J V Birch

It’s been an eventful week. Wednesday I went to the launch of Jill Jones’s latest collection at Goodwood Books and Saturday to Poets and Pizza at Coriole.

Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems is Jill’s thirteenth collection who is one of the most prolific poets I know, not to mention amazingly talented and widely read. Published by Puncher and Wattmann and introduced by book curator and arts consultant Sarah Tooth, Jill began with the beautiful poem ‘mother i am waiting now to tell you’ about things unsaid, which she read with her wife Annette, alternating the left with the right justified lines on the page. And then followed a Q&A style session, with Sarah asking how Jill got into poetry who shared her inspirations, which includes Kenneth Slessor and lines from his infamous poem ‘Five Bells’ that left an impression:

Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down.

And it’s this same sense of profound reverie that’s so evocative of Jill’s work, pulling you in and under to a different line of sight. Jill read several poems, including an ekphrastic one literally split into snippets of art and most notably ‘Unbuttoned’, which opens with ‘If I have to earn some skin does it have to be new?’ then proceeds to explore ways to obtain this, culminating in this rather haunting undress:

Or shall I unbutton and fold

what’s left, step out of my nerves

and my veins, leave everything

– corpse, crevice, carcass, shell –

but keep my breath for

the impending and tremendous air

that’s beyond howling when

I touch it to my old pelt?

The bookshop was packed and the line for a signed copy snaked to the door. Originally hailing from Sydney, Jill is now a permanent part of the Adelaide poetry scene, for which I’m immensely glad.

Two of my favourite poets read at Saturday’s event – Rachael Mead and Louise Nicholas – along with Kalicharan Nigel Dey and Bruce Greenhalgh, facilitated by another wonderful local poet, Jude Aqualina. First up was Bruce, whose clever and compact repertoire focused on rhythm and rhyme, both entertaining and far-reaching, in which he explored various aspects of the human condition in a relatable way.

Rachael followed, beginning with ‘The wild grammar of leeches’ from her collection The Flaw in the Pattern by UWA Publishing, with the poem part of a sequence about trekking the Overland Track in Tasmania containing these gorgeous snippets:

I shed my clothes like an awful first draft,

…look down to find my body being edited, its pages

harshly corrected with black punctuation.

…full of stolen content they race end for end

across my skin, challenging my sensitive narrative

with their bold-third person revisions,…

Rachael also shared a poem inspired by the #metoo movement and another comprising a series of broken questions, the kind you hear every day, but in this context, stick.

Louise followed the break with a selection of poems centered around family and memory, sharing the rather poignant ‘Echolalia’ from her collection The List of Last Remaining published by Five Islands Press, about her graceful name-giving and how it changed after her mother’s death:

So when she died

my name for a time

lost its grace

became shape without shadow

question without answer

and even now

if I were to stand on a mountain top

and shout out my name

there’d be no echo

calling back.

Louise also shared entertaining poems about the year she was born, the wife of the man who invented the pap smear and about her children who were in the audience, but presumably forewarned.

Nigel finished the set, urging us to dance and sing, delivering his poems in a unique way, his previous acting career clearly evident in the way he performed and engaged with the crowd.

And now I’m planning my own event to launch ice cream ‘n’ tar, which offers a somewhat surreal perspective on the ever-shifting climate and lack of inaction. Every little helps.