Enclave of images

Jaya Savige’s first book, latecomers (2005), was an impressive début and won the New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry in 2006. Surface to Air is a more varied, equally impressive, volume. Savige meditates on the poet Tasso’s oak tree (inspired by Peter Porter’s ‘Tasso’s Oak’), a survivor of Hiroshima, the Big Brother television show, and, as this book’s epigraph by W.S. Merwin might predict, the loss of an uncontaminated natural world, or Eden: ‘kneel by the sky-blue bic that nests / in the shallow bowels of an albatross carcass’ (‘Recycling Night’). Surface to Air is divided into four sections, whose titles indicate possible approaches to life and art. The first section, ‘Snorkelling Lessons’, portrays the poet’s birth into language, describes a hushed Lawrentian seascape and the lures beyond. The second, ‘Circular Breathing’, begins with the Tranströmer-like ‘Crisis’, in which the child awakens to a new world of computer screens: ‘and when the missiles rained their trails / shone like space’s vivid blood / streaming where the darkness had been cut.’ One separation from nature results from technology, with perception now channelled through, or even replaced by, devices. ‘The Iliad, disambiguation’ imagines that epic as the brand-name of an online gadget. Experience also frames perception: on the one hand, knowledge complicates, corrupts, erases innocence; on the other hand, ignorance erases truth: ‘Headline in the troposphere: / federal police recover rocket launcher – / its serial number filed off’ (‘Serial Light’). The poem ‘Ötzi’ ponders the 3300-year-old Iceman’s fate; this contrasts with the death witnessed in the following poem ‘The Pain Switch’: Sunlight smirks through the curtain when the nurse shakes my wrist, saying It’s time. I grasp your hand, realise you’ve been holding on for this. Your vanquished sigh, a sharp, hot fist. These poems hypothesise possible resurrections of the past, by science or by art, while ‘Circular Breathing’ notes a busker in Rome playing a didjeridoo, an instrument more ancient than Roman ruins. Savige often uses rhyme to end a poem, mostly effectively, but at times this can sound too neatly parcelled-up, or unduly ceremonialised. Some poems are an enclave of images – similes that unfold in detail, metaphors that replace objects – but occasionally this opulence feels exhausted, too filigreed, and the echoing syllables and consonants tend to be overly insistent. A few poems struggle to sustain the zing of their strongest lines. The third section, ‘A Brief History of Risk’, explores a compromised survival and continues the many images of flight, the Hiroshima survivor of ‘Flash Bang Baby’ (‘Swaddled in the glow of the colossal / fungus, you grew wings and flew / across the dying room’), the academic life, where knowledge seems padded over a wound. This section contemplates how we might perceive the world: the ruthless narrator of ‘First Person Shooter’ compares killing with photography. ‘Elegy for an Old School Friend’ speculates on imagined or remembered worlds, child’s play: Hoop pines groan from their swamp, as mosquitoes zip through the miasma. Bloated with blood they dip, miniscule Icaruses. So I model this poem on the design of the guns we invented to zap the dead to life with, dancing in the khaki scrub. The book’s closing section, ‘Memory Card’, finishes with two reclamations of heritage in the only concrete poem ‘Stingray’, followed by ‘Riverfire’, a fevered paean to a Brisbane fireworks display. ‘Riverfire’ exhorts the nineteenth-century Australian explorer John Oxley to enter the heady city, and imagines him ‘tending a BBQ by the Nepalese pagoda’, and repeatedly invokes his name like a talisman. Part celebration, part portent, this long poem ends with an Aboriginal story of a shooting star: a young boy, believing he has been shot by it, falls like Icarus, forming a pietà with his mother; the poem recapitulates underlying themes of birth, death, and marbled art. As ‘Sand Island’ depicts a shoreline that ambition and curiosity will soon abandon, this last poem looks to the skies – celebratory fireworks, a shooting star – as well as to a mythologised return ‘home’. Surface-to-air missiles destroy an airborne threat, as in the Space Invaders game (released in 1978, Savige’s year of birth) that inspired ‘Crisis’, but Savige’s poetry disturbs and airs the past, dredging it into the present – Paris Hilton as Raphael’s ‘Galatea’, a ‘Beethoven ringtone’, accordionists playing ‘My Way’ outside Keats’s house in Rome. These poems range from sparse, short-lined couplets to thick pageants encrusted with metaphor and extended similes, dissatisfied by any one angle – ‘Winter is in the trees. / The fountain’s moss-cheeked magistrates / discuss endlessness, / their cold lips’ ‘O’ / piping the water’s soft calypso’ (‘Monastery of Sant’Onofrio’). Stylistically, Savige adapts poems of Peter Porter, John Forbes, and others to fire his work, and often employs a half-ironic formality of address, particularly in a few love poems (usually modern poets’ weakest works) or in the use of imperatives such as a welcoming Shakespearean prologist. His twining imagery and explorations of technology aim for the poetic conceits and subtleties of Donne and Marvell. From the questing opening poem’s ambition to write the world, to the precipitously balanced public address of ‘Riverfire’ that enacts that ambition, Surface to Air is a thoughtfully constructed and evocative book.

Gig Ryan

From the New Issue

Pursuit of the New: Louise Hanson-Dyer, publisher and collector edited by Kerry Murphy and Jennifer Hill

‘Calm Voice’, a new poem by Anders Villani

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

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