It’s not that Judith Beveridge’s poetic eye is without compassion – but it is, has always been, unblinking. She continues to stare even when the sight is shocking, and she tells us exactly what she sees.
The title poem of her first collection, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987), has served my classes for years as a teaching example for writing non-human creatures. The poem does not resist some anthropomorphism, but it does succeed in making a powerful comment. Its description of a pair of giraffes trapped in a zoo enclosure is strong. This is especially true of its concluding image: one desolate giraffe lapping the urine stream of the other.
So from the beginning of her publishing career, Beveridge has refused to allow us off the hook. Always, some readers in my classes recoil from this moment, finding it abject – more offensive than the giraffes’ ongoing plight.
Review: Tintinnabulum – Judith Beveridge (Giramondo)
Twenty-seven years and seven collections on, Beveridge’s empathy is clear. Her most recent collection Tintinnabulum – tintinnabulum meaning the sound of tiny (often temple) bells – begins with a section that focuses just as squarely on other-than-human creatures. Butterflies, possums, kittens and cuttlefish all receive the work of that same unflinching gaze.
In the first poem, we watch as a butterfly struggles from its cocoon. The poem closes with:
I offer you honey-water –
your proboscis, thin as a human hair, sips from my hand … Soon
you’ll die in my palm, the only small holding you’ll know.
The heart-wrench of that final phrase both draws us back to re-read the poem and carries us into the next one, Dead Possum. Here, the narrator lifts the carcass “away with a spade”, but can escape neither the flies,
a frenzied paparazzi, assembling and re-assembling,
eager to make a maggot-mass in the possum’s flesh,
nor the foreseeing of her own death:
thousands and thousands of maggots
creaming, risotto-like, inside my own half-eaten head.
This stark vision prepares our imaginations and our hearts – if at all possible – for the next two poems: Animals in our Suburb, 1960s and Cuttlefish. These poems revisit the rampant, ritualised cruelty with which we treat other creatures. Yet they are delivered in a disarmingly conversational style:
Who’d
ever heard of a Lhasa Apso, Shih Tzu, or a Bichon Frizé?
(Animals in our Suburbs, 1960s)
just before the man stuck a knife into it and its gills
leaked green blood
(Cuttlefish)
The strict six-line stanzas of the former mirror the brutal management of domestic animals. In the latter, lines trail down the page to make a shape reminiscent of the creature’s tentacles or the flow of water.
Walking to the bizarre bazzar
The focus is on other species, but the human is always present. In much of the book’s second section, Walking with the Poet, human consciousness – let’s call it the poet’s here – is located (finely, consistently, insistently) within small spaces in the natural world: in gaps, cracks, crevices. This close attention to small spaces, and what is embedded in them, brings into stark relief just how much space we human animals take up, how much of the world we devour.
For me, two of the most moving poems of this section are the prize-winning Two Houses and the devastating Two Brothers. In both, the other-than-human acts as a metaphor for human experience.
The meditative tone of Two Houses, its sustained reflection, counterpoints the events it describes: the upheaval of ending a marriage, beginning another relationship, moving interstate. We are introduced early to the poem’s extended metaphors – owls and a freight train passing through. The owl – nocturnal, mysterious, elusive, largely silent, steeped in mythologies of war, protection, wisdom – reappears years later, reminding the narrator of the freight train she used to hear at 3am on Fridays, and of
how far we’d come – all the actions,
workings, means, and mechanisms across time and distance
to pull to its destinations this rich consignment of love.
In Two Brothers, cats belonging to immigrant brothers Bibo and Jakov also act as metaphors. Named, as loving acts of remembrance, after family members killed in war – Nada, Jamina, Enas, Ferez, Malika – these beloved pets are also killed (the beloved family killed again). They are made into conduits of xenophobic hate and unbearable grief, found by the brothers returning from work hung “by their tails from the clothesline”.
If we think about poetry – indeed, all creative writing – as a centuries-long conversation between texts, then Beveridge is at her most loquacious in the third section, The Bizarre Bazaar. She riffs on lines by Wallace Stevens, an American poet intensely interested in the nexus of creative imagination and so-called objective reality.
It’s here that the intense focus on sound – the possibilities for play that language offers – evident in earlier poems like Dead Possum (“fervid satanic twanging, / demonic tremolos musing”) finds its place. Beveridge lets loose her own passion for sound in response to Wallace’s, and the resulting poems are wild, thrilling, fun.
But in my view, it is in the final section, the aptly titled Choirwood, that the poetic, ethical and philosophical concerns of the previous sections best combine. It achieves the aim of any choir, simultaneously sweeping us up and along in its blended stream, and maintaining for the audience the clear presence of each part.
Life – its multiplicity and minutiae, transience and eternity, its repetitions and patterns, velocity and change – is here in abundance. The sheer number of named birds is uncommon. In one poem alone – At the Lake – we find egret, heron, coot, little grebe, crow, noisy miner, wren, brush turkey, cockatoo, sparrow hawk. Elsewhere in the section: corolla, magpie, robin, fantail, butcherbird, currawong, silvereye, kookaburra, channel-billed cuckoo.
In a form as small as poetry, with every word crucial, it is reasonable to ask why so much naming is necessary. The answer, of course, is in the ethics. Every species, each creature, matters. Particular bird voices are described – as “choriambs”, “bubblings”, “up-talk”, “vocal fry” – or rendered: “chin-cher-inchee / chin-cher-inchee”. So are the sounds of different tree species in the wind. This is the blue gums: “Sibelius Sibelius it seems to say – then Sisyphus Sisyphus”; and this, casuarinas: “sassafras sassafras – then when the wind changes susurrus susurrus”.
This world bursts with sensory detail. The human narrator is so closely embedded as to seem stitched in, and we readers are equally immersed. Everywhere is light on water. On lakes and creeks – “The light now is loose and yellow like spooned honey” – on rivers and seas, in sky and clouds. Living creatures flit through, intent on their own practices, and we become part of it all. Creatures of memory also flit through the narrator, as in “ghost-horses, spirit-mares / the soft canter of foals”.
The exquisite cover of Tintinnabulum, with its delicate ghost-image of what seem to be the bones of hands, suggests both the living and the dead: the human, creaturely, mortal, hidden; the timeless and enduring.
The final poem, from which the section’s title is drawn, closes with a summary. From all her close observations of the minute and specific in the world, Beveridge’s vision deepens as it unfolds:
and I think about
the intoning, harmonising, buzzing and quavering
I can’t hear: the bonding of molecules, pairings
and transfers of particles, electrons and photons
speeding around the globe, quarks popping in
and out of existence, neutrinos zipping through
bodies, asteroids, planets, all the infrasonic
symphonies of the vast and vibrating invisible fields.
Tintinnabulum is a beautiful, onomatopoeic word. Say it aloud. It is the sound of tinkling temple bells, the voices of trees and birds, and all the sounds of the world that we don’t and can’t hear.
Marcella Polain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
