Shearsman Books, 2025
Reviewed by Melissa Ashley, StylusLit
Brisbane-based poet and academic Jane Frank’s latest collection of poems, Gardening on Mars, explores themes of imagination, being and creativity. It’s a sort of lyrical manual of the curious, adventurous, and deeply conscious vision of a poet’s life. The discovery of poetry, the pleasure of writing it, the power it affords the poet to think clearly, to invent and remake, is such a deeply arresting experience that she returns again and again to joyfully examine its many facets. But poetry is a slippery creature, and although one might strive to grip it like the wings of a rainbow lorikeet, it is ever elusive and cannot be held onto. Nor commanded or tamed. Rather, the poet must wait for a visitation, must cultivate a presence of mind so she can recognise the sound of its knuckles on her door.
Frank’s poems explore the myriad responsibilities that tie us to the earth, competing for our attention, dragging us in every which direction. Daily, we are absorbed in our scripts of working, parenting, daughtering; in the habitual beliefs we hold about ourselves and the choices we have made; in our grief and pain. But if we want to live joyfully, expansively, we must always raise our heads and look around. We must lift off, ride away, dream and hope, step out of the drowning flow. ‘These mercurial moods / must stop,’ says the speaker, there is more to life than being ‘worry-crammed and aching.’ Always, there is something to celebrate, to be grateful for, a treasure, a small, secret surprise: ‘the day’s edge is purled in gold.’
A way for the poet to transform her mood is to immerse her body in water. In the hilarious poem Survey, the speaker responds to the strange questions of a surveyor about her experiences in the municipal pool with her own invented list. She loves the pool itself, its ‘raised pavilion’ and curvilinear walls; its geometric patterning; the memories it stirs; the associations of classical medicine; the way it concentrates her mind, soughing chatter with thoughts that nourish and refresh; perhaps invite an encounter with the beginnings of a poem, floating and twisting beside her. The pool, like many physical settings and places in Gardening on Mars, is a portal. So, too, might be a window, a hotel room, a wedding, a bird on the wing, an article, the view through a telescope. These transformative surfaces are metaphors for poetry; they are like an eyrie or nest, a place for the imagination to settle, to survey and connect, to arrange and integrate.
In the poem, Watching Hang Gliders with Leonardo da Vinci on Tamborine Mountain, the poet is reminded by the painter and inventor that she must not forget the relationship between ‘forces that pull down / and lifting pressure on a bird’s wing, / that the air is fluid and so am I’ (88). The intense, imaginative space of weaving the endless stuff of living into a poem, the freedom experienced in that moment, has its own rules of physics and is so thrilling that the poet asks Leonardo if ‘thinking / is a kind of flying / like riding a bike through air’ (88).
Like a photograph, the precision of poetry is important. And it is always specific: ‘I want to capture the exact way / a grove of trees looks in a particular month, or season, / or time of day.’ Painting works too; poetry is not the only medium in which to make sense of one’s life. ‘The paper of the sunset that day / had a heavy tooth’ (28) observes the speaker in Western Beach Walk. The poet’s father was an artist, and several poems explore her grief at his passing through reference to his painting. The poem Elysian invents a heaven for painters, which the poet visits to find her father. When she finally locates him – she’s not sure if he’s aware of her presence – he is painting. ‘There is joy / in his face as he mixes yellows, and the sky lightens’ (90). A powerful representation of the relationship between father and daughter, negotiated through art.
Frank’s poems open further and further out, drawing in different systems, states, places, people, memories, expressions; there is no one overarching understanding or place, there is no final arrival or unifying theory. I think this is because poetry itself, in its metaphorical invention, its chains of association, its storytelling and accidents of rhythm and cadence, its wild, magical formation – Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a poem – renders it able to contain entire universes. Gardening on Mars is a fist to the sky in support of the human imagination; it is a shout-out to curiosity, beauty and marvel. For the poet, her craft is the magical wand to sense-making, to integrating and accepting – or sometimes just surviving – the cacophony of daily living; it is also one of the deepest and oldest expressions of our culture and selves. There is no limit to what poetry can express, its ululations and permutations are infinite. And it will ever endure: ‘The house of poems // has walls in colours yet to be named’ (12).