Lines of Desire (Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2025, 77pp.)
Màthair Beinn (np: Vagabond Press, 2025, 96pp.)

Two poets who both share a dual heritage and use it in different ways. Paul Dawson is of mixed Asian and Australian descent and Eartha Davis comes from a New Zealand and Scottish family. With our obsession with liminal heritages – between genders, classes, ethnicities – and the feeling that new things can come from such states, this makes for a heady mix. And yet one of the things that recommends these books is that they don’t flirt with existing interpretations (it may be too extreme to call them current ideologies) of ethnic liminality. For a reader like myself, with a profound dislike of fashionable explanations and a sense that poetry can be epistemologically anarchic, I’m warmly disposed from the outset.

Some of the poems of Paul Dawson’s Lines of Desire push the issue of mixed heritage out into the open in a way that show a personal familiarity with the issue. And this familiarity involves irritation about the matter of being part-Asian by birth but having a quintessentially ordinary Australian name and never having had any desire to visit the land of the Asian component of his personality. No solemn travelling in search of roots here. Lines of Desire is only his second book of poems, the first, Imagining Winter, having been published nearly twenty years ago. The difference between the two is stark: the first is a bitty, beginner’s compendium while Lines of Desire is a sophisticated book that knows exactly what it is doing. It does share with Imagining Winter, though, a tendency to mix modes. Although the book divides neatly into three sections “In Theory”, “On the Page” and “In the Flesh”, the subjects it returns to – annoyance with the contemporary highlighting of hybridity, explorations about narrative, and some sophisticated love-poems – are not packaged into these sections but rather spread across them.

The first section, for example, after beginning with three poems about narrative, its origins and meaning, plunges into “Declaration of the Rights of Rights” a semi-comic piece about the reductive problems involved in the notion of inalienable rights which, as a constitutional lawyer arguing in favour of Australia’s lack of a Bill of Rights once said, simply leads to endless litigiousness and endless hair-splitting problems of definition. “Declaration of the Rights of Rights” embodies this by being four and a half pages long and creates the sense that the examples it uses might be spun out forever. It’s not an entirely abstract issue – exploring how something taken to logical extremes can generate an endless poem – because the matter of the poet’s parentage often pops up among the examples, as though a slight degree of personal stake can work inside a largely abstract piece. Take the beginning:

All rights are born equal.
Some are more equal than others.
I have a right to get married
you have a right to carry a gun.
It is my right to watch porn, free
from persecution, and your right
to call me a racist when I complain
about Asians who spit

but you won’t call me racist, for I have asserted
my right to minority status. I invoke my Asian side
 - the one that got me anthologised -
although my other side regards me as a hoax.

Freedom of religion is a right, and your beliefs
should not be compromised: no work on holy days
and no baking cakes for gays. Secular beliefs don’t count
because human rights are articles without faith . . .

And so on, mixing a persona which speaks of the poet’s actual situation with one in which he represents either side of a binary with no connection to his own beliefs. There are poems in Lines of Desire though in which the “I” and “you” are clearly marked. These tend to be those in which the irritation mounts to exasperation when, for example, a woman in a supermarket during Covid complains that he has overstepped the social-distancing limit. She has seen his “Chinese” eyes above his face-mask and slipped into the paranoia of the period in which the virus is imagined as being continually imported into the country from China. Allowing personal irritation to blossom is usually something that weakens poetry but Dawson is especially good at it and those poems of this type are especially strong. As, for instance, “Bio-diversity Note” the opening poem of the third section:

Moving through this climate-fucked world
in a racialised body made Australian by birth
made Asian by an askance glance of the white gaze
claimed hybrid by the pride of identity politics
and anthologised by diversity ticks, half-

marginalised by ancestry but privileged by class
announcing my gender as a Cartesian metaphor
floundering upon pronouns as I fall
through age groups that keep ratcheting up
like bracket creep, feeling seen

as the patchwork of my belonging comes into being
through coordinates of place, race, sex-
uality, mobility and brain chemistry to forge this
teeming biodiversity, this identity sales pitch
for a submission checklist like census day come early.

As with “Declaration of the Rights of Rights”, there’s a concern here with the shape of the systems we use to think about all of these identity issues. If the subject of “Declaration of the Rights of Rights” was the endless issue of determining which rights have precedence over others and which of the smorgasbord an individual can lay claim to, then the underlying issue in “Bio-diversity Note” is that, once a category of social identity has been established, it becomes difficult to define the exact boundaries. The more closely we focus on the boundary of a category, the vaguer and more dubious its outline becomes. It’s an issue that ranges in significance from what constituted a Jew in Nazi Germany or a black person in apartheid South Africa to what enables a rugby league player to play for Queensland or a footballer to play for Australia. The only practical solution – a “checklist like census day come early” – makes a mockery of the category itself.

There’s a lot of canny analysis lying behind these poems dealing with “social” issues: “#auspol”, for example, has very funny, but surely accurate, portraits of fifteen voting types ranging from Liberal and Labor voters on the one hand to Aspirational – “don’t fuck with the tax system – / because even though you hate rich bastards / one day, you could be one of them / I mean, you never know” – and Independent – “scattergun protest vote or boutique cause? / what makes you different / is what makes the difference”. It’s humour but it’s all sophisticated humour, as is “Ten Poetic Commandments” which, like the much inferior “Yabbering Sextons” in Imagining Winter, gets into the subject of being a poet in Australia. The tone is cynical but, again, the world portrayed seems to be pretty accurate, and only slightly nudged towards hyperbolic satire.

Bracing as these “public” poems are, I retain a lot of interest in the poems about narrative which begin the book: it just seems a promising world for future experimentation. These are quite challenging poems, especially “Indicative” which concludes the book’s first section:

The blue of a curl that nominates
a cloud, its cumulative presence
an apparent artifice saturated
with naïveté, with the petal gentleness
of a sky in transition – streak of
smooth colour illuminating
the meandered edge from nimbus

to ether, and then after -
a sudden sunken heralding
of yesterday’s clause
contraction of an eye birthed
in the image of what was to come.

It’s not a completely impenetrable piece: the cloud image that makes up the first stanza is quite clear and there are three uses of (or puns based on) grammatical terms, “indicative”, “nominates” and “clause” that make one think that this is as likely to be about writing as it is to be about what sinister things are going to happen in the world at large. At any rate it seems to connect with the first three poems in the book rather than those dealing with social issues. It connects to the first poem, “#Emergence”, which is certainly about narrative in that its first image is also of the sky. It’s quite a striking idea to link the mysterious signals within a murmuration of birds to the way a narrative unfolds: coherent but according to laws which it is difficult to penetrate. It’s an image taken up in the second poem – “The line of the graph / begins to curve upwards, like an eyebrow of doubt, // like a bird contemplating flight” – but here the drive of fictionality is connected to desire, something that produces the title of the poem as well as the title of the book. The third of these poems moves more overtly towards desire where – I think – the motivation of desire moves out of the real world to create its own universe and its own genre: “this impossible world // of romantic bliss, of nightly fictions”. I’m rather taken by these four complex and intriguing explorations of the interaction of desire and narrative. They are a long way from the poems about hybridity but they constitute what might become a fruitful line of development.

Eartha Davis’s Màthair Beinn is a very strange book, something that recommends it to careful reading. On the surface it seems easy for a reader to reject it as little more than an ecstatic rave but a closer reading reveals that it has a lot to offer. One intriguing feature is its lack of engagement with issues of ethnicity: the strands of Scots and New Zealand heritage in the poet’s personality aren’t teased out though they undoubtedly influence the material of the poems. Another intriguing feature is its Scots-Gaelic title (Màthair Beinn translates to Mother Mountain) and Vagabond Press deserve praise for producing a book whose title few potential buyers would understand. Commercial pressures don’t always have to be yielded to. Most of the poems’ titles are also in Gaelic and, though these aren’t crucial to an understanding of the poems, most serious readers are going to find themselves working regularly with Google Translate. It may be perverse, but I find all of this both admirable and inviting rather than irritating.

In the poems themselves a number of subjects or images recur – heart, birds, motherhood, mountains, palms, rivers etc – and the method seems to be to mutate from one to another through a kind of supressed metaphoric modulation. It can be difficult process to describe abstractly so a more or less random quotation will give some sense of what this poetry is like and how it works – as well as what it demands of a reader. This is part of “Beò, Beò” (“Alive, Alive”):

. . . . . 
        long
ago, joy
was a 
wren / winged
patina
snagging
on the
limbs
of
trees / long
ago, Heart
was a
lone
traveller / a
feathered
life
taming
her
prayers / salting
the ocean
with
song /
Heart
was
body’s
swan / Heart
was
Earth’s
genesis / now,
Heart 
forgets
her
portrait / forgets
her
wingsown
placenta / listen:
Heart
remembers
the poetry
of Mountain / Heart
remembers . . .

You can see the difficulties that poetry like this has from this example. A reader is inclined to slide down the one or two word lines and be carried along in a way that stops you actually wondering what is being said here. Or at least, what is going on in the transitions between heart, bird and mountain.

One way is to settle on one of the images and follow it through its various transformations. It doesn’t give a complete picture of the strange world these poems inhabit because the result is more one-dimensional than the poems themselves but, in my case at least, it served as a way into the poems. I chose heart – or Heart – to follow, partly because the book ends with a poem about that very topic but also because one senses that Heart is a more central conception than either womanhood/motherhood or the mountain that the book’s title and two named sections suggest. The last poem, “Aoradh do’n chridhe” (“Worship of the Heart”) puts its subject through a rapidfire set of transformations, covering most of the important characters in this drama:

Heart
is a prayer
dressed as
flesh / a spirit-
plumed
river
ballooning
from
our
palms / Heart
worships
our softest 
miracles / marries
the strands
of our 
lostness / asks
our names
to leap
into
belief / remember:
Heart
is an orchestra
of 
witness / her truth
kisses you
gently
on the
mouth / her truth
beats
from within
honey-
laced
fingers . . .

One poem whose title translates as “Towards the Light” begins by seeming to contrast two different directions:

I am ferrying us
lightward/ tucking
our prayers
under
symphonic
shells / I am ferrying us
heartward / plucking
small lives 
from 
lyric / cupping
charred
faces
& their
melt
towards
forgiveness . . .

It’s a passage one might cling to in reading this book as establishing heart as representing an inner drive. It is, as another poem says, caged by the body. But although heart is essentially interior, this kind of poetry quickly opens it out to be part of the world through its modulation into another important image, that of the bird – “Heart is an empire / of worship / spirit quilled / with body’s skyland / the widening birth / of starlings . . .”. In fact, birds might have been a more useful thread to follow through the book since although not a central conception like mother, mountain and heart, they do get involved metaphorically with all the crucial issues. We meet a bird in the first poem which speaks of the woman’s responsibility to connect and repair what has been broken (something in which she is implicated) in bird-terms of nest-making: feathering, braiding and whittling.

Whichever way into this book is the most useful for first readings, it remains a very strange poetry, unlike any I have seen around the place. Rhapsodic, allusive, interweaving elements, shifting shape and all in all challenging the reader: always a sign that a book is worth looking at carefully. One minor downside is its Acknowledgements section. Acknowledgement sections and Notes sections have been growth areas recently. One can understand the extensive Notes sections of contemporary books (understandably there isn’t one in Màthair Beinn) because of the need to protect any allusions to, or modifications of, other people’s texts from the charge of plagiarism. But is there any reason to have Acknowledgements sections which expand like acceptance speeches at an award night? Do friends, loved-ones, publishers and editors need to be thanked? Davis’s book would likely win the prize in this hotly contested area of exhaustive thankyous. It might be my crotchety old age, but I prefer the classic approach that survives in Dawson’s book which simply lists the journals which have hosted certain of the poems. No gushy thankyous there.