South Launceston: Walleah, 2025, 67pp.
There are seventeen years between Buoyancy, Louise Oxley’s second book, and this new one. There were five years between her first book, Compound Eye – little larger than a chapbook, really – and Buoyancy. Barely over a hundred poems in more than twenty years must make Louise Oxley the most restrained of Australia’s better poets. This new book, while a little thinner than Buoyancy, has poems of as high a standard and has a lot of connections with that earlier book. Buoyancy, for example begins with poems of orientation. In the first poem, “Surfacing”, a whale breaches off the southern coast – “where the Nullarbor stops” – moving from sea to air but also going backwards in time because, as the poem points out, whales are descended from land animals that returned to the sea: “it’s as if the earth were too hard, / walking too painful”. The poem has a surprising conclusion where what seems like a meditation on a fellow creature with the capacity to inhabit air as well as water suddenly becomes about going backwards in time – reversing the direction of evolution. It also shifts to add a personal element to this reverse evolution:
. . . . .
as if
to open the throat and cry, to draw breath
through the mouth and utter, to close a hand and grasp
were nothing, and I wish I, like you,
were a thing of the past.
These personal issues come into the poems of Buoyancy in subtle and sophisticated ways. The very section titles, for example, “Surfacing”, “Line of Sight”, “Division”, “Extraction” and “Buoyancy” can be read as a lightly coded narrative of separation from one’s partner and the final section interprets “buoyancy”, not as an ability to inhabit water and air so much as a spiritual state achieved after a happy love affair in Wales.
I focus on Buoyancy here because Range Light operates in a rather similar way. The first two poems are poems of orientation. The first, “Orbit”, is stylistically unusual in Oxley’s poetry in that it is a very abstract and denotative piece:
Orbit: a rut made by a wheel. To go forwards or backwards, the wheel must turn. Forwards, not backwards, is the way you think you want to go. High overhead, three eagles circle. You want to go with them, eagle parents and young, take the path they take. The path: child around mother, moon around earth. It’s a matter of gravity; eagles feel gravity in their feathers. They read turbulence, the true shape of clouds, understand lift and bank, know the shape of their own wings. One day the mother’s gone. But watch and wait. Watch the sky and wait. Remember, you can want to go back, to see her again. The wheel must turn.
It’s a complex piece. As I read it, the eagle mother is lost, probably shot, and an observer might want the wheel of time to run backwards so that the family is once more complete but unfortunately it only goes in one direction, a direction that leads to partners separating and children growing up and going on their own orbits too. “Forwards not backwards is the way you think / you want to go” says the poem at the beginning, but there are experiences of loss and separation that make you want to go back. I suppose it balances time as progress with time as memory. And then there is the unifying image of circularity: the rut made by a wheel and the fact that the three eagles circle in a domestic equivalent of the moon orbiting the earth.
The book’s second poem, “Self-Portrait with Oars”, though in a different style, touches on this question of direction, of going backwards. It focusses on the fact that, when rowing a boat, we face not where we are going but where we have been. In a sense we are doomed to “want to go back” while we go forward. It’s probably inevitable that the poem will reference the Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes who are famous for conceptualising the past as lying in front of us – because we can see and know it – and the future as lying behind us where it can’t be seen. Ultimately, although it meshes with the idea of direction and is an important theme in the book, this seems to me essentially a wryly comic poem which mocks the indecision between wanting to go forward and wanting to go back. Here, the poet while rowing, eyes closed to experience – “the sun illuminating / the blood in my eyelids” – finishes up going around in circles.
Once you become aware of this interest in direction, it’s revealling how frequently it recurs. Although the title poem, “Range Light”, belongs to the poems in the book which are either ekphrastic or generally concerned with art – this one imagines an artist having the power to make the spirit of an object like a mini-lighthouse transmigrate and find a new life in an art installation – it’s worth remembering that the object itself in this poem is part of an apparatus to enable sailors to know when they are in the correct channel. There’s an allegory about correct directions there that makes the poem justify its rank as the book’s title.
There are also poems in the first section whose titles alone alert the reader to their interest in the direction of travel: “Riding Out” and “Round Trip”. The former describes horse-riding with a friend, someone who shares a knowledge of the past: “Comfort is in our old knowledge: / our past demands to be left undisturbed”. The ride is a trip forward with the knowledge of the past as a shared experience but at a certain point the pair separate to circle back to their respective homes:
. . . . . We aim to ride a circuit, not to return the way we came. . . . . . A yellow-topped post is where our paths diverge. A goodbye hug’s precarious. The ground is rough; the horses shift and swing, sensing home. I scan the hills for words. You’re returning to a house that’s all but empty, where the man you chose for kindness will be where you left him by the window, in his recliner, staring out. Around us, peppermint gums hang limp and bluish in still air. Their trunks, as smooth as human skin, have creased somehow in growing.
That final image of the gum’s bark emphasises that growing – the inevitable movement forward in time – occurs despite the fact that the riders circle back.
“Round Trip”, describing travelling on Bruny Island, seems on the surface like a dense description of things seen while journeying. In this it resembles, “Invitation to Earnscliffe”, an earlier poem. But again, the issue of forwards and backwards appears. A “remnant cemetery” records the names of the past dead including “Hannah Green, 4 months” and the poem imagines her in the present when it looks for a simile for the way a cloud changes shape:
. . . . .
The sky’s an open, dizzying blue
and seems still, but everything, as ever, is in motion. The one
cloud stretches, dropping bits; becomes a fancy chicken
trailing tatty pantaloons, as Hannah might have, had she lived.
A For Sale sign’s appeared outside the homestead sheds: Your chance for boutique
farmstay or new eco-home, where sheep once clattered in for shearing
and onions hung to dry. For now, the brazen pumpkins fruit, three
cabbage moths twist up and up, the green rosella must be taken off the road.
Everything about the environment speaks change, the process whereby English-style farms become rougher working farms and then become boutique ex-farms, where cemeteries become tourist sites and ‘everything is, as ever, in motion”. Perhaps an earlier reference to the sea whose continuous waves leave a line of sea-wrack is a reference to these processes of change. But within the remorseless movement forward there is also a sense of circularity. Hannah Green can be brought into the present and the farms move from heritage creations and eventually back to boutiques. For this reason, the journey which seems to go in one direction – from “Alonnah to Lunawanna” as the epigraph says – is also a round trip though it is only ever described as a one-way journey.
Moving simultaneously backward and forward informs a number of the poems which are about the poet’s personal situation. “Towards Equinox”, the final poem of the book’s third section, deals openly with the partner’s leaving – “you’re three years gone from here, after all”- but imagines in a guide-post reflector lit up by the setting sun, an evil eye watching over everything done on the property, always ready to criticise. This is all followed by a violent storm, nicely symbolic of an emotional state, which, occurring at the equinox seems to be a way of offering two paths: one back into memory and despair and another forward towards a new strength. The second part of the poem is devoted to some symbolic daffodils, flattened in the storm but kept in a vase. Those in the open will survive storms and have a strong life as time moves beyond the equinox into spring. Their fate is positive, as the end of the poem shows – “Virescent, they’re called. Greenish. Becoming green” – but the issue is whether the poet identifies herself with the damaged flowers in the vase, having “a brief afterlife” or with the thriving flowers of the open field. Perhaps we aren’t supposed to imagine an answer to this question but instead see the poem as expressing both doubts and hopes.
Range Light is not only a book about directions, though. Another of its concerns is the issue of observation. It comes up as method in dense descriptive poems like “Round Trip” but also in “Invitation to Earnscliffe” – another poem where the observer is moving – and “Heifers”. The book’s second section, “The Observatory Shore”, is a set of poems in different forms deriving from the book by Jaques Labillardiere describing facets of Australia from his position on the ship searching for La Perouse. He is an observer par excellence and the poems try to convey something of his precision. There is also a section of poems about paintings – as there was in Buoyancy – though here they are all about works by Brett Whitely.
The final section of the book has poems which are more outward looking, more concerned with contemporary issues of living in the world although these could be squeezed into a paradigm which saw them as looking at the ways in which a colonial past can co-exist with the present-day world. In “The Corvids”, black crows (a potent image in Tasmania) make a constant racket that seems as though “they scold us, like hard truths”. “Thistle Villanelle” looks at the way thistles spread over cleared and damaged ground using it as an allegory of colonialism. In simple condemnations like these the position of the poet is important and it’s good to see Oxley including herself amongst the colonialists – “And so, weedstock myself, I labour with mattock and spade / undoing indifference, re-doing penance and repair”. “How to Treat a Dairy Cow” is about treating domestic animals with a love and care they rarely receive and this treatment of animals is the subject of “Girl on a Fencepost” a description of one of those much-watched YouTube shorts in which a little girl forms (or exploits) an attachment with horses by singing to them:
. . . . . Her open palm moves up and down between the horse’s eyes, a pressure the animal leans into. It blinks more slowly. The eyelids close and soften. The child’s small fingers come to rest around the bony nose that could unseat her with the slightest push. But no, the horse nods off, the head dropping in little increments, the tufted muscular lip twitching in her lap in sleep. A second horse standing by just out of frame approaches now . . . She sees the pony coming, turns and offers it that same small open hand, her smile beneath the jammed-on hat fearless, tender, as if a better world were in her power.
This, and poems like “Stone of Return” in which an aboriginal man transfers the red of a piece of ochre – which has the power to “give and receive” – to her wrist, or “Seedling” with its celebration of the carefully kept plants migrants and refugees have brought, makes for a more upbeat conclusion to the book. But it’s hard not to feel that the dominant key of the book is a minor one, fretting over separation and the tension between facing a life in the future and living backwards in a more satisfying past.
