Poetry

Poems speak to us through panic and fences, closed doors, forests, rivers and distanced days. Their atoms lodge somewhere within us and we carry them close, hoping that, in the inferno of loss and uncertainty, the intensity and ambiguity of poetry can salvage something.

With each collection of poems, Farrell has absorbed new tones and registers in ways subtle enough that it is easy to miss a decisive shift in the make-up of whimsy and seriousness in his work. And so we may suddenly find, reading Family Trees, that irony, kitsch, and burlesque have started to feel like elegy, philosophy, and flashes of utopian vision.

So much has been written on the Heide group of artists, Nolan, Tucker, Hester, and their patrons John and Sunday Reed that it is hard to imagine anything more could be added. π.ο.’s Heide however, though holding this group of communalism, camaraderie, and free love as its centre, radiates backwards to the history that precedes the Reeds’ utopian endeavour, and continues into its aftermath.

Can poetry make things happen? Can poetry bring about change? Does it hold that power? In the wake of the heaving 2020 chronicle of civil rights protests, a global pandemic and environmental disasters, what role can poetry play towards a recovering world?

Since the invasion the settler diaspora has demonstrated its fascination with and obsession for bigness – the vast, the immense, the wide. This preoccupation manifests itself on the physical landscape in all sorts of crass shapes and forms. There is the Big Banana, the Big Prawn, the Big Potato, the Big Pineapple, just to name a few. These scars of the physical environment cross the settler psyche as well through the repeated discourse of ‘nation’, the ‘national anthem’, ‘ordinary Australians’ and the ‘wide brown land’. Kwaymullina asks: ‘What is bigness other than a network of small places? What is this nation other than an interconnected network of Indigenous locales invaded and now occupied by different settler diasporas?’

Bodies get hungry, and I’m at the table, telling birth stories, and so is LK Holt, and so is Astrid Lorange. We don’t always agree, but at last we’re talking loud enough for everyone to hear, and join in the conversation. We’re talking about the birth, and everything that happened before and after. We’ve all brought something to the table. It’s revolutionary, sitting here. There’s a spare seat for everyone who’s laboured, and that’s all of us, one way or another.

Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness is a journey of sorts; neither linear nor heroic, but certainly profound. It is a struggle between dark and dark. How to interpret the suffering of another, of the Earth, and of oneself? Whereas other poets have found ways to bear witness to telluric presence through language, Boyle is working at the hinge where psychic and material reality meet. He bears witness to his own lyric continuity as a poet, but through his polyvocal skill he makes this an act of humming fluidity instead of solipsism and cacophony.

‘Blak anthologies unsettle Australian literary whiteness, which has often marginalised, and categorised First Nations work through stereotypes, assuming it falls into narratives of protest or disadvantage. Guwayu pushes against this, creating what Leane terms ‘a radical intervention in Aboriginal publishing for its breadth of representation, diversity of language, and drafting and editing protocols’. And while a groundswell of Blak anthologies are emerging, there’s a continued need to push Blak practice further, evident in the uneven way this work is often perceived by the industry.’

There are a lot of memorable episodes and images in Displaced. But memorability isn’t enough, in my mind, for a memoir to stand out. Something that can elevate a memoir beyond an account of lived experience (however skilfully told), and help it flourish as literature, is when it evokes and explores the mechanics of memory: when the story is built on how remembering through writing works. Kinsella is conscious of this possibility of memoir.

Guwayu – a Wiradjuri word – means still and yet and for all times. Guwayu means all times are inseparable; no time is ever over; and all times are unfinished. Guwayu – For All Times releases the arrested times of the Country’s First Peoples held captive in the colonial calendar, and frees kidnapped memories held hostage to false claims of settlement, nationhood, sovereignty and justice. In all First Nations languages, there is a word for all times. And now there is a time for these words. Guwayu breaks the silence Munro’s poem speaks of to unleash the beauty of First Nations words that have been and always will be here.