Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2025, 94pp.

There’s an interesting observation by John Foulcher on the back cover of Isi Unikowki’s first book, Kintsugi, which says that his “restless poems never allow the reader to become complacent. When we get on board, we rarely know where these poems are heading, yet when they arrive there, the destination seems right, almost inevitable”. Readers of these reviews will know that I have no great love for blurbs with their tendency towards vapid elegance but this seems to me to be a very accurate and helpful introduction to the poems of that first book and to those of this second one, Re:Vision. Unikowski seems like someone whose poems might fit into the category of meditative lyrics, and in the specific sub-branch where the twists and turns of the meditation form the structure of the poem. Foulcher was probably thinking of poems from Kintsugi like “Holbrook”, “Watchman in the Orchard” and “I Would Say Something of Water” but the same applies to many of the poems in this new book.

Take the first, “Pumping Station”, for example. It begins as a description of a photograph seen at the counter of the ticket office for a tour of a sewage pumping station. This, alone, sets up a host of possibilities: it might be a poem that goes on to look at how human waste is dealt with – there are a lot of metaphoric possibilities there – or it might focus on the past and its way of dealing with things. But turns out, as it progresses through one turn after another, to be a poem about positioning. The poet stands at a kind of halfway point between the smoothly-turning open machinery of the past with the “bowler-hatted, unsmiling, moustachioed” men who keep it turning, and his children’s generation of iPhones and computers that use solid-state technology so that the mechanisms are completely opaque:

. . . . . . 
The guide balances a coin on the casing
to show how smoothly the piston rods perform,
without the least vibration, in greased silence.
Our kids, from a world of few moving parts,
where whatever machinery is left
is so well-hidden it might as well be magic,
go back outside for better reception, unimpressed. . .

I may be guilty of over-reading here but I suspect that someone of the poet’s age and position finds this opacity very disturbing: how can one live in a world where we have no idea of the mechanisms that keep it running and which we desperately need? The old pumping station then becomes something of a comforting device just because the cogs and wheels are so visible. There is, the poem goes on to say, “an amenable logic / and purpose to the way rocking beams, cranks, rods / moved and pulled and pushed” and the machinery is “made beautiful in filigree and ornament”. But although “Pumping Station” finishes on a note of admiration for this aspect of the past – something exploited in Steampunk works – the central subject, I think, is the poet’s positioning between generations.

And this positioning is an important issue in many of the poems of Re:Vision. The title poem itself is a good example. It deals with Brahms’s rewriting in 1889 of his early Piano Trio and is interested (as both Brahms and Clara Schumann were) in the relationship between the two versions:

. . . . . 
          Then time sped up, things
had to be said more clearly, more simply, or simply
make their claim to be said at all.
          So some themes never come back fully, they head off
          in different directions, different instruments, different years
as if that first iteration were naïve; the second version
looks at the first with affection, sympathy,
                    that person not quite a stranger,
a chance to reconcile with the younger man.
          Not an older man giving advice to his younger self,
                    but a chance to hear the younger man
giving an account
          of himself to the one he will become. . .

(It’s worth noting how, in Brahms’s specific case, this relationship of old to new is felt keenly at the simple level of photographic portrait: the contrast between the bearded, waddling old man of the late eighteen-eighties and the strikingly handsome young man of forty years earlier is extreme, much more extreme than usual.) At any rate, in a poem that explores the positions of old in relationship to young and vice versa, it’s inevitable that the poet himself should appear, pondering his own position at a moment, if not of crisis, then certainly of radical change:

. . . . . 
I’m listening to the second version as I stroll
          before returning to the office for the afternoon where they
               will tell me
                    I’m going to lose my job.
Sometimes a piece of music, a needle-drop, accompanies your life so well
                    it becomes the sound of your thinking.
Or perhaps it’s the life, once or twice a decade,
          that catches up with the score,
the key that harmonises a life and its work.

My reverie roams the same span of years
          as elapsed between his first and second versions. . .

Another poem about positioning is “By Half and Half”, which evokes Zeno’s paradox whereby, in a race, as the pursuer covers half the distance, the pursued makes at least a small advance so that, if the process is continued ad infinitum, the pursuer can never overtake the pursued: as the poem says, “The arrow won’t find its target. The runner never crosses the line first”. It’s a complicated poem which focusses on three scenarios from the actual world: a child about to crash on a bike, a woman in a cell and a man asking for air. My reading of it is that these are scenarios where we wish Zeno’s paradox actually operated so that by a continual application of the principle of half and half the terrible outcomes can be endlessly postponed.

The idea of positioning is especially significant in what might be called the family poems in Re:Vision. It’s a family background we are introduced to in poems in Kintsugi like “On Being the Middle Generation” whose title alone establishes that what matters to the author is his place between generations. And the history of the preceding generation has a lurid, frightening aspect that many poets would simply set out to exploit: a Jewish mother and grandmother hid precariously inside a convent and a father consigned in his teens to Buchenwald. “On Being the Middle Generation” tries to puzzle out a position between a younger generation of kids playing cricket – “barely taller than the plastic yellow stumps” and an older one:

. . . . . 
I’m thinking of my father’s childhood, of how we need
a taxonomy, a way of mapping worlds

as if they were cousins, consanguineous,
by human alchemy intertwined
proliferating branches of acceptance and release
from exile and diaspora’s inheritance.

First world: my father reading Jules Verne for his friends
in the icy ghetto; second world, once removed
from our kids:
unable for fear of the racket,
to put down a zinc bucket he has carried to the attic
while the Gestapo questions people in the apartment below,
my grandfather watches a stray dog in the street outside. . .

In Re:Vision there are a number of such poems but it would be unfair to see them simply as memories of his parents’ past. True, some like “A Bag of Pinwheel Biscuits” and “Collecting” are reasonably straightforward pieces about childhood memories, but a poem like “Threads for the Convent Girls” is rather more complicated. Like “Pumping Station” it begins with a trip to a historical display. This time it is to an old convent school, and it provokes thoughts about the girls who spent their time sewing and preparing for the future, imagined as being dependent on the threads they choose. Not only that but it is imagined, in a sort of relaxed reverie, that angels look over the shoulders of the girls, determining their threads (and fates) – “grey for the winters of a soul’s seasons, / blue for the evenings of a husband’s absence”. This prompts a simple transition to the fact that his mother was a “convent girl” in Belgium in 1942, hidden by the nuns with her mother, and a less predictable transition to a memory of a particular incident:

. . . . . 
my grandmother, returning from errands in a nearby town
was about to knock on the convent’s front door,
not knowing that the Gestapo was on the other side
questioning the Mother Superior. Just at that moment,
someone she didn’t recognise, a priest perhaps,
hurried past, beckoning for her to follow, away, to safety. . .

This intervention of an imaginary angel (a Hebrew version of what, in the Germanic world, would be those spirits invited to a child’s christening: any whose invitations have gone astray become the “bad fairy” who will foul up the child’s future) occurs because the lucky day was “a day of golden threads” and as the poem goes on to say, “that’s the trouble with angels: they only exist if they’re punctual”.

Another complex and fine poem, “’There’s Some Mighty Good Water in Tennessee’”, is a meditation on America, seen from different perspectives (ie positions). Its title derives from a comment made by Abraham Lincoln in his lawyering days, to a woman who had killed her abusive husband. Framed as a simple observation, it’s in fact a recommendation to flee, something, so the poem’s note tells us, she did successfully. It’s a poem that twists and turns, beginning with an apocalyptic vision, moving on to a stanza celebrating America’s poets who, since they have become familiar to us, encourage us to be familiar to them – “I wave at Berryman drinking / alone in Hopper’s bar”. The poem then moves on to the more common way by which we become adapted to America in our younger days; through its films – “the stories you told about yourself in technicolour / bore a fidelity to the colours of another reality / not ours”. Finally, in an unexpected but fascinating and satisfying twist the poem turns to the poet’s father:

. . . . . 
Tonight I’m thinking of what America meant
to the camp inmates like my Dad, crowded around a window, April 1945.
They asked the ones who could look out
“can you see them, the Americans? Can you see them yet?” and when
they arrived, the Sixth Armored Division, when they entered
the camp, how amazed he was, my Dad, still a teenager,
who had never seen an American. . .

And these “family” poems aren’t the only ones rotating and developing around an interest in positioning. “Solstice” is a complex piece in which a drive with his daughter prompts thoughts of “tales about women / who descend into realms of darkness” and the way in which such stories show no interest in the witnesses, those positioned outside the central tale. This, of course, is the poet’s position, that of the bystander who has,

                           to accept that their place in the story
is to be the bystander
witnesses must agree to be witnesses
the chorus has to wait in the wings for a chance
to perfect its job; which is to wait,
wanting only to be astonished
by astonishingly ordinary days . . .

In a fine image that encapsulates this, the poet tries to take a selfie but finds that his daughter has positioned herself outside of the frame and he is left with “only a tilted avenue of poplars”.

“Handwriting Remembered” reveals Unikowski to be, like me, left-handed. It would be nice, though overly convenient, to ascribe this calm, humane, meditative interest in his positions in the various events of life to that left-handedness, the essential idea being that left-handers understand that the world they live in is never (and can never be) their world. They look on as witnesses. They make good diplomatic negotiators but if, like John McEnroe, for example, they have an intolerant personality they are likely to be continuously fighting against the world. Unikowski certainly isn’t someone saddled with that kind of personality and his poetry is all the better and more intriguing and impressive because of that fact. The result of being concerned with positions means that it isn’t a poetry of vision and assertion, rather one of meditation. It’s a poetry with a respect for the world that we take our various positions towards. As “’If I Were Called in to Construct a Religion’” says:

. . . . . 
         Called in to account for my faith in something, though,
I too would fix my footings in elements indifferent to our nature:
a callistemon’s redness beyond our need to know
what red is, what bees dance into; a Manchurian pear
where it catches the first of autumn’s light . . .