Love of her father endures in the wonder of words

Sarah Holland-Batt’s collection of poems seek to capture her rage and sadness, and acceptance of her father’s death.

The Jaguar, by poet Sarah Holland-Batt, has been named The Australian’s Book of the Year for 2022. Picture: Jane Dempster

Sarah Holland-Batt remembers well what it was like to visit her father, Tony, as he cried in the nursing home. She remembers sitting beside him, tenderly asking what if anything she could do.

There was nothing she could do. He had been a brilliant man, and he was dying from an illness determined to take life from him, one capability at a time. He was disconsolate. Holland-Batt describes the experience of talking to him in her poem, The Gift:

“I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again.

“I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade.

“I hate myself for noticing his poetry – the triplet

that should not be beautiful to my ear

but is.”

The Gift is a beautiful work of poetry, one of many written by Holland-Batt during her father’s illness and after his death.

It forms part of Holland-Batt’s collection, The Jaguar, which The Australian has chosen as its Book of the Year for 2022.

The poems seek to capture Holland-Batt’s rage and sadness, and her acceptance of her father’s death.

It has been praised by critics across the globe; it is poetry as succour.

“My dad’s experiences with Parkinson’s were surreal, eccentric and tragic, but also full of tenderness, humour and affection: qualities which can get lost when we speak of old age and the end of life,” she said. “The Jaguar was my way of reckoning with the ways the disease changed my father, as well his love, humanity and brilliance, which endured through all the change.”

The Australian’s Book of the Year doesn’t come with any money or even a statue. It is a simple, even humble gesture of the deepest admiration and appreciation, by all who work on the books pages.

“It is lovely, unexpected news,” said Holland-Batt.

“A delight, at the end of a long year.”

 

Holland-Batt has won many national literary awards, among them the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

She has been a recipient of the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and, in 2021, she became the first poet appointed the Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney.

Holland-Batt has also, since the death of her father, become an advocate for the aged, testifying on his behalf at the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.

And why is the book called The Jaguar? In part, because one of the first things Holland-Batt’s father did after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s was buy the car he’d always wanted: a jewel-green, vintage Jaguar that “shone like an insect in the driveway” of the home he shared with his beloved wife.

Defiantly, he drove it even after “they” – the doctors – told him that he had lost too much of his eyesight and co-ordination to do so safely.

He wrecked that car by tinkering with it. They had to sell it for a near-scrap price in the end, so worn out was it, as he, too, was worn out.

Besides the Book of the Year – the inaugural prize went last year to Noel Pearson’s Mission, a collection of essays – The Australian’s stable of literary critics will on Saturday name their best books of 2022.

Critics including Peter Craven, Stephen Romei, Antonella Gambotto-Burke and Gideon Haigh have admired a fine compendium of books: sport, politics, fiction, nonfiction, Australian literary novels, international blockbusters, crime, espionage – even a children’s book gets a mention.

It’s been a bumper year for books, with more than 50 million sold in Australia, year to date.

That is a 10 per cent increase on even the healthy Covid years (healthy for book sales, that is.)

But it’s good books, only some of which are also madly popular, that the books pages will celebrate this weekend.

The Australian’s Books of the Year for 2022 appear in the Review liftout on Saturday.