Tigers on the Silk Road by Katherine Gallagher

Tigers and ‘the Silk Road to Istanbul’ feature in Part I of ‘1969’, the opening poem in this volume, which traces a hopeful setting forth into the undiscovered spaces of Asia and Europe. It is playfully exotic even while the homeward pull of a relationship envelops perception like a cloudscape: My bus crawls across India,the afternoons catch me like sleep –looking forward, looking back.I pick through shelves of cloud,see you everywhere – your face grinningwryly, slipping through cirrus bands. A large part of Tigers on the Silk Road taps into Katherine Gallagher’s life before this journey, and subsequent returns from the life she established in Europe (in Paris for nine years, and now, for many years, in London). It is not always the case that the expatriate experience sharpens memory, but it is true here. Gallagher evokes scenes of her country childhood in Eastville, Victoria, with a mixture of simplicity, deep feeling and astringency that makes such poems as ‘Frost Country’ and ‘Bloodline’ (about her father) poignantly memorable. Part III of ‘Bloodline’ is ‘Going to Mass in the ’39 Pontiac’, which ends: He raced along the dirt roadsscattering dust; on his left,Mother, one eye on him,powdering her face Paris-pink;a baby snugged between them. The connection with a wider world is registered in portraits of local soldier boys, returned or unreturned, from the war: Arriving home, he said Merry Christmas,hugged people and slapped them on the back.Wandered about the place, eyes crinkledwith strain, lines duginto his forehead. So young, he seemedto be either laughing or very sadas though, in between,there was nothing.(‘1942’) Subsequently, new vistas open up – ‘Jumping In’ is about a first glimpse of the sea at age fifteen. But while there are images of large physical perspectives at key points in Tigers on the Silk Road, these mostly have an air of (deliberate?) sketchiness about them. They represent openness and potential, yes, but are more a counterpoint and backdrop to the intimate particularity of human presences and absences that compel the poet’s attention. ‘Behind us, Australia beckoned – / a grand water-lily /squat on the Pacific’: this is a comment on a photograph of the poet’s brother and herself taken at Barbizon, which has fallen from her bag, in ‘In Memoriam for My Brother’. It is the final image of a ladybird – ‘burnt-scarlet’, proverbially fated – that carries the poem’s weight: ‘You murmured Hello / and your eyes followed as it / flew off in dust-dry air.’ In this poem, as in others on death and grief, spareness is richness, the interface with silence is honoured. An empathy between the living and the dead is portrayed in ‘Nomad’, where a widow travels to deal with her loss: And still each new place sang,claiming you against the dark.He would have loved that –you travelling solo pulled by both worlds. Gallagher’s characteristic lightness of touch serves her well here, as in ‘My Mother’s Garden’, which beautifully describes a visit to the ‘lemon gums, golden wattle ... lavender, jasmine, rose’ of her mother’s garden after the latter’s death: My feet don’t tire of this walkI’ve come back to for her sake and mine.The current owners of the house left the gate open –they may come back, tell me to go. I have my alibi,talk to my mother through the soles of my feet. Katherine Gallagher is a poet of the earth and of growing things. Trees, plants and flowers figure strongly in this collection: images of promise, a sustaining joy. Perhaps, for this reason, they are often at the heart of poems on illness and mortality, as in ‘Arriving’, where the poet brings cherry blossom from her mother’s garden to her in hospital; the impressive ‘Poinsettias’, celebrating a dying friend; or ‘The Ash Tree’, where a woodman prunes a listed tree (‘it will be denser, / go into itself, discover new shoots. // ... The woodman is coming to terms / with the tree. It will outlive him.’) This earth-connection proves a more powerful force than that mixture of adventure, heightened awareness and slippage constellated around travel, as in ‘Jet Lag’: ‘Don’t ask what day it is – // my body clock ticks in those concertinaed / intervals between borders and continents, // oceans urging them forward.’ In ‘Dancing’, images of flying (‘My eyes glisten, past bitterness – / I dance in my sleep. / Whole streets fly by me’) and of being earthed (‘Nothing has dulled my feel for earth, / its stern gravity-pull, / its cushion of dark’) are brought together. There is a balancing process at work in this collection – between Europe and Australia; between a large embrace of life and the small, the diurnal, the local; between ‘looking forward, looking back’; between celebration and the work of being at peace with difficult truths. For months I’ve imagined,magnified the scene, peppered itwith anecdotes, have seizedthe sky’s still azure, felthow the sun sweeps through me,how my twin-lives have come full circle to this ... Wind spikes the tableclothwith sand, a speedboat skirrsthe river, briefly drowningour voices and the secretsnot told in letters. (‘River Murray Reunion’) Questions of physical roots and of personal connection take on a forceful imaginative life: the pangs of distance between places, and the living and the dead, are rivetingly real, but acts of rootedness in the self and in memory, such as those performed in these poems, may leaven grief, offer some kind of haven. Tigers on the Silk Road is a generous and accomplished collection with a wide range of sympathies and concerns. It spans the curve of Katherine Gallagher’s life in two countries and of her thirty-year journey as a poet. It also makes a specific contribution to Australian poetry in a number of areas: an Irish-Australian country childhood remembered; war poetry; nature poetry; the Australian–European theme. There is an understated quality to Gallagher’s tone that I think of as characteristically Australian, though life and circumstance have put her in the position of claiming her ground with care, and she does so with assurance. There is also a mixture of freshness and resilience, an exuberant sense of potential, that I think of as Australian virtues – whoever else may fairly lay claim to them. Above all, this is a volume of poetry informed by courage and grace.

Diane Fahey

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