Artarmon: Giramondo, 2024, 82pp.

We have been living with Judith Beveridge’s marvellous poetry since the publication of The Domesticity of Giraffes in 1987. With that length of exposure, I feel I should be more confident about the shape of her work but I always feel that I don’t have enough of a grasp of her “poetic-self” to generalise with any degree of certainty about what these poems actually do. At one level they are very similar – the tone, for example, seldom changes and neither does the pace: the poems tend to be expansive. But at another level they are immensely varied: she seems just as much at home in lyrical personal expression as she does in dramatic monologues, where she enters the personalities of very different characters: the Buddha, Marco Polo’s concubine and Hannibal, to name a few. Looking at the poems from this point of view – the stance of the poet vis a vis the human consciousness that the poem is dealing with – raises another difficult issue, or at least an issue I used to find difficult before I learned how to relax and not worry about it. That is that often we aren’t sure whether a particular poem is “personal” or “imagined”. “Making Perfume”, the fourth poem of The Domesticity of Giraffes, is written in the first person and luxuriates (a feature that runs throughout Beveridge’s poetry) in names, and, in this poem, the way in which they match the scents being created. It’s always worried me whether this is “personal” or not – ie is it a poem about the author’s adolescent hobbies? The answer is “probably not”, but the evidence for that would only be a matter of probabilities and one wouldn’. Was her father a birdwatcher with a special pair of binoculars (“Sun Music”) did she have a dog which died in 2016 (“Bandit”) and so on? It’s a complicated issue in reader’s responses to poems and Beveridge isn’t the only poet where it turns up, but it isn’t resolved by treating this as a voyeuristic desire to know intimate details about someone’s life. Somehow it relates to authenticity. There’s a big difference, for most of us, between seeing a host of golden daffodils and imagining that you have done so. Or of actually having a gorgeous girlfriend who is as beautiful as a red, red rose and imagining that you do. Somehow we want lyric poets to recognise the significance of special experiences they have had and to make them the basis of exploratory poems. In contrast, of course, imaginative, dramatic enterings into unfamiliar personalities – Marco Polo’s concubine, for example – must, by definition, not arise from personal experience but from imaginative reconstructions.

Paul Kane, in the brief introduction to Hook and Eye, a selection of Beveridge’s work made in 2014 for an American publisher, comes at this issue in an interesting way. His first move is to consign poems about actual experiences to the world of confessionalism. That’s really a straw man argument but it does have the advantage of locating the issue in the poet’s experience rather than the reader’s. Next, and most interestingly, he sees the mixing of actual and imaginary as a deliberate poetic stance:

Beveridge’s poems restore the fabric of the world – rent as it so often seems – by bringing the fictive and the real together, joining them as if with hook and eye that we may try on a new perspective, clothing our imagination with her vivifying vision.

It’s a complex situation but if it is true then we can say that it makes the world the centre of Beveridge’s work and poetry itself has the function of opening us to the world. Perhaps. It might explain the joyous linguistic elements in the poems: pleasurable poetry will do this task better than dull explorations deriving from some theory about reality or language.

Leaving aside selecteds and chapbooks, Tintinnabullum is Beveridge’s sixth book of poetry, and it differs from the previous ones in being divided into clearly demarcated sections. There are divisions in the other books, of course, but none that seem as clear and valuable as these. The first, devoted to poems about animals, has a thematic base, and the tendency of the poems is towards the abject – these aren’t happy snaps preserving an animal in its distinctiveness. The second, “Walking with the Poet”, is made up of two readings of that phrase: there are poems where we accompany the poet on perambulations that can lead into the natural world but are just as likely to lead into other lives entirely, and then there are remembered walks with other poets, often conceived as elegies and thus extensions of a mode introduced by the three elegies in the new poems section of Sun Music. The third section gathers poems of what might be called conceptual explorations and the final section has poems registering place in a way that is familiar from Beveridge’s other books.

None of these styles or subjects are absolutely new. The third section might look so but that would be because a number of poems are grouped together and thus create a sense of mass; in fact there are similar conceptually experimental poems throughout Beveridge’s work. And so the reader is left with a sense of a poet wanting – to some extent, at least – to codify existing practices, perhaps with an eye to deciding how far certain styles can be taken and which lines of development are the most promising. It is certainly a great help to a reader because it isolates certain styles and directions which, when mixed, can become confusing. To take a simple example: part of Beveridge’s genius lies in her verbal exactness. She has a freak ability to deploy rare or technical or semi-metaphoric words to exactly represent motion or noise in the natural world. There’s the “flacker of the ducks” as they take off; the rain “drumbling across awnings”, the cicada’s “stroboscopic glitzy aural brandishing / and the bee’s legato blur” – all taken at random from earlier poems and which could be supplemented by thousands of other examples. There’s clearly a sensual pleasure here shared by poet and reader. But is it aimed at precision of description – of “fixing”, so to speak, something natural in words? Is it aimed at a kind of baroque elaboration? Or does it aim to maximise poetic pleasure by tickling a particular pleasure-spot. A poem like “Rain” from Storm and Honey (where the word “drumbling” appears) is an eight stanza description of that phenomenon and I’ve always wondered whether the aim of such poems is absolute accuracy, continuously changing description locking the topic down so intensely in words that it can’t escape, or whether it’s a more playful, almost decorative approach to something so fluid it can never be limited to words.

I’ll leave these desultory meditations to look at Tintinnabulum in some detail. As I said, the first section, devoted to animals tends to focus on the abject and it’s perhaps a reminder that in Beveridge’s poetry most experience of animals is like this: the first poem of her first book describes a giraffe in loving detail but we are obliged to remember that it is a caged animal which drinks its partner’s urine in a need for salt. There only seem to be a few animals which are celebrated, notably water birds (perhaps in the Shaw Nielson tradition). Here a butterfly emerges damaged from its cocoon and dies on the author’s (or her character’s) hand, a dead possum with its cloud of flies has to be removed, an elephant, trained to dance, dies, mountain goats, whose fabulous surefootedness saves them from almost all dangers can’t cope with hunters – and so on. In a way, these poems have a mix of styles. The elephant poem is a monologue, the possum poem feels personal and a poem about cicadas is a set of thirteen metaphors for the sound that cicadas make. These metaphors are baroque, playful, precise, multi-sensory and, in their own way raise that issue of whether the aim is precision or pleasure. More interestingly, perhaps, it is a poem which might have appeared in the third section of the book where experimental conceptions are explored. The poem which interested me most was the comparatively brief “Horses, Turon River”

Six horses lean into one another. They snort, shake their manes.
They’re stalled by the fence, a jerry-built dilapidation.

The river rears over stones, bucks against the banks,
fast-flowing, free roaming, refusing to be broken in.

The horses huddle under lightning’s stockwhips, under tiered
clouds: a grandstand of dark akubras, mist swirling like dust

in a ring. The river rushes onwards. The horses snort again
leaning their heads into the tightening bridles of the rain.

On first reading it is one of the very few Beveridge poems which could conceivably have been written by someone else. It could even be seen as an attempt at minimalism (in the Japanese/Chinese tradition). Two items – the horses and the river – are put next to each other to make the point that the horses are domesticated and controlled whereas the river is free. And it makes its point without explicitly stating it. And it doesn’t expand the scene out into long stanzas of poetic description. At the same time, though, there is precious little restraint about the way the image might be interpreted. A large percentage of the poem’s vocabulary rather hammers the point” “stalled”, “bucks”, “broken in”, the clouds are like the akubra hats of show-visitors or race-goers where the horses will perform and the rain will act like “tightening bridles”. It is, in other words, the opposite of an open, suggestive poem: children, meeting it in a class, would quickly be told that there was one and only one correct answer to the question, “What do you think this is saying?”. And, perhaps, ultimately it is too pointed, too elaborate, when it comes to the metaphorical weaponry that can be deployed when it makes its point. It’s an intriguing poem raising intriguing issues about where delicious poetic elaborations become too much.

The second section plays, as I’ve said, on the two meanings of its title, “Walking with the Poet” in that some of the walks are with another poet – as elegies or, in the case of “Two Houses” – dedicatees, whereas others invite us to walk and look with the author as she moves through the world. The density of metaphor in Beveridge’s poetry generally means that as readers we are tempted more than usual to read many of these walks as allegories. The first poem is a description of surfers in wetsuits riding high seas off Manly and everything encourages us to read these seas as representing the dangers life provides. The sea does this explicitly in the third poem of the section which says:

. . . . . I can only watch you go into the tumble of time, into the tidal bore of fate that can work behind our backs to deliver setbacks, mishaps, who knows what adversity; a wave generated elsewhere but reaching us eventually . . .

Whether the surfers of the first poem are triumphantly riding such waves or risking plunging down into them is a matter of interpretation and either could probably be argued for.

In terms of what I have been saying about Beveridge’s personal engagement with the events of a poem, this section is interesting in that it tends to alternate between poems that derive from personal experience or from imagined personal experience and those which are much more like portraits of distant objects. There are, in this second category, poems about a garland maker and his daughters, makers of pots, and Indian washerwomen on the Ganges. In a way they recall those memorable earlier poems from Accidental Grace like “Man Washing on a Railway Platform Outside Delhi” or “The Dung Collector” which, early on, established that Beveridge could write empathically about something (or someone) culturally very distant. There is also a portrait of a waitress who dreams of working on a cruise liner in the Pacific. Like the giraffe in “The Domesticity of Giraffes”, the horses in “Horses, Turon River” and countless other animals, she is imprisoned in her current life.

If this second section focusses on people, the last concentrates on place and thus makes a kind of balance. The aim of these poems seems to be to convey place by bringing the full imaginative resources of poetry to bear. A few lines from “At the Lake” will provide a good example of the results of this:

. . . . .
Today wrens are flitting near the bamboo canes packed
densely as organ pipes, their tails flick in time with their quick

jerks and twitches. Gnats are dancing around each other
swapping orbitals like electrons in a subatomic choreodrama.
Suddenly a kingfisher dives into the lake. An egret lowers
a leg into the water the way a scribe might load a brush

with ink, pondering a new script. A few noisy miners
are trying to oust crows from a branch – a separatist clique
endlessly declaring thug rules – the birds don’t budge,
they sit like shiny black shoes: ultra-stylish, ultra-supreme.

Sometimes these rapid-fire metaphors for sound and sight seem almost too much but I think we are prepared for this by the overall stance of these poems that reality is so complex that even such a barrage of metaphor cannot begin to approach the task of describing it. One of the poems speaks of trying “to set something down: preserve a scene or two, / a small moment, though everything streamed with change” and, although these poems eschew any overt engagement with the metaphysics that attaches itself to mind and the flow of circumstances, there are enough hints to see that such philosophical perspectives (or awarenesses) underlie these poems. Indeed the final poem of both the section and the book seems to claim that even the nearly obsessive deployment of the imaginative resources of poetry falls a long way short of true description:

. . . . . 
                                              A bee
whirs giddy joy as its wings conduct a shakeout
of pollen in the bottlebrush, 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.

The word “symphonies” will probably lead readers to suspect that perhaps the book, carefully subdivided as it is, has a structure designed to parallel a symphony of the classical period. This would make a lot of sense of the positioning of the third section, “The Bizarre Bazaar”, which occupies the role of scherzo. If a scherzo is lively and jocular, these poems are jokes of a specific kind: their basic method is a free-flowing baroque invention that has a comic aspect in itself and is sometimes brought back to earth in a comic way. So “Incense”, in which a merchant spruiks his wares – “He took another stick – / told me its scent was made from buds that blossomed / after dark, under the influence of a spotted nightjar / calling only during a new moon” – allows Beveridge to revisit her interest in scents. The one she actually buys – “a blend / of jasmine, pine, cinnamon, and myrrh which must / be burned at dawn while I wear a ring of fire opal / and carry a handkerchief with an embroidered phoenix” – turns out to be a fake. “Weather Divinations” is a long comic list of interpretation of events which might foretell the weather – “When a crane sits on the back of a crocodile it means dust / devils will blow” – and “Moon Poem” and “Reading the Clouds” are lengthy sets of descriptions of the moon and the various kinds of cloud. Most of this material is absurd (as the brief examples I’ve given will show) and the pleasure of these poems is in the seemingly effortless expansion of absurdity, though it is counterbalanced (or enhanced) by the vibrant, poetic quality of the expansions.

The poem that gives its name to the section is a kind of homage to Wallace Stevens, though the sort of exoticism found in Harmonium seems to me to have quite a different quality to Beveridge’s poems. The ten stanzas are answers to the question posed in the first line: “What can you buy at the Bizarre Bazaar?” and among the possibilities are many items from the poetry of Stevens. What attracts Beveridge, you feel, is the exoticism of the names as much as the exoticism of what those names represent. This is an extension of the fascination which enables her to imagine that the waitress in the earlier poem I mentioned, achieves some kind of escape by muttering the word, “Honolulu”. “Appaloosa” from Storm and Honey, ends “I have always loved the word appaloosa” but appaloosa is only one of a host of loved names.