Walleah Press (2025)
Reviewed by Rose van Son for StylusLit.
Prize-winning poet, Vanessa Proctor’s first free verse collection, On Wonder, is a cinematic observation, a telescopic view and love of nature, and the intimate relationship she shares with it. Yet, it is a gentle meditation, a continuing awareness of the pleasures that envelop her.
The collection’s first poem, In the Park, (p. 1) centres the reader on the park’s inhabitants: rabbits, possums, ants and worms. The poem begins with trees, what has been lost:
trees uncover their skeletons / leaf by leaf, the peeling bark / of the blue gums, the ground /
cross-hatched with fallen branches. //
In the second stanza, Proctor points to the silence; ensures we hear the earth’s breathing. We breathe as she breathes– shallow breaths–for it is in our shallow breaths that we can hear clearly:
‘the earth is humming / with the energy of the unseen: / …’
This awe, this wonder, Proctor seems to say of the earth’s melodious energy: listen, and know this wonder, ‘this place, this now.’ (p.1)
Her words, music, repetition and metaphor capture a symphony of life and light. In Emergence, (p.3) when a child is born with unexpected ‘skin yellow with jaundice,’ / the poet writes, ‘It wasn’t meant to start this way -’ – nonetheless, when we are home, ‘I’ll take you outside. / We’ll feel the breadth of the sky, / watch birds, the way / sunlight catches leaves. //
Proctor shares intimate stories. Story Cafe (p. 7) begins with a wonderful epigraph by Joan Didion: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. A very telling, consolatory epigraph. Proctor writes, …‘amid the clink of coffee cups / two women lean in towards / each other…’ sharing coffee and story. The women crave privacy, but // … are sandwiched / between sentences that appear / like glass noodles, transparent, / shiny, temptingly delicious, / bitten off halfway through. //
While in Beading, (p.10) Proctor employs the visual and the aural, as ‘Beads scatter across the floor boards, / spilling from their packet / little berries of glass and plastic / roll into random mosaics / on this damp winter’s day…’ and we are left to wonder this spillage, but soon we are cast into reflection, a memory:
‘And I think back to the heat / of a Languedoc summer. / My sisters buying melons / from a roadside stall, / heavy and fragrant, / slicing them with / a large-handled knife / scooping out the seeds / washing them in river water.’//
Then, in the third stanza, we are returned, seamless, to the beads and the plastic, as if they have been packed away, boxed, but the memory of ‘that carefree summer spilling over’…remains.
So many exquisite and memorable poems to consider. A dragonfly epitomises stillness and flight, ‘We become a stillness / that dissolves into the morning…’ (p.15)
Proctor’s love of nature and nurture features extensively in this collection. There is a beautiful section on gardens and gardening, so full of seeds, tranquillity and possibility; there is a celebration of time, the past and the future intermingled: what is past is present, and what is present is braided in hope for the future. The seasons, the plantings come and go, change is inevitable, and in this way, it is very much like haiku: observing, wondering, connecting, remembering, another garden, another hemisphere.
Although this is Vanessa Proctor’s first collection of free verse poetry, she has been writing and publishing poetry and haiku for 30 years and has three published haiku collections. Her poetry appears widely in literary journals, and an impressive list of publications and prizes is listed on the last pages.
Proctor deftly weaves her observations in focussed, effective language. Hers is a journey of knowledge, a promise built into each stanza: a promise of hope and return. Solitude and solace can be found here, along with mediation and reward: the reward of being at one with nature.