Award-winning poet Sarah Holland-Batt on fixing the system that failed her dad

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Sarah Holland-Batt. The 40-year-old poet, critic and editor is the author of a collection of essays, Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry, and three books of poetry. Her latest, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize and Queensland Premier’s Award.

Sarah Holland-Batt: “Poetry sits on the margins of literature and of any economic use. From there you can say and see things differently.”Credit: Paul Harris

DEATH

You were 18 when your dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. What was it like, hearing that diagnosis for the first time? It was devastating. I understood that a certain part of our life was over. Naively, I thought he was going to die immediately. I had no concept of how long it would take: 20 years in the end.

Did The Jaguar, in which you write about his life and death, change your perception of what had happened? ”Therapeutic” isn’t the right language for how I see writing poetry, but poetry does push you to find a different way of thinking about [an experience]. It’s a process of translating it into something else, rather than recording it. By sculpting it into something with language, you transform it.

Has all this fast-tracked how you reflect on the inevitability of your own death? Totally. You spend your 20s worrying that your dad’s going to die, so I’ve thought about death and metabolised and accepted the fact that I will die. You live a fuller life when you confront that stuff early. Most people put it off, and insist it won’t happen to them. There are all these fantasies that people recite – “I’m going to kill myself before I go into a nursing home”; “I’m going to move into a house full of friends” – none of which are connected to the reality of how the system works, how affordable that would be, or questions of access. So I feel grateful. It’s a big lesson that my dad handed to me, not that he would have wanted to have taught me it.

What’s a good poem for a funeral? There’s a beautiful poem called Pavana Dolorosa by the British poet Geoffrey Hill as he looks back at the death of a loved one. It has a gorgeous last line: “I stay amid the things that will not stay.” There is a beautiful sense of accepting that things are passing, but that is part of life.

RELIGION

Were you raised with religion? My dad had wretched experiences with the Anglican church as a child and was a raging atheist. Weirdly, he sent me to an Anglican primary school, but primed me with all these atheist talking points for religious-ed classes, and I spent my childhood being sent out of those classes. One of my earliest memories is of Mormons doorknocking on the weekend. Dad would answer the door and say, “Are you peddling religion?” as his hello. Then he’d say, “Tell me your home address and I’ll come round to yours on a Saturday.”

Amazing. Where does that leave you now? I believe that this is the one life we have. The issue I have with some organised religions is the idea of human exceptionalism. A lot of poor behaviour comes out of this sense that we are here for a special purpose: we’re above the environment, we’re above other animals. If I have any belief, it’s that we are very firmly creatures of this Earth; that this is the one life we have. I think we have bodily death, that it’s the same as spiritual death, and that’s the end of things. Maybe it’s bleak, but maybe it’s also about accepting and valuing what life is. It’s really precious. I don’t think that we get another go-round. Make the most of it while you’re here.

What are your commandments for writing poetry? Commandment 1: read. You cannot make any art without knowing what’s come before. Commandment 2: pay attention. Good poetry comes out of close attention to yourself, to your inner landscape, to the exterior world, to emotions. Pay attention to the connections between things, because that’s where metaphor comes from, that’s where symbolism comes from. These are the tools poets use.

POLITICS

You’re a poet, but you’re also a strong advocate for changing standards in aged care. It’s one thing to have witnessed what your father endured, it’s another to advocate for change. What compels you to do so? I was astonished that someone like me, who’s educated, able to navigate systems and, therefore, able to get an appropriate outcome, couldn’t in Dad’s case. The hardest thing was weighing up whether to go public through the aged care royal commission. I was worried about Dad’s privacy, but I recognised that I had the capacity to do it.

You spoke at that royal commission in 2019 and its final report was handed down in 2021. Has the progress so far been rewarding or frustrating? There’s been a change of government, which is positive. The former federal government did nothing and, in fact, made things worse. But perhaps what people don’t appreciate is the scale of progress required to create an aged care system you and I would be willing to go into. Even if we achieved all of the recommended reforms of the royal commission, they don’t go far enough in creating a system in which you or I would say, “Yes, I feel totally confident, happy and comfortable going into that.” That’s the bar we need to be striving for here.

To what extent is poetry a political act? Poetry, inherently, is kind of oppositional in that it sits on the margins of literature. It sits entirely on the margins of any economic use. It’s marginal in so many ways. From those margins, you can often see and say things differently than you do in the mainstream. The way politics operates, where everything is in sound bites, dumbed down to the simplest level so that an idea can be communicated, poetry is the radical opposite of that. That’s what excites me about the form.

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