REVIEW: Handfeeding the Crocodile, Gina Mercer
Pardalote Press, 2007
The back cover
of Gina Mercer’s third collection of poetry, Handfeeding the Crocodile, promises
the reader ‘poetry moving at a high level of grace and definition’ (Peter
Bishop), poetry which ‘shows Mercer at her muscular best.’ In fact, many of
these poems have the muscular grace and fine-honed perceptions of haiku. The title poem is
a case in point, its sense of urgency and danger created by means of short, hard-hitting
lines and a central evocative conceit:
- nostrils ripple open
-
the milky surface
-
just
-
- we never clear-view the rumpled
teeth
- but their clamp is familiar
- on my sanguine dangling leg
-
- today
just a festering bruise
-
- but I know my lover
- handfeeds the crocodile
(from ‘Handfeeding the Crocodile’)
‘Night
Breathing’ is another evocative piece, this time the mood an aftermath of contented
domesticity:
the blue house breathes
- trees caress the roof
- gossiping to the wind
-
- the cloud-grey cat dreams
- birds into its magnetic mouth
-
- the fridge is full as a harvest
moon
-
- my lover speaks sternly
- to his unconscious
-
- the floorboards creak their mild
jokes
- i breaststroke through the calm
air
-
- my daughter’s nest
- blooms with her warm scent
and she is
still breathing
this is enough
Likewise,
‘Lizard of Loss,’ the lovely following poem, focuses on grief and loss as
represented in the drawing of a dead lizard:
- you draw
- in a delicacy of blue
- this lizard
- frail as pencil dust
A number of
poems explore the double face of love/sex (‘Our Frequency,’ ‘Spice,’
‘Dugong Map,’ ‘Sprinkler Waltzing,’) or invoke sexual politics
(‘Stirring the Porridge,’ ‘Clothes Lines’). Others comment
confrontingly on the war-games our politicians play (‘Never the Same,’
‘Sarajevo’s Soccer Fields’). There are shape poems (‘Bulbs,’
‘Beach Bellies’), kid poems, and poems that rely on clever word play, such as
‘The Curve of Her Hip’:
- as elegant as the curve of a
ship
- as it breasts the wave-swell
- as elegant as the swell-wave of
her breasts
- as they breast the waves of
street air
-
- her curves as elegant as
elegance is hip
The collection
has two centres of grief, firstly the separate and tragic deaths of the persona’s
parents, and then the shared suffering of a sister with cancer. The resultant series of
poems shows the poet working through a process towards eventual acceptance. ‘What You
Showed Me, Father’ is a poem of non-acceptance, of a childhood sense of deprivation:
What You
Showed Me, Father
- is your genius for
escape
- in choosing
- death head-on
- three months before
- my inescapable birth
- you showed me
- the power of absence
- and silence
- and genes
-
- you pattern
- the click of my patella
- the kick of my freestyling legs
- the lobe of my ear
- the curl of my tongue
- the curving chambers of my
nautilus, fatherless heart
The more
literal ‘She Turned Right’ and ‘Chrysanthemums’ deal with anger at the
accidental, but avoidable, death of the mother. These poems achieve powerful effects
through the shock value of words, but the more subtle ‘Patchwork,’ relying on
the central image of ‘your idiosyncratic blanket of love,’ is a step further
along in the process of recreating memory.
As if this
suffering were not enough, the very fine ‘Metastasis’ rises to an immediate
pitch of grief:
- but now
- when this poet
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
- unexpectedly
- she burgeons words
- words the spider cannot contain
poems bud from
the gut she once described as
a concrete
bunker housing radioactivity
- I welcome her free-bursting
words
- but cannot comment
- cannot sculpt
- beside the spider
-
whose needlepoint toes
-
hone relentless images
-
absolutely clutterless
And then there
are the ‘Glacier’ poems, which I first came upon in Blue Giraffe (and
commented positively on in a review in Five Bells, vol.13 no.1). In context here,
they read even more powerfully, especially ‘Glacier II: Terminal Moraine.’
‘A Howling Affair’ and the low-key sequence ‘Melbourne Weather
Forecasts’ bring this section on grief to a wry conclusion:
and finally
tomorrow’s forecast
-
it’s kind of like Melbourne weather it’s unpredictable but it just keeps going
on and on
-
and a lot of us go on living there in spite of it being like that
Another poem I
meet with renewed appreciation is ‘Let Me Grow Old’ (Blue Giraffe, No.4),
which I’ve previously described as ‘a nice comment on the resilience of art, and
the subjectivity of perceptions of female beauty’ (Five Bells, vol.14 no.4).
It’s always good when later readings confirm your first enthusiastic impressions.
Finally, the poems on Tasmania, where Mercer has made her home, deserve mention for the
warmth of their loyalty and humour:
- you don’t need the tinted
portfolio, Tasmania
- the fake turquoise rivers
- the glare-green parks
- the toxic sunset skies
- you need to know, Tasmania,
- the first roll of 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
(from ‘No More Garish Postcards’)
The Houses
Here
- huddle
- as if they dread
- the next beating
- from that unpredictable husband
- the weather
-
- the houses here
- hold themselves
- small and neat
- trying for well-behaved
- discreet
- hoping for no more blows…
Handfeeding
the Crocodile is a book to be enjoyed, to be empathised with, to be moved by.
Mercer’s finest poems in this collection stand up among the best.