"I have felt
the wind lifting grass
at its roots,
heard you in silent things."(36)
“Book of Hours for Narrative Lovers” is the most challenging section. As with “Observations on Time, Cargo”, the pieces are serialised, taking up only a small proportion of each page. They are linked to one another thematically, but also stand alone, each work signalling a new start with the large formal typeface of the first letter. The white space provides enough of a pause to separate each piece. While there’s a prosaic feel to this work which is grouped into paragraphs rather than stanzas, the sentences are mostly left unfinished, working, like the breaks at the end of each page, to force the reader to participate in the creative process, filling in the gaps or adding in the connections. The grammatical syntax is also inflected, though not enough to lose the coherency. Instead, the conjunction of familiarity and distortion provides a kind of cognitive dissonance that, mingled with the lovely imagery, is simultaneously pleasing and intellectually tricky.
As the pieces are written in first person, there’s a confessional aspect to them that invites collusion. There is also an innate musicality to the work as it rings and jingles through a range of poetic tools, including repetition, as the poems refer back to one another. Each piece therefore becomes a kind of mini-performance, changing and taking original shape with each reading:
"We are on eternity’s cold side. A woman with red sleeves a man with a horse. Heads rush into light. I bend to drafts and read each tablet like a memory. Acoustic revelation."(41)
“Authentic Nature” comes back to a more familiar poetic - a series of discrete, relatively concrete poems that are instantly accessible. As the title suggests, these poems have a lyrical, pastoral quality, taking their cue from a natural, very Australian inspired world. Jacaranda, magpie, swamp hen, a honeyeater, and eucalyptus stumps move across paddocks, the Hawksbury river, familiar backyard gardens, and Sydney suburbs. The play of words here is more relaxed, but no less driven by the desire to create something entirely inventive. The title poem “Authentic Nature” sums up the overall theme of the entire book:
"Here I dig
for a different language,
a new balm for the bruise
of lost opportunities" (73)
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