Poetry from Ivy Ireland, Maria Zajkowski; verse novel by Jeri Kroll

‘Strange’ is the word that leaps to mind when assessing some new poetry anthologies.

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In a back-cover blurb, poet Brook Emery praises Ivy Ireland’s Porch Light (Puncher and Wattman, 72pp, $25) as: “Never obvious or contained ... [it] is its own multi-verse of ideas, speculations and puzzlements.” This is certainly a fair, if not complete, description, especially of the book’s first section, Space Opera, where Ireland, in a related series of 24 poems, attempts to deal with nothing less than the place of human consciousness in the universe (or, rather, universes).

Her question, “How can I write / a lyric poem about the micro-needle in the gargantuan multiverse” is the central one. It’s a quixotic task (we are certainly a small needle in a large haystack) but Ireland’s efforts to address the problem are cumulatively entertaining, albeit at times a little draining to read. The reach of her rhetoric may well work better in live performance than on the page.

Among the more striking poems in Space Opera are earth-bound ones such as Strangler Fig and Mangrove Sutra. While quite a few of the poems here touch on the indifference, even mercilessness, of the universe, Strangler Fig brings it all up close.

“It is a necessary thing,” writes Ireland, “this taking over ... / this clawing towards being.” As she puts it later in the poem: “First symbiosis, then slavery, the necessary / cyclical sacrifice.”

The poet then proceeds to personalise the plant further: “Imagine digging into my veins, strangler fig, / find a port for your primitive circulatory system, / adjusting your god-veins to the munificence of my viscera.”

This last image is typical of Ireland’s humorous and hyperbolic way with imagery. Like John Donne, she is a poet who enjoys executing great bounds between the separate halves of a metaphor. As with any form of athletics, however, this kind of thing can prove exhausting.

Perhaps a little more mainstream are the poems in the last third of the book, in the section called Follies. These are generally one-off pieces, and among the most memorable (and the most orthodox) is the prose poem 54 Working Murderers. It begins with a remarkable quotation from the Newcastle Bulletin in 1836 describing a “high tea” given for the “society ladies” of that city in view of “54 working murderers” working on Nobby’s Breakwater. The epigraph finishes with a more-than-poetic flourish: “the sponge cake sweats in the afternoon heat”.

The poem, in turn, displays Ireland’s characteristic, quasi-scientific humour, as in: “Your tastebuds expound the new rancid cream to your synapses, which pass the dire message like Chinese Whispers through neurotransmitters to your cerebral cortex but by then it is too late, Mrs Smith is asking what you think of her recipe.”

Porch Light is a distinctive and strange collection that falls short of being absolutely wonderful. Ireland’s reach is cosmic but the linguistic textures can at times be less than digestible. Her lines (and sentences) tend to be unapologetically long and the rhythms at times are difficult for the reader to hear (though there are some traditional iambics scattered throughout, as in: “we know this bench will not refuse to sing its sordid secrets “).

Maria Zajkowski’s The Ascendant (Puncher and Wattman, 59pp, $25) is also an unusual book, but in a different way. The publishers assure us Zajkowski “has published her work in local and international journals” but no specific publications are named, although it is pointed out that poems from The Ascendant, as suites, won the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize in 2011 and 2012. Another accomplishment, unmentioned by the publishers, is that some of the poems from this book have been performed and recorded by the Grammy Award-winning choral group Roomful of Teeth. An effectively eerie sample is available on the internet.

Cold on the page, however, the poems are likely to have a mixed effect. The influence of 20th-century central European poets such as Zbigniew Herbert and Vasko Popa is strong, but the emotions evoked are generally less intense — or perhaps more oblique and complex. Most of the poems are minimal in form and rarely run for more than a page. Some are only a few lines. The syntax is often deceptively straightforward but the effect can frequently be gnomic and/or sibylline. We are left to make of things what we can — not always a bad thing in poetry.

Sometimes, as in The White Butterfly, this combination of techniques works very well. Its 10 short lines are brief enough to quote in full as a sample of Zajkowski at her best: “The white butterfly is / the brown butterfly / who is the moth, / the moth is the tree / the tree is its mother / the mother is the sun / and the sun is the white / butterfly falling into every / crack, looking for a place / to hide her child.” These radical changes of perspective certainly have a cumulative point to make and develop to a poignant climax.

At other times, however, as in the final poem, The loophole, or, how the sky ignores us, the sibyl can speak so mysteriously that the average reader will be inclined to despair and not give the poem the multiple readings it demands. Zajkowski’s use of the pronouns “we” and “you”, here and elsewhere, can often seem deliberately imprecise. Those who can crack the last six lines of this poem will probably find The Ascendant enjoyably elusive: “... you become the animal / we thought thought // you sang in silence and grew so tall / your first light above the horizon // the last known unknown / we can be certain of”.

If Ireland’s and Zakjowski’s books are strange, then Jeri Kroll’s Vanishing Point (Puncher and Wattman, 283pp, $24.95) is markedly less so. It’s a verse novel with a linear story and a no-nonsense approach to language. Diana Warren, its protagonist, is an Adelaide-based 19-year-old suffering from anorexia nervosa. She has a problematic but well-loved brother with Down syndrome, Philip, and parents whose marriage is less than satisfactory.

The narrative is in three parts: the lead-up to Diana’s collapse, her stint in hospital and her subsequent recovery when a new boyfriend, Conor, and a love of horses extricate her from the downwards spiral of the first two parts. What adds to the complexity of this structure is that almost all the central characters serve as narrators. As if in line with this, Kroll uses a variety of poetic forms throughout — from free verse and prose poems, through to blank verse, rhymed quatrains and even a sonnet at one point.

These are nearly always expertly handled and their variety makes an important contribution to the book’s momentum. Only rarely is there a lapse — such as in the (seemingly inadvertent) awkward contrast between the iambic pentameter “She kisses us and shuffles up the stairs” and the line that follows it: “I wait half an hour and then follow” (from Pale Faces).

It’s interesting (and more than a little disappointing) that the term “verse novel” appears nowhere in the title (or in associated publicity), for that is assuredly what the book is. On the front cover, the publishers say it belongs to their fiction list and nowhere are the dreaded words “poetry” or “verse” to be found.

Across more than 30 years, Kroll has produced six substantial collections of poetry and one of short stories. Certainly, Vanishing Point provides a satisfyingly complex and well-organised narrative, together with memorable characters, but it is no less poetry than the other two collections discussed above.

Geoff Page edited Best Australian Poems 2014.