Walleah Press, 2025

Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit

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In the blurb I provided for this striking first full collection of poetry, I noted the poet’s ‘wide ranging and sensory appreciation of history, mythology, art, land and coast,’ as well as his unrelenting interrogation of fundamental human questions in ways that surprise the reader and draw us in. These are also poems that pay close attention to public events and frame them expertly— at times, a kind of documentary poetics— in keeping with Southorn’s career background as a newspaper reporter of 32 years in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Pareidolia is the tendency to interpret meaningful patterns —often faces or figures—in random stimuli such as clouds, stains, rock formations or tree bark. More broadly, it is about making connections between unrelated ideas or even about hallucination that can be traced to earliest human survival instincts. This collection certainly blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern worlds; high and low culture; the human and the non-human.

In Southorn’s contribution to Axon titled ‘Faces in Trees’ (2020), he describes a multi-year practice of walking his dog and photographing faces in trees—pareidolic observation as a daily creative exercise and process that feeds his creative life. This sustained study of hidden patterns in nature—many of them cultural—inspired the thematic thread of this collection but there are many other fascinating aspects to this work.

Southorn’s poems demonstrate a deep regard for place and environment, particularly acknowledging First Nations sacred places, but also wider environmental and spiritual undercurrents. The work is also a canvas for the layering of ancient Greek and Roman mythology. For example, in the love poem ‘Lampetie,’ the poet is referring to the sun nymph daughter of the Sun God, Helios, transformed into a poplar tree in legend, her tears turned to amber:

            I put my hand on your face

            The sacred art of touching

 

            Folds pleats veils

            Conceal a slow stream

 

            Dark syrup under the bark

            Sticks on my raw fingers

 

            Warm and thick …(25)

 

Place and space are central to this work and Southorn has indicated interest in Henri Lefebvre’s ideas of spatial practice and ‘spaces of representation.’ Poems often incorporate place names—Burleigh, Tallebudgera, the Nerang River (the author spent many years living on the Gold Coast) and Bermagui in New South Wales where he now resides.

Another place example occurs in the prose poem ‘Argos in Ashmore,’ a poem about a dog scared in a storm. Once again, we find a fusing of ancient and modern worlds, northern and southern hemispheres:

            Argos stood shivering behind buttress roots of trees … He watched

            the rain and the river become one, drinking in the smell of stirred up

            waste and decay. He heard voices of the ancestors and saw his master

            at last, in battle …(58)

This is also an example of human/non-human connections.

 

Pareidolia, associated with creative seeing, is linked to artistic imagination and Surrealist art practices that challenge rationalist perceptions, providing new ways of experiencing the world and creativity. Poems like ‘Despatch,’ (96) demonstrate this thinking:

            The Pacific Garbage Gyre is turned

            by a single blue Pepsi screw top fixed

            to the end of a mahogany walking stick

            in the shape of Ghandi’s left leg from the ruin

            of the Taj Mahal after the Great Flood of ’49

            the walking stick is stuck in meltdown glue …

 

In ‘Dali’s America’ (89), the pareidolia comes from a Dali painting in a gallery window where Southorn achieves a scrambling of surrealist imagery with the modern America of Elon Musk. The painting described —which we imagine melted like Dali’s clockfaces —is a metaphor for America as a disintegrating power:

            … New York an organ not distinctly a heart,

            cataclysmic conglomeration in torment.

            Florida a drooping gland,

            San Fransisco a plumbing of pipes and taps …

            … Certain I am staring America in the face,

            I ooze inside, tell the attendant sharp

            in a dark pinstripe, I like the one in the window,

            the one with the waggly tail.

I particularly enjoyed Southorn’s art historical subjects and the vivid imagery in a poem like ‘Restraint’ (107):

            We stood in Vincent’s room at the asylum

            his bed, his chair, his portrait by another

            a barred window; view across a lavender field

            empty sky a disappointed blue.          

Also, in the tightly packed and surreal ‘White Dahlias’ (103), where Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are:

            smoking      sipping tea

            picking hors d’oeuvres

            with the orange and lemon trees

            so much flesh     what a sweet thrill

            of the haunted     drunk and drawn

            to their plush fingers

 

Some poems feel like reworked newspaper forms, headlines or reportage. There is a collaging of pop culture with politics and landscape— constant juxtapositions and shifts in register. Southorn’s journalistic prowess is evident in a poem like ‘the Lowdown’ (91) which reads like a list of headlines:

            … Etiquette is delightfully upset

            Infantile cruelty is disaster chortling with excitement.

            The snarl of wildlife blows the ashes of fashion under the lights of ritual.

            The ambition condition is ammunition, once somewhere never near enough.

This writing is best read aloud for its clever assonance, chime and internal rhyme.

Readers will savour these fierce, honest poems that highlight places as spaces of memory and belief as Southorn unravels beauty from the twisted tendrils of a chaotic world. I recommend this powerful collection to you.