Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Therapy Like Fish: New and selected poems by Marcella Polain

by
June 2009, no. 312

Therapy Like Fish: New and selected poems by Marcella Polain

John Leonard Press $24.95 pb, 154 pp

Therapy Like Fish: New and selected poems by Marcella Polain

by
June 2009, no. 312

Marcella Polain’s latest book of poems continues her lyrical exploration of personal experience. Her earlier collections centred on immigrant life, shadowed by a violent history, in the adopted context of the Western Australian wheat belt. In the new poems, which occupy more than one third of the current volume, the emotional terrain has thickened, and the range of experience has expanded to include midlife concerns of failing health, ageing parents and death. ‘So this is what life is,’ Polain writes, ‘nausea, vertigo, migraine, cramps.’ One poem describes the extra chores of helping her mother, and ends: ‘Last Sunday you couldn’t remember who I was or / what you wanted me to buy for you.’

A clear strength of Polain’s work is its straightforward and emotionally charged imagery. In 1963 Robert Bly declared that American poetry had taken a wrong turn, and held up several, mainly Spanish-language poets as exemplars: poets whose work, he said, displayed an inner intensity lacking in more intellectual and contrived poetry. When Bly contrasted Lorca with William Carlos Williams, he said the difference lay in Lorca’s approach, which was based on ‘the absolute essentiality of the image’.

From the New Issue

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.