"Pretend there still are homecomings.
That we still have homes and can find them."
from "Homecomings"
Rather than seeing herself as an orphan of place, she is a traveller, a flight animal, moving away from the past. e.g. California Morning.
"... the sounds from things
that won't be pinned are quickly gone."
Lea draws heavily on nature for imagery and metaphor, but I'm not convinced that she is "as one" with nature as she'd like to be. These poems have an eerie quality of detachment. As if the poet had seen the poem waiting to be written and become the scribe. After all, the Great Poet has already written nature, as poets we only observe, examine and conclude, the subject matter is all around us. Bronwyn Lea has taken the time to look. Lea's flight animals are according to "Growing Up With Horses/ Six Poems" horses, butterflies and crows and these totems are invoked throughout the text. Amid the hoofbeats and the flutter of wings, there is the flight animal of Lea's racing imagination. There is also the jellyfish, the flotsam of her musings.
From "Contemplating Chaos At Burleigh Heads".
"My daughter skips
a jellyfish across the flats.
... the flowers in her hair
are not flowers. They are drowned butterflies
that have washed up with the jellyfish ...
... am i not an abstraction to myself?"
The exception to this being the poem "Herself", which is a perfect poem of its kind. Lea immediately engages the reader,
"As if for the first time
I saw her standing alone,
shaded beneath her flimsy brim",
Lea is accomplished in the creation of intriguing set ups. "Herself" is a poem for/about Lea's un-named daughter. It's a poem which particularly appeals to me because it celebrates the existence and nature of a child, and intersperses this with acute observation and consideration of Lea's own mortality. It does not confront the child or drown in its own sentimentality. A child could easily live with this poem as an adult. It's refreshing to read a poem from a mother to/about a daughter that isn't a latter-day version of the nude baby on a rug, whose cellulite bottom is there for everybody to ooh and aaah about dimples at.
Mortality is a theme which is explored in several poems in the text, "The Island Is Different Now", "Orthograde", "Handing Back Time". Lea sets past, present and future, pacing each other within the poems like a tightrope walker juggling, with no balance-bar and no net.
I don't know why she was "Found Wanting At Zen Mountain Monastery". It's a superb sequence of poems which explore energy. The final section reads:
"shichi
The one I love
is sitting by a wall.
The wall is white."
I would have lost that last full stop, gone through the wall and become one with the one. Everything might be white then, and white may not be a barrier.
Lea's poetry is variously tender, as in the poems for/about her daughter, pensive as in most of the poems in the third section of the book, and hilarious (those feet in Seven Feet And Where They're From).
The structure of some of these poems bothers me. Lea's peculiar use of couplets, e.g. "The Wooden Cat" seems to have no bearing at all on the subject matter. The poems are too peopled to warrant couplets. It's a pity because "The Wooden Cat" is such a strong poem. Rhythmically, triplets would enhance the characters within the poem and their relationships to each other.
She only just escapes banality in "Ode To A Gymnast", "The Hoop" coming to the rescue at just the right time.
"Woman Holding A Vase" intrigued me. I've written a poem myself where the I character is an artist's model. I chose Picasso in his Blue period, Lea prefers Leger. To me, this goes to show that there is such a thing as Zeitgeist. There can be one poem with many voices because that is the tenor of the time.
I also have to wonder why a woman who spells her own name in lower case should litter her poems with purposeless capitals. It's not such a great inconsistency that it affects the reading of the poems, but it does jar the eye.
There is an archetypal feel to these poems, as though Lea has constructed templates for future poems. They are SO perfect, SO refined. They do all the right things and then some. There is no photo of the poet, which is a disappointment. I warmed to this poet's voice, she engaged me so completely that for the first reading, I couldn't leave my bed for twenty four hours. The poetry was so awesome, that it took time to leave Lea's world and return to my own.
Bronwyn Lea is not a poet around for the short-term. She is here for the long haul, "Driving Into Distance", "Orthograde".
It's her journey, but it's the reader's journey, too. Lea is an excellent travelling companion.
(Reviewed by MML Bliss, September 2003)
