{"id":277,"date":"2014-03-05T23:12:54","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=277"},"modified":"2014-03-05T23:32:08","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:32:08","slug":"therapy-like-fish-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=277","title":{"rendered":"Therapy Like Fish: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

From David Lumsden,\u00a0Australian Book Review<\/em>,June 2009, p.59:<\/p>\n

Marcella Polain\u2019s latest book of poems continues her lyrical exploration of personal experience. Her earlier collections centred on immigrant life, shadowed by a violent history, in the adopted context of the Western Australian wheat belt. In the new poems, which occupy more than one third of the current volume, the emotional terrain has thickened, and the range of experience has expanded to include midlife concerns of failing health, ageing parents and death.<\/p>\n

Polain\u2019s work gives primacy to the image. Her effects are often built from the simplest materials: \u2018Pull in the sails of wind and language. \/ Fill our hands and mouths with cloth.\u2019 [\u2026] The sudden abstraction of that word \u2018language\u2019 is a deft touch, one used by Auden in his lines, \u2018O dear white children casual as birds, \/ Playing among the ruined languages\u2019 \u2013 that sudden abstraction getting the phrase airborne.<\/p>\n

Polain has an ear for the euphonies of language. In the poem \u2018A curled submariner\u2019, she threads her way through imagery, waking from heavy sleep, and \u2018the life before \/ this brisk one\u2019, to an in utero sort of existence \u2018where each heart is \/ the loudest thing\u2019. Polain\u2019s work [comprises a] fabric of meditative personal narratives, in which \u2013 through the sort of inwardness that Bly extolled \u2013 the exterior world is rendered new and strange.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Michelle Borzi,\u00a0Island<\/em>, 2010:<\/p>\n

Marcella Polain\u2019s\u00a0Therapy Like Fish: New and Selected Poems\u00a0<\/em>collects most of the poems (with some revisions) from\u00a0Dumbstruck<\/em>\u00a0(1996) andEach Clear Night\u00a0<\/em>(2000), and adds a new full-length book,\u00a0Therapy Like Fish<\/em>. Polain is from Western Australia: I know quite a number of readers in the eastern states who value her poetry highly \u2013 this book was shortlisted for the ACT poetry prize \u2013 but I have an idea that her work is not that widely known. This collection confirms her quality and metier.<\/p>\n

One of the new poems, \u2018Straight\u2019, has an epigraph from Emily Dickinson, whose ambivalence could apply to the entire collection: \u2018Tell all the truth but tell it slant\u2019. Polain\u2019s poem goes on to reveal a restless discontent with the craft: \u2018I am tired of poetry, \/ always reaching for metaphor \/ as if we diminish the truth by telling it straight\u2019. The feeling is understandable, but how can poetry tell all the truth? A poet\u2019s task, of course, is to invent and to shape; and invention necessarily plays into indirection. At the very least, Polain is suggesting her own refusal to hide unpleasant perceptions, or to turn away from human suffering. As the speaker says in \u2018waterwheel\u2019, from \u2018schoolyear 1967\u2019: \u2018my song is sharp as twig\u2019. Yet in Polain\u2019s poetry, direct as it may seem, the imagination is also working \u2018slant\u2019.In this book, the political world converges with the private, and the connection is anything but \u2018straight\u2019. A sequence of sixteen poems, \u2018Letters to Belgium\u2019, is addressed to a brother and sister, and many of the reflections are about shared memories. These poems also open to visions of public violence. In the eighth poem, shared privacies are shatteringly projected outward:<\/p>\n

wherever you are<\/p>\n

close your eyes<\/p>\n

see this album I will open for you:<\/p>\n

these men play with this somali boy<\/p>\n

stretch him over fire<\/p>\n

how broad their smiles<\/p>\n

how blue their berets<\/p>\n

The stillness in the narrative reverberates with fury. The turn to the torturers in the last two lines sharply focuses the question of whether poetic language falters when faced with incomprehensible human behaviour.<\/p>\n

In the penultimate poem of this sequence, the poet\u2019s gaze shifts between abrupt images of human violence towards animals, and then settles to gravity:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen rooms full of body parts:<\/p>\n

the heads of lions<\/p>\n

the glossy backs of fox<\/p>\n

the severed feet of elephants<\/p>\n

planted with umbrella<\/p>\n

imagine these feet speaking<\/p>\n

thumping on the earth<\/p>\n

lands shuddering with words<\/p>\n

go out into flanders<\/p>\n

plant your feet in that ground<\/p>\n

stand very still<\/p>\n

hear me.<\/p>\n

The implicit protest (the speaking out) would be \u2013 if it were a straight-telling \u2013 \u2018thumping on the earth\u2019 as hard as the guns of Flanders once did. But the cadences of poetry and those of politics will always be in an unbearable mutual tension. Even so, this poet continues to rely on the act of conversing. \u2018The world bawls \/ down my tunnel of a head\u2019, she writes in \u2018Do not assume my deafness to be absence\u2019, urging a response.<\/p>\n

\u2018Other country\u2019 is a key poem about otherness, bringing together a hope against violence with a hope for a shared language:<\/p>\n

I have been told<\/p>\n

silk will stop bullets and<\/p>\n

if we wind words from our mouths like thread<\/p>\n

pass messages from lip to lip<\/p>\n

we will learn the salt of distant throats.<\/p>\n

These lines pivot on \u2018if we\u2019. The graceful allusions to writing emphasise an intimacy between words and the body, and equally a sense of wonder at the strangeness of language itself.<\/p>\n

Familial connections are noticeable across all three books. \u2018In memory of my father\u2019 and \u2018the day before\u2019 from\u00a0Dumbstruck<\/em>\u00a0trace vivid memories of a father,whose early loss seems hardly to have eased with the passing of time. Grief and reminiscence emerge again in two sequences \u2013 \u2018the truth of lightning\u2019 from\u00a0Each Clear Night<\/em>\u00a0and \u2018My father as a girl\u2019 from\u00a0Therapy Like Fish<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 where loss and pain are turned to a nurturing of memory.<\/p>\n

At the heart of this book is a poet who constantly pushes the boundaries of a \u2018self\u2019. At times, this involves an unyielding toughness. In \u2018I am not a wife\u2019, a steely self repeats two lines, \u2018I am not a wife \/ I am a glacier, drifting\u2019, at the opening of all four stanzas, maintaining an unsettling ambivalence. A number of poems, especially among the recent, contend with the body\u2019s response to illness, in self and others. \u2018Marathon\u2019, \u2018The trouble with morphine\u2019, and \u2018To his dead mother\u2019 explore individual fortitude in the most difficult circumstances. But, paradoxically, such poems also catch a fierce sensuality and often feelings of alienation from the body and from loved ones are presented with a supple tenacity, such as in \u2018A small dark shape\u2019 and \u2018Speaking chrysanthemum\u2019. \u2018Zero point four\u2019 offers a candid synopsis, and this is about as \u2018straight\u2019 as Polain\u2019s poetry can be: \u2018So this is what life is: nausea, vertigo, migraine, cramps \/ Obedience. Endurance\u2019. Polain\u2019s New and Selected writes the self into the shapes of poetry, \u2018reaching for metaphor\u2019 and sometimes sounding straight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From David Lumsden,\u00a0Australian Book Review,June 2009, p.59: Marcella Polain\u2019s latest book of poems continues her lyrical exploration of personal experience. Her earlier collections centred on immigrant life, shadowed by a violent history, in the adopted context of the Western Australian wheat belt. In the new poems, which occupy more than one third of the current […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}