Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #11/thyla11f-lmbook
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
What the Body Remembers by Lorraine McGuigan
(Five Islands Press, Wollongong, NSW, Australia, 2003, ISBN: 0-86418-748-3, $18.95)
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I enjoyed this poetry collection immensely, and read it in one sitting. Lorraine McGuigan possesses all the qualities I like and respect in a contemporary poet - honesty, clarity, emotional engagement, technical adeptness, and the maturity to work - without hysteria or bitterness - some of the more difficult experiences of her early life into a narrative that, while not shirking from the horror of child abuse and neglect, is awash with compassion and acceptance for a mother who was clearly suffering from a mental illness. The end result, for this reader, is a sense of wonder at how someone from such a background was able to overcome her sad childhood and go on to create successful, loving, spousal and family relationships. |
The poems about Louise, the poet's mother, are harrowing. Dotted throughout the collection, they collectively build a picture of a narcissistic, neglectful woman who blithely chases her own rainbows, in the process exposing her little daughter to sexual and physical abuse. Born early in the last century, Louise is shown as unable to sustain relationships, instead moving from one man to another, amassing children as she goes. We see her as a young girl in the 1920s, already hearing voices and feeling earthquakes, sleeping in a cemetery, being picked up by police, and, finally, being sent to a 'Home for Uncontrollable Girls'. But her good looks attract men and, as an adult, she seems unable to resist their attentions, even though by now she has a husband, Tom, stepfather to the young Lorraine. This relationship is portrayed as sometimes happy, at other times tainted by domestic violence, witnessed by the child.
Even in Louise's old age there is little wisdom or regret, but rather, a degeneration into eccentricity, loneliness and senility, and a continuing refusal to acknowledge her daughter ('I have no daughter you tell me ... I do not know you. / ... / In time you drew a circle containing / yourself, six fowls and an old dog. / You kept a diary each day blank / except for a date and a question mark' - Silence, p.11).
The child Lorraine longed to know her absent father ('I who have no father must fashion him / nightly, willing him into my life, my arms' - Dreaming the Father, p.9) but the mother lies about who he was, providing various explanations at different times (a 'law student', a rapist policeman, and - the 'gospel truth' - someone she had sex with on a grave at Box Hill cemetery, aged seventeen. The child's desire to know is thwarted by the mother's need for colourful - and frightening - lies. Further, the child must endure being strapped and sexually molested by her mother's new lover while Tom is away at war, as well as by the 'godly' church organist ostensibly giving her banjo lessons. Later, she is beaten by her mother for the sin of turning thirteen. In the final poem, Another Country, the poet marks the tenth anniversary of Louise's death, and describes the irreconcilable pain of having endured for a lifetime her mother's rejection ('Wish you were / here you'd say on family postcards, except / mine. I would practice the art of forgetting / but there are no lessons, no guides' - p.88). What has been done to the child can never be undone.
Within these bookending 'Louise' poems, however, are others describing moments of beauty, love, sadness, and personal fulfilment in the wider world, and these often vivid pieces provide a counterbalance to the collection. One can't help but feel that the poet's early life experiences has provided her with a clarity of vision, a compassion for other people and animals, and a love for what is beautiful in the natural world. Whether she is describing an octopus trying to free itself from a hook, an echidna digging into sand in an effort to hide itself from humans, young women enduring domestic violence or miscarriage, unexpected and tragic drownings on an Italian beach, or a wife lovingly tending to an ill husband, McGuigan's poems express a deep compassion and clear-eyed vision of the beauty and pain of life. This is a courageous and life-affirming first collection, well worth a second, or even third, reading. Highly recommended.
(Reviewed by Liz Hall-Downs, June 2006)
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Thylazine No.11 (June, 2006) | |
