Figtree, NSW: Five Islands, 2026, 67pp.

Denise O’Hagan is responsible for three books of poetry: The Beating Heart, Anamnesis, and this new one, What the Mirror Tells. The growth in quality across these books is quite remarkable. The first book is very much about memories of her upbringing in Italy together with a number of poems about her son’s medical condition but its title poem is about the writing experience itself. It is framed as one of the poems about childhood in Italy and it involves memories of her father and mother both writing – he drily accurate reports and she scenes involving fictional characters – before going on to reflect on the experience of writing itself. It, like other poems in The Beating Heart which deal with the writing process, is fairly prosy – “Even now, decades later, it seems / Direct experience is not enough: / I was ever wrapped in words . . .” – but has a useful description of the interests and obsessions which will inform the later poems:

. . . . . 
To move the boundaries of what’s real
And write a world into existence,
People it with those who may have lived
Or did or could or should have 
And give voice to the maybe-souls
Who inhabit the fringes of our subconscious. . .

This alternate world or “otherworld” is a recurrent theme in the poems of the later books but the quality of the poetry is good enough for readers to feel sure that this is not a matter of a “themed collection” – a fairly superficial method of imposing a unity on a book – but rather a reflection of the author’s poetic personality at a deep level. The quotation from “The Beating Heart” could be interpreted as implying an interest not in otherworlds but in otherlives and thus promising dramatic monologues or novelistic scenes. But many of the poems of What the Mirror Tells push the issue into much more interesting areas. Take the first poem, for example, where the poet enters a ruined building:

          I’m walking through the stone arch
into the space that used to be something -
the farmhouse cellar, perhaps, or a stable.
I look up at the ceiling with its slow scattering of stars.

. . . . .

          The moon is pouring her light down,
and it’s falling about the beautiful rubble.

This arrangement was centuries in the making.
Every stone is exactly where it was meant to be.

And this is only how the story starts.

What the Mirror Tells, the wider context of the idea of unrecorded lives, keeps these poems afloat. The girl reading the letter in Vermeer’s painting gets to speak about the experience of posing and, at one point, she gives us an inkling of what the letter might have contained – “it dawned on me / it’s hard to stay furious if you can’t move” – again a reminder that there are other perspectives on experience, other worlds interacting at certain points with the one we are focussing on. The maid in “The Maid Awakens at 5.00 am” lives in her own world of intense local physical experience but also has a sense of a wider world. But these are subsumed when she begins her job preparing “to tuck myself into the margins / of other people’s days”. “Snowfall” rehearses the idea of two people who momentarily cross paths in their apartment block but who know nothing about each other and go their separate ways. The poem itself doesn’t profess to know or be particularly interested in what these different paths are, making the point that each life has its own pattern and that there is no omniscient perspective to explain what these are: this is not going to be a repeat of In the Mood for Love.

An important and intriguing poem, “As Water Is to Mist’, inverts the usual approach to the otherworld we perceive at the corner of our vision or when we are disoriented in some way. Here the perspective is not centred on the characters who are granted the vision but instead on the imagined spirits who wait there. When scenes like this are imagined – one thinks of the horses in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life – the spirits are usually demanding to be let into our world but in “As Water Is to Mist” we are introduced to spirits who are genuinely sorry for ordinary blinkered people such as ourselves. They are the speakers of the poem:

They crave a sign, those souls confined
          to the slip of space between soil
and sky, that this is not all there is.

We try, in our insubstantial way,
          to stay with those who need us most,
for we are to them as water is to mist. . . 

Not only are they sympathetic, but they also long for recognition – “Oh, / how we ache to converse with them, / be recognised in some small way by those // who are our flesh and blood . . .”

One of the key words that helps to reveal O’Hagan’s poetic personality is “detritus”: fragments of the past from which the alternative worlds and lives can be at least partially reconstructed. In a sense, that first poem of What the Mirror Tells is a “detritus” poem, it’s just that here the detritus is on a macro scale of rocks, rooms and ruins. The opening poem of Anamnesis, “Subtext”, is about detritus on a much more familiar scale:

I am talking of the dent in the hallway door,
The cracked halo of paint around the handle of
The third cupboard in the kitchen, the tracery
Of sentence scraps and childish doodles held
In the wax polish of an old oak dining table:
These things, the chipped and the stained,
The broken and the maimed, fill in pauses
In the official narrative of our daily lives.

. . . . .

                                    We need to
Work backwards, build on the fretwork of fact
To feel the passion in a pressed flower falling
From the leaves of a novel, the heavy pull of
Domesticity in a torn-off shopping-list, touch
Grief folded into a curl of hair in an envelope.

Perhaps the most interesting poem on the subject of detritus is “Alwyn’s Antiques” from What the Mirror Tells. An antiques shop is, by definition, a home for significant detritus, larger than the items of “Subtext” but smaller than those of “The Given”. It’s a good enough poem to be worth quoting in full:

where the light spooling out from the retro table-lamp
coming to roost in the looped linen sails of the Cutty Sark,
has a smokiness that recalls a distant coastline at low tide,

their slow steps over black and foreign sand, the thin, chill wind
raking their hair, how they offered themselves up to the sky,
their knuckles white-dusted by an early smattering of stars

or by the fine lemon-wedge of the moon, with no thought
to the drudgery of work visas, landladies or curfews
or how the language of hands never lasts the distance –

their lives as a slideshow, a brief collusion subsiding
to a rising tide of shadows, a blurred profile slipping past
a café window in the rain, a husky laugh half-

caught in rush hour on a metro escalator and set to replay,
or the particular quality of ashen light cradled in the sails
of a model ship in an innocuous side-street shop. 

It’s a complex piece, though its relationship to the idea of detritus is obvious enough. I read it as a “slideshow” presentation of the developing lives of those who might have come ashore on a sailing boat, progressing in time through a world of foreign sand, to learning a foreign language, to dealing with the inevitable government bureaucracies. All of this produces a “blurred profile” which is imagined as sliding past outside a shop where the retro lamp and the model sailing ship sit firmly in a kind of solid, alternate reality.

O’Hagan’s interest in in otherworlds, her assumption that other lives and other perspectives are unknowable can be thought to come into conflict with the groups of poems in each of her books which deal with memories of her intimate, family life: father and mother in Italy, her son who suffered from birth with a rare and a difficult syndrome. These are experiences in which the narrator-poet is intimately involved and one in which she wants to focus intently on what she knows rather than worrying about mysterious perspectives seen out of the corner of her eye. When the family life is far removed – the world of ancestors – it doesn’t present a problem and the poems can exploit our ignorance of the past lives of grand- and great-grandparents. There are throughout a number of poems which deal with her father’s family’s arrival in New Zealand in the middle of the nineteenth century, marked by the loss of a child on the voyage. And “Recalling Sarah” from The Beating Heart, which re-emerges in a different form in Anamnesis, tells of her father’s mother, dead at thirty-two from tuberculosis. A fine poem from What the Mirror Tells, “Dusting the Ancestors” shows that, when the time perspective is enlarged the two themes – wanting to understand the past and treating it as part of the unknowable otherworld – can co-exist. It could be mistaken for a clichéd poem in which dusting the photographs of predecessors provokes thoughts about the lives they led. But this poem, though its touch is light, is much more than that. It acknowledges that the ancestors’ world is not only a separate one but one with its own logic and tissue of causations, things which are quite separate from the observing poet who looks at the images through the glass of the photograph frames as though she were a child kept out:

. . . . . 
          I stare back at them skipping through the room,
unencumbered by the heavy air, their feet barely grazing the floor,
casting aside their parasols and walking sticks,
          my nose pressed to the glass – 

The intimate or familial past is a tricky issue. A memorable poem from Anamnesis describes getting her first pair of spectacles at the age of thirteen having long resisted it. It is like a little allegory. Before the glasses she had lived in a blurred world and now that world has been made suddenly clear. But you feel that the blurred world is one in which otherworlds are more likely to be seen from the corner of the eye and, to complicate matters, the new clear world reveals unpleasant details:

. . . . . 
I looked out again to see my father vanish round a corner,
Shadowed by the flutter of a floral skirt too close; saw

Fatigue powdered pinkly into my mother’s cheeks; and for
A moment wanted nothing more with this sharp new world . . .

And then there is “Eavesdropping” from What the Mirror Tells, whose details are done brilliantly: a long-ago wet winter night in a cosy pub with friends is imagined to be frozen in time so that it produces a still image, or painting, which can be observed analytically:

                         See, the five of us huddled

at a table, leaning – not over dice, or a hand of cards - 
          but towards one another, mid-sentence,
firelight lacquering chins and knuckles, wetly;

oils take days to dry. And there he is, still twenty-one,
          slouched at the intersection of thirds,
his dark face flushed, hands upturned in supplication,

perhaps, or anger – or had he just drunk too much beer?
          The face of the girl opposite is masked sheer
by the fall of her hair and the pale ridge of her ear . . .

The poem warns about too much staring at images like this, eavesdropping on personal pasts because it will “stir up ghosts to trail the rest of our lives”. Because “Eavesdropping” is such a memorable poem in itself, it may be that we feel that this injunction is more general than it was intended to be. There may be nothing wrong with exploring the past and this may be nothing more than a dangerous single case – probably involving a love affair and decisions made – but it stands as a warning that it is possible to recollect the past too clearly and too obsessively.

The attractions and dangers of dealing with the past are perhaps best summed up in “Chimera”, the book’s second last poem. As it says, the chimera is a mythical creature who “exists in the oblique glance, the afterthought, / the sixth sense that something may be amiss or the opposite”. The memories that are produced in this state can be surprising and, as “Eavesdropping” suggested, disturbing. No matter how much her “pull towards non-oblivion” – a good phrase – is resisted, we are sure, eventually, to feel “the sting in her tail, her whiplash body”.