Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2025, 79pp.

This is very much a book of poems about Tasmania but there’s little trace of Hobart or Launceston in it, let alone of the colonial legacy, of the convict era or the massacres. It’s very much about the physical environment and the title, Lithosphere, refers to those parts of the earth’s crust exposed on the uplands. The central issue for this kind of poetry is what to do with such extensive experience – mainly gained through hiking but also from some social histories – of a purely physical location. Ben Walter’s solution seems to be to try to ensure that each of the poems has, at its heart, a distinct conception, distinctive enough to enable the poem to support itself rather than be merely an appendage to the natural world. Not every poet takes this approach and different poetries try to do different things ranging from trying to reproduce that magical interaction between sound and sense to exploring complex structural devices conceived according to various theoretical positions. But there is also a poetry – more common in Eastern Europe and South America, perhaps – which depends for its strength on a sophisticated concept, often explored in quite simple denotative language. I am thinking about something like Symborska’s “Photograph from September 11” with its elegant, surprising and satisfying conclusion: “I can do only two things for them— / describe this flight / and not add a last line”. Many poems about very specific and limited territories focus on the process of “capturing”, using technical resources to fix the unique quality of the landscape, of the wildlife, of the specific tang of the air and so on. Lithosphere, seems to me to be unusual in being an attempt to make a book of “conceptual” poems.

All this is abstract enough, so an example, admittedly lengthy, will help. “In the Whale” is the second of a group of eight poems about Mt Wellington which are spread throughout the book:

if this rain were a cloud
held at eyes-length, shaped
like an old-books whale with
its bones dusty and sunk,
solid in the sky, cut
from the colour and dry,
we would bathe our backs
in the warm world soil,
skin alive with seeds

but the windscreen
splatters clean moths;
outside, we’re
covered by white mould,
a score without song;
each drop chooses
a cheek to kiss as
fingers stroll
the skin of trees;
glances flow, the
branches conduct.

in ghettos of scree
the doors are slammed
on pattering knocks;
where is grace?
in the whale,
a slippery tongue;
the raindrops
feeling me up.
a cuckoo trills,
he can’t keep pace.

snarling rumbles the air
and the wet, caught white,
clears out in fear. panting
on a green shore, we grip
damp sticks we have fetched;
delicate bones from an ear.

Not at all a straightforward “capturing” poem although one can detect that impulse in the background. The central concept of the poem is to imagine that the surrounding rain and fog encountered on a hike on the mountain is solidified into a whale. There are literary echoes here, of course, bringing in not only Jonah but also Hamlet “very like a whale”, Milton “him haply slumbering on the Norway foam” and, probably most significantly, Orwell’s essay, “Inside the Whale”, with its argument that some experiences are best written about entirely from within without too much concern for the perspectives and judgements of those who are outside. An important issue is whether or not this is “relatable-to”. Once again, I’m reminded of the Metaphysicals whose conceptions – that lovers can be likened to compass legs, for example – are not relatable-to emotionally but have an intellectual (ie conceptual) justification. And half the fun of writing those things must have been the act of demonstrating that such conceptions are intellectually intriguing and worth pursuing in a poem. In a sense the Hamlet reference is exactly about this: Polonius, in his efforts to be sympathetic to his slightly dotty prince, agrees that a cloud is, among other things, shaped like a whale, and one could spin out philosophical issues from this based on accuracy of sensory impressions, the joining of disparate objects in simile, and so on. But the real emphasis of this strange poem is, I think, the experience of being inside something as Jonah was. You do get a feeling of sensory isolation in the poem, one which leads to interpretations of natural events that wouldn’t be countenanced in the sunlit external world. So raindrops are accused of sexual advances, and branches “conduct” – either in the sense of leading the hikers or of organising an orchestra. Finally, and making a fitting conclusion, the walking sticks, picked up on the trek, are like the fine bones of a whale’s inner ear.

These walking sticks remind us that the experiences of Mt Wellington, as of other mountains in the book, are ones derived from hiking. There is a constant sense of movement within the poems. A tricky poem from the Mt Wellington sequence, “Neither on this Mountain”, has as its refrain, “walk hard”. It’s another conceptually difficult poem which I think attempts to position walkers in the environment. Certainly, its conclusion seems to support this: “we do not walk as withdrawn saints, / we do not go naked into the west. / I am fagus in the green havens”. The poem generally works by overlaying a group of religious images on the mountain and the experience of walking –

. . . . .
no honour now for forms of fashioned sand,
trudging hymns and letters from the pines,
so many echoes pressed on pebbles; our feet
recite their chants as eyes beseech
the cool vaults hammered from the cloud;
lee pews slung near wavering columns . . .

All of which encourages a reading of those last lines which assert that the walkers are not penitent saints manque but something altogether more distinctive, even disruptively human. This produces the image of a brilliant autumnal Fagus tree amongst trees that are otherwise solidly green although it could be read as reminder that the other trees are evergreen whereas the Fagus, like humans, displays its own decay in its spectacular foliage.

“Sustainable, Mine” is another of these Mt Wellington poems and has a complicated layout dealing with the way that, in the past, the mountain provided ice that could be sold in Hobart when the weather there was warmer. It’s as straightforward a poem as this suggests though it’s a dramatic monologue where most readers, including myself, might have trouble identifying the speaker from the opening lines:

hello, will you be water?
i have an icehouse
that crushes your bones;
there                       a skull
at rest in the ground.
once, i was water for two
whole days . . .

the purpose of ice is to keep the meat fresh, “closer to walking / than walked on” in the city’s cool boxes, but water can have higher aspirations: when the water is in a dam it reflects the clouds, something that the valleys can’t do, and at night it will even reflect the stars. Again, it’s a matter of choosing an oblique angle towards a subject that might have lent itself to something more conventional.

Often the poems devoted to a particular place create their core concept by anthropomorphising. It’s as though places in the landscape, especially the mountains, interact with the human walkers on the same plane. “Black Bluff” – “your face so white, / the warm fog erasing” – and “Tanina Bluff” – “squat and fat and puffing last, / you poor hill” – are examples of this. And then there is “your roots” which also anthropomorphises: the speaker crouches at the base of a large tree and explores the way it can be conceptualised. The above-ground root system is reflected in the rain so that the whole tree seems merely a ghostly reflection of something far more solid underground:

slipping down your roots,
drunken ladders
playing snakesgames,
trickling. in the blind mud
your reflection
climbs from the surface,
steepening rain
surging the ground
from your undressed limbs. 
I crouch in this ghost,
buried in the open air.

Perhaps one of the best of the poems which choose anthropomorphising as a tactic is “Driftbones” a poem in which the floating logs and timbers of wrecked ships make – as they do – temporary large interwoven structures where the tides and currents have forced them to mesh with each other:

we splintered, empty threads of ships,
press-ganged by wind to service,
cloudbones bowing worship

we waterlogs, with rounded faces,
currents making marriages and 
covering our traces

gripped in rings of time, we rise
and make a wreck about us,
till the ocean catches breath
and starts to breathe –

dragged, with fingers
clutching sand, dragged back
to drift with the sea’s longing,
the longing for the sea

True, the metaphoric density here, with its remorselessly nautical cast, looks like something that is necessary to keep the poem afloat but the structure as a humanised dramatic monologue also means with this poem, as well as with others that work this way, that we are tempted to read it as being as much about humans as about driftwood. That’s part of the double nature of metaphor and it’s quite possible to read “Driftbones” as an allegory of human relationships, damaged and complex but also temporary and subject to the winds and tides of time or fate.

The other poems in the book may be more varied in subject matter but they, too, want to exploit distinct perspectives. Some of them belong to the same category as the Mt Wellington/mountain poems in that they deal with a specific locale – many of them you feel, are places that have been walked to. Sometimes the conceptualising involves a transformative metaphorical framework so that a poem devoted to “capturing” the grass trees in words works by a series of such metaphors:

the tallest birds do not
bury their heads, but we
are cartwheels arrested.
this is no myth, our legs
are petted by sky, flowers
caress white tights; a skirt
of green with definite lines.
will we bow, then soar?
we have moulted our minds
into roots . . .

Metaphor is also the central technique in “There is Always More Than One Canopy”, a hiking poem which seems to contrast the abilities of birds to explore the landscape in a way that is impossible for mere hikers – “so many boots / pecking blunt / at the ground”. Although for much of the poem, one can read the birds as metaphors for humans rather than as a different and superior species. As it says, “we are birds on / this blink of open cliff . . .” implying, perhaps, that the speaker has arrived at a place open to the sky – what an earlier poem calls “great cliff verandas” – and a comparison of himself to a bird is quite viable.

Rather different from the poems that explore the place by hiking through it and then finding ways to conceptualise it, is “Orchidaceaen Footholds” though its five pieces are also based on metaphor because the orchids are described in metaphors suggested by their common names. Thus the Caleana with its strange duck-shaped flower is described in those terms:

watchmakers, bird watchers,
dainty care to wings and bill,
keel and feet; a dry flock
of tiny paintings twitching
in the breeze . . .

Although these seem radically different to the poems based on walking through the Tasmanian lithosphere, they haven’t abandoned the book’s central location: they are all flowers found in Tasmania.

Lithosphere might be a good book to set for students wanting to write about a very specific place since it demonstrates the possibilities and difficulties of adopting this idea that each poem should be framed around a central concept and that these concepts should not be repeated. It would also demonstrate the use of such techniques as conceptualising metaphor and anthropomorphising within that strategy. Of course, getting the right concept is a poetic skill rather than a simple intellectual one.