
The Told World
by Angela Gardner
Shearsman, 2014
Angela Gardner’s The Told World is a collection that made me feel homesick for Brisbane. Gardner is a Brisbane poet, and while some of the lines in this book specifically reference the city, it is not actually a Brisbane book of poetry. Many of the poems are pastoral, but not grounded in a specific landscape, generally the ‘here’ could be anywhere. And yet, they provide a landscape of familiarity, a space for noticing and reflection, and sometimes, a longing for where you are from. Like in the collection’s second poem, ‘Metamorphoses.’
1
Street after street held back in unanimity
drowned in brick and tile containment
flat suburbs of white bread television stupor
droning and drowsing out to the rivermouth.
That paradoxical question from philosophy:
How to live?
Above, the sky is radiant with risk
turning shadows, luminous glances, break
throughs in motion, charge and discharge.
This poem traverses the general to the specific, from ‘white bread’ suburbia to ‘Mount Coot-tha staked with television masts’, an iconic Brisbane landmark and a sight familiar to me from living in western and southern Brisbane suburbs. The poem has an observational quality, ‘The morning air held, like breath, expectant / not even a distant lawnmower’ and there is an interchange in the narrative mode between first and second-person, shifting our perspective from the ‘I’ ‘On the driveway of my own house / looking forward rather than back’ to the ‘you’ who will ‘come to cliffs / with equipment laid out: ropes, harness, / other tackle and instruction / shouted from the rim.’ Gardner’s metaphorical language provides pleasurable little shocks: ‘radiant with risk’, ‘luminous glances’ and ‘cognate cloudburst’.
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