The territory is as 'treacherous' as a mountain range in Afghanistan. There are caves full of meaning which are constantly under bombardment from high flying aircraft. The ensigns are sometimes difficult to see. But we know why they're there. And we know what they bring with them. Death. It is difficult to touch and be touched by this subject. Often it is too close to home, too close to the heart to bear closer inspection.
One of the first things I do when I read someone's poetry is listen for the poet's story, for some key that will set me free to explore the perimeter, to disarm the creative workshop Claymores and to avoid the pleasure pits with their parochial punji sticks. And Bateson provides 'Scenes From A Marriage' - written with the voices of him and her, promising to bring each other 'home'; back to the battlefield which is the home. And that's my key - I ask, does this poetry lead its reader home or into a war zone?
The first section introduces several poems concerning the birth of her son, and relationship difficulties (not always from her own perspective or voice). Life really is a struggle for survival when you're raising children and, from the outset, the idea of home is in turmoil. Only the idea of having a child offers the prospect of stability. But even this is unassured. There are no guarantees, no refunds if everything goes horribly wrong.
The poetry moves from place to place. As unsettled as a lifestyle punctuated by pain and violence, suffering and silence (Bateson refuses to be silenced). Bateson moves from relationship difficulties with boyfriends and girlfriends, to raising children as a single parent. The ongoing care that children constantly require and sometimes don't is never written about strongly enough.
Bateson's view of children as 'thieves' in the opening poem, troubled me. But I'm glad I pushed myself through this section. In the next, Bateson attempts to recall the hospitalisation of her son for an unspecified heart problem, and describes with some degree of accuracy the inadequacy experienced by parents and staff alike in such settings as 'Ward Seven West'. This poem is referred to in the blurb as the centrepiece of the collection, containing an award winning poem called 'This Is The Poem', but I found Bateson's centre elsewhere.
The poems in 'Ward Seven West' most people will relate with but the staff poems are often distracting, allowing Bateson to distance herself from her own story, her child's story. The hospital becomes someone else's vision of home. But Bateson powerfully justifies her interest in the stories of staff and of other parents in 'Angela':
I'm a professional. I can work anywhere but this is home.
It's not that people behave better.
They fight more. Families break up.
Accusations are shouted. A man goes grey overnight.
The women stoop. People go to the edge, look over.
You can learn here,
something about dying
more about living.
The child's story does not return. A motif perhaps for the kind of anticipation Bateson's writing evokes - the promise of return, the repetition of a life that is sometimes beyond one's own control. But, just to return to Bateson's 'This Is The Poem', I'd like to say that her poetry, her art, is very much a central concern of her life, and it often dominates the poetry as much as it does the life. For instance, in this poem there is a degree of sensitivity which poems about poems rarely express - I really can imagine Bateson attempting to write a poem whilst her son is dying. Disconcertingly, it's an accomplished piece of writing.
The five piece 'In The Tattooist's Parlour' is interesting, revealing as it does Bateson's alter-lifestyle, and the origin of her resistance to authority and family. And it makes a wonderful statement about the centrality of art in her life:
Here's my exhibition, my hanging -
an installation that walks, talks, makes love and cups of tea.
This poem is followed by 'Visiting the Bookshop (For Shelton Lea)'. I have stayed on several occasions with Shelton and, from experience I can confirm that, Bateson's observations are exact and uncompromising:
And there's still that rush, potent as adulterous love
- the backroom with its stash of signed editions
and bottles of cabernet under the sink
and me tongue-tied examining a postcard
from Ferlinghetti while Shelton
rolls a j and my son reads
the picture book of 1990
upside-down.
In 'Letter To A Dead Friend', one of several poems written on the subject of death, Bateson celebrates a life:
There should be no sorrow in this.
There is a lot more poetry in this collection, all to be understood in the reading of a life. Bateson returns to high and low points in her life and, sometimes such determinations are beyond certainty - patches of dichotimised grey abound. 'Wild Nights at the Alliance Française' contains Bateson's early interest in Australian-based exotica. This poem combined with 'Brisbane, 1994' and 'For Anna' constitute an entirely new voice within the poetry:
I report from this battlefield
the only one for which I am entirely qualified.
And then there's 'Angel of Mercy' - a stand out poem - which reminds me of Christiane in Michel Houellebecq's Atomised. Suddenly, I'm looking at Catherine Bateson with fresh eyes and understand how strongly she is clinging to a notion of hope and peace in a world gone middle-class mad. 'The Bones and the Song' echo the sentiments of Christiane/Catherine and pin-point a remarkable shift in Bateson's vision.
The lengthy sequence 'After Five Years, My Own Reflection' is one of the best revisionist poems ever written in this country. Bateson's language picks up its pace and the development of metaphor, showing like red knees through threadbare jeans elsewhere, takes on a life of its own, and several lines need repeating:
the seas up there practically swirled in his fingerprints
The story of Barbara Crawford's return to Sydney after five years spent living with the Kaurareg in the Cape York area following the loss of her husband and three crewmen during a salvage operation that went wrong in 1844 - reflects the transformation of a romantic sixteen year old girl into someone very different by the time she is twenty one. The impact of her arrival in Sydney (1849) takes on several manifestations in terms of the challenge to colonial attitudes and morality:
I tell them the bones of the thing.
Leave out his plum dark flesh.
Barbara Crawford's inability to re-integrate into Sydney life is beautifully, and tragically summarised:
Last night I dreamed of turtle meat
when I woke I could smell cabbage cooking.
Today I will hock my Sunday clothes for a bottle of gin.
The collection ends with a short sequence entitled 'The Reluctant Pilgrim'. Within this poem there are suggestions that the poet desires to be discovered. The person who evades capture is forced into the light of the reader's eyes:
We complicate our journeys.
Here is my road home -
I give myself up.
The poem could easily have stopped at this point - the religious rhetoric that followed was not welcome.
The wild and taciturn Bateson writes with a loud but graceful voice. There is force and angelic gravity in her tone. And sometimes, a strange tenderness. The poems are pressed with the urgency of a life too often lived to the full, but, a life most difficult to capture in poetry.
(Reviewed by Richard Hillman, September 2004)
