Calanthe Press (2024)

Reviewed by Melissa Ashley for StylusLit.

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Small Epiphanies is the debut poetry collection of Gold Coast poet, David Terelinck. The collection spans a wide range of adventures, passions and emotional states: travel, place, grief, imagination, sex, desire, food, gardens, nature, memory, art and music, just to name a few. Terelinck’s poetry is packed with fresh and original wordplay: judicious rhythms; well buffed verbs; imagery suggestive of vivid texture and light. Aptly novel associations and juxtapositions are everywhere. In ‘Blue Mountains Elegy,’ for example, ‘the melaleuca is bonsaied / by ocean winds and salt’ (38); the sky is ‘a pale blue ceiling / sponged with clouds’ (38).

In the title poem ‘Small Epiphanies,’ the speaker contemplates the structures and creatures at the shoreline of an unnamed bay, teleporting the reader to sit with him and listen carefully to ‘the distant slap of an oar/on the skin of the inlet’; to marvel as ‘another starfish froths up at my feet’ (4). Terelinck’s poems revel in a synaesthesia of extended metaphor. In ‘A Hint of Neroli,’ the speaker observes a bowl of oranges and is transported on a fantastical citric journey into the music, art, dance and religion of Spain. Renovation store shopping is enlivened with irreverent cataloguing in the hilarious ‘Forest Bathing at Bunnings.’ The suggestive, over-the-top names of Taubman’s colour charts ignite a flight of fancy from the ‘sylvan glades / of dappled light’ conjured by the hue of ‘Scots Pine,’ through to daydreams of a sexy tradie painting the speaker’s bedroom walls and windowsills in ‘Raspberry Silk and ‘Bed of Roses’ (16).

But there are far more serious subjects, too, particularly the overbearing prism of grief. The poem ‘Defining Moments’ reflects upon the continued body-shocks of loss felt after the death of one’s partner. Why isn’t there a word for the brutal effect of ‘a whiff of Old Spice’ on his memory? the speaker laments; or a term to describe how it feels to have his feet ‘wallowing in your gumboots’ (6). The emotion is explored in all its slippery chameleon facets. In ‘The Opportunist,’ grief is rude and inconsiderate, showing up where it’s most definitely not welcome: ‘What if grief is just an opportunist / who loiters in the background / waiting for handouts?’ (7). In ‘Plainsawn Psalm,’ the pain on both sides of a difficult parental relationship is evoked with devastating understatement: ‘there is no easy way to ask your father / why he is crafting his own coffin’ (34), observes the son who didn’t grow up to fill his dad’s carpenter’s boots.

The ever-watchful eye of Terelinck’s poetic observer lingers and savours the small pleasures and surprises of material, day to day life. Terelinck writes tenderly about imprinted, recognisable childhood pleasures, bringing a smile of nostalgia to the reader: ‘you can buy mixed lollies / (redskins and caramels for me) / with a handful of change’ (15); or a memory of the speaker’s grandmother, ‘a scrim of lemon butter / on burnt toast’ (40). One of the most powerful, comforting and instructive, even, qualities of Terelinck’s poetic voice is his continuous enactment of the pact he makes with the reader in the collection’s title. Be it the pomegranate in a Persephone Salad, the china teacup cradled during a Zen meditation, or a personified goddess of Autumn working her magic in the garden, a wise graciousness, kneaded from the ingredients of beauty, presence, acceptance and gratitude, permeates. In the collection’s final poem, ‘Nocturne by an Unnamed Pond,’ the poet makes a taxonomy of the ritual-like gathering of physical objects and the state of mental preparedness he likes to cultivate, to create the mood to write a poem. And is swept up in the moment of noticing these simple objects and acts of being: ‘Tonight I want to feel the poem / not write it’ (61), he decides. It is the perfect coda for unwrapping and treasuring the generous gift of Small Epiphanies.