South in the World
by Lisa Jacobson
UWA Publishing, 2014
For three weeks in Japan I’ve read and re-read Lisa Jacobson’s new collection of poems: in subways, on shinkansen, in parks, cafés, restaurants and my apartment – up on the twelfth floor of the hilly suburb, Dainohara, in Sendai. The poems, now fiercely dog-eared, have become my familiars; challenging, apostrophising and snaking/drifting/sidling into my consciousness, they have shaped my thinking and insinuated themselves into my conversations with ‘native English-speaking’ colleagues, Japanese friends and ex-students.
These are deftly subtle and insightful poems – worldly and ‘spiritual’, artificed to bring out the particularities of a ‘glocal’ Australian consciousness, youthful idealism and a difficult complexity.
Section One opens with the wry ‘Several Ways to Fall Out of the Sky’ and ends with the mock heroic, ‘Habits formed by Eternity’, where ‘God falls to earth with a resounding clang … Dog-tired … in his faded cardigan.’ This is antipodean iconoclasm, as ‘blowflies hover like small black angels’. In ‘Why, When we Fall off things, We Fall Down’, a more venal fall ‘from a car’ to escape the ‘Stable Boys’, some ‘mates’ intent on sexual assault, and the tongue-in-cheek advice to a daughter about gravity add a sense of real danger and whimsical metaphysics to the post-lapsarian consciousness. For Jacobson, the sadness and dividuality of ordinary experience, the ‘deadweight of oxygen; / its brash insistence’, slows our ‘Traffic with Angels’. Though even here, there are ‘Signs of Life’ that, in her womb-with-a-view sonnet ‘Emergence’, Jacobson can see quickening: God’s ‘slow reading’ and the ‘longevity of a prayer’ might register as ‘clouds of budgerigars’ or ‘A woman [turning] like fruit / to the light’. These are rich, suggestive, metaphorical explorations of the ‘wheelbarrow’ that is human life.
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