Figtree, NSW: Five Islands, 2026, 146pp

One of the things that distinguishes Jo Gardiner’s second book of poetry, The Grasscutters, from her first, The Impossible Shore, is the comparative absence of those poems of imaginative projection into exotic other lives which was one of the hallmarks of that first book. There we met, in “Vigil” a disgraced nun keeping watch over the body of her only sympathetic contemporary; in “The Cage” a girl who has flown from Saudi Arabia to be with her dying father but who is stuck in a Melbourne hotel in Covid times; and a series of portraits of inhabitants of a lunatic asylum. What struck me about these was how intense the poet’s desire to move imaginatively into these alien environments was. There is no description of the girl’s hotel room in “The Cage”, for example, but elements from the girl’s past – in Australia as well as the Middle East – either cause, or allow, the poem to blossom:

. . . . .
she bought them near the Masmak mosque, the royal jewelers
and merchants, beyond the gold market in the Souk al-Zal of old Riyadh

where even the sparrows are golden, and the pungent scent of Arabian oud
drifts from woodchip smouldering on hot coals and mixes with the smell

of coffee beans and spice, the cheese washed with honey. . .

As I’ve said, this movement into others’ lives is comparatively rare in The Grasscutters though the first two poems might be said to be exceptions to this rule. The first, “Boat Harbour”, deals with the memories and stories of a man growing up poor in north-east Tasmania and is really about the processes whereby memory draws material from the past in the way a net draws fish and lobsters from the deep rather than being an opportunity for a poem to explore an alien life, for the life here would, at best, have to be called domestic-exotic. It probably has first position in the book because of the way it contains themes that are crucial to the later poems: memory, language, the way the world suddenly declares itself and what are the signals that this is going to happen, and so on.

Much more like the poems from The Impossible Shore which I’ve mentioned is the second poem – or set of poems – “Mer-Neith-it-es” which runs to nine pages and so gives scope for expansion. The speaker of all but two of the poems is an Egyptian temple priestess whose mummified remains ended up in a Sydney museum and were only recognised as significant when they were investigated in 2017. The poem is able to release itself into an evocation of intense memories – “Warm wind // swizzled the sycamores, and touched my lips / dusky as plums . . .” – while, at the same time, exploring the notion of incomprehensible changes. As the first line says, “We are always becoming something else”. To make matters even more interestingly complex, a mummified ibis was found accompanying the remains and this ibis gets two poems in which it can speak of and for itself. The ibis in Egypt is connected to Thoth, the ibis-headed god, who is, among other things, the god of wisdom and writing, and he is Mer’s companion and assistant. There’s a lot of humour in a sacred beast finding himself in “this land of parrots” where the ibis is no more than a “bin-chicken” an urban pest.

Most of the other poems in The Grasscutters are anchored in the poet’s experience of her environment. We get to know the house and the garden with the robinia, the liquidamber and the tupelo trees quite well in their Blue Mountains setting. The themes that circulate through these poems involve memory and dream, the idea that the natural environment speaks a language we do not understand, and the presence of visitations, especially from birds, which come from that environment. Many of the poems focus intensely and forensically on how living actually takes place. Central to this is the home that provides a human and poetic habitat to its current owner. “Tenancy” is a poem about how fragile that inhabitating can be in that it is open to disasters such as bushfires, but it does so by beginning with a reminder that just as we precariously inhabit our homes, we also precariously inhabit our bodies – “The body makes a home. / The tree makes a box – / our last home.” An important poem about the centre of this “tenancy” is “Stanzas” the first poem of the fifth section. You could read that generic title as being a kind of balance to the high specificity of the poem itself which basically takes us through the rooms of the house – each a separate colour – from bedroom to study, a place where the poem we have just read is born. It describes one set of rooms but it also describes one day so that its eight stanzas begin in the morning and finish in the evening, a miniature version of those works of art which confine themselves to the events of a single twenty-four hours. On a more important level, the poem springs out of the need to live in the moment (or, perhaps, day) rather than be too concerned with plotting processes. As its opening, presumably imagined to take place while lying in bed in the morning, says:

If you talk about tomorrow, they say,
the rats in the ceiling will laugh, so speak
only of this one day when morning drops
its bright curtain across the window,
                                 *
and the yellow walls watch you stir
and shake birds and leaves from your hair. . . 

So at one level this is a fine book about life as it is lived, where it is lived. There’s a precision and grace about the poems that makes them memorable and enough conceptual sophistication and variety so that you never feel they are monotonously mining the same territory. But I think the interesting issue behind both The Impossible Shore and The Grasscutters has more to do with Gardiner’s own poetic facility. To summarise briefly, my impression is of a poet whose natural tendency is to expand her material. This happens because of what, in the old days of rhetorical studies, would be called “fertility of invention”. Knowing nothing about her writing practices, I still feel that imaginative ideas arise easily and the issue is whether this leads to overkill and, at worst, a facile but empty rhetoric. Thus, although the themes that I have mentioned circulate throughout the poems of the book, a profounder issue is one of expansion and containment.

Take, for example, the first poem of the second section of The Grasscutters which describes the not uncommon experience of a near accident in a car. Most people will respond to the way in which it seems to happen in slow motion as the body gets flooded with adrenalin. In “The Swerve” the focus, though, is on what happens afterwards, once you regain control of your car: “deeply churned, / you find in recent absence, / the presence of the world”. That is, this is one of those poems where the world announces itself anew to you. It’s not simply because you so very nearly said goodbye to it that you only now appreciate it! It’s rather more interesting than that, suggesting that the odd state in the immediate aftermath of the accident produces a condition in which the world can become apparent. This is covered by eight short stanzas detailing such things as “The way the cattle on the pasture / drowse in pooling light / and the musky scent of sheep”. This is not a minimalist poetry in the manner of classical Asian verse where the magic of the newly experienced world would be contained in a single precise example: “After the near crash / the world announces itself: / the musky scent of sheep.” – something like that, but much better! On the contrary, Gardiner’s poetry is inclined to be detailed and expansive: eight stanzas of examples. As I have said elsewhere, there is often something very Australian about this which might well derive from the lack of a trustworthy reading public which encourages Australian poets to speak if not loud, then at least long. But in Gardiner’s case it seems to be a feature of her poetic imagination: it is inclined towards expansion.

Almost as though to demonstrate this, the next poem is a five-page long description of the results of a serious fall in young adulthood which, in age, causes a lot of pain and requires radical corrective surgery. But one could list any number of examples of this natural expansiveness. At the most obvious level, there is the size of the books themselves. The Grasscutters is more than half as long again as a conventional sixty-odd page book of poems and The Impossible Shore is also a large and compendious book. I think the inhabiting of radically different lives in exotic locales – Mer’s life in Egypt, for example, or the nun’s in “Vigil” – allows the imagination to expand in full baroque detail, the way it does in the work of some historical novelists.

“Triptych for Time Lost” is very much about this issue. Illness prevents a trip to Florence and the subjunctive “would have been” allows the poem to bask in luscious imagined detail:

. . . . . 
Slip from pasture to pasture: inside the Duomo, murmurs of dusky pink. The blue is not Fra Angelico of Lippi blue, but a further-out-to-sea, thicker blue. Now, the Medici Chapel, and the Procession of the Magi, each wide eye pinned on yours as they stream into the city, robes flowing over the flanks of white horses, stamping and unbridled from the dark. . .

The last part of the poem deals with life “at home” but it isn’t a matter of contrasting the crude flat and ugly reality of Australia with the glories of Renaissance Florence because the immediate world, just entering spring, is similarly transfigured so that the faces of children are lit and a bower bird, “rows the blue boat of his body into the cherry”. So, thematically, this is a poem about imagination and reality. It could be saying that imagining Florence primes the eye in such a way that the hidden glories of the immediate now are revealed. But it could also, conceivably, be saying that too much dwelling in the imagination distorts our view of our actual surroundings. But I’m more interested in it as being a poem about the expansiveness of the imaginative view. That description of Florence might have continued in the same vein for a dozen pages without any sense of strain and the description of the Australian present, far from being a gruff “but instead I’m stuck with this”, taking no more than a line or two, is equally expansive. And it’s significant that “Triptych” uses a technique that occurs in other poems and that must derive from Gardiner’s concern that her tendency to expand can be a dangerous one. Here the triptych is interrupted by two haiku, forming, as it were, the hinges. Something similar happens in “Bendemeer” and there is a tanka inside “Nightside”. Other poems have statements which tend to summarise and are italicised as the haiku are. Again, at the technical level, we can see a feeling that the fertility needs to be controlled by the use of enjambments, not across lines or even stanzas but across stanzas separated by an asterisk. I think the aim here is to set up awkward divisions which prevent the feeling that the material is rolling out like a sweet honey, encasing its objects in an irresistible flow. It’s an understandable technique but it begins to look automatic and thus irritating after a while.

A final technique which is more promising but can only be used sparingly is the casual introduction of important components. It occurs most interestingly in the title poem of The Grasscutters. This poem appears at the opening of the book’s final section which means that readers have had quite a while to worry about who these people are and what their role will be. The poem is largely about a state of post-operative pain – “you try to shrug yourself / free of forceps, scalpel, / and the bone drill” – and uses the “enjamb-across-asterisks” method I have spoken of. The grasscutters themselves are introduced almost in passing as the poet drives towards the swimming pool for her recovery exercises:

. . . . . 
      Then, after the grass-
cutters shred long stems of light
along the road
                      *
to the pool, reaping
from morning’s pasture
deep armfuls of gold leaf . . .

They aren’t a symbol of the world revealing itself so much as a reminder that in the world there is a kind of grace-in-light that can be harvested. Again, that’s a thematic interpretation. I am more concerned with the brevity of reference: what might have been a long, celebratory passage about harvesting light is here done as brief flash, a controlling of temptation. Sometimes the structure of a poem can deliberately make an issue out of expansiveness. In “Fox”, the “mad infatuation” with the sun generates line after line of heady exaltation:

. . . . . 
          and after a summer taken hostage

by rain, the liquidambars breathe on the embers
          burning behind the dun wave of gums;

the Boston ivy smears a martyr’s blood through
          the relics – the bones of branches,

shadows on a concrete wall – and revives
          your reverence; and kids walk

to school in a straggly procession, unaware
          of their halos of hair. The car radio

sings up the dream of that long-ago May dance
          under the moon you never thought

would end . . .

This poem of seemingly endless linear expansion finishes:

. . . . . 
                                       How
          hard to remember that leaves –

no matter how bright – will coarsen and fall,
          when even the eye of the roadkill

meets yours, quivers and leaps at the low sun,
                    her fur alive with light.

We’ve been waiting for that fox since it appeared in the title and the direction of the poems expanse seemed to be continuously taking us away from it.

It’s intriguing to see a poet working to control by various techniques what in other poets might be a creative blessing: a fertility of invention and ability effortlessly to expand into imaginative areas. But there are so many good poems in Gardiner’s two books that is apparent that she succeeds more often than not.