heavy head in my palm like a premature baby, would its petals (that remind me of my mother's skin when she was old) fall to the floor? Others turn away in a dried blush of shame. Just a few plump bodies flaunt sheen on velvet cloaks, yet stems stoop weary. They wait in colour-obliterated twilight. Forgotten.

(50)

Nature and culture mirror the life of the poet growing up in England. In the poem ‘Sisters’, the English weather is a constant; the rain like dank seaweed is synonymous with ill health, doctors and nurses. A six year-old sister is destined for a sanatorium.

Our shoes crunch crunch      a storm has thrashed pebbles across the path.

Wrenched apart like an arm from a doll       for a year.      No children near.

Her room is quiet as daisies in grass.

(59)

From an ecological perspective, the poems in this collection reveal tiny museums of the family at home swathed within the natural world. They stand much like exhibits, their bodies sitting, walking or standing in the housing tenements of tree-lined streets, flower gardens, ‘swallows in the eaves’. It’s not only pictorial, but photographs by Elizabeth Roberts (Abbs’s sister) convey the body / mind of the poet returning to this four dimensional world. Entering the house ‘where her father was born’ is a giddying, terrifying experience.(32-33)

In the poem ‘Three Pictures’, the body again, is in motion. A teenage sister is leaving home – ‘a small suitcase bumping her thigh. The street narrows in the distance, / she becomes smaller, fainter,      gone.  /    A sparrow flits past the window’. (70)

In the binary of home/ away the poet recalls a European visit in the poem ‘An Attic Window (Montmartre)’ where the view and sounds of revelry ‘puncture the night with sirens'. The poet takes a moment to think of home and school days on a swing. ‘I swung high    and dropped     from a starless sky’ … And juxtaposed with ‘bells that donged’, she is back again on holiday ‘amongst cobbled streets, leaves in the square, a closed boulangerie, hosed pavements in the shadow of Sacré Coeur Basilica.’ (72)

A further poem that epitomises the body juxtaposed with nature is titled ‘Alexander (late 1939)’, where heartache is described as a terrible chill cold as snow, hollow without sound. I am taking the liberty of quoting the locus of the poem.

He was her newborn son wrapped in a shawl    she held so briefly     pressing her lips to his downy head.    They took him that awful moment    relived over and over for twenty-one years the emptiness…    Today he’s gone again   there’s a terrible chill in the house, hollow sound, snow on the ground.

(45)

There is much more in relation to the embodiment aspect of the poetry in The Tiny Museums. Poetry as dense as this is phenomenological; a text filled with sounds, motion, multi-layered meaning, Victorian England, olfactory reminders, the nature of birds, trailing trellises of bougainvillea, and the seaside. Limited space is a constraint in any review, and I wanted to reveal many more excellent poems, but I hope that a readership might seek out this collection to discover its hidden gems, its deft poeticism of language; its truths and realities. I have only delved a little way down.

David Adès second book of poetry is a ‘celebration / questioning’ of life. This five part, 128 page journey uses gentle, everyday images to test the reader’s imagination, while drawing on his own life, looking for connections between past and present, between innocence and adulthood, light and personal darkness.

The parts should be read as a whole.

In Part 1, 'Darkness Contends with Light', Adès reminisces about life

of imagination, of possibility. A time before standing, before falling, before exile.

('We Are All Fallen', 11)

There is a movement from innocence to regret, of a life left unfulfilled, and he expands on this as memory,

and still I read: here, the lovers’ quarrels, here the betrayals, the abandonment, here the sad litany of illusions

('Still Reading from the Book of Love', 36)

then drawing it into himself,

I am between desolations: between the man I have been and the man I must become.

('The Bridge I must walk across', 22)

This introspection, bordering on despair with a sense of loss suggests that life has to be appreciated; its lightness, before its true form, its darkness, can be seen. But even its true form is just an

echo, a ghost, a whisper, hear a shadow, hear a memory.

('Monologue to a Friend', 19)

Adès seems to suggest remembering is darkness interpreted through the lens of light; of the impossible fairytale of an earlier life left unsatisfied by the interruption of memory.

In part 2, 'As If Dreaming Could Be Tethered', the reader is taken on a journey from south to north through Central Australia on the iconic Ghan railway train. Adès explains

in this space lies a metaphor, lies a vast inland sea that the explorers never found. It was there once –

('Between Us', 45)

Like memory, it was and isn’t what we observe today. What we see today changes what we thought yesterday, altering memory, and as the memory is retained, the original memory becomes a forgotten dream always changing to a new form: 'dreams die and dreams refuse to die' ('In the Land of Maybe', 30), suggesting that dreams themselves are lost in the desert of our minds.

This journey enters the realms of the First Nations' mythology,

The tracks of ancient songlines cover the earth. The dreamings of the ancestors and their children fly in the wind.

('Between Us', 48)

The loss of words is like the loss of family, a motif Adès returns to in 'I wish you long life' (58–61), and even more so in 'Va, Mon Enfant' (81 – 84) and 'Synopsis of a Story in Three Generations' (108–109). There is personal pain in his exploration of family losses he has experienced. In drawing in the First Nations, the loss of their stories and their dreaming is the loss of their family and traditions.

'The Light of Other Stars', part 3, questions the movement of life. Imagery is set free – 'Wild man motion without pause ('Wild Man', 71) – and yet no fear is shown. It is as if within the speaker, there is another that is free, but not released,

I can no longer hold on to anything,             so what else but to let go?                  

('The Heart, Always', 77)

This yearning to be free is just a dream, a moment in time drowned by the desire to know:

O for the certainty of death and taxes             when all else is shifting sand.            

('The Hammer of Uncertainty', 86)

This section is the low point, the questioning, at times almost pleading for release from memory and its hold on the present.

As the poet moves into the fourth part, 'A Home I Never Knew I Wanted', the narrative moves to Pittsburgh, USA, where Adès lived for a number of years, and there is change as if walking into light. The sense of loss is being replaced,

It is the light seeping in: its light-fingered touch upon my face,

('Morning', 93)

The return to light, from darkness, is continued with new life

Here, pushing a pram around Squirrel Hill in early spring,

('Walking Along Northumberland Street', 96)

and yet, memory follows where ever he goes,

Two days before he died my father fell I’ve been falling ever since

('Synopsis of a Story in Three Generations', 108)

returning to the first poem: 'I fell, as we all fall. How many times have I fallen?' ('We are all fallen', 11). Adès used this theme of falling almost as an apology for failing to fulfil the dream that can never be.

Part 5, 'The Night is Starless' contains just two poems. 'Vale, David Adès' (115–125) is an extended deep personal reflection on his life. The last poem 'After' (126) ends the journey on a note of hope.

This is a very accessible set of poems from an erudite writer. Even a superficial reading is rewarding, but with a bit of effort the reader is taken on a journey questioning life and struggling with the darkness that clouds the light of the imagined perfect life. Adès shows his skill, creating in the reader the ability to engage with struggles through imagery of the everyday. I would recommend 'Afloat in Light' especially for those who appreciate good poetry that seeks and questions meaning derived from experience.

Trying to define ‘poetry’ is a mug’s game. To cast your definition wide enough to encompass all ‘poetries’ is to leave holes big enough for anything and everything to swim through. Tighten the net too rigorously and next-to-everything is excluded. Yet we do need something approaching a definition so as to have some idea of what we are talking about. To this end I am thinking about Samuel Johnson’s not-at-all technical suggestion that ‘poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with beauty by calling imagination to the help of reason’. I am attracted to this definition because of its linking of beauty and pleasure (however those slippery and contested terms might be defined), and because it denies the false dichotomy between imagination/emotion and intellect that sometimes, and still, bedevils poetry. I like poetry which can think as well as feel.

This definition/description of poetry occurred to me while I was reading Kathryn Fry’s debut collection, Green Point Bearings. To be strictly honest I thought of Samuel Johnson’s words while reading the poems that went on to be included in Green Point Bearings in the course of an ASA mentorship that I conducted with Kathryn during the course of 2017.  Kathryn Fry’s poetry thinks and feels and it is beautiful. It is a source of pleasure.

Green Point Bearings is an unpretentious, self-transcending collection, yet it is also strong and assured. The poems are about people, places and events, solid, genuine things, and they are straight-forward but far from simple-minded. Meanings are not ‘difficult’ or, in any sense, obscure. The poems are characterised by precision and lucidity but they are also delicate, subtle, and layers of meaning and affect creep up on you in the sure rhythms and images, and in the turn of the lines. The mood and implications of the poems are felt before they are fully appreciated. The poems amply confirm T. S. Eliot’s observation that poetry can communicate through the ‘musical impression[s] upon the sensibility’ and, thus, can be apprehended before it is understood. These are poems which grow and deepen, they appear to be the meditative products of a life lived alertly, appreciatively, intelligently.

It is possible almost to see the way the poems work in just the title of this book. ‘Green Point’ denotes a specific place, and specificity and accuracy are hallmarks of the poetry. Yet the book ranges widely in both place and ideas. ‘Bearings’ is even more suggestive. To ‘take one’s bearings’ is to plot a position in order to determine a direction, it is to take stock. ‘To bear’ is both to bring forth and to endure. All these connotations resonate through the collection.

The book is in five sections and the first of these, ‘Going One Way’, is principally concerned with the description and celebration of the local area encompassing approximately the northern section of the Sydney basin. Of course, they are not just descriptions as can be gleaned from the first, understated and controlled poem, ‘Ferry to Bobbin Head’:

History is falling

from Barrenjoey, whispering from the bays of Refuge, Flint and Steel, and the smooth lips of their beaches: Hungry, Resolute and Eleanor.

We’re enclosed by contours

of memory in the sandstone carved to cliff and cave, in the hill-folds’ slow tumble to the stone-edged water, and that tree, a bonsai on rock.

West Head sits in shadow and late

light as we ferry the Hawkesbury swell. And I recall when we first set course on our voyage together, and ever since, the crests and the calm.

(9)

Here is a first taste of Fry’s interest in place, history and memory, and the way the immediate can provoke a wider, more abstract thought; a tantalising introduction to her descriptive powers – think about the music and imagery, the play of the rounded and sharp in ‘We’re enclosed by contours / of memory in the sandstone carved to cliff and cave, / in the hill-folds slow tumble to the stone-edged water’; and her restrained, light touch in the reference to the one who shares the journey, the bigger journey, with her. It is a convincing piece of work. Here, and throughout the collection, readers will appreciate the accuracy, scientific accuracy, of Kathryn’s descriptions of nature and landscape, of trees and flowers and birds which are, nonetheless, always composed with an ear to the way they sound and an eye to the images they create. This first poem does set the collection’s bearings.

The second section is called ‘Histories’ and here the scope of the book widens dramatically. The poems are attentive to the history of the ancient land of Australia, principally with the knowledge and insights of the Aboriginal custodians of the land but also with the contributions of the explorers, naturalists and artists who opened white eyes to an appreciation of the land, who helped us find our bearings. These poems are written with respect and tact and an acknowledgement and appreciation of the primacy of the Aboriginal people. Here are just the first two stanzas of ‘Water Myths’:

Women on plastic chairs shift in the sand as the scientist lifts the box to their table. Mungo Lady brought back, safe in country; a breeze rustles her spirit home. They spread her cracked, charred bones on the velvet lining and cry the same tears of forty thousand years before – and this, the first cremation for our world to know.

(26)

The third section, ‘Art Talk’ concentrates mainly on visual art. There is, of course, a long tradition of poems about painting stretching back, perhaps, to Simonides who is supposed to have said, ‘Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting which speaks.’ It is an agreeable subject for Fry who brings all her ability to render the visual beauty of nature in words to the task of translating the visual medium of art into the ‘meaning medium’ of words.

For example, the poem ‘Chinese Pots and Lemons (1982)’ begins with a self-deprecating quotation from the artist Margaret Olley – ‘Flowers in a vase and fruit: that’s all there is to them.’ Fry deftly undermines this statement by showing just how much more there is, while all the time denying that she, Fry, has any knowledge of how an artist might think. Here are the last two stanzas which each hang off the phrase ‘I cannot know’:

How she placed. How she brushed russet, umber and a little sienna into the effort of bench, background and woven wicker, and what was not. How she spaced curve and lip, belly and thin handle, ridge, neck and sure base, gold-hip and glaze, lemon-leaf, wisp and flowers, ripe before the fall.

(41)

Just listen to the sound of ‘gold-hip and glaze, lemon-leaf / wisp and flowers’, and think about the final phrase, ‘ripe before the fall’ – how much more are these than description, though the description is very good indeed.

The fourth section, ‘Greater Than the Sum’ is in itself, and unintended I think, a good description of the way poetry works. The way surface is only surface and all the work is going on somewhere else but still depends on the surface. Many of the poems in this section are moving, personal, family poems about memory and the past. They are often about loss and suffering, but no less beautiful (and pleasurable) for that. Here is just a little bit from the third part of ‘Motherlode’:

Hers were Tiffany’s dreams at breakfast, a catwalk on Fifth Avenue, the fall of crepe, the cut of linen, always the choice of colour. She’d be the purple crowned lorikeet, flighty bright as every crayon in the pack, chalking up the crimson of these flashy myrtle flowers. But give her strelitzia’s gold or gerberas, bowls of pink magnolias, camellias large as plates. Alone in those final years, she broke bread for the butcherbird at her kitchen window. 'A long time gone,' you said. But I find you in my sister’s voice, my thinning hands and now even where you’ve never been.

(58)

This is lovely, and loving.

‘Here’, the final section, returns us to place, to ‘here’, perhaps the Lake Macquarie / Newcastle area and, by implication, to ‘now’. It is a nice movement coming out of the previous section and, to me, a neat bookend to the opening ‘Green Point Bearings’ section. These are love poems. Delicate, restrained, thoughtful love poems for special people and for nature. They are an apt way to finish a book about finding one’s bearings. Here are the endings of, first, ‘On Meeting a Colony’ and then ‘Solstice’: ‘My mind eases / out of itself // to drift with the billowing / tremulous white’ (80) and ‘And all the cells of my being align, / as if from the pull of a magnet / they start to sway and shimmer’ (81). I am thinking here of the almost evanescent movement suggested and of the implications of ‘align’ and ‘magnet’, and of the interplay between these two contrasting sets of images. It is moments like these that gently surprise a reader. To my mind, this book has certainly found its bearings.

The novel begins in a cell, small and dark. Jeanne is forced to renounce the divine voices she has claimed as her inspiration, made to change her male clothes for a white dress, immediately making her more identifiably ‘female’ and more vulnerable to sexual attack.

How can this be? How has she been brought to such a weak position, this woman and soldier who fought and led her men so bravely, and helped bring the French to victory?

Who knows the truth. Things that compel a peasant girl to convince knights to arm her and the king of France to give her an army. History’s most important young woman. An opportunist who lied about communication with divinity – or a suffering saint in the making. (7)

The historical facts give us the bones of the story, but not the person. Born into a peasant family in Domremy, north east France, Jeanne claimed that visions of St Michael, St Margaret of Antioch and St Catherine of Alexandria commanded her to lead a force to take back land claimed by the English and to bring Charles II to the throne. She persuaded Charles to allow her to ride with his army, and her role in the subsequent lifting of the siege of Orleans saw her rise to prominence. Captured by the English, she was tried and burned at the stake for heresy, but twenty-five years later her trial was debunked by Pope Callixtus III and she was declared a martyr.

It is all so improbable that it is fascinating: a young, illiterate peasant girl donning male clothes, claiming visions from saints, being taken seriously by the Dauphin, being followed and admired by soldiers and achieving success in military prowess and strategy. It’s not surprising that her story has been told and retold in opera, theatre, novel, image, sculpture, film, television, video games and comics. As with so many figures from history, the gaps in the historical record allow us to use the woman and the story to think and argue with, to make Jeanne into whatever suits our argument.

Ali Alizadeh has studied the story for over three decades and is more aware of the dilemma than most of us:

There are many more paradoxes and complexities one may discern when it comes to the life of the so-called Maid of Orléans. For me, these are not entirely resolvable, nor are they reducible to one or more possible resolutions. In her I’ve found a potent paragon of the human subject at its most radical, most truthful embodiment.

She is one of the most extreme manifestations of the singularity of humanity, and a testament to our capacity to break with what reduces us to bare life … in her we find that most impossible and improbable phenomenon – genuine, irrefutable hope.[i]

Alizadeh’s recognition of the inability to resolve the paradoxes of Jeanne’s legend informs and, in many ways, structures his novel, and gives the narrative a lively and intelligent energy. It is one of the great strengths of this retelling of the legend. Alizadeh weaves a complex web of voices and narrative positions into a powerful portrait of two women caught inside the swirling military and ecclesiastical forces of the time.

The novel is divided into four parts, each one beginning with Jeanne in her cell, afraid and taunted by guards; there are threat of rape, and more. From the cell the narrative moves to flashbacks, each part focusing on to a differing account of the history. The structure at first seems random, but is in fact a recognition – more than that, a demonstration – of the way that a figure emerges from historical research, gradually becoming enfleshed, her personality and feelings explored.

Part I provides a summary of the war, from 1329, 83 years before Jeanne is born, through to the maid’s victory at the freeing of Orleans from the English in 1429; the latter years of Jeanne’s involvement are reported, at times, by the hour and even the minute. The narrative is third-person reportage and we watch Jeanne’s actions, hear of her fears, her tears and her determination, rather than understand her or motivations.

Part II again begins with the cell and the mounting threat of rape, then to flashbacks of Donremy and the war’s impact on Jeanne’s home village; we see the young girl and her dreams, her developing sexuality, her lack of interest in boys and marriage, her fear of the war and the first of her voices. Her longing and her loneliness are answered by visions in which the natural world seems to overwhelm and swallow her: at first it is the moon:

The white circle seems larger, expanding. Is she under a spell, or feverish, or losing her mind? Is the moon about to devour the young girl? Is she drowning in heavenly luminescence? Will future historians really know what is happening to her? (83)

The narrative point of view here is fluid, uncertain: it seems like close third person, so close to Jeanne’s mind, and yet that final sentence moves us beyond that: is this Jeanne reminiscing, aware of her own future place in history, or is this the narrator puzzling over the position he has ascribed to her?  In this way, history and the personal shift and blend.

Later, Jeanne hears the voice of St Catherine answering her cry from the deluge of a sudden rainstorm. It is in Part II that we begin to discover Jeanne’s voice, and she addresses her ‘love’, as yet unknown to us. In this retelling, the natural world, the spiritual realm of Jeanne’s voices, her own developing sexuality and sense of her difference from those who will marry, all gather, inundate her, show her a future. Violence, beauty and desire intertwine in a poignant and heartbreaking precursor of the Maid’s victories, suffering and loss.

Jeanne’s account of her voices, one of the reasons she is charged with heresy, is an aspect of the story that causes historians the most trouble; if the woman is a hero, what are we to do with something so unverifiable?

Everyone has heard about her Voices, and we know nothing about their reality.

I’m sure they’re real. (Real like yours, my love.) But can one ever be certain? That it was Saint Catherine and not a demon or an imaginary thing. Informed by psychology, psychiatry and neurology, theorists peddle their theses. Epilepsy is the latest fad, but she never had a seizure. And it is known that one should not trust historical records and religious beliefs. (93)

Again, the historical narrator and Jeanne take turns to speak, and almost blend, and we remember that Jeanne is in her cell, reminiscing and uncertain. There are no claims here, only an impatience with the desire to explain – to explain away.

The Voices, mostly from Saint Catherine, are formatted as free-form poetry, moving across the page as if they float, barely even there. They could be from the devil, or they might equally come from God, and no churchman would dare to pronounce too hastily. The problem is, of course, that they cannot be externally verified, unlike the woman’s battle courage, strategic prowess and strength with the sword.

And yet for Jeanne, the voices, her determination in war, and her longing to be loved are intertwined because the voices promise her the love of a woman with red hair and blue eyes, but only once her martial victory has been accomplished. This is where Alizadeh departs from most accounts. Writing within the gaps of the record, he explores the possibility of Jeanne’s lesbianism which, like her men’s clothing and visions, was bound to bring her into conflict with the teachings and powerbrokers of the Catholic church.

The two forces, love and war, are never truly separate in Jeanne’s life. Once she has met Pieronne, the beloved she believes is promised to her, she longs for nothing more than to remain with her, and is impatient for the war to be over. Her usual disdain for bloodshed, and her pleas with the king to use diplomacy where possible, are overwhelmed by the need to be win, to be done with the war, so that she can return to Pieronne. But finally, rejected by her beloved, Jeanne allows herself to be captured.

At the beginning of Part III Jeanne is brutally raped in her cell, and she accuses St Catherine, St Margaret: ‘Why did you have me leave my village, God? To be brutalised in this evil place?’ (134)  And Pieronne: ‘It’s the thought of you. You who took my heart and then broke it … It was because of you, Pieronne, that I went on to be captured. It was because of you that I attacked an unbeatable army.’ (134)

It becomes apparent that the novel is addressed to Pieronne and to Jeanne’s heartache. Her physical and her emotional suffering are one. While the military and political history provide the framework, the battles and the victories are only one element of Jeanne’s story in her desire to be loved and accepted as the woman she is.

The final chapters belong to Pieronne, imprisoned and struggling with the decision to deny or own all that she knows of Jeanne d’Arc. It is as if Jeanne’s reminiscences in her cell have conjured her beloved, drawing her from oblivion in the historical record and helping us to understand what might compel a young peasant girl from her village into French military history. It is a powerful and anguished end to the story.

Forty-seven paired poems and photographs make up this beautifully realised work. Photographer Maude Schuyler Clay and Poet Ann Fisher-Wirth have collaborated to produce a book of Ecophotography and Ecopoetry – careful and moving testimony to the eponymous river, the landscape and its people who do inhabit and have inhabited it. The subjects of the poems are fictional, as the author’s notes explain. However many of them are based on history, or are inspired by people of importance to the authors.

The poems are set in the Mississippi Delta and its environs. Over many decades, the river has suffered considerable degradation and this is known first-hand by these artists, who live in the area. This degradation cannot, Fisher-Wirth tells us, 'be separated from [the area’s] history of poverty and racial oppression' (ix). The resulting ugliness and suffering are given place in the work, and are the depth against which the beauty in people and environment, can be plumbed.

Although each poem relates predominantly to the photograph on the facing page, and is complete in itself, it is not given a title. This means that the text is set free to flow in a single long thread from one page to the next – the voices drift into each other, like the river, like the generations.

The photographs combine both open land and riverscapes – often with empty buildings – and interiors. Many of the images are of commonplaces – petals dropped by a tree on a path, the curved shadow of window lace-work on a faded runner rug, the contours of everyday fruit in an ordinary bowl on a deal table. Sometimes they are of kitsch kewpie dolls or plaster and tinsel figurines. All the photos are rendered beautifully, regardless of subject matter. This is so even when the image shows what has contributed to the area’s degradation – cotton crops (with their association to slavery and implied fertiliser use), leading to algal blooms on waterways.

The quality of the images is not achieved by a photoshopped aesthetic, dressed up for the readers’ easy consumption. Rather we are invited to enter this complex world of beauty and ugliness, pleasure and suffering, and take in what we see. We are shown people’s stories in word and image, through the lens of understanding and compassion, so that we might deepen our empathy and understand the complexity.

Clay’s use of light has a haunting, muted quality, gained, as she says in an artist's statement, by her preference to take photos in 'the natural low light of early morning or late afternoon, "in the gloaming" as the Scots called it – the last rays of eery, orange light that blanket the evening before the sun disappears for the night' (100). This gentles the lines and invokes a comparable approach from the viewer, making the photos memorable.

Her framing also invites the reader to engage beyond a first glance, to partake of the stillness of river shots. Or in others, to pose questions. She manages to allow the mystery of life to hover in the photos – not everything is disclosed and this intrigue deepens the reader’s engagement. The dog for instance is alert, solitary, in a riparian setting. What accounts for its downcast expression? The accompanying poem, poignantly reads:

 ... I don’t need to be feeding no dog that won’t hunt ...

... leave em behind

you know what I mean?

(10)

Although much domestic and other human detail is represented in the imagery, there is only one actual portrait. A young woman lies on a rug on the grass, having fallen (the poem tells us) for the German Artist who came to her school and gave her a freedom-vision. The poem captures her voice and its scorn for all that her parents and the school represents, through her disdain for cotillion square dancing. What a world of teenage pain is captured economically in its invocation!

People are not represented visually in the photos but the work is a community of monologues, bringing life to voice and in so doing honouring the Mississippi inhabitants – White, Native American and African American people alike. The representative voices endow the text with aural richness as the cadences flow and stutter onto the page and into the ear. A self-confessed sinner tells us poetically that, 'Devil he put the stars out / take away the moon' (58). The (also self-confessed) dumbass describes being so pissed when his ‘skanky ho’ leaves him that he inadvertently shoots his own window out. The collection reminds me of Rilke’s work 'The Voices', a series of poems in the voice of people who don't usually get to express a voice, characters excluded from mainstream narratives. Fisher-Wirth’s poems aren’t afraid to use the real language of these people, which hasn’t been dressed up to suit a more mainstream readership. The complexity of economic and environmental pressures are woven into the narratives, helping to contextualise some of the meanness – this is an honouring too.

But there is eros and gentleness also. Sometimes stress is met with a kind and loving gesture instead of a violent one, and nature is seen as solace. One partner, ‘that sweet man’ rescues a woman from a domestic meltdown (86). He,

puts us in the truck and drives us to the lake

 

Breathe he tells me

baby breathe

and look at it                                just look at it

(86)

Voices, and other soundscapes are strong in the poems. In one poem, for instance, a woman whipping up egg whites is used as a simile for the vociferous insects. These sounds drench the poem in aural plenitude.

the cicadas in the privet and pecan trees whupping up their little motors … like beating the eggs for angel cake…

(82)

One of the most moving poems in the collection gives voice to a woman who fears dementia will disinhibit her. She’s scared she’ll start thinking like her mama did and that these words will flow uninvited from her mouth:

words I grew up with along with croquet in the summer, crystal swans and silver salvers—

(68)

Her evocation of her mother brings those violent, racist times into the book, preventing them from being forgotten and reminding us that today’s racism has long roots.

The last poem in the book is particularly evocative, as is the photo with which it rubs shoulders. An old house sits on a field, its furrows filled with liquid light. '[N]ow as the seasons pass', Fisher-Wirth says, 'the husk remains' – a comment both on time and its depredations in all things and the house itself. It is now just a shell open to the elements, where once it was a home –  'she laid plates on the table', and 'he scraped rancid mud from his shoes' (94). The quotidian becomes elegiac, a note frequently sounded in both poems and images here. The poem goes on to say:

Light shines through walls

from which boards are missing

(94)

This couplet beautifully sums up what I have most enjoyed in this work – the permeability which is at its heart – images, people, things. Permeability also reflected in the aesthetic of the poems themselves – sparsely punctuated, relying on white space to do the work of timing and dramatic unfolding. The poems are spacious and tend to the contemplative, fitting counterpoints, and sharing a similar energy, to the photographs.

The final pairing is inspired. Fisher-Wirth’s poem is reminiscent of the poignant tanka by Izumi Shikibu, 'Although the wind ...', which also uses the image of a ruined house and what its permeability opens us to. Jane Hirshfield observes of this poem that it 'exchange[s] certainty for praise of mystery and doubt', stepping 'back from hubris and stand[ing] in the receptive, both vulnerable and exposed'.[i] Fisher-Wirth’s poem and Clay’s image describe a house in decrepitude, but though in decline, the poem does not leave us with grief. Rather, it achieves a remarkable transformation, which is one of poetry’s main wonders. What we are left with is uplifting – literally – to a sky, 'drenched and pulsing'. And 'Light, snak[ing] away from the house / in watery furrows' (94). The poem’s final exhortation is to the light as a possible life-guide. If you followed it, it asks, 'what would you find there' (94). It leaves the question hanging, without even a punctuation mark to close it off. It is a superb and open place to end.

Tamryn Bennett’s phosphene is incantational poetry, delicate and evocative. As she writes in the introduction, the short poems are ‘votive offerings’ in response to a series of places and their histories. Bennett joins other Australian poets, such as Peter Boyle and Stuart Cooke, whose interests span continents – between Australia and the Americas south of the United States, in Bennett’s case: Mexico. Popular culture informed by Catholic imagery and immersion in place, wayside shrines, statues, offerings, and their intimations of grace and peril, inform the images in phosphene.

The poems themselves are haiku-like gathered into sequences. They are interspersed with the beautiful evocative drawings of Jacqueline Cavallaro, suggestive of interior life. Spanish translations by Guillermo Batiz and the whimsical insertion of characters, such as ^ > -, scattered like dust motes over the pages, contribute to a layout that makes the book itself a poem, an artwork that is also an offering.

In part due to the layout, and in part because of the sparsity of the words and the sharpness of the imagery, phosphene has a meditative feel. Titled ‘at the temple of letters’, the first sequence suggests the possibility of words/poems as sacraments. The poet writes:

at the temple of letters

en el templo de letras

'

the owl finds you

el búho te encuentra

“___________

“an omen”

“un presajio”

(4)

The owl will return toward the end of the book. Careful imagery requires thought:

two thousand stone steps

into cloud

shifts toward

the mountain

comes undone

(6)

The poem moves from a powerful image of steps lost in cloud toward the mountain dissolving, not only in the immersing cloud but as if some ancient solidity is unsettled by the poet’s gaze. It is hard not to hear an undoing in the speaker as she gazes upward.

Religious imagery appears at a slant. Where in the Catholic calendar All Souls Day follows All Saints Day, here the poet writes ‘all sins, all saints’ before

your broken mouth

the confession box

(8)

suggesting a woundedness, if not also violence, in this religiosity. This continues in ‘poor little virgins / nailed to the porch’ who are ‘dressed in roses and sulphur / stale bread at their feet’ (9). Household shrines and offerings hold deeper resonances of perdition.

For an English-speaking reader, the Spanish translations function as echoes on the page, especially toward the end of the first sequence with its repetition of ‘here’ (‘aquí’) and the reference to ‘an echo’:

a breath,

an echo,

a trace

un respire,

un eco,

un trazo

(11)

The second sequence, ‘tumbleweeds’, draws the reader into imagery of destruction – ‘tumbleweeds of hair / and teeth’, ‘the routine of ruined hymns’ (18) – where we are reminded that in bull fighting there are ‘no tears for sequined beasts // cheered to death / on Sunday afternoon’ (19). In this dispensation, ‘dahlias shoot / from wounds’ (20). The delicacy of Bennett’s writing is deceptive; violence is interwoven with beauty. The tendril of a plant may be a gunshot.

The third sequence, ‘the invisible’, is haunted by grief, chance and death. But the dead are presences, the invisible who live on (31). Together with startlingly evocative images like ‘in the wardrobe / your breath sprouts wings’ (29) are playful allusions to children’s tropes ‘things that go bump in the night’ (33) and their lurking fears.

The ‘owl returns’ (43) with an invocation ‘call in the comets’. The section closes with ‘chants of code / and chance’ (43).

The title of the final section, ‘a river grows’, suggests both hope and danger. The speaker is getting ready to welcome the spirits with food, plants and decorations because ‘the souls are coming’ (44). These spirits ‘come to dance’ and to welcome them is to risk the uncanny:

glue streamers

to the swallows,

(46)

to find

lilac knots

of language lost

(47)

Is the growing river refreshment or flood or both? The volume closes with the lines:

 – a river grows

from ritual

(52)

Ritual, the votive offerings of these poems and the religiosity to which they refer and which they respectfully and lovingly mimic, is fertile and fearsome, life-affirming and perilous. It shapes cultural communal experience and inner life. Tamryn Bennett’s poems themselves, the translations, the layout and the accompanying drawings by Jacqueline Cavallaro, offer a revisioning of ritual: both in the practice of writing and gifting poems in place which elicited the book and in the book itself as a material artefact carrying on that gift.

The weight of light is a most amazing variable: it measures bodies as they touch and release, landscapes and crowds, black and white, fullness and emptiness. It even helps eulogise the dog in Spanish. The poems in this collection have an extraordinary range of topic and of voice, all acting to link the lightness of  spirit with the heavy reality that we bump around in every day.

Sound and colour are tools for recording the weight of light. In the poem ‘Snow after fire (Parsons Track)’

We arrive on the plateau, climbing from the walls of rock, the coloured

gums, the mountain shrubs,

to where the only thing not blackened by the long summer’s fires,

perched in the Rorschach

of receding snow, is the sign ...

(52)

Black and white are the only colours we see – and even they are an improvement on the awfulness of a landscape brutalised by fire. We remember what colour was and ‘how difficult it was up here, pushing into wind-toughened tips / of wood, of leaf edge ... And in the noise of its stillness, // the hauntings, the flames all but visible. ...’ (52).

The poem takes us though a rediscovery of the terrain, a relearning of the idea of height, until the speaker(s) return to a space where colour exists again – to children, children’s children, the world they hiked away from: ‘ ... We are grateful. And more / for the stones themselves.’ (54).

A pattern throughout the collection was the variation in shapes of the poems. On my reading, it seems that the wide-format poems (mainly, longer lines and fewer stanza breaks) came from a different place than the narrow strings of (usually) triplets. I thought that the narrow poems were more intensely centred on  the ‘I’, where the broader ones expanded to ‘I in the wider world’, providing commentary as well as a statement.

For example, look at the two poems ‘We meet again’ (first stanza) and ‘Friend’ (first three stanzas):

The remnants I kept, the line of you, how you moved a little behind the rough shield of your body, how when you laughed, your unmasked self, woven into the sound, seemed always more hopeful. How your eyes would question your tongue but not your heart, and were blue though I wanted them brown. This I packed, compressing you, into a pinpoint coil amid the dust, almost forgetting you.

(80)

And on the page facing:

between your name and my name – most of the ink still in the bottle all the songs on the radio – softer than your hum in my head a small you still visiting – the sleep-over we have while you are gone

(81)

‘These mountains – what the body cannot keep’ and ‘Poet’s daybook (II)’ (68–69) seem to me another call and response of the two styles – and there are other pairs. This is an impressive way of balancing the poet-in-the-world against the poet-in-her-own-brain – reading the poems in twos leaps over the messy grey area between the public self and the private self with an assured elegance I find one of the great charms of these poems.

Reading the book we drift through various stages of being without any noticeable jolt as we go from one space to another. Everything makes sense in its place.

Lang ends her collection with ‘Mexican wave’ – which I’ll quote in its entirety, not to demonstrate any critical point but simply because I think it’s lovely. And because I am so glad to have read this book.

The half-slipped wave of sleep around the Earth, my arms up madly in the night and none awake beside me. The sputtered sub-wave – milk vans, night-cleaners, a nurse going home, and me, subverting light in the kitchen. And from the rooms still dark, filling the house – the soft weight of limbs, the breathing. And as I pass, looking in, their sleep- blinded eyes, each lidded gaze in mine, unbroken. Look, I’d say – this hollow night, Earth’s other side, this silence, where my lips move but do not speak, and my eyes, on this edge, this shade, refuse the familiar. But they do not stir. The noise of them – sleep’s muted birds shuffling in their branches. There, on a shoulder, there, on a jut of chin. And I return, the kettle boiling, and I am not alone but waiting – a disjointed pulse, unsleeping, thrumming between these walls, the fridge humming the hours, and all the rock of Earth bearing their waking.

(88)

Leni Shilton, Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow. Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, Crawley, 2018. ISBN:  9781742589701

Di Cousens

Bertha Strehlow accompanied her more famous husband, Ted Strehlow, in the deserts of Central Australia for six years. Ted – the son of Lutheran missionaries whose first language was not German but Aranda – was an anthropologist and collected the stories and histories that make up the landmark book, Songs of Central Australia. During this field work he mapped the interior landscape of the deserts, travelling on camels, staying in tents, remaining in contact with the peoples he knew as a child. While Bertha found the conditions harsh and had four miscarriages, she also typed her husband's manuscripts and provided different kinds of support such as simple medicine to the local people. In turn they assisted her and Aboriginal women provided herbal medicine which stopped her bleeding after the first of her miscarriages.

Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow is a long narrative poem, made up of separate poems, mostly not more than one page in length. The author, Leni Shilton, who has also lived in central Australia for many years, conveys the atmosphere of the landscape through evocative imagery and countless tiny details. Her research into both Bertha and Ted's lives is joined with her own deep encounter with the land in these beautiful and remarkable poems.

Ted's parents, Carl and Frieda Strehlow, were Lutheran missionaries at Hermannsburg from 1894 to 1922. In addition to his missionary work Carl became one of the most important anthropologists in the field of Aboriginal studies, aided by fluency in Aranda, Dieri and Loritja languages. He also worked to protect the local people from squatters and police. Ted's work echoed that of his father's, and in addition to his anthropology he obtained the position of Patrol Officer in 1936 with the intention of protecting the local people. It would be too simplistic to characterise these as typical 'white-black' relationships as these were not of one type. The poems also record many unexpected moments such as when the Aboriginal cameleers command their camels in Arabic.

This is some of the complex backdrop to Bertha's biography. The book is written in the first person in the form of a journal of poetry whose many layers have been disguised by an elegant simplicity of language. For example, of Bertha's first miscarriage, the poet writes:

I feel calm – safe we confess old secrets our sins punished we here alone – our baby gone now. Her tiny, hardly formed body buried by the tree where I have cried myself empty.

(62)

Shilton suggests a more sublime experience during Bertha's first trip to Uluru.

I might die here, for love, for beauty and the moment would pass so quietly.

In a very different style of poem, 'I speak from under the earth', Shilton presents an evocation of the pain of the land and the people during this time of loss. The people are sick, the cattle trample the waterhole, the birds are silent. But this bleak outlook is crossed by a sense of wonder and purpose.

The night a black blanket I can't find the edge of, the dingoes call loneliness in the dark; they cry like they are hurting and I shiver knowing people die here. The mopoke calls late and distant from across the hills. Can you feel it? I must speak from under the earth to be heard, with a voice no longer mine. The desert is its own animal, alone and desperate. Enough it snarls, barely glancing at me as it performs its night ritual. The stars save me, their distant glowing buzz a thick light like white paint splitting the sky. My night dreams wander; here I see the stories, the land maps that roll across the country, and it is a comfort.

(65)

This is an extraordinary ventriloquism and the source for each poem is richly described in Shilton's Notes.

In 1942, after the first of three successful live births, Bertha returned to her Anglican family home in Adelaide. Shilton conveys the sense of Bertha's longing to return to the desert and her inner conflict:

when does the red stop falling from the pockets and hems of my clothes, when does it finally wash from my body?

(104)

There are many complex relationships here – between Bertha and Ted, the desert and the city, Lutheran and Anglican families, the Strehlows' engagement with Aboriginal people, anthropologists and their sponsors.

After spending most of his time in the field Ted returned to Adelaide to teach at the University of Adelaide in 1946. Ultimately Ted found love elsewhere and left Bertha in 1968. Bertha's important contribution to Australian anthropology through her editorial work was not acknowledged in the prefaces of Ted's books but that work and her own remarkable encounter with the land and the people of the desert has finally been given life in this wonderful long poem.

Di Cousens is a Tibetologist, poet and photographer who lives in Melbourne. Her academic publications are on Tibetan history and engaged Buddhism. Her poetry has been published in anthologies, journals and chapbooks. Her most recent book is the poetry chapbook, the days pass without name,  launched in April 2018.

Susan Richardson. Words the Turtle Taught Me. Wales: Cinnamon Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-909077-71-3

Daniela Brozek Cordier What the Mariner didn’t hear? 

Susan Richardson’s Words the Turtle Taught Me caught my attention after having read Mitchell Thomashow’s paper 'Environmental Learning in the Anthropocene: The Language of Reciprocal Sentience' not long before. Tomashow’s paper surveys the language of nature; from Robert Macfarlane’s archival collections of disappearing words (words that open our eyes and deepen our connections to nature and place) to David Lukas’s suggestion that, through creative engagement with the environment and actively expanding our perceptive powers, we could invent new words for nature. Tomashow, like the writers he cites, suggests that we should ' ... use language as a tool for transcendence, an open-ended conversation with species and landscapes ... '.

Words the Turtle Taught Me is a wonderful example of what Tomashow advocates. It is a collection of thirty poems about threatened species (one poem per species). The poems were written, by Richardson, for the 'Thirty Threatened Species' project of the Marine Conservation Society, UK. The publication also includes an exegesis, which focuses on how Richardson’s personal engagement with each of the species influenced the poems. As I was reading this, I wondered if the exegesis somewhat overshadowed the poems, creating a massive, inescapable human presence that detracted from the species themselves, which are so brightly illuminated in the poems. The poems on their own would have made a wonderful chapbook.

The exegesis has some value though. At one point, Richardson draws attention to how problematic it can be, trying to make people enthusiastic about many marine species. She notes, for example, the temptation to use 'domestic, human-focussed similes and metaphors' (83). Generally Richardson resists this compulsion however; in 'De-extinct - Squatina squatina', her language is spare and scientific. The lines are coupled like strands of DNA, only it is DNA that is stressed, breaking apart, threatening to drift away:

If we can fashion fur and tusk from mammoth cash; fabricate great awks and engineer sheer redemption – we won’t need to untrawl, de-dredge, bid by catch bye-bye for we can match and mix, do and un-die, get high on tech, spawn sci-fact from sci-fi ...

(64)

The exegesis certainly offers a lot of food for thought. Together with the poems, which, though thematically similar, are extremely variable in form, Richardson’s exegesis demonstrates how many different ways there are to write, and offers ideas writers might try in their own projects. For this reason, Words the Turtle Taught Me could be really useful to help those teaching creative writing and poetry. It would be suitable for people of all ages.

But returning to the poems themselves: each of Richardson’s poems has a one word title, followed by a subtitle which is the Latin name for the subject species. I know a few Latin names, and have a rudimentary enough grasp to sometimes guess what sort of species a name suggests, but mostly, I read Words the Turtle Taught Me the first time without knowing precisely to which species a poem was referring. I did this because I wanted to read the poems for what they evoked in their own right, without allowing my preconceptions to obscure Richardson’s words. I wanted to know whether her poems really could open my mind to unanticipated ways of perceiving the species. Certainly they do. The heartbreaking 'Waste – Dermochelys coriacea' completely belies any notion of sentimentality that might be suggested by the title. It describes in shocking, visceral detail, the impacts of plastic bags, nets and other human waste upon turtles (33–34). 'Stench – Galeorhinus galeus', on the other hand, wrenches open the doors of perception, making us wonder at the incredible sensory faculties of a shark:

Imagine smelling the creeping acidity of the sea

tiny shelled terrors

(41)

The poems 'Watch - Lutra lutra' and 'Watched - Prionace glauca' are startlingly juxtaposed. The former (about otters), follows animals who are absent and yet reassuringly present, for they leave traces affectively strong enough to impact on the narrator:

Now oaked among roots

I can feel

the  river  dream  him  again. Quickslide

down

the bankslide

tarka  my  way

upstream

(23)

Despite the upfront 'I's, which are repeated throughout 'Watch', it is always the animal, Lutra lutra, that is foremost. Richardson evokes it through descriptions of the traces it leaves, and these vibrantly bring the creature to life in the reader’s mind, making it seem as though it is indeed physically present. The tables are turned brilliantly though, in 'Watched', which is about the Blue Shark. In this poem, it is the trailing, blundering, human who is conjured-up and Richardson dramatically exposes all of our inadequacy as the would-be custodians of other species:

... Always baiting

your breath with blamings and stats. Always wording. Always herding us into bar charts and grids. Always blurting our secrets ...

(24)

Words the Turtle Taught Me is a thoughtful and engaging collection of poems, and has been presented bound in this volume, with the accompaniment of evocative, intricate images by Pat Gregory. It is an appealing publication, but one that cannot be read with undiminished wonderment and joy, for the poems and images, together, seem almost more a memorial to these thirty species, all of which are edging inexorably closer to extinction every day. This cannot be forgotten as one weaves one’s way through the book, for the species are organised into short sections, each titled according to the level of concern for the species, in accordance with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s 'Red List'. The collection begins with three species of 'Least Concern', before marching adamantly onward, through 'Vulnerable' and 'Endangered', and eventually to 'Critically Endangered'. Richardson ends there, with one of her most curious and haunting poems: 'Plibble  – Acipenser sturio'. I will not provide an extract of this poem, for it is beyond mere human words. In fact you will discover what it does if you turn to page 72: it preserves and transcribes, Richardson suggests, the language of 'the last sturgeon to be sighted in the Severn Estuary, ... some three decades ago'. This astonishing poem will surely encourage readers to cup their ears to the languages of the natural world occasionally. It is a marvellous feat of trans-species imagination.

As is surely clear from the example of 'Plibble', it cannot be said that reading Words the Turtle Taught Me does not bring some real pleasure, despite the overarching gloom. Richardson shows us how to hear the other sentient beings that surround us and, in so doing, she also makes us understand why their extinction would be so great a loss. This is the lasting effect of one of her most joyful and poignant poems – 'Play – Lamna nasus', where I will leave you, with this wondrous extract:

love quickswim and squidding

love egging little finniness –

thousand egging

love best when frondling kelp the overunder underover roll and oh

the gilly tingle

(44)

Works Cited

Tomashow, Mitchell. 'Environmental Learning in the Anthropocene: The Language of Reciprocal Sentience'. Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments, March 3, 2017, https://www.terrain.org/2017/environmental-learning-in-the-anthropocene/reciprocal-sentience/. Accessed 8/3/2017.

Daniela Brozek Cordier was made by Tasmania’s wild and human places. She has taught English in Europe, been a guide on Tasmania’s Overland Track, worked in tourism and marketing, grown and sold plants, and was an environmental consultant for many years. She is principal of Bright South, which, among other things, publishes poetry and assists writers with marketing and promotion.

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s women: poetry: migration [an anthology] effectively represents and validates the eco-cosmopolitanism that Ursula Heise postulated ten years ago in her ecocritical manifesto Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global.  Referencing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Heise argued that deterritorialisation, 'the detachment of social and cultural practices from their ties to place' (51), shifts the imaginative core of environmentalist thinking 'from a sense of place to a less territorial and more systematic sense of planet' (56). Eco-cosmopolitanism, then, 'is an attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary "imagined communities" of both human and non-human kinds' (61).

Such concerns are evident in the 'essays' – that is, statements of poetics – that Joritz-Nakagawa solicited from all fifty contributors to the anthology (including herself and translators). As well, as editor, Joritz-Nakagawa introduces the collection with her own declared intentions:

After having lived in Japan for quite some years (almost half my life) though born in the U.S., as a poet who uses a different language for her poetry than for most of her daily life, as somebody who feels both part of the local mainstream and not part of the mainstream, over time I came to become intensely curious about other women poets moreso than men due to feeling outside the mainstream as a woman (in a male-dominated society/world), not just as a person who grew up elsewhere and has a foreign passport and whose primary daily language is her second versus first language. How does a woman’s knowledge of more than one language and culture affect her and her poetry? was something I wanted to investigate further by finding and reading poetry by other women for whom this is the case. What kind of eclecticism, richness or complexity might occur for those of us whose lives and work encompasses more than one culture? (x)

Joritz-Nakagawa, whose previous work, notably distant landscapes (2015) and diurnal (2016), has exhibited ecopoetic concerns, has now determined to take the reader directly into the realm of eco-cosmopolitanism through the work of non-mainstream female poets mining corresponding cross-cultural veins.[i] This is a poetic world removed in time and place from the bioregional 'home grounds' of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder (or Sansei Yamao and Nagasawa Tetsuo in Japanese environmental poetry). Apropos, Joritz-Nakagawa comments upon 'the unfortunate emphasis on regionalism which even affects many poetry anthologies' (xi), though this should not necessarily be taken as an inherent criticism of the above poets or their poetics.[ii]

As well, as a poet anthologising migrant women’s work, the editor reminds us that she also thinks of language itself as foreign. Here she quotes the Japanese poet Kora Rumiko, who observed in an interview that, even as a child, she felt 'that language was not mine, that I existed outside the language that surrounded me, like a foreigner ...' (xii). The aforementioned 'essays' by the contributing poets express similar concerns. Jody Pou remarks, 'If there is a theme in my work, I would have to say it is the questioning of language and how we use it. I like to deconstruct historical subjects, simultaneously deconstructing language itself through the use of these multiple languages, citations, samplings of music, etc. I use one language to undo the other or make it clearer, depending on the need. I like to deconsecrate punctuation as well at times' (146). Hazel Smith, transplanted from Leeds to Sydney, writes of her 'post-language' approach, her technical experiments including 'notating words in musical rhythms, linguistic coloratura, discontinuous prose poetry, incursions into surrealism, interrogations and elaborations of metaphor, multi-voiced polylogues, and "internet cuts and pastes" that take the form of literary remixing' (104).

M. NourbeSe Philip, living in the 'space-time of the City of Toronto', describes her poetics as engaging 'with the issues that have emerged from my entanglement with issues of Language and its fellow traveller, Silence' (172). Vietnamese-born poet Mông-Lan, in line with Charles Olson, Cid Corman, and Ted Enslin, and more recently the Armenian-American poet Arpine Konyalian Grenier (who should have been in this collection), 'consider[s] spaces between words as breaths, much as a composer would, using white space as moments, a measure to mark meaning and breath' (207):

'Particulars' how strange to feel your strength

as soon as i touched you

name the nouns

fingers on wood fingers on strings

the hallowed chord of a guitar

toe on grass  nail on toe

the Achilles tendon

at the crossroads of my own knowing

one writes

the particulars

to mean the whole

i’ve outgrown the red skies

las noches oscuras de Buenos Aires

sin fin outgrown the need

to be miserable

(203)

Nathanaël, in her poem 'Augustment (translation without language)', cites Spinoza’s argument that it is a 'universal failing in people that they communicate their thoughts to others', contending that the 'silence that is called for authenticates what might be said. It recognizes as something more than the mere futility of speaking ... the danger of giving one’s voice so off-handedly to language' (215).

Another shared dimension of these anthologized poems is observed by Donna Stonecipher in the essay following her contributions,

In my poems I am interested in exploring travel and how it touches on ethics, privilege, and aesthetics. I’ve long been intrigued by what I call 'voluntary exiles,' people who without economic or political imperative choose to live in a country in which they were not born and/or are not citizens. The trivium of love, job, fellowship does not apply to these seekers. What are they looking for? Why do they willingly give up the support system of family, citizenship, native tongue, a known culture, for the unknown? (77)

In contrast to the imposed exile of displaced migrant poets, these voluntary exiles, whose work is arguably predominant in this anthology, have their own set of eco-cosmopolitan anxieties and hang-ups.

Éireann Lorsung, who was born in Minneapolis and has lived in rural France, the English Midlands, and rural Belgium, observes,

My migration has been shot through with fear though I am a bureaucratically 'easy' migrant—I’m white, have a lot of education, come from the US, speak several languages, chose to leave, and am trained in a vocation (teaching) that is often in demand. The longer I live where I have no permanent right to remain the more intensely I’m aware of the ways in which I don’t belong and the stronger my underlying anxiety about being found out and punished for my difference. ... This isn’t rational, but it has been formative. One result is that I associate home more and more with a feeling of safety, and safety more and more with an abolition of borders, prisons, and surveillance.

In places where I don’t belong I have tried to make rooms of various sizes (some internal) that resist my underlying dread of the official—customs officer, police, inspector—and my sadness about my ways of life—unmarried, childless, without a permanent or constant source of income—often precipitates a demand for explanation. (82).

At the same time, benefits of such rootlessness accrue. Ivy Alvarez sees herself as 'fortunate to have lived in many countries and traversed several cultures: Filipino, Australian, British, Celtic, European, and now, New Zealand. Moving around means I uproot myself every time, so that it feels like I start from scratch, a state that gives me the advantage of the outsider, one who looks in, is never comfortable, always questions, observes, records' (108). Lisa Samuels (born in the United States, lived in Sweden, Israel/Palestine, Yemen, Malaysia and Spain, and now situated in Aotearoa/New Zealand), after '[her] turn to the efficacy of productive action in the world', understands 'unknowing as positive and empowered' (167).

Still, that this anthology is determinedly eco-cosmopolitan in poetics and orientation does not preclude some of the contributors exhibiting strong attachments to specific places, though such evocations are often undercut by an uneasy sense of deracination. Take, for example, a poem by Carrie Etter (whose biography – 'born in Illinois, educated in southern California, and now living in Bath, England' – places her somewhat outside the editor’s stated multilingual concerns):

'Future Interlude' Where are you? Normal, Illinois What do you see? Cornfield upon cornfield splayed, flattened by tornados What do you see? Stunted stalks, palest soil under a heavy sun What do you see? Soybeans submerged in water What do you see? Tomorrow What do you seek? Our great-grandfathers’ ghosts: we’d have a word

(46)

Although more conventional than most of the poems in the anthology – where experimentation, often under the influence of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, dominates[iii] – Etter’s contributions from The Weather in Normal, as contemporary evocations of place, pointedly take into account the effects of climate change, the new 'normal' in Illinois.

No, you can’t go home again. Jane Lewty, a native of Leeds, recounts in her 'essay' how the different genres of 1990s electronic dance music '(for example rave and UK hard house among many others) built a sense of community ... where the North of England dominated the South in a defiant mode of expression' (121). This music 'opened up a large-scale world that we could connect with—the techno giants of Detroit, Chicago, NYC'; however, Lewty contends that '[o]nly from other places can I look on/back to Yorkshire with a measure of detachment and write a voice that reverberates through the sounds of the 1990s and within the topography of a place that can never be fully regenerated, either for the individual or the collective' (121).  (She also reflects upon her visits as a teenager to Sylvia Plath’s grave at Heptonstall, and Plath’s migration to the moors of Yorkshire, '[a] landscape beautiful, dramatic, and punishing; and within it the American poet who was placed there incongruously, it seemed.')

Rachael Tzvia Back, in translating the poetry of Lea Goldberg (1911–1970) from Hebrew, suggests that Goldberg’s poetry 'continued to express the two-fold sensibility and longings of an immigrant. This sensibility often resulted in a sense of being suspended between two places and, finally, of belonging nowhere at all. Goldberg articulated this reality as "the heartache of two homelands"’ (156).

However, Ursula Heise (and now Jane Joritz-Nakagawa) does not focus on such heartache in propounding eco-cosmopolitanism. Instead, Heise sees these conditions, to quote Bruce Robbins, as making real 'the possibilities of an environmentalism without borders'.[iv] Mông-Lan, who left Saigon on the last day of the evacuation during the War in Vietnam, studied at Stanford and the University of Arizona, lived 5-6 years in Tokyo, returned to Vietnam on a Fulbright Grant, lived in Bangkok, and spent many years in Argentina, and who now divides her time between the States and Argentina, travelling to Asia and Europe, includes the following in her poetics statement:

Where I’ve lived, what I’ve seen, and the cultural ramifications of all this is important to my work and subject matter: history, Vietnam, Asia in general, South America, particularly Buenos Aires, the tango dance, and love, not only of the physical variety. ... Further, socio-political concerns are of great importance: the people and how they live, wars and their aftermath. Being a refugee from a long war, from a country that has had a history of wars, I have always been concerned about the political impact of anything and everything. Feminist concerns are of vital importance, writing from the point of view of women, women’s rights and politics. Ecopoetics, writing about the earth, taking care of the earth, singing of the earth, the beauty, vast skies, indeed, love poems to the earth, are vitally important. (206)

Here we are reminded of Heise’s argument that '[r]ather than focusing on the recuperation of a sense of place, environmentalism needs to foster an understanding of how a wide variety of both natural and cultural places and processes are connected and shape each other around the world, and how human impact affects and changes this connectedness' (21). Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s women: poetry: migration promotes such an understanding in a glorious celebration of eco-cosmopolitanism.

Divided into three sections, Eunice Andrada’s debut book of poems Flood Damages ranges widely across tone, place and style, but it is held together by a strong and consistent voice that expresses recurrent themes of the body, politics, belonging, identity and family. At the level of technique there are poems that play with pagination (‘novena for her sickness’, 13), repetition (‘poem in which I’, 39) and story (‘Marcos conducts my allergy test’, 64). However, in each of these variations, Andrada is careful to pay respect to her elders; and female mentors, predecessors and teachers, including her mother, are particularly important. This is the work of a young woman interested in an intersectional and personal feminism that is conscious of power structures that touch us all. And yet, feminism is only one way to read this book. It also has threads of Christianity (‘second coming’, 28), diaspora (‘alternative texts on my aunt’s lightening cream’, 44; ‘where are you from?’, 63; ‘last meal before deportation’, 80) and sexuality  (‘ode to the dark cunt’, 57; ‘novena for fidelity’, 46).

The poem ‘(because I am a daughter) of diaspora’ contains many of these issues and themes, stating:

and by default – an open sea, what language will not meet me with rust? They convince my mother her voice is a selfish tide, claiming words that are not meant for her, this roiling carcass of ocean making ragdolls of our foreign limbs. In the end our brown skin married to seabed. When I return to the storm of my islands with a belly full of first world, I wrangle the language I grew up with Yet still have to rehearse. I play with the familiar rattle of consonants on my tongue and do not think myself a serpent. By the street corner, a man in rags speaks to me in practised English. Where are you going? I don’t respond, the words a recognition of the mongrel flag I call my face. I want to say to him, We are the same. Pareho lang po tayo. My bleached accent, the dollars in my wallet sing another anthem. How long have you been here? How long are you staying? I am above water, holding onto a country that drowns with or without me.

(9)

It starts with a rhetorical existential question that suggests a kind of searching (‘what language will not meet me / with rust?); a reference to her mother with an allusion and metaphor of water, both as ‘tide’ and ‘carcass’; an awareness of personal embodiment that is nevertheless political (‘brown skin’); an understanding of contractual relationships (‘marriage’); the way language helps us feel at home whether that is comforting or alienating or both (‘I wrangle the language I grew up with’); a conjunction of herself with collective identity (‘the mongrel flag / I call my face’); bilingualism with a Filipino phrase that might also translate as ‘we are both’; the difficulty of the ‘foreign’ anthem and the burden of dollars in the wallet suggesting the complications of privilege; and finally the acknowledgement of who she is and what that means for her place in the world. The poem’s final lines are poignant and touching, a complex understanding of where one belongs, even as it does not show in an immediate or obvious sense. In that way, Andrada is a daughter of diaspora searching for home, but it might not be nation she belongs to. It might be the countries of poetry, female solidarity, language, water, and life itself as it floods and courses through us regardless of where we grew up or where we go.

In that way, water becomes a recurrent motif, in the form of tears, drinks, and, of course, flooding. For readers of Plumwood Mountain journal who pick up this book, it will soon become apparent that Andrada is interested in our climate-changed world. Her focus is on the impact global warming has on people (rather than plants or animals per se), and women who labour in particular, including migrants who are forced to leave their homes. Flood Damages is an intersectional book then for it is aware of how systemic issues affect us all and it is a reminder that a very real set of problems continues to unfold because of global capital.

Flood Damages is a timely intervention in the world of Asian and Australian poetry, for it speaks to our moment now with truthfulness based on authentic experience. It understands ideology and the systems of oppression that affect us all. Andrada is capable of beautiful expression and the collection as a whole is affecting, insightful, and often has a common sense profundity that is directly accessible. Her final poem, ‘recognition’, speaks to the role of poets who can see and herald their people be that family, friends or strangers. To bear witness as the world ignores, suffocates, floods our homes and our roots is a necessary if difficult task. That is a role Andrada accomplishes with a sense of tenacity, level headed indignation, and stunning legibility in Flood Damages. May we all listen and respond in our very own mother tongues.

In his foreword to Renga: 100 Poems, Paul Kane explains that his collaboration with John Kinsella began with an initial tête-à-tête, and a proposition: 'Why not continue an hour’s conversation over an extended period – and in verse?' (iv). The result is 'an exchange, a private correspondence' ('Renga 100') written between 2002 and 2012, as the poets – 'never in the same place together' – move between America, Australia and England (vi). The chain of alternating poems traverses ideas of home, place, belonging, memory, mirroring, juxtaposition, criss-crossings, and seasons, and its fundamental mechanism is alluded to by Kane when he writes: 'Call and respond was the modality' (vi). The renga is a collaborative form insofar as the poets’ contributions give rise to one another, in ways that are discernible or intuited, whether by framing, contrast, association, or subject matter. Stylistically, Kane retains the strict syllabic scheme of the traditional renga throughout the work, while Kinsella’s poems are more variable and lyrical.

The poets’ first exchange sets up a direct mirroring, creating a frame through which we enter the work. Kane writes in 'Renga 1':

Back where I come from, hills – an eroded plateau – send green up to meet the sky in summer, then red blazing, then white in winter.

Kinsella’s parallel phrasing in 'Renga 2' underscores distinctions in location, season, and palette:

And in the place I come from, hills – an extinct volcano – often in drought, yellow fusing with summer sky, the red that comes with a short green season surprising the sun

Kane’s location, at the time of the initial exchange, is 'dairy farming / land, with corn, hay' ('Renga 1'), whereas Kinsella’s is a landscape where 'sheep and wheat / work with each other, against the grain' ('Renga 2'). Each location represents an agricultural system that’s binary, but complementary, a model of the dynamic at work between the poets. In 'Renga 3', Kane reflects on how seasons are generative by the fact of their fluctuation:

Yet think of the paperbarks along the Murray wetlands, how they need an ebb in spring floods to grow young trees: alternation rules.

The generative power of alternation within the work is evident as Kinsella’s poem about the farmer 'who grubbed the last mallee fowl / mound out of Mount Hardy' ('Renga 26') elicits an exchange of poems about the mining of Toodyay quartzite and Appalachian coal. Further on, the final phrase of Kinsella’s 'Renga 62', 'black black earth', is taken up in Kane’s lines 'the black dirt is the blackest / black I know' ('Renga 63'), then varied by the repetition of 'black and white' in Kinsella’s 'Renga 64', with Kane’s 'Renga 65' completing the transition with: 'let light suffuse / the hour with white, with white white.' This play of one poem upon another creates a sustained tension in the work.

An essential theme is the necessary correspondence of place and time: each poem’s moment is an inextricable juncture of a here and a now. This underpins Kane’s 'There is yesterday, / here is now' ('Renga 77') and Kinsella’s 'Night is the space / I occupy' ('Renga 80'), and gives the poems their sense of immediacy: “'Now is a word for / never again, and here means / wind chimes ringing clear' ('Renga 13'). But, even as the poems represent a here and now, they’re framed by an inherent awareness of the absent other, so Kinsella writes: 'from where I look out you’d see' ('Renga 12'). There’s also an understanding of the influence of place on what’s written: in 'Renga 6', Kinsella pre-empts a move to Jam Tree Gully and remarks: 'I will talk to you / in a slightly different way.'

'Home' also emerges as an essential theme, an important consideration for two poets who’ve spent much of their lives alternating between continents. Kane states: 'We’re at home in two / worlds' ('Renga 33'), to which Kinsella responds: 'For years I’ve been split / three ways' ('Renga 34'). Following on from their considerations of home is the poets’ rejection of claims to the proprietary ownership of land (as Kane writes, 'I own property, but it / isn’t mine, nor am / I its', 'Renga 41'), an idea uniquely appropriate to the renga as a form. As Octavio Paz argued in his introduction to Renga: A Chain of Poems (1971), co-written with Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson, a renga is '[a]n antidote against the notions of author and intellectual property', insofar as it resists neat claims of ownership (27). The poets’ reflections on ‘home’ culminate in Kinsella’s 'Renga 78', where the undercurrent wells up into a litany: 'Homecoming homebound homebody homebred. / Homeland homemaker homeomorphic homeless.' Kane’s response moves the conversation forward, but takes its cue from Kinsella’s wordplay:

We’re at the cliff’s edge plunging into the new year – polis, politics, politicos, pointless pols, pals, posses, past the last post –

('Renga 79')

The poets’ exchanges also respond to public and private concerns. References to the death of mutual friend Peter Porter in 2010 establish the timing of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth poems. To Kinsella’s 'Peter Porter died in London / yesterday', Kane counters that 'Poets are always / dying, it’s how they make their / living', while Kane’s 'The days grow longer / as everything grows apace' finds its antithesis in Kinsella’s 'But here the days / are getting shorter.' Elsewhere, the poets are preoccupied with the seasonal quotidian (frozen pipes, or cutting a firebreak), domestic and international politics, species extinction, drone strikes, wind turbines, and ecological concerns – particularly climate change, which looms larger as the sequence progresses: 'Venice / is in our future. / We’ll be toast if we’re not sunk' (Kane’s 'Renga 75'). Kane’s response to destructive mining practices in the Appalachians is: 'Start small, I say each morning, / a bird cry can crack a shell' ('Renga 29'), and Kinsella’s affirmation is direct: 'Yes, I say the same thing: miniscule / is large, and the morning is wide / as an eye' ('Renga 30'), though their optimism is less conspicuous in the later poems.

A consciousness of mortality or finalities inflects some of Kane’s later poems, as in 'Renga 99' when he writes: 'when time / will be no more and / this book will be part of what / I leave behind.' His words emphasise the work’s importance to the poets’ oeuvres, anticipating any inclination to dismiss it as an aside or addendum. The book’s driving call-and-response mechanism propels Kane and Kinsella into new and worthwhile terrains, and the work is a valuable demonstration of the renga’s enduring possibilities, particularly in the hands of these two highly accomplished poets.

I first encountered the poetry of Diane Fahey in 1997 when I read ‘Jorinda and Joringel’ in the Sydney journal, Heat. As a young adult I was a relative non-reader who was beginning to find a passion for poetry. My discovery of this poem, early in my journey, forever changed what I knew Australian poetry could do. ‘Jorinda and Joringel’ is a feminist narrative poem sequence that reimagines the Grimm Brothers tale of a witch who transforms stray girls into birds who are then kept in a castle, waiting for the male hero. This is ambitious, necessary poetry: expansive, vivid, and rich in juxtaposition and allusion. It led me to seek out Fahey’s Metamorphoses (1988) as I eagerly awaited the publication of The Sixth Swan (2001), a whole book of Jorindas and Joringels.

I have also long admired Fahey’s nature poetry: so richly lyrical and full of wonder. Mayflies in Amber (1993) is such a surprising celebration of the world of insects: moths, cockroaches, bedbugs, lice, fleas ... . And while Sea Wall and River Light (2006) and A House by the River (2016) might work a little more conventionally as personal responses to a moment spent in beautiful natural places, they are still fascinating in the way they use praise for the natural world to explore such human concerns as bereavement and old age. The subject of this review, however, is November Journal (2017). On the book’s back cover we are told by the South Australian poet, Jan Owen, that this is a ‘fine extension of Diane Fahey’s oeuvre: her jewel-like images, sparkling moments and salient surprises pack the austere tanka form with vibrant life’. I think Owen’s generous words certainly describe Fahey’s efforts in The Stone Garden (2013) where the tanka form is also used to respond to the natural environment, this time of County Clare in Ireland. ‘Sunset’ is an apt example:

A hawk cuts hilltop oaks from their shadow: starlings lift and whirl; unspool; billow in ghost shapes. Sky-wide sifts of jet veil coral-red.

(38)

‘Sunset’ is stunningly memorable in the way it expresses image and sound in such sparse and grammatically adventurous form. But, what of the tanka in November Journal?

Fahey, throughout her career, has rightly won numerous prizes and residencies. And so in 2009 she was awarded another residency, this time at Bundanon Artists’ Retreat, on the Shoalhaven River in NSW. November Journal is a record of this month-long sojourn, celebrating her view of fields, forest, plains, escarpments and the Shoalhaven River. The book reads with all the personal insights and compressed momentum – and unevenness – of a month-long diarising. The book’s first poem 'Arrivals' is a good example:

Galahs by the path to meet me; the spiked welcome of friarbirds in silky oaks circling the house. River, stone hills, bush, waiting.

(1)

There is a melodramatic anthropomorphism in these prosaic words. And the poem is not rescued by that comic brilliance of the friarbird’s ‘spiked welcome’.

November Journal is uneven in quality, but many of Fahey’s hymns of praise are superior to the example above. Fahey makes much of this tone of rhapsodising in moments spent with the natural world. In ‘Magpie group at sunset’ she observes:

Within a gold cone they step towards the river, pause, carol with beaks raised, walk, sing again. This seems, is, a ceremony of praise.

(23)

This book is a ‘ceremony of praise’, and at times it is very fine, as in ‘Hillside sun’:

Its full glare finds you through the scatter of bloodwoods, ironbarks, lanterns their crowns. Starbursts of copper, new green, taupe, gleam from dead fronds.

(25)

But in the twenty-first century, when we have so much context and insight available to us from the ecological sciences, is it enough to praise alone? Just as we expect so much more from nature documentary than mere picture postcards and worship or admiration, shouldn’t we also anticipate more from nature poetry? Perhaps Fahey is aware of this problem, because we often see her reaching for a field guide, especially to identify birds, as in ‘White-eared honeyeater?’:

Busybody-swift it feeds, flirts and flits before I can search my book, name another enigma, stroke that soft, consoling green.

(13)

While in ‘Reading The Secret Life of Wombats’ she references the work of a science journalist:

A boy charts tunnels, finds a mummified wombat then one with live eyes – who grunts. He grunts back, snakes fast in reverse through the tunnel.

(29)

However, in November Journal, Fahey rarely goes beyond these superficial attempts to locate her rhapsodies within the context of natural history, to see her cast of animals and plants as existing within ecological niches and systems. I think that twenty-first century nature poetry needs to be more than this single minded praise.

Argentinian-born author, Mariana Dimόpulos has created a riveting story about identity, life’s journey and our relationship to others, places within and outside of ourselves, and she tells it poetically and laconically in All My Goodbyes (Cada Despedida). The beauty of the language and the brevity make for an in intense and fast-paced novella. The heroine is both ancient and contemporary as she engages in introspection and self-analysis in her quest to get to know thyself (Socrates) and 'trawls the web' for a place to stay as quickly as one can say 'google it'.

'I arrive, and I want to stay, and then I leave.' (1) The protagonist and narrator of All My Goodbyes confesses her conundrum from the start of her story. We are hooked and want to know why. So does she: 'When you go to lift the suitcase and realise it makes no sense, you just put it back down, unpack the clothes and hang them up in the wardrobe again. Then you … write down all the reasons why you shouldn’t leave. You read over it. Learn it by heart. And that’s it. You don’t go.' (4) It wasn’t that easy. I was never able to name a single reason for staying in that house or in that city, the place that was the cause of so much pain in my head, my stomach, my eyes during the insomnia at night, and my shoes during the day.' (4) The protagonist seeks to escape from the pain and discomfort she feels in Madrid, Málaga, Barcelona, Berlin and Heidelberg, among other places, not necessarily in that order. Time, in All of My Goodbyes, is mnemonic, not linear, and we learn about the people and the places as they are remembered.

'In Málaga, I called myself Luisa: in Barcelona, Lola.' (4) This is the only reference we have to the protagonist’s name and from the beginning, we are not convinced that these are different versions of her given name because in this instance, she assigns a different name to herself in different cities. She paints a picture of living a life in transience, where what she does is strikingly ephemeral to her. In her own words: 'All I knew was flight.' (81) By the time she got to Berlin, she had 'inhabited seven, eight, nine different bedrooms, and in each one I’d fantasise about overstaying my welcome, because I didn’t know myself well enough, I still wasn’t convinced about who I was.' (39) We don’t find out her name from anybody else either as nobody is described as uttering her name: not even Marco (her boyfriend), Julia (her friend), or her father, in dialogue or any other form. She is a blank slate, in this regard. As for her outward appearance, we don’t really get any insight into that either. We don’t know what she looked like. The only inkling we get about her physical appearance is from another person’s perspective: Alexander’s, and that is a subjective one: 'I looked splendid, he told me.' (1)

'I lived in Heidelberg. I never went up to the castle, nor did I feel the need to … Such things simply didn’t interest me.'  Places are not of interest to the protagonist in terms of the still geographic topography and hold no beauty or romance for her: The sea is 'the same stain it has always been' and the snow is 'insufficient'. She seems more at home inside buildings with synchronised and familiar processes. She is aware that in a world of globalisation, an IKEA store in one country would resemble an IKEA store in any other but seems to enjoy the safety of the sameness in her work. Nevertheless, she is also aware of the dehumanising and mechanising effects that repetition and standardised delivery service can have on a person in a job where tasks are repeated over and over again: 'I was taken to the warehouse … I followed him up and down the looming aisles of shelves with their thousands of boxes, stepping in time with the rhythm of his machine so that he didn’t have to waste a single second on me.' (29) When she travels back to Retiro, the place where she had fallen in love with Marco, she says, 'I craved repetition down to the finest detail: I wanted to get off the bus, walk to the fire station, cross the road, continue past the cabins, then walk up to the little house on the patio, even if it had already been knocked down.' (134) The people she connects with become the landmarks of a place for the protagonist. Alexander was 'Heidelberg' and 'Julia and her son Kolya' were Berlin … as for herself, she was hard to pin down: 'I had always been hard to categorise, like a stray dog.' (59) Her self- esteem is low and sorrow is often inherent in the tone.

'Where’s the dog?' (21) Luisa asks Stefan, a man she has just met on the beach in Málaga. This is like an echo of, 'Where’s the cat?' in the classic film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) where the heroine avoids giving her pet cat a name since she does not know her own identity, let alone the cat’s! In All My Goodbyes, Luisa first sees Stefan 'from afar walking with a certain nonchalance. A dog was following him, shoulders pressed forward, back heavy, exuding that radiant resignation particular to men walking with their dogs.' (19) Stefan says, 'There was a dog following me but it’s not mine.' Luisa seems more interested in animals than she is in people. He asks her about family: 'One brother,' she tells him but tells the reader that she has two. 'He lives in Chile. He’s an architect.' Stefan tries to find out more. 'No opinion. He’s tall. He writes poems in a little book.' (19) He later introduces Luisa to his young son, Andrei and asks, 'Do you like children?' Luisa does not answer but just refers to him as 'the kid' in her subsequent descriptions of him. She seems more sensitive and partial to dogs than some people: 'I could smell the night, heard the complaint of a frightened dog.' (37)

'Peering through the latticework of pretend cakes and decorations piled up in the shop window of the Haupstraβe Bakery in Heidelberg, I was safe from the treacherous mud of my own thoughts.' (28) With freed up time to think, the protagonist says, 'slowly, the empty lot of my head filled back up with volatile and unstable things, like methane gas.' She is emotionally fragile and seems to walk a tightrope at times between life and death but knows herself well enough 'not to drift too far towards melancholy'. (28)  She feigns cheerfulness and describes herself as 'mean-spirited' but we know that she cared about her friend Julia, a trauma therapist, when she got punched in face. She describes Julia as a 'good' person, 'unlike me'. She is reflective and analytical too: 'I leave because I cannot stay, I leave so that I cannot stay.' (23) She tells us outright that she 'lies' and promises Julia and Kolya that she’ll 'stay in touch' even though she knows she would not. Despite lying, she is likeable to the reader as the protagonist and narrator because she is honest with us and we think of her because she thinks so little of herself: 'Now in the planetary system that was Heidelberg, everybody went about completing their individual elliptical orbits, glimmering in lazy rotations, and I was nothing more than a distant star, barely a reflection of the others’ light.' (10)

'Curious George wanted to know if I … was really a biologist or was I a used-car-parts sorter.' (48) The protagonist tells us that jobs like the latter, 'spared us from the perils of meditation'. (28) She spends many a night discussing these and boyfriends with Julia: 'I told Julia in Berlin about my odd jobs and love affairs as we stood around in the kitchen not eating dinner, nibbling on bread like a pair of sleepy birds, leaning first on one leg and then the other'. (26) Julia found it hard to believe that she had been through 11 different jobs already: a 'shelf-stacker' for IKEA, 'spare parts sorter, patisserie, attendant, greengrocer, waitress … grudgingly' and more. As a naturalist, the protagonist’s father had wanted her to pursue work in science as she had studied biology in university. After her father’s death, she feels guilty about the science lab that they did not build together and for not attending his funeral. While he had been alive, she had 'loved him biblically, perhaps even more than that'. (11) Her brothers remind her that she had missed his funeral 'again and again'. (36)

'Camellia Sinesis' are two of the first words she utters to Alexander, her first boyfriend who is described in some detail. 'Calendula officinalis,' he dares to utter back (59). They are having tea in a café and are 'in sync' with one another. Despite falling in love with him and everything about him, including his apartment which he asked her to move into and share with him, she had declined and left Heidelberg because as she explains, 'at heart I’m no good'. She had been afraid of living a life of familiarity and predictability in her personal life unlike in the workplace. 'If I were to accept Alexander’s offer of living together, we would eventually go shopping to places like IKEA or another department store … to find a piece of furniture or any other mundane thing …  I thought about how it would always and forever more be the same curtains, the same stove'. (46)

'You should have stayed,' says Julia. She advised that it would have been the best decision to stay with 'a man who loves you that much'. The protagonist realised that Julia thought that Alexander may have cured her of her 'suitcase syndrome'. That same night, she decided to move out: 'my room in Julia and Kolya’s house seemed to compress suddenly into a tiny cube and I was forced to leave, regardless of what I had on … if only for a few minutes, I could breathe once more the seemingly free air'. (31) 'Back in Argentina, years later, I understood what Julia had tried to tell me … “There is Marco’s house” and just beyond that, his mother’s house'. Marco is the man that she had fallen in love with. He had awakened all of her senses. 'They called me up to see how the story ended: The living room covered in blood from wall to wall, the ransacked house … I stated that I had loved him … What was I supposed to say? I extracted a tear from my eye and handed it to them, but they didn’t want it. They wanted serious words. I stated that I had loved him … That I didn’t kill him. All of this was true' and we believe her but we know that she can also lie.

The main motifs of 'flight' and 'place' bring to mind the classic poem: 'The City', by Constantine P. Cavafy where the hero tries to escape by going from city to city but keeps running into himself. In the Edmund Keeley translation we read: 'I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one' and then, 'You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you.'

All my Goodbyes is also a translation. It is translated by Alice Whitmore into English from the Spanish and although I am not familiar with Spanish, as a writer and translator, I can say that it appears that Whitmore has struck a beautiful balance between what is referred to as 'indigenisation' in the world of translation and 'foreignisation'. That is, she seems to have blended the idiom that embodies all the meaning recognisable by an English reader while maintaining the aroma, spirit and poetry of the source language and another place.

All My Goodbyes, by Marianna  Dimόpulos, is the first of what promises to be a compelling series by Giramondo about 'Literature of the South' by writers of the southern hemisphere.

Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior is a quiet, heartfelt and deeply rewarding collection. As much as it is concerned with interior spaces – those our bodies take up and our own inner worlds – I would argue it is as concerned with the connection between these interiors and the land that supports, surrounds and is sometimes damaged by them. In fact, the position of each poem in relation to land is so omnipresent that it could easily be missed.

Just as it is easy to overlook the activity occurring in a still or 'barren' landscape, it is easy to mistake quietude for reticence or even detachment. But the stillness of these poems is not any reflection of remoteness from their subject matter. In fact, they often seem to come from an extreme closeness – a point at which the true strangeness of objects, relationships and experience comes into focus.

There are many examples of this focus, but one of the most stunning must be 'Crisis Poem'. Over in just ten lines, it resonates like a scream:

And suddenly the men are holding beers and standing round the trampoline and not the barbecue, turning over toddlers instead of steak. The women make the salads.

In many respects this poem is not representative of the collection as a whole – Wright is more likely to use longer lines and looser structures – but it does show the poet’s precision and her attention to the unsettling realities that are present inside every domestic scene.

The collection is organised into five parts, the first three of which address relationships to space most directly. 'Origin' points to foundational spaces and experiences, 'Never Simple' looks more closely at some of the more bizarre aspects of suburban life, and 'Elsewhere' points this lens beyond the suburbs to zoom in on places such as Perth, Katoomba and even Berlin borough Neukölln. Here again, Wright is unflinching:

Make the poems squeal – I’m making your fucking tea, and I’m gonna let that puppy steep. … You can’t tell me no one’s ever put a baby in a bath in Berlin before. This one isn’t mine.

This work of writing about locations beyond the familiar is common to many poets writing within Australia. In just the last few years we have welcomed Robert Wood’s 'book of place poems' Concerning a Farm, Eileen Chong’s Rainforest, which takes in Sydney, Singapore, Scotland and Kunming to name a few, and Phillip Hall’s Fume, which was written specifically 'for Borroloola' – these are only recent examples that come immediately to mind. In fact, we see this preoccupation with place so regularly it is near invisible.

Tracking this concern throughout Domestic Interior, I began to wonder whether there was more at work here than a stereotypically Australian desire to write 'travel poems' or 'poems of place'. Does writing in the shadow of a largely unaddressed colonialist history mean non-Indigenous Australian poets are compelled to examine and question the spaces they occupy? Perhaps this kind of work is happening even if the poet doesn’t overtly intend to address these issues.

A poem such as 'Ode to the Metro', for example, first appears as a record of suburban objects and inhabitants. But here again Wright is also exploring the surreality of spaces that have been settled, cultivated and gentrified:

I’ll take a sample shot of lukewarm wheatgrass – it’s not that bad – and run my fingers on the pelts of peaches, become certain of their gravity, the point where they might overspill and scatter.

In this suburban space, the pastoral is made strange. Peaches become animal-like and vaguely threatening, while grass is something to be choked down.

In the final two sections Wright moves into more personal territory with 'A Crack in the Skin: On Illness' and 'Enviable: Love Poems'. It’s here that Domestic Interior connects with Small Acts of Disappearance, Wright’s essay collection on living with an eating disorder, that was written at roughly the same time. While both these works are emotionally and intellectually generous on their own, their cumulative effect is particularly rich.

Reading a poem like 'A Queer and Sultry Summer' in light of Small Acts of Disappearance, it becomes clear how Wright is able leave certain particulars unsaid, becoming free to reveal more than she could within an essay’s constraints:

There’s a fig tree tattooed on your hipbone but you want, almost, the fruit to fall, for the way the seed within your belly burn … I can’t resolve your need, but feel it spit against my windscreen the whole way home. Your wear a talisman that scares you.

Similarly, in the love poem 'Almost Aubade, Melbourne', Wright gives us place, longing and perhaps even regret without including anything explicitly personal:

Seven hundred and forty-eight (give or take) kilometres of distance. My fingers are starlike, longing for orbits of their own – how can I feel gazed upon, I have lived all these years as a child.

One of the deals we make with writers (and with female writers in particular) is that the more they reveal, they more they win our admiration. One of the many things Wright has achieved through this collection is to write about themes such as love and illness while resisting this demand. The poet is in full control here, sharing with us only the words she chooses. There are rooms here we may not enter.

There is a sadness that runs through this collection, but there are also many moments of playfulness and of joy. Domestic Interior is punctuated by poems that take pleasure in daily language, once again revelling in a deep strangeness. 'Tupperware Sonnets', for example, brings the language of motherhood into focus:

No plastic? But what about their sandwiches? No, you don’t need plastic on their sandwiches. Don’t they go yuck? I mean, I hate using plastic, but always worry, won’t their sandwiches go yuck? They won’t eat their sandwiches if they go yuck.

In one of the collection’s funniest moments, 'Thank You Internet', Wright is both satirical and sympathetic while using language that sounds completely unembellished:

lean the fuck in, Louise and don’t be tied to some idiot man who can’t even cook frittata – it’s just an oven-omelette, it’s not that fucking hard –

Whether Wright is favouring her own voice or writing through the language of others, each of these poems represents a moment of close attention. Moving through the collection as a whole feels akin to walking slowly through an exhibition in a gallery free from other visitors. Each poem is its own painting, quietly revealing the stunning colours and jagged edges we usually miss: the laughter that waits inside loss, the love that is sometimes present within illness and the alien that is always there inside the domestic.