CAROLYN FISHER
Review:
Louise Oxley's
'Buoyancy'
Five Islands Press :
2008
Buoyancy
is Louise Oxley’s second collection but first, full-length book of poetry. The
unpublished manuscript was short-listed for the ArtsATC Alec Bolton award under the title open
water.
Her first
collection, Compound Eye, was part of the Five Islands Press New Poet Series 2003
and was commended in the Anne Elder Award.
Louise Oxley
has been a contributor to the poetry scene in Australia for many years. She has served on
the boards of Arts Tasmania and the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre and is one of the
current editors for Blue Dog, one of the few literary magazines to take the bold
and admirable step of reading its poetry submissions ‘blind’. It’s not
surprising then that Oxley values the similar perimeters that competitions provide, she
has been the recipient of an impressive list of poetry awards over the last ten years
including the Banjo Paterson Award, the Henry Kendall Award (twice), the Tom Collins
Award, the Bruce Dawe Prize (twice), the Melbourne Poets Prize and the King Island
Literary Award.
The poems in
this collection are amazingly eclectic, linked by commonality of language that is both
intelligent and finely tuned. Subject matter ranges from personal reflections of childhood
and love, to Norwegian expressionists, Paleolithic cave artists and the study of plankton.
The 52 poems are divided into five, loosely thematic, appropriately titled sections:
Surfacing, Line of Sight, Division, Extraction and Buoyancy, establishing a
consideration for the reader that prevails as sense of inclusion, setting the tone for
this collection. It’s difficult to pin down how the book achieves such an air, but I
believe it’s simply the combination of technical competency and judicious handling of
theme that invites a level of engagement, rendering the work personally relevant. The
narrative of subject and experience is delivered in a style that is devoid of
self-importance, with the subtle but powerful result of encouraging empathic reading.
The natural
world is a major source of Oxley’s inspiration, explored with tenderness that never
lapses into sentimentality. The opening poem Surfacing p13, titled with reference
to watching whales off the Head of Bight in South Australia starts
- Here’s where the Nullabor
stops.
- As if it suddenly forgot itself,
the land
- falls into the sea and I am
groundless.
- You are too, but you belong
there;
- you come out of the blue like a
dreamer from sleep,
- breaking from its lilt and
swing, lift and sink…...
and a few lines
on,
-
………..Bejewelled
- in barnacles, breaching worlds,
- you are all collision, elision,
- a balancing act on a fluke, a
moment of trance,
- an evolutionary quirk.
These first
lines carry within them a taste of what is to follow: delightful double-dipping use of
vernacular, alliteration mingled with onomatopaeic effect and a lyrical confidence that
infuses the work, the poem continues with one of the collection’s trademarks; the
canny hyphen
- Wing-tipped, lick-slippery,
slick-smooth
- you take each other face to
face.
and ends with the
promise of another, honesty:
- ……..and I wish I, like
you,
- were a thing of the past.
Combined with
the precision of meter and rhyme used in some of the more traditional forms of verse these
qualities result in a poetic integrity that leaves no doubt as to the collection’s
importance.
Buoyancy
boasts a swag of formal verse, which is pulled off with skill: two sonnets, two
villanelles, a pantoum about a father near death, Blood Moon p65 that also displays
proficient use of sustained metaphor with stirring effect, and a rare and wonderful beast;
a sestina that makes sense, and in so doing becomes a moving love poem seemingly unaware
of the rigidity of its repetitive confines. Blaendigeddi won the Melbourne Poets
Union Prize and is the second poem in the suite Border Country p82.
The collection
contains a wealth of information that has been painstakingly researched with intriguing
results. The Radiolarian Atlas p42 is a poem inspired by a book written in 1862 of
the same title containing illustrations of the minute protozoa that make up plankton. An
image of the detail of one of these minute organisms by Hobart painter Sue Anderson is an
appropriate front cover for a book in which so many of the poems focus the microscope as a
tool for amplifying issues relevant to the full mystery of life. The Radiolarian Atlas
typically employs descriptive detail, in this case of an unlikely and original subject,
plankton, not only as a celebration of nature but as a means to explore experience.
It’s always exciting to discover new words and this poem also introduced me to one of
the most thrilling, guddle; to grope with the hands for fish, a marvelous word that says
it all, as does Oxley’s creative use of the hyphen, most commonly as a lyrical aid
simultaneously either reinforcing image or condensing information. My favourites have to
be
- Fred’s pony, winter-rumped
with a coat the depth of a hand,….
- … that steady sharp-eared
leaning look of hungry ponies.
-
from Horsetails p26
- …..that bold belligerent
- chip-stealing
beauty……..(of gull’s eyes)
from Silver Gulls p27,
the marvelous swag-bellied
mares of The Joy of the Painter of Lascaux p35 and the opening lines of Beelines
p75
- So this is the noise earth
makes, turning again;
- this fine-tuned,
coming-in-to-land, abdomen-down
- heading into blossom, threads of
drowsy sound
- shuttling towards and away in
almost-unison,
- each steady furred excursion
into talc-scented pollen
- ending in intimate probe and
suck
The poem
continues as a steady fourteen line buzz. Similarly Walking to Witch’s Leap
p18 takes the forty-four line journey as a meditative descent, interrupted only by commas
and a couple of semi-colons, combined with that clever hyphen to provide an energy that
positively bowls the poem along, ending with a break in the reverie, not uncommon in
Oxley’s work, and turn of phrase that in this case asks a question of etymology
- I might remember mist sinking
- into the valley, and I might ask
myself
- how we’ve ended up saying
end up.
Such sudden,
seemingly casual reflection or questions encourage implicit involvement and Oxley uses the
device with remarkable effect on several occasions. Silver Gulls p27 pauses in its
contemplation of gulls on a winter’s evening with an abrupt change of mood,
sanctioned by the immediate return to it, and the one liner
How far would
you want to go, if flight were effortless?
In Things to
tell you: day 193 p80, a love poem that was runner up in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize
in 2007 written with a stream-of-consciousness, epistolary feel, on observation of a pair
of oyster-catchers the poet stops us, in her tracks
- The cove was mirror still.
- A pair of oyster-catchers flew
in, red-beaked, red-legged.
- They probed and prodded the
shallows.
- It’s funny they’re
called oyster-catchers -
- oysters don’t take much
catching.
- Those birds don’t wade,
either, come to think of it,
- not like we do, dragging our
shins through the water;
- they step in and out of it, high
and ladylike.
Oxley
invariably enlists the architecture of a poem to echo its theme. Ordinarily as a non-cat
lover I might feel impartial about a poem that pays tribute to a cat’s coat, (The
Coat p25), but when the study begins
- This is strict counterpoint:
stave and fiddle-back,
- silks waved or watered, a
fingerprint,
- tidemark and sea-wrack, topaz
and jasper,
- licorice and toffee,
wheatstubble over loam
I find myself
riveted by the 26 lines of words as dense and tightly woven as the coat itself. Wandering
off p58, a pictorial poem that won the 2008 King Island Literary Prize, comprises nine
four lined stanzas that gently wander across the page, a presentation that transforms
observation into open-ended suggestion. Baby, cradle and all p55, expressing the
fears of a mother as she watches her child play in a tree, evokes the format of the
well-known children’s picture book Peepo by Allan and Janet Ahlberg and takes
its title from a line in the nursery rhyme Rock-a-Bye Baby with poignant effect.
But it’s
the deft-dealing with simile and metaphor and the powerful imagery that, for me, makes
this collection special. One Tuesday p50 charts the destruction by fire of a family
home and the resultant despair of its owner, it is impossible not to be moved
- In the close-aired living room,
smeared
- with the sour fear of horses, he
faced us empty-throated,
- his eyes as dull as pumice
stone.
- Helpless witnesses, his
broken-spirited hands
- opened and closed on the things
he could not save.
And later in the
poem
- …………Under
the old wattle that once
- seemed to part like lazy thighs,
- the seat was burned off the
swing.
- Here, skirts fluttering, we had
swooped and sung,
- making of ourselves a pendulum
for losing time.
When presented
with a fine collection of poetry I find myself overwhelmed by a chocolate-box temptation
to pick a favourite. I can’t resist and mine has to be The integrated shark
p20, a taut, lithe poem that attracts attention from the first, flowing on to mesmerise
with its abrupt turns in train of thought, and ultimately hunt itself down.
I find myself
gushing: this is a poet in whose hands you feel secure, which is not to imply that Oxley
is afraid to chart the emotive, dangerous waters of personal loss and reflection but that
she navigates them with the developed repertoire of a skilled poet, and you are saved from
any disappointment. The book is appropriately titled, the well-developed sense of lyricism
alone is enough to hearten and inspire.
- CAROLYN FISHER moved from the
United Kingdom to a quiet corner on the northwest coast of Tasmania some years ago. Tim
Thorne launched her first collection, The Unsuspecting Sky (PressPress) in October
2008.