Author: mascara

Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945

by Michael Farrell

Palgrave

ISBN 978-1-137-48571-7

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

Michael Farrell’s Writing Australian Unsettlement is necessary reading. It is a welcome contribution to a small field. However, Farrell’s work has several areas that are problematic and that are also symptomatic of wider issues concerning poetry and politics in today’s society. It should be seen then as a starting point, an opening up, rather than a definitive statement or end of a conversation.

Part of the modern and contemporary poetry and poetics series edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis for Palgrave Macmillan, the aim of the book is to ‘unsettle’ Australian poetics. This is taken here to mean the work of undoing assumptions, firmness, bedrock as it is currently constituted in Australian literary criticism, particularly in a nationalist canonical iteration. Farrell returns to ideas of unsettlement time and time again, giving a variety of definitions, particularly in the introduction. Somewhat later in the work he states:

The hunt is on for new, formerly useless poetries, perhaps poetries in Perloff’s terms that are ‘by other means’; other languages and genres (like diaries) that may, if not constitute a new ‘model of a national Australian literature’ at least foster new reading and writing networks of the history and the contemporary that attend to different literacies, including that of the visual. (84)

This is a book then not only about content and form, but intended as a sort of speculative methodological reading enterprise. This is through examining poetry from the colonial period from Bennelong’s letter from 1792 until various twentieth century texts until World War Two. For a review that discusses the contents of the book at length please see Matt Hall’s in Cordite.

As worthy as that enterprise is, that desire to make a ‘new’ thing, Farrell is also indebted to, if not limited by, past discourses, languages, tropes, motifs. Indeed, it is one of the ironies that he deploys the following quote from Martin Harrison early in Writing Australian Unsettlement:

Borrowed terms like ‘pastoral’, ‘urban’ and ‘landscape’ for instance, may work very differently or simply may not work at all when applied to Australian poetry. (1)

It is ironic because over the course of the book, Farrell relies, too much in my opinion, on imported, metropolitan theory, framing and quotation for legitimacy. Witness the repeated use of ‘______ says insert quote’ from Freud to Bataille to Deleuze to Sontag (117, 157, 171). These are often used without criticism – theory remains deployed rather than challenged – and one apparent result is that the observation of poetry cannot stand alone without participating in an elaborate citation ritual that only reaffirms the canon of European continental theory. To buttress the continental theory is the North American field.

Consider the following passage:

Meanwhile the critical tools have also been developed to begin to read this work, whether as ‘exophonic’ or appropriative writing, or in terms of visual prosody (Perloff); in terms that resist the dematerialisation of language and parataxis (Silliman and other language writers); through theories developed from visual poetry (Cluver, Willard Bohn); theories of space, textual criticism, and archival work that read the page as a page rather than as a hoist for a message, that recognise the freedom of handwriting and resist the hegemony of typography (Davidson, McGann, Werner and Howe); or that account for the ‘non semantic’ (Forrest-Thomson). These theories themselves draw on criticism associated with concrete poetry and works such as ‘Un Coup de Des’ as well as the histories of the avant-garde. (83)

If Europe is good for theory, North America is good for the academic work of today. Primary among these is Marjorie Perloff, who supplied a blurb on the book’s back cover and who is invoked with regularity. However, Perloff seems to me to be the arch settled and settling critic of the white American avant garde. As a node in the network of contemporary writing, one might question not only her relevance for work on colonial Australian poetry but also her politics. Witness recent criticism of her by Mongrel Coalition, Fred Moten, Kim Chen, C A Conrad and others.

This heavy quotation and reference is evident throughout. I recognise how it mocks some undergraduate idea of academic writing and enables assemblage, a defining part of the work, to be meta-commented upon. Yet this seems at odds with an independent impulse, with autonomy as a political and authorial subject position as possibly enabled by the Harrison quote early on.  This is, of course, not to establish a false binary between voice and assemblage either, or to dismiss a speculative enterprise. Paradox is, of course, not a failing in and of itself, but the implication of such importation is to undermine the importance of the local. It might appear global, but it is possibly a colonised manoeuvre. There is a lot of Australian literary criticism in the archive and reading against the paradigmatic straw man grain might have enabled a different perspective. As it stands one can find in Clement Semmler or Vincent Buckley or others, a complicated way of reading that might not be as settled as Farrell makes out. This is supported by the lack of discussion of the Australian field in general. To take only genocide studies what of important work by Attwood, Reynolds, Tatz (161)? The broader question to ask then is: why can’t we apply an unsettled reading to theory and field and not only poetic text?

This framing is despite the fact that Farrell is a very adept close reader. When it comes to the Australian poetry in and of itself there is nuance and insight. Readers should pay attention to his criticism of Norman Harris’ ‘Letter to Jim Bassett’ (104) and drover bush texts (186). This insight is there too in the section on Ngarla songs. However, in some of the Indigenous sections there is slippage that I think is symptomatic of Australian academic culture more generally (25). In one passage that talks about the democratic semiotic possibility of the equals sign Farrell writes it ‘resembles Indigenous philosophy rather than settlement sentiment’ (80). I would be interested to know how one can sustain such binarism. There are several other moments like this. This collapsing of specificity may, though not necessarily, be read as an ahistoricising gesture, for it collapses important distinctions and arguments. How should ‘we’ collapse Roe and Neidjie, Bandler and Pearson into a thing? It flattens the diversity in other words, which people on the inside of the discourse may find important. This is not, though, a defense, in a positivist sense, of linearity, or of cleanliness, just a comment on the need for consistent attentiveness to frame and context. Indeed, the heterodoxies, contradictions and complications of a thing, if it could be said to exist, called Indigenous philosophy remain submerged in Writing Australian Unsettlement precisely because the texts quoted are Freud and Deleuze not Indigenous people themselves as they exist in ethnographic and self-authored texts (see Deborah Bird-Rose, Sally Treloyn, Magabala Books (Various).

Mascara readers may be particularly interested in chapter 3, which examines Jong Ah Sing’s The Case. Farrell writes against other critics, who ‘in demonstrating their concern with The Case’s biographical and historical significance, largely treat its poetics as a barrier to truth and usefulness, rather than as a contribution to a remarkable assemblage of a new kind of English, and of a new kind of poetic text’ (66). Instead Farrell makes the compelling claim that the poetics of Sing’s work are important in and of themself and ‘how Jong’s inventive practice unsettles notions of Australian writing’ (67). It is one text I would like to seek out for myself, particularly for its visually arresting style that Farrell discusses.

Settlement as a word has currency in academic debates now, but the elasticity of its deployment in this work, undermines a politically astute and historically attentive reading. You can’t build an empire on sand, but nor can you build a humpy on water (see 157). Notwithstanding its problems, Writing Australian Unsettlement, is a major intervention in the dialectic of un/settlement and makes for entertaining and challenging reading. It is necessary for those with an interest in Australia, avant garde reading techniques, colonialism and poetry.
 
 
ROBERT WOOD has published work in Southerly, Overland, Plumwood Mountain and a variety of academic journals. He is currently completing a PhD at UWA and is a regular contributor to Cultural Weekly. His next book, heart-teeth light-bitten crownland, is due out from Electio Editions later this year.

Inside My Mother

by Ali Cobby Eckermann

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922146885

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

Since the appearance of her popular first collection, Little Bit Long Time, in 2009, Aboriginal poet, Ali Cobby Eckermann, has produced five more books including a couple of verse novels, the second of which, Ruby Moonlight, won the NSW Premier’s Prize in 2013. Along with Samuel Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, she is one of the most prominent Aboriginal poets writing at the moment.

According to its author, Inside my Mother, grew out of a period of mourning and overseas travel which proved therapeutic. This fourth collection has a core of powerful and moving poems — and a number of others which are a little less forceful. Eckermann’s family has been affected by the “taken away” syndrome for three generations and the impact of this is the genesis for quite a few poems. “First Born” and “The Letter” are just two of them.

In the latter a mission girl who is learning typing begins: “Dear Mother / The Mission is good. /The food is good. / I am good” before “ripp(ing) the page from the typewriter” and starting a new one which begins “Mummy / Where are you?” It’s all over in twelve lines. The narrative strategy is simple, as is the vocabulary, but the point is indelibly made. Mainstream readers who find this too simple altogether and who demand the “whitefella” sophistication of, say, Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery, are probably missing the point. Cobby Eckermann’s  poignant distillation here is just another thing that poetry can do well. There’s no need for a hierarchy.

An interesting, and relatively unusual, dimension to Inside my Mother is how Cobby Eckermann deals with the tensions within Aboriginal families and culture, not just the pressures from “outside”, as it were. “I Tell You True”, for instance, is a dramatic monologue from the viewpoint of an Aboriginal woman explaining her addiction to alcohol. It’s in a stricter form than most of the other poems and is modified by, rather than couched in, Aboriginal English.

The narrator’s reasons for despair, one in each stanza, include a daughter “burnt to death inside a car”, a sister dead who has “hung herself to stop the rapes” and a mother who has been killed, “battered down the creek” — a death for which the speaker herself is partly blamed by her own  family. “Their words have made me wild / I can’t stop drinking I tell you true / ‘Cos I was just a child”.

It’s significant that the speaker doesn’t disclose the race of the perpetrators. This is a further sign of Cobby Eckermann’s political sophistication; she doesn’t just keep on hitting easy targets. The poem also ranges more widely by implying that domestic violence like this is not unique to any one group or the product of a single cause.

There’s no doubt, however, about who the guilty are in Cobby Eckermann’s “Kulila”, a poem written entirely in Aboriginal English and voiced by one of the “old people” who still remember the massacres of an earlier century. “don’t forget ’em story / night time tell ’em to the kids / keep every story live // … sit down here real quiet way / you can hear ’em crying / all them massacre mobs “  Dramatic monologues like this one were the forte of Kevin Gilbert, the Wiradjuri poet (1933-1993). Cobby Eckermann (b. 1963) makes good use here of a strategy and linguistic  authenticity which non-Indigenous poets can employ only at some risk should they wish to ventriloquise on behalf of Aboriginal people.

Occasionally, as in the beginning of the book’s final poem, “Evacuate”, Eckermann’s language is not strong enough for its task. “today I shall relinquish / my body // I shall process my / dreams of tragedy”.  Although we have seen a number of tragedies throughout the book, the phrase “dreams of tragedy” remains unfocussed and over-explicit.

For this reader two other relatively minor shortcomings in Inside my Mother are the lack of a glossary for important words from Aboriginal languages and the poet’s abandonment, for the most part, of traditional punctuation, a strategy now a hundred years old and not as effective as its users are inclined to imagine.

The fact that punctuation is commonly foregone in much contemporary free verse does not, in itself, establish its effectiveness. The small, momentary confusions the reader often experiences through this convention can sometimes be a good thing artistically (analogous, for instance, to the clever use of enjambment) but it can also distract from the main thrust of the poem, a factor even more important when the poetry is political, as much of Cobby Eckermann’s work is.

This reminds us too that the role of politics in Aboriginal poetry has always been an inevitable and a difficult one. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920 —1993) admitted this when she once (inadequately) described her own poetry as “sloganistic, civil rightish, plain and simple”¹. Some of her best poetry was when she approached important problems indirectly. Lionel Fogarty (b. 1958), on the other hand, has often, in his idiosyncratic way, turned the language of the conquerors against themselves, using “ English against the English”². Fogarty has argued that the way Aboriginal poets “write and talk is ungrammatical, because it doesn’t have any meanings in their spirit”³. This can lead to a poetry of strong feeling (often anger) but which may not be as effective politically as it intends to be.

Ali Cobby Eckermann (and, to an even greater extent, Samuel Wagan Watson) steers between these two extremes and her poems, for the most part, tend therefore to work more effectively, both aesthetically and politically, than they might have otherwise done.

Inside my Mother is a worthy addition to Ali Cobby Eckermann’s growing body of work. It is packed with things that non-Indigenous Australians need to know or be reminded about — while, at the same time communicating effectively, I would imagine, with the still-disenfranchised Australians for whom she is increasingly a spokeswoman.
 
 
Citations
1. Kath Walker, “Aboriginal Literature” Identity 2.3 (1975) pp. 39–40
2. From Preface to New and Selected (1995) by Lionel Fogarty http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/new-and-selected-poems-0214000
3. ibid.
 
GEOFF PAGE is an Australian poet and critic. He has edited The Best Australian Poems , 2014 and The Best Australian Poems, 2015.

Small Acts of Disappearance

by Fiona Wright

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-922146-93-9

Reviewed by EMMA ROSE SMITH

‘I just saw Fiona Wright,’ says my friend over the phone. ‘At least, I thought it was her.’

A statement that wouldn’t be out of place at a poetry event or around the streets of the inner-west of Sydney. But my friend is not in Glebe or Enmore; she’s been sent for a few weeks, for her own wellbeing, to one of Sydney’s private mental health institutions.

‘I didn’t know whether to say hi or not,’ she says. ‘I mean, you never want to publicly know anyone from these places. What was I going to say: I like your poetry?’

This was about a year ago, before Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance was published, before any one of its essays featured in Overland or …. My friend and I had read Wright’s poetry, heard her on the radio, seen her do readings. We did not know that she was open about her condition and was in fact researching its details, contradictions, and existence in humans and literature, as the topic of her doctorate.

In one of the essays in the collection, ‘In Increments’, Wright describes the visceral experience of being admitted to a day program for eating disorders. This was years before the longer-stay program where my friend saw, but decided not to greet, her. During the program, Wright is questioned by the doctors for her garrulous attitude. She loses weight, and is kicked out. Desperate, she eats cake every day in an attempt to gain enough weight to be accepted back into sessions. She writes: “I cried a lot. ‘You’re living my dream,’ the dietician said. I smiled, though I wanted to slap her, and hard.”

Each of the essays in this collection covers a different element of illness: as it is seeded in youth; as it takes hold in uncertain times; as it is experienced as a foreigner; as it is treated by various practitioners. Wright also assesses the appearance of illness in fictional and nonfictional writings by writers such as Christina Stead, Carmel Bird, Tim Winton, John Berryman and Louise Glück. Anorexia is rendered with an honesty and humility I’ve never seen before, by descriptions of its contradictions, its inner complexities, its varying effects upon varied humans. It is seen within the context of addiction; of deception; of a desperately certain foundation amidst the life’s uncertainty. In an essay on the miniature, Wright explains the mistaken conflation of smallness with control:

This is a false and contradictory kind of command: the more control we try to exert over our eating and our food, the more our illness asserts itself and the less able we are to operate autonomously . . . We possess the world, perhaps, but in the process we are dispossessed of our own selves.

She was sick, with a denial of that sickness, for several years before the dispossession could be held apart and called what it was.

It would be irresponsible to discuss Small of Acts of Disappearance without an analysis of the societal structures that contributed towards its creation. Wright is capable of accessing healthcare treatments, despite the detriment their price tag has had upon her; however, not all who experience hunger may be able—financially or otherwise—to enter private healthcare. Australian eating disorder treatment in public systems is hard to reach, says Wright:

No state has more than about eight public hospital beds for adult eating disorder patients; these beds are all in locked psychiatric wards, the waiting lists are often up to thirty-six weeks long and only available to the critically underweight and medically imperilled. I had to fight, and fight hard, to get the treatment that I needed.

Small Acts of Disappearance is not social criticism and doesn’t claim to be; but considering the aforementioned limitations, it’s clear that institutional structures are in stark need of reform.

Wright also dissects hunger in the context of her stay in Sri Lanka, where many citizens go hungry without choosing to do so. She notes that the food she threw out in this time could have supported some of Sri Lanka’s homeless population. The disposal of resources is itself a privilege that is met with blankness by those who cannot afford waste. She writes: “In Colombo, my hunger was obscene. It was not predicated on need, on poverty or parentlessness or war, corruption or greed . . . My own denial was something as incomprehensible to my local friends as the hunger they lived alongside was to me.”

If we are to utilise intersectionality in our reading of Wright’s essays, we must ask: How do class, education, whiteness, heteronormativity, ability, and other social factors influence mental health? How do they influence our capacity to access care, and feel safe doing so? How might someone of different circumstances experience anorexia or another hunger disorder? Wright notes, but does not properly address, the myriad embodiments of hunger beyond her own. “Illness is a foreign country,” Wright declares in ‘In Group’. “We do things differently here.” And the natures of ‘hunger’ range as widely as that of the people who live alongside it.

Small Acts of Disappearance changed my ways of understanding food, vulnerability, and control. Midway through grocery shopping, I remembered Wright’s descriptions of the textures of food, “choking up in my throat, as glutinous as craft glue.” I thought twice about buying rice. I decided to try not to use the word ‘binge’ in casual conversation. ‘In Hospital’ mentions the shock Wright received encountering mainstream usages of sickness discourse, after finishing an eating program.  “A waiter brought a brownie to my table with my coffee and called me ‘naughty’.”

Wright herself had misconceptions about the control of food: “I couldn’t see myself as one of those women—I thought that eating disorders only happen to women who are vain and selfish, shallow and somehow stupid; it took me years to realise that the very opposite is true.”

I read these essays as a poet, and also as someone with lived experience of other kinds of obsession. From both perspectives, Wright’s clarity and generosity of expression contribute towards the rendering of a resounding text. Within the urge to sate curiosity, to seek causes and convenient vocabulary, the reader encounters sentences built with years of thought: “I think sometimes that the drive to hunger, the drive towards smallness, is about precisely this: we feel so uncertain, so anxious about our rightful space within the world, that we try to take up as little of it as possible.”

Wright speaks eloquently of the ways we choose hunger. As a way of exercising agency in the midst of life’s pandemonium. As a reduction of the inelegancies of the self, its clumsy inaccuracies. As a method to focus. (“I still find it so difficult to think, to write, to work, after I eat; how my thinking feels so much sharper, more vivid, when I’m hungry.”) Wright’s ending essay, ‘In Hindsight’, contains the undeniably clear announcement: “When I was hungry, I felt alert and intense and alive along every inch of my skin, and I felt unassailable.” It is not difficult to apply these reasonings to other methods that we utilise to get on with our lives: exercise, medication, meditation, sex, alcohol; any number of the superstitions and rituals that we engage in to best let our creative projects blurt out from within us. All methods are flawed; but sometimes it’s the closest thing we’ve got to something that works.

EMMA ROSE SMITH writes manic poetry, smelly-lady nonfiction, and fiction that overuses the word ‘ululate’. She is often mistaken for a vegetarian. Her chapbooks and zines, including ‘Goonbag Mystic’, ‘Fingerbang’, ‘Pull Out the Pop-Schlop’, and ‘Pink Bets’ are available from her lounge room. She is starting a collaborative literary index of events and submissions (http://spokensydneystories.tumblr.com/), and drafting her first novel.

The Hazards

by Sarah Holland-Batt

UQP

ISBN 978-0-7022-5359-1

Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO

The first poem of Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Hazards provides a fitting opening for a collection so beautiful, so cold, and so much about the coldness of beauty. The eponymous jellyfish speaker of the poem ‘Medusa’ is unapologetically cerebral—‘a brain trailing its nettles’, a mind ‘vain and clear as melting ice’. So much so, in fact, that the speaker seems to exist as a drifting organ of ‘bitter reason’, separate from the organs where the capacity for feeling and compassion reside: the nerves ‘blooming around [it]’ and the soul which ‘billows out like hollow silk’.

One might dare to read the medusa of the poem as avatar for the poet persona. In a 2014 interview with Jacinta Le Plastrier published in Cordite, Holland-Batt remarked on the importance of the cerebral in her composition process: ‘My poems are acts of thinking […] I know that this is different for other poets, who are perhaps more impressionistic and have a more Romantic conception of their own poiesis. For me, writing poetry is a wholly conscious process […]’ (1)

Indeed, the overall tone of the collection is detached, rational. The poems are technically flawless, consistently gorgeous, but often unsettling. For if the poet is the predatory medusa, and by extension, the Medusa of Greek myth who turns the objects of her gaze into stone, then the implication is that poetry-making is as brutal as the paralysis of a hapless victim—the textual equivalent of turning the living into the statuesque dead. Poetry as enacted by The Hazards is premeditated violence. So is art at large, the collection posits, as well as the creation and appreciation of the beautiful in general. And it is this quality of calculated violence, this mingling of the cerebral and visceral, that makes The Hazards so powerful, so disquieting, so moving.

The intertwining of beauty and violence is most apparent in the poems ‘Approaching Paradise’ and ‘Beauty is a Ticket of Admission to All Spectacles’. The first poem reveals that death and pain are fundamental elements of a beach paradise:

You will find paradise in a whiting
drowning in a bucket of freshwater,
in the jammed blade of a fishscale
like quicklime under the thumb.
(19)

The sublime requires sacrificial victims: ‘the bloated body washed in’, ‘bikini-clad tourists jerked out by rips,’ and ‘A shark’s slit corpse […] / its head yanked on a hook like a sacrifice. / Its shank is smooth and black as paradise.’ (20)

In the second poem, art’s beauty makes the horrific pleasurable, admitting the imagination even to that ‘you do not want to enter’: gory alternate versions of the scene depicted in Goya’s La muerte del picador in which the bull dies instead; Judith in the act of beheading Holofernes before Klimt paints her portrait. Because of their beauty, ‘[t]hese things are easy to enter’. Slaughter is made bearable, its severity diminished: the speaker remembers a crow her father shot one Easter, ‘the tyranny of its open eye, / as wild and dark as anything’ belying the reality of its defeat.

Paradoxically, entering into another’s experience facilitates disengagement from it. And it is this unexpected pairing of entry with detachment that makes the collection’s take on violence and artistic beauty more than a mere parroting of W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which suggests that emotional detachment is born of an inability to enter into the experience of another. It is by entering into the mind of the concubine in Ingres’ Grande Odalisque that the poet-speaker of ‘Against Ingres’ carries out her own unflinching objectification. There is no sympathy here for the woman, no retrieval of her humanity. Even as we have access to her thoughts—her fellow concubines, the sultan’s garden, ‘fat, lazy Nilüfer who scratched graffiti into the walls’—she remains unsettlingly object-like, inhuman:

her back patient as polished maple,
a line the colour of buttered toast
unfurling down her spine in an arabesque
to her tailbone and buttocks,
which are long and slumberous as a mare’s.
(60)

The model may turn her back on Ingres to protect her inner life against ingress. But the poet’s breaching of that inner life, its historical canvas, enables her to enact a more thorough objectification still. Even when we know the woman’s mind, we find, ‘Here there is nothing’.

‘Reclining Nude’ is troubling for the same reason. The painter’s dehumanising of his model comes from a purposeful distancing, a refusal to engage emotionally with the woman he tells ‘to crawl, spread / her legs, grind her arse like a pig’:

She has kernelled another body in her body there,
perhaps one of his, it doesn’t matter, he can’t
remember if he has had her, the point is,
she understands largesse […]
(64-65)

But the poet goes further. She shows us glimpses of the model’s passage from pink girlhood into ‘monstrous’ obesity. She walks us down the fluorescent halls of the model’s dream life. She reveals to us that behind the model’s face, most likely ‘intelligence lives, / here the rational, the sceptical’. And because she is able to access the model’s interior in this way, her cruelty to the model far exceeds that of the painter: if he portrays the woman as grotesque simply because he does not care about her inner being, the poet portrays her as grotesque outside and in, ‘rump, hog, beast’ through and through.

It is by entering that art does its worst violence. Holland-Batt reveals how the several paintings that inspire ‘An Illustrated History of Settlement’ turn the scene of invasion into nothing more than landscape suitable for a picnic: ‘sky boiled’, ‘a choppy wedge’ of water, a black man with ‘a toothpick spear’. The invaders are rendered innocuous by colonial representations: ‘heads knotted with tidy black ribbons’, ‘[f]aces fat with apple-cheeked Englishness’:

This is where the eye enters.
And often leaves.
(13)

The Hazards exposes the mechanics by which cruelty is made breathtaking; and in doing so, is itself breathtakingly cruel. But this cruelty reaches almost unbearable levels when the poet-speaker, refusing to spare even her self, turns her own person into the object of infliction. In ‘No End to Images’, it is the speaker who is invaded—by a relentless stream of memories that strip her bare, transmuting her suffering into beauty for the reader’s benefit:

No end to the hour I stood and shook
like a leaf in the shower’s privacy,
no end to my name, snagged like a burr,
no end to the body which is colossally small
with its pains and plainer longings.
No end to grief, never any end to that.
(69)

‘The Invention of Ether’ (and its telling title) gives us insight into the attractions of of numbing oneself when the heartbroken ‘I’ still

[…] cling[s] to the sting
like the slobbering octopus
I failed to rescue
from boyish torturers
on a Sicilian beach:
hopelessly suctioned, unable to release.
(84)

Aid is found in the anesthetisation of the heart. And if protecting the self from invasion is to be gained only by invading the inner lives of others—probing their interior space to find relief in the coldness of intellectual exercise—then so be it.    

‘Desert Pea’ is a sparse poem. Compact like its title, it is a mere page long, composed of ten two-line stanzas. It provides stark contrast to most of the other poems, their language opulent and luxurious and finely tuned, like clockwork nightingales. Nestled in the middle of the collection, it sets down in plain words the theme this review has spent over a thousand words elaborating: the refuge of the intellect in a world where raw experience simply cannot be borne.

I cannot stand
the certain world:

rock grass and thistle,
animal thirst

invading my eye.
Give me night, the stars

streaming past me
huge and soundless.

Give me the silence
of the mind.
(18)

Note
1. Jacinta Le Plastrier interviews Sarah Holland-Batt in Cordite, 10/9/2014

TIFFANY TSAO received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her written work includes literary criticism, fiction, poetry, reportage, and essays. She is Indonesia Editor-at-Large for Asymptote, an online literary journal specializing in contemporary world literature and translation.