Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #11/thyla11f-palbook
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
Speak to the Moon by Patricia & Alexander Lee
(Rivendale Publications, Suburb?, NSW, Australia, 2003, ISBN: 0-9751408-0-9, $??.??)
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This is a spare but delightful little chapbook, a collaboration between a poet wife and her photographer husband from regional New South Wales. In the introduction Patricia Lee writes 'I believe poetry should communicate and I make no apologies for most of them being accessible'. 'Accessible', however, does not mean 'lacking in poetic ability or intensity', but the overall effect is of a gentle conversation with friends, ranging over discussions of world events, descriptions of people and places, and observing nature and art.. |
These poems do not scream 'look at me'; rather, they whisper 'look at the beauty and terror of the world', a natural world we are encouraged to see anew through the poet's eyes. Thus, in "A Walk through Winter" she writes:
'Everything that hungers is fed
and fed again
even the earth
with an old ewe
the cold night has kept for itself'.
In "Exposed to Everything" she pities the driver who:
' ... does not see
Ned Kelly cut into
a dead tree or
hear fragments
of pine cones
flutter down
from the beaks
of black cockatoos'.
And in "Custom-made Drawers" Lee ponders the man who made a roomful of drawers in his marble-lined penthouse on Sydney Harbour for his wife to store her possessions and asks,
'If you built a
room like this for
me
where would I
put your love
and the children's
joy when they
see a blue-tongue
lizard soaking up
the sun
at the back of
our house?'
Individual encounters with wildlife and nature's cycles are painted as the essence of life, far more important than amassing possessions or status, and it is this quiet conservationism that enchants and convinces the reader that these are, in fact, things of great value.
Other poems look at events such as the first "Bali bombings" ('Kuta becomes Flanders / in one night / ... / Some return heroes, / stunned like Anzacs.' - "Bali"), the "Iraq War" ('People without faces / soldier the armies / as they have always done' - "War as Entertainment"), or ponder what it must have been like to be a convict at in the early days of settlement ("Port Arthur"). The poem "Know When" is like a personal version of that old classic, "Desiderata", a 'what I have learned' for future generations, and contains such gems of advice as: 'Curl up in the leaves of a forest and / let your skin listen' and 'Seek truth not in flattery like the media's lens lickers / But in something slowly done and beautiful / Only to yourself'. These are the lessons of maturity, and the lines are both reverent and psalm-like.
The photographs of trees, leaves, creeks, the ocean, and sunsets are a quite beautiful complement to the poems. It's a shame the authors didn't print them in a larger format, as the small size they are reproduced in detracts quite a bit from their obvious quality.
There's a lovely moment of wry humour in the poem "Unseated" when, after describing the usual domestic chaos of her lounge room, she notes how a visitor 'in our perfect clean lounge room' lifts a couch cushion and sees 'the detritus captured there'. Lee describes the mortification in being discovered as a less than perfect housekeeper in the lines, 'I would rather / she had seen me naked'. This reader, for one, is glad Patricia Lee has chosen to eschew some of the more prosaic activities such as house cleaning in favour of producing this well-crafted poetry that speaks from, and to, the heart.
(Reviewed by Liz Hall-Downs, June 2006)
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Thylazine No.11 (June, 2006) | |
