Poetry

Babel Fish by Jillian Pattinson

by Geoff Page •

November 2015, no. 376

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 75 pp, 9781922186690

Poetry

Babel Fish by Jillian Pattinson

by Geoff Page •

November 2015, no. 376

Halfway through her first full-length collection, Babel Fish, Jillian Pattinson quotes Borges's famous argument: 'Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.' Her whole book does its best to embody this idea.

As its title 'Waterline' implies, the first group of poems here is loosely unified by water references, from the semi-scientific language of 'Communion' through to the T.S. Eliot-influenced poems, 'Ambiguities' and 'Estuary'. 'Estuary' elaborates a 'death by water', comparable to Virginia Woolf's suicide.

Geoff Page

By this contributor

Geoff Page is based in Canberra. His books include 1953 (UQP 2013), Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry 2013), New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013), Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (Picaro Press 2014), Gods and Uncles (Pitt Street Poetry 2015), Hard Horizons (Pitt Street Poetry 2017) and PLEVNA: A Verse Biography (UWA Publishing 2016). He also edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and The Best Australian Poems 2015 (Black Inc). His most recent books are in medias res (Pitt Street Poetry, 2019) and Codicil (Flying Islands Press, 2020)