Observer effect

Precise observation is considered a prerequisite for poetry, but there are limits as to what a surfeit of detail can bring to a poem, or even to an entire volume. Three new poetry collections, each different in tone and subject matter, deploy close observation to varying degrees of success across poems that scrutinise domestic tension, interspecies dynamics, landscape, and everyday grace. Harbour: Poems 2000–2019 by Kate Llewellyn Wakefield Press, $19.95 pb, 75 pp Kate Llewellyn’s Harbour: Poems 2000–2019 displays the poet’s characteristic wit. Llewellyn’s poems have always adopted the frank vocabulary of the everyday. Here the sharpness of her voice is somewhat softened; the poet is interested in observation and reflection rather than the complexities of sex, marriage, and travel. Harbour is more willing to let the world’s hypocrisies go largely unchecked, though it is by no means a forgiving book. Some poems are whimsical, relying on cliché, and as a result are not particularly compelling, such as ‘Ordinary Sublime’, where ‘ease and grace’ are given ‘as abundantly as stars’, or ‘Christmas Poem (10)’, in which ‘hope and faith are rocks / piled beside the everlasting sea’. Others maintain the detached observation typical of Llewellyn’s oeuvre, as in ‘Sleep’: ‘Watch a sleeping man / even then they still seem astonishing / to me with an air of tragedy / like a fallen horse.’ The image, though awkwardly phrased, balances tenderness, uncanniness, and humour, all of which are apparent in poems like ‘The Lodger’ and ‘Tucker’. The collection, minus section breaks, is sometimes overwhelmed by sentimental imagery associated with flowers, stars, and water. The speaker in ‘The Jetty’ encounters a ‘bucket which is not exactly empty / but full of hope’, and some of the collection’s least successful poems overuse personification, like ‘The Day’, in which ‘the day departs the dawn / and firmly shuts the door’. In ‘The Marriage (2)’, the speaker is attended by ‘Dr Grief’ as her marriage ends, which feels largely unconvincing. More successful poems contain striking images of backyard grace: guinea fowl are ‘a flock of nuns ringing their tiny bells’; a tree holds ‘small birds / trembling like thumbs given wings’; the speaker in ‘Memory’ watches ‘sparrows embroidering the garden’. The voice is this collection’s distinguishing feature: here, observations that in Llewellyn’s earlier work might have been brutally sharp are good-naturedly bemused, open to mystery, aware that ‘in a world of kitsch even cute / can seem significant’. Airplane Baby Banana Blanket by Benjamin Dodds Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 79 pp Where Llewellyn’s observations bring the quotidian into closer view, the desire for precision in Benjamin Dodds’s second collection, Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, results in detailed but distant poems. Dodds tells the story of Lucy, a chimpanzee raised by an American family in the 1970s. The story may be familiar to some: it has also been explored in a novel, a short film, and an episode of the Radiolab podcast. Dodds notes in his afterword that the impetus for many of the poems came from another literary work, a memoir by Maurice K. Temerlin, the psychotherapist who undertook the experiment of raising Lucy as part of his family. Airplane Baby Banana Blanket follows Lucy’s adoption and her life with the Temerlins in Oklahoma. Often the short poems comprising this collection become contorted in their attempts to match the detail of this much larger narrative. Many poems in the first two sections are overwhelmed by exposition. Densely packed stanzas rush the reader into each poem, as in ‘Warm Welcome’, which begins: ‘Two hours of slow sliding on icy / night roads more than earn a generous / colleague his pitstop on return / from an interstate conference.’ The syntax is hampered by excessive detail; like many poems in this collection including ‘Hierarchy’, ‘Renovations’, and ‘Lucy’s Cat’, ‘Warm Welcome’ lacks attention to rhythm and lineation. Perhaps a fidelity to Temerlin’s memoir influenced the poet’s tendency to privilege anecdote over image or lineation. This is compounded by the mannered voice, which adopts a limiting, primarily observational approach that positions each poem as a series of anecdotes recounted at a distance. Dodds’s afterword explains that the third and final section departs from Temerlin’s memoir. Here are some of the collection’s more emotionally resonant poems, as Lucy’s human family finds the chimp’s ‘manifold needs / begin to exceed family means’. The story of Lucy’s transition to post-Oklahoman life is fascinating. The poems are less expository, allowing the pathos to play out. The collection addresses the complex tensions of familial dynamics and scientific ambivalence, but it’s unclear what poetry as a form has brought to this familiar story. A wholesale departure from the source material might have offered fresher insights. Recipe for Risotto by Josephine Clarke UWAP, $22.99 pb, 104 pp Recipe for Risotto, Josephine Clarke’s first book, has clear messages to impart across its four sections. Some of this is handled subtly – poems about family members, while sometimes heavy-handed, are authentic and sensitive to domestic tensions – while other poems, particularly those concerning the depredations of the mining boom, are primarily observational and descriptive, often mired in familiar imagery. Poetry can be subtle, but it can’t rely solely on description. The poet is interested in lonely, picturesque towns transformed by mining booms. In poems like ‘Dwellingup’ and ‘Manjimup’, there are streets of ‘empty houses where miners sleep’ as ‘tourists make their own cuppas’ and ‘four-X glows over the pub / the intersection branded in Schweppes’. While these familiar observations are connected to Clarke’s broader environmentalist critique, the malaise feels superficial. Many poems fail to add anything new to this well-trodden terrain, particularly in Western Australia, where John Kinsella’s environmental poetics looms large. In ‘Pemberton mist’, the poet is a stronger presence, and poems that adopt this intimate approach feel more vibrant. ‘Pemberton mist’ contains compelling images of ‘aluminium sky’ and kangaroos ‘drumming the clearing empty’. Pemberton is a place the poet ‘cannot shake off’, appears numerous times throughout the collection. There are similar moments of brilliance in ‘After a controlled burn, Pemberton’, where the horizon is ‘a flammable lace of trees’. Poems about corporate and consumer indifference, like ‘City’ and ‘harbour’, feel unimaginative; this may be because Clarke seems uncertain about handling repetition and silence. The poet often deploys one or two internal caesurae per poem, or, as in the final poem ‘transnational’, combines these with backslashes: who will come back /come home / come throughand hold my hand? my real hand These infrequent devices are jarring, suggesting that the poet isn’t fully confident in controlling the line. There is some arresting imagery in Recipe for Risotto, auguring well for future work from this poet, but the book does better with the personal and familial than with the place-specific material it is often preoccupied with. If observation is a crucial poetic skill, it is one that must be attached to depth of perception. A great deal of focus is placed on the importance of finely rendered images resulting from detailed observation, but this approach falls short when observation lacks insight.

Ella Jeffery

From the New Issue

The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten ancient creatures that make us human by Julia Kindt

Our Moon: A human history by Rebecca Boyle

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

The New World Disorder: How the West is destroying itself by Peter R. Neumann, translated by David Shaw

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