St Lucia: University of Queensland Press: 1990, 251pp.
My involvement with Jennifer Rankin’s poetry relates only to the production of her first book, Ritual Shift, the seventeenth in the Gargoyle Poets series of small books, one of whose policies was to introduce new poets in a twenty-four to thirty-six page format which would obviate the need for them to accumulate sixty-odd published or publishable poems before producing a first book. When I first saw Jennifer Rankin’s manuscript it seemed no different to the sort of submissions we received: I knew nothing about her work and this seemed a manuscript of poems at the beginning of a career. At any rate, we accepted it, did some editing in collaboration with her and finally produced the book. The morning of leaving for the Adelaide Festival of 1976, I got a call from our printer to say that some advance copies were available (we were supposed to approve them before the full thousand were printed) and so, although it was an awkward thing to do – and on another day I might not have done it – I made a detour on the way to the airport and thus, serendipitously, had a copy to give Jennifer at the Festival. She must have shown it to Ted Hughes, a guest at the Festival, because I saw the pair of them crossing a street on that first afternoon: she had a copy of Ritual Shift in her hand.
Her writing career was a very short one: she died of breast cancer three years after that first book. Judith Rodriguez’s edition of Rankin’s collected poems, published eleven years after Rankin’s death, is, in effect, a memorial to a poet who might have quickly been forgotten, given the length of her publishing career, but Rodriguez was right to see the quality of her work. One of the things this Collected Poems did was show how inaccurate my idea of Ritual Shift as a collection of early poems was. She had already written a considerable amount of material before Ritual Shift appeared and I now see that small book as a mid-career work. There are fifty-odd poems in the “Uncollected Poems” section of Rodriguez’s edition which are written before and during the writing of the poems which make up Ritual Shift.
Rodriguez’s introduction is very useful for filling in the biographical background to these early poems. The first one of the “uncollected” section has a date of composition, 1969. That means that Rankin’s ambitious writing life lasted for ten years, a mere blink of time in a world where medical improvements have meant that writers can have productive careers of more than sixty years. Rankin began writing during her marriage to David Rankin, known now as a painter but then as a poet as well. It’s no coincidence that the first component of her writing career that one would want to emphasize is its “painterly” quality. That first poem, “Looking Through” is an example:
Flywire even seems to reshape the moon. While the poem in my mind strengthens itself gathering in the quiet night and the reshaping of the moon.
Of course it has more to support itself than a simple description, focussing on the interaction of poem and scene, but its impetus comes from the visual experience of looking at the moon through a screen door which, perhaps, recalls the artist’s technique of drawing scenes by looking at them through an artist’s grid. Then there is “Rosella”, the first of the poems to demonstrate Rankin’s creative use of titles:
Tomorrow I might happen to take a walk past the tomato sauce factory on the corner of our street and suddenly look back to see whether its chimney has broken through the sky.
The fun in this poem, apart from its sharing the throwaway quality that good lyric poetry is allowed to have, is in the way the title suggests we might be in for a sharp visual depiction of a parrot when instead the poem is about the Rosella Tomato Sauce factory.
The visual interests of this early poetry have their consequences. One of them is that the poetry tends to avoid lengthy subordinating sentences in favour of brief declarative statements. The longer and more complex sentences are used for different material. Take the first poem of Ritual Shift, “Mainland Eyes”:
Two miles out and the island. Glistening. An eagle slips between moorings. Begins. His flight. Edge out a channel of air and come by on it. My sure rider. We all dance just short of the waves. A silver mist, peeled off the sea, hangs on the beach. People approach it. Adults agree to smile. Studying the children doing all the usual things they go about the business of conscientiously stepping through. Two birds are shadows. Flying so closely. They loop up the sky and swooping weave it with black wings. To the sea.
The first two poems I quoted are perfectly accomplished but they aren’t ambitious. “Mainland Eyes” is ambitious. It’s interesting for many reasons but one is the way the abrupt non-sentences are used for description of the natural environment and they are contrasted with the longer, four-line sentence that deals with the behaviour of the adults. The impression given is that a scene is being painted and some humans are located within it, doing the usual uninteresting things that humans do. The poet’s real interest is in the sky and its inhabitants, the birds, and in this sense “Mainland Eyes” is an introduction to one of Rankin’s continuing interests. There are birds in an extraordinary number of her poems, birds which, unlike bees and other insects, show no great interest in the earth.
The best of these visual poems is probably the four-part poem, “Williamstown” from Ritual Shift. It is entirely about the changing visuals of the dock area as though someone were planning a painting but it is able to convey process and change. It’s a place where the skyline shifts – “the seasky wrestles gently with the city for line” – and where the windows frame visual compositions:
. . . . . That time it was a spaniard on a bicycle who rode out of the bulk flour container frame of my window, past the Magritte backdrop where the horses graze behind the trainline yet in front of the sea . . .
But there is another component to these early poems. Many of them, including the title poem of Ritual Shift, are visits of childhood memories. Though it is a common enough theme in poetry, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about this, and it will go on to be experiences explored with a considerable degree of sophistication, especially in the sequence, “The Mud Hut”. But for the moment, it’s worth pointing out two things. The first is that the short sentence style of the visual poems is abandoned for a much longer-breathed line. As, for example, in this stanza from “Green Ash”:
. . . . . Summers spent hiding in the itching kapok vine reading a book while the others wash up tough fighting in gangs whose hardware is rocks lessons in cricket from the red-headed boy who, neighbours whisper, later majored in Greek . . .
Apart from “Ritual Shift” and “Green Ash” there is the longer poem, “Soft Track” an unsuccessful attempt to harness this personal memory material that she will deal with so much better as her career progresses. The poem is structured almost like a medieval dream vision: the poet leaves the main road and follows a track to the place where the childhood holiday home (later, the “mud hut”) had been on a block of land just north of Mittagong. Stagily, the track brings back memories of photographs which are described in various inset stanzas, concluding with the fact that now a highway has cut across the land that the hut was on. Like “Ritual Shift” it contains memories of her mother (a single parent after she and her husband divorced) a figure about whom who Rankin has complex feelings and who will play a major part in later poems.
I have never been a wholehearted admirer of Earth Hold, her second book – the only book apart from Ritual Shift published in her lifetime. I think the reason though is extra-poetic. The book is, in itself, such an ugly volume for a start, a trimmed A4 page size to enable it to include etchings by John Olsen which means that the poems are in large type, heavily leaded: not the best format for poetry. The back cover contains an endorsement from Ted Hughes which is eloquent but vague and leads to the suspicion that the book was published in England (by Secker and Warburg) on his recommendation. There are fewer than forty poems included so it has always seemed to me like a book the publisher had no confidence in as poetry. One of the many good points of Judith Rodriguez’s collection of Rankin’s poems is that, after the group of uncollected poems that are previous to or contemporaneous with those of Ritual Shift, there are a group of poems – at least six but probably more – which seem to have been omitted from Earth Hold. The giveaway is that the first six each have the word “earth” in their titles. In a way this enables a reader to reconstruct the book as it might have been as a manuscript before poems were omitted to make way for commercially more trustworthy etchings.
On an initial reading one is tempted to think of the poems of Earth Hold as being – as the book title suggests – poems which venture into the chthonic, poems which by drilling and excavating operate in quite a different mode to the visual, “flat” poems of the best of Ritual Shift. In fact, the connection with the first book is surprisingly strong. These tend to be poems of the east coast of Australia rather than of, say, the muddy fields in Devon. “Earth Lock”, the first poem, looks like an extension of “Mainland Eyes” the first poem of Ritual Shift.
Flying up and down the coast of this land I am unable to enter in. Cloud shadow is making blots on the sea. Below. A sea-horse. Slowly moving between protecting sea-weed. Earth stirs under its sea-bed. . .
The difference is the presence of the viewer not as a visual recorder but as an active participant. It might be possible to say that the visual details here are subordinated to the complex position of the poet herself. The poem’s last line describing the view from one of the aeroplanes emphasizes this – “I hang in my white sargasso. Sky creature in air-weed”. It’s taken up in the third poem, “Island Crossing”, where the poet’s experience comes out as a series of contradictions:
I sailed to an island. It was not there. I flew in a plane from the mainland. It did not exist. . .
The world of the visual, and the terms that painters might use, can be seen in the second poem, “Dragon Veins”, which describes a scene not unlike that of “Mainland Eyes” though without the human representatives. It is expressed as a search for a line in the sense of locating the horizon line but, of course, also of finding the way into a poem. It begins with birds, not the same birds as in “Mainland Eyes” but certainly objects in the upper part of the imaginary canvas:
Four birds fall over the sea. Blue sky is lidding my after-day. On a new-made southern beach I search for a line through hillside. Sand. Flat reef. Trees gnarl down to sea-pull tree-roots wrangle in wet coarse sand. Gulls are whitening my daughter’s eyes. The line slips. My iris sun bleeds at its edge. Then over the sea. A thin shadow. I find cloud pick up the line follow it into this poem.
This sort of image is taken up in a later poem, “The Line”, where the outlines of gravestones make a line as does the edge of a shag’s beak. But the painter’s language goes far beyond the idea of a line separating sky from land. As Rodriguez notes the idea of cutting back images is taken from David Rankin’s aesthetic vocabulary. In a fine sequence, “Mound Poems”, this activity is transferred to the air, the sea and the earth. The air is experienced as wind:
Ridges of wind thudding born out of stone stubbing the earth. Speaking and cutting back. Here early trees reach out and are shaved hard into straight-slanted horizons. Always the cutting back. . .
The sea’s function is “hollowing out . . . . . dressing and undressing the black rock”, while the earth is seen volcanically pushing up rock in a “slow revolt of the sea-bed”. One of what look like the rejected poems of Earth Hold, “First Myth”, is a description of the moment of dawn, something that recurs in Rankin’s poetry. Dawn is the moment when the first line forms between sky and land and, to continue the metaphor, it must also be the moment of the beginning of poetry.
A reminder that all the earth references in Earth Hold are not about topsoil but rather about the planet itself comes in the poem, “Earthed”, which is a semi-comical allegory about Rankin and two other poets. The central metaphor is swimming and these poets, invited for “quiet chat”, turn out, in contrast to the poet, to be “marathon swimmers” whose extended discussion of poetry tires the poet out. She retreats to swimming “alone in her long blue pool”, plainly irritated by the guests. Nothing profoundly chthonic here, just poetic irritation.
The next – and last – major item in her work is an extended sequence, “The Mud Hut”, which, according to Rodriguez, Rankin wrote quickly, just before her diagnosis of breast cancer and which was published in a Canadian journal. With “The Mud Hut” we are in the world of poetic psychodrama, recalling perhaps something like Roethke’s “The Lost Son”. Areas of emotional significance are visited and there are poems about her mother, her father (absent since childhood) and her brother and poems set in places: the mud hut of the title is the holiday home near Mittagong and there are also poems set in a psychiatric ward where she stayed briefly in 1968. One of the overriding images is of retreat into the earth for respite and renewal. This is an image that ties in with earlier poems about the childhood holiday home where bees and other insects burrow into the mud walls in a kind of minimalist enactment of self-burial. In the sequence, the symbol used is of the wombat’s ability to dig into the ground:
. . . . . Wombat! Wombat! Hesitating at earth’s open wound perhaps you remember the countless spearings your ribs feasted off, your belly such good eating, picked clean by the fears of others well may you loaf awhile in the earth dreaming your poem not eager to dance to jut out from the rim.
It’s an image in which the subject is exploited by others – though Rankin is never self-pitying about the way the world has treated her and is more inclined to face up to her own guilts – but still able to dream its poem while in seclusion. The second poem of the fourth section openly speaks of the way in which relations with people – family, friends etc – which are visited in “The Mud Hut”, are visited in this symbolic retreat into the earth. Exploiting the ambiguity of English pronouns, she moves from a collective “you” to a specific one:
During this stay this respite within the vaults of the earth I have rediscovered picked you all up and polished you each night I have sat with you at this table even you who specialised in shadow (who once broke into the chain of brilliant summers to cast yourself into that walk along the cliff path soaring at my side above the jealous sea our conversations desultory my smile courteous as with an unknown guest my legs unduly skipping.)
Rodriguez thinks that this man who “specialised in shadow” is her father and she is probably right, though it’s also tempting to think of him as being one of the poets whom Rankin knew well – she met Galway Kinnell at the Adelaide Festival after the one when she met Ted Hughes. An earlier poem about local flooding invokes a “world-traveller”:
When the floods came the wind too hurling in gales released from the vast plateau of nothingness when we were all sucked down exhilarated by the simple action of water falling into the earth then I wanted to send you a telegram world-traveller, student of the earth I wanted to let you know what it was like in this new ark before the waters dried and the land muddied and cracked taking us back with itself into itself.
It’s always possible that these figures are not specific individuals but rather characters in a psychodrama, more like the unstable individuals who turn up in our dreams, but, on the other hand, “The Mud Hut” is very clear that the mother, father and brother who appear there are the actual figures in the poet’s life. The most complex relationship, in “The Mud Hut” but also in Rankin’s earlier poems, is with her mother: there is a considerable amount of aggression in her attitude but also a degree of reconciliation.
I began this review by talking of Rankin’s first meeting with Ted Hughes at the Adelaide Festival of 1976. It’s fitting to finish with Hughes’s account of Rankin, contained in three poems published together as “Three Poems for J.R.” in 1993, fourteen years after Rankin’s death. Each poem focusses on a different facet. Firstly, Rankin is seen as a “waif in our human mystery”,
. . . . . Defending your family from your own wildness As if Joan of Arc, in the flames, Had begged God To remember the innocent stake And the poor sticks, no less. . .
Secondly, she is seen as a kind of self-consuming, almost priestess-like devotee of love:
. . . . . What was your love? Eyes, words, hands, rooms, Children, marriages, tears, letters Were merely anaesthetics – the lulling flutes As you fed your heart to its god. No matter what happened or did not happen You burned out. You reserved nothing. You gave and you gave And that included yourself and that Was how you burned out A lonely kind of death.
Finally, she is seen in a way that perhaps only a non-Australian might see her, as a kind of avatar of the continent, a lover of the sea and the desert, caught up in the mythic perspectives of the indigenous inhabitants
. . . . . Till the Gulf Provoked by your restless hungry glances, Your incantatory whisperings, your prayers to be carried off By boundless Tao - Came in the dream you just managed to tell, Skull-eyed, big-winged, and took you.
The dream she just managed to tell is from “Night Bird”, one of the poems of Earth Hold. The dream-bird is perhaps the most intense of the birds which have inhabited Rankin’s poems from “Mainland Eyes” on but it’s worth noting that in this dream poem the bird doesn’t take her, as Hughes’s poem says it does, but rather flies past: “I looked into its head as it flew by me // and its great open skull was weeping”.
