[Deb Westbury, Hobart, March 29th, 2007]:

It’s a joy to be in Hobart again – and in such distinguished company.

What is it about Tasmania and all its brilliant poets! – Many more per square mile than one would have thought possible. My own theory is that it must be something in the wine – but more research may yet be necessary – especially if Gina keeps handfeeding crocodiles.

I once heard two chefs discussing the way their passion for their art form grew out of their lives. One of them was Stephanie Alexander, the other an Indian chef whose name I forget – both told similar stories – the Indian began talking about growing up in her grandmother’s house – the colours and fragrances from the garden to the kitchen, the excitement of feasts, the intimacy of a child’s cupped hands receiving a small sweet treat – the way your teeth will strip the outer fibre from the cauliflower stem to savour the tender pulp with tongue and palate – because of her circumstances there was no need for this young girl to learn how to cook. However, years later, in far away New York, she decided she wanted to cook, and in her body memory was everything she needed in order to begin – as if the tastes, smells, textures, sights and sounds of her childhood were like so many paths slightly overgrown, waiting to be cleared – and followed to gastronomic bliss.

This delight and immersion in sensual detail, the sheer joie de vivre of Gina’s work is part of its distinctiveness and one of the pleasures one encounters in the reading of it.

And these qualities are all-embracing. Like all true poets, Gina loves every word for its own sake; for every sound and syllable, for every possible nuance of meaning – extending through joyful inventiveness, to the precision of line, stanza and form: e.g. ‘a glidder of yellow fat’ (p28), ‘my shank-spindling delicate as lark bone’ (p25). (From Handfeeding the Crocodile).

These were some of the qualities I admired when I first encountered Gina’s work in 1999, and it’s been a delight to re-read ‘The Ocean in the Kitchen’ for this occasion. ‘The Ocean in the Kitchen’ strikes me as a bold title – and one that does justice to the exceptional fecundity of the life within it.

‘come close now to the big-hipped mango tree which lumbers birth squatting
in every tropical street and garden
demand-feeding off city water restrictions
drop smashing fecund through greenhouse walls
fruit rot ferment lolling the lorikeets rainbow slow
greendark trees with magenta furbelows
make massive sky parlours where the chocolate skeins of satin velvet bats
cathedral their canto diablo
the mango trees bear buxom luscious cupid fruit
see the way they
toss the dense muscled flesh free sprawling into any lawns lap’

(from Away With Espalier)

Since this poem was written – Gina has happily embraced the delights of socks, open fires and overcoats – taking the small island into herself as she did the large island.

‘… Tasmania
the first roll if film i shot here
recorded the angles of your clouds
alarming in their cool beauty
subtle colours softening my tired eyes
bedding me aloft in this new space

and your generous rivers, Tasmania,
silking through your cities
burnished to picnic bright
brooding slate grey
slashed by wind to white
open to the sky’s complex embrace’

(from No More Garish Postcards)

Gina’s maturity and poetic range lead her readers well beyond the linguistic and geographic to the paradox inherently represented in the titles of both collections: The image of the kitchen, a place which is traditionally a site of nurturing, the heart and soul of the home being inundated, has tremendous power as it does, of an almost overwhelming fecundity. One doesn’t have to imagine the full tsunami to recognise in the cracks and strains the overheating and engorgement of the earth that gave birth to it.

The breast, site of nourishment and erotic pleasure, can also nurture the source of a woman’s destruction – from Handfeeding the Crocodile these lines from ‘Metastasis’ attest:
‘… my sister
is death clasped
the spider-cancer rocks
tending her like an egg sac
rocking her tender teeming mass

this spider poems her body
bares the knoll and beauty of her skull
sculpts her cheek bones
as sea winds erode stone
colours the creases of her flesh
until they are the gills of wild mushrooms’

In the midst of life we are in death.

Despite her long absence from her daughter’s lives, the mother is everywhere present – as one left for university she made her a patchwork rug – the daughter, becoming a mother, delights in her own pregnant body

‘… the syrup of late light gilds their curves like cupolas like domes
reminding us of the golden meniscus of brandy in brandy balloons
the women’s standing legs grow out of the tiled water like curving
wooden banisters on grand stairways …’
(these lines from ‘Bulbs’)

The orphaned daughter, with every year of her own daughter’s life, becomes more attuned to fragility, vulnerability and loss. Death lurks just beneath the milky surface of tranquillity – its nostrils are visible, though not its rumpled teeth. It has been handfed by what and who we love – and yet the poet can affirm ‘how much all that scar tissue binds it together’. With typical grace and wit Gina turns the paradox on its axis – In the midst of death we are in life.

Again, with impressive control of language and feeling, the poet tendrils beyond the exquisitely intimate metaphors of the microcosm, to imponderable mysteries of world politics and history – poems like “Sarajevo’s Soccer Fields” (p60).

The poems in this section bring to mind a review I read of paintings by John Curren, at the Whitney Museum in New York.

‘The undesirability of the works’ meaning forces a perusal of Currin’s virtuosity – his phenomenally subtle drawing and eloquent touch.’

The precedents and associations that he invokes spark warring reactions… but these add up to less than the work’s effect – something is left over that calls for one of the grand old terms of aesthetics – mystery, sublimity, transcendence. The content of Currin’s complaints and raptures is witty – but his art gives it the force of truth.

When a feeling reaches its highest pitch, says Dr Suzuki, the Zen master, we remain silent – even 17 syllables may be too many. We can only admire the virtuoso control of language and feeling which gives the truth of Gina’s work so much force.

To read Gina’s poetry is to be reminded that, although poetry may have moved from the centre of our cultural focus, there will always be some occasions when we call upon poetry to say, to do, what nothing else can. We call on poetry to mark our most significant rituals – to convey our love, appreciation, grief, hope and sympathy – to express what might otherwise be inexpressible.

Jacques Lusseyran, a blind man and a hero of the French Resistance writing about poetry in Buchenwald concentration camp, wrote – “I hear sceptics growling ‘He’s not going to tell us that they were fed by poetry’ – of course not, we fed on watery soup and bitter bread. Listening to a man recite poetry they had thrown themselves upon it as if upon food”.

We are gathered here to celebrate the value of poetry and to recognise the achievement of excellence in the writing of this collection. Some of us, of course, will always need a bit more convincing than others.

A few years ago, a newly appointed Minister for the Arts bounded up top Australia Council official at a Sydney function, prodded her in the ribs with his sushi roll, and demanded “Give me one good reason for supporting poets”!!

“Poetry is becoming more popular. It is earning more revenue.” said the Australia Council official, looking flustered.

“Bullshit!” said the Minister. “Give me a proper answer.”

“Poetry is fire and darkness, it is our essence, our soul.” said the official, startled by her own passion.

Friends – I give you Handfeeding the Crocodile.

Congratulations, Gina.