An example, quoted in it's entirety, is B C (Before Computer), which evokes a pen and pencil time those of us over 35 can sometimes feel nostalgia for:
'My windows have web sites
with real, not virtual, spiders.
They will inject more than ink
into my scream if I try to delete
with bare fingers.
My lap top is a cat, her paws
the only pads a mouse encounters
in this house.'
In "The Gods", Aquilina imagines Gods 'shut ... in their celestial lounge-rooms', lonely, with the sound turned down on enormous screens, 'staring at the soapies which they've produced'. Beside the humour sits a wry acceptance of 'this tough adulthood' which requires 'miracles' to get us through ("I Want MORE"). In "Nipples" she lists all the things nipples are not (such as 'not on-off buttons'), coupled with what they are ('radio dials waiting to be tuned in'), and ends the list with this astonishing image: 'Nipples are not shy / they are brave sherpas leading women on journeys'!
"The Head Mistress's Speech" amusingly evokes the world of private schoolgirls in the 1970s, being warned before the school dance what not to wear, and how not to behave, like a sepia photo of a more innocent and stitched-up time. Other poems are more serious: the marriage that 'survive[s] on sedatives' in "Tranquil Sea", and 'kiss[ing] more people than I have all year' in "NYE Generic" while 'a few merry lads help the band / sing Khe Sanh', an accurate portrait of Australian suburbia, clear and unsentimental.
"Stations" melds in four dense prose stanzas the experiences of love, sex, birth and ageing with the movement of trains in a clever juxtaposition, at the end circling back to childhood, 'back to the first small siding where my mother waits with my case', and with hopes 'that [after death] a little of my cargo will remain'. Part 3, "Seeds", contains fruit and vegetable poems, inspired by a period working at Adelaide's Central Markets.
Ginger 'has been seen / dancing with Fred Astaire'; Figs, whose 'fruits are pregnant questions ... have even been known to strangle their closest friends'; Grapefruit will 'take out its frustration / at being green with envy / at its enemy: the sugary, / ostentatious orange'. The final poem in this section, "Outside the Market, 7 am", brings us back to harsh reality, with a portrait of a drunk wrapped in rags, asleep on the street: 'Don't worry luv / their ears go blue / when they're dead'.
The final section, "Creature Acts", rises to a peak in its descriptions of an old, wild, balding cockatoo awaiting its death by predator, children at Sunday lunch fearing the father's belt hung over a chair awaiting misdemeanours, and sensual descriptions of the old clocks and keys that personify a father who, in suicide, revealed that 'the key to happiness ... was not in his collection'. "The Mourning" is a powerful, affecting poem describing an orally passed-down story of Aboriginal massacre.
Jude Aquilina, self-described 'poet of moments' has produced here a collection that celebrates life, explores death with acceptance, and finds joy in the vitality of the everyday. This is a wonderful, shimmering body of work, with poems that unfold further on subsequent readings, an asset to any serious Australian poetry collection.
(Reviewed by Liz Hall-Downs, June 2006)
