Within the whole collection there is lots to suggest that Rebecca Edwards has explored through various areas of expression and communication, from Ginsberg to some of the concrete poets, but with a consistent sense of her own voice and her own country.
This is a harrowing and savage landscape of poetry where the inner hurts of physical things find their image in the wild world of the body and the cruel contours of nature. Rebecca Edwards writes about such things as birth and birthing with a searing lyricism:
Her poem 'The Mothers' begins with a brief incantation. "The Mothers/ are breathing into my left ear./ Their hands brush my shoulder./ I can smell their hardened palms/ they are onion, soap and polish." (How sharply accurate is the word 'onion' in that recall!). The poem then launches out into a long rhapsodic catalogue that draws in all ages even into prehistory. It ends:
"In her womb, the cell-mother, dreaming of mud.
A pearl passed from daughter to daughter
Riding in the one who rides my shoulder
I feel her long loving tongue on my cheek,
Smell her musk between my legs."
For me, some of the most memorable poems were those which capture the little everyday habits of connectedness in a family. These are both celebrative and sharp:
From 'Tony Washes Beryl's Hair'
"Towards the end
Her skin hung from bone in crumpled skeins
And one day, drawing her brush down
You brought it back up again, clogged
With fistfuls of dusty, cracking hairs.
Your hands strike water from your face
At this memory, familiar now to me
As the battered basin in which we rinse
Then wash, morning's bowls and cups."
The final poem, 'Night is the Smell of Burning' is the longest. It is in 13 sections and won the inaugural Arts Queensland Poetry Award in 1999. Deservedly so. In long, ambling lines that are held together by a sort of inner tautness, the poet takes all the risks in the world, from snips of conversation to tight lyricism and a constant swirl of tenses, voices, persons though the personal voice of the poet is what drives it, and what makes it driven.
Rebecca Edwards is a powerful poet, perhaps an earth-mother poet, but certainly a stylist who is not afraid to take risks, or to face the gustiness of living. But she is also a poet of decisive affirmations:
Epigraph
"I am a woman of heavy thighs
With meat of mountains on my hips.
A woman with buttocks of marble
With a belly of granite
With ankles of stainless steel precision machinery.
A woman with breasts of pigskin
With breasts of torn silk
With breasts of stretched mulberry paper.
I am a woman with shoulders designed and constructed by civil engineers
With shoulders like a steel bridge."
The poem moves with Whitmanesque energy and aplomb through all parts of the body, grabbing in the world in its passage. It ends:
"Thighs that birth a blue tree and a red swamp, lips that suck ashes
From the sky.
Milk and bone,
Saltpan and mountain,
Rainforest, sclerophyll, and redbrick imaginings."
This is a striking new voice in Australian poetry, but for me perhaps the major sequence was called, significantly, 'Birth of the Minotaur in a Public Ward: section iv (Afterbirth)'. It begins:
"That's not the end of it
That scream that rends the fibres of the world
That's the birthing of the head.
Get your breath.
Clench those too-big muscles,
Squeeze out shoulders, hips, and legs.
Your body, a huge bloodied beast,
Settles back inside you
As you touch the wrinkled creature
Relieved your mother thinks it's beautiful.
Its father cuts the cord.
And one more ripcurl pain crashes over you,
Dumps you gasping on the sheets.
The afterbirth is born."
Once read, these poems continues to slash at all your vulnerable parts. A book to rush out and buy extra copies for all your
friends.
(Reviewed by Thomas Shapcott, March 2004)
