Walleah Press (2025)
Reviewed by Stephanie Green for StylusLit
The lasting impression of Kathryn Fry’s latest poetry collection, To Speak of Grasses, rests in its evocation of wonder. These poems explore the living world, through nature, art, music and family, attending, most of all, to awareness of being. In the titular poem ‘To Speak of Grasses’ – which appears in the first section of the book – the poet travels through the Pilbara, observing both continuity and impermanence as ‘home-spun hummock grasses grow the land’, which she finds ancient in form, rich in wildlife. ‘It‘s hard to process the time taken’, she writes, ‘to gouge shapes to foster life’ (8-9). In this poem, as in many others, there are subtle references to brutality and sadness.
Given the great gift of witnessing timeless rock paintings – ‘outlines on the fine-grained boulders heaped/on each other— a huge emu and a ship’ (9) – Fry takes the opportunity to remind us of ‘the significance of these signs’, memorialising tradition, destruction and loss, taking careful account of the beauty and importance of what remains. With the poet we ‘stand stilled as light turns leaves’, embracing this ‘antidote’ for despair (13). In ‘The Old Sand Mining Site’, land reclamation is celebrated: ‘to tend to the garden and nursery/is to feel the weight of your shadow self evaporate/as if being in no time’ (14). Fry works with geological and botanical precision, naming the living beings of place to invite recognition and understanding: for example, acknowledging Triodia and Plectrachne grasses (Spinifex), and Glochidian ferdinandi (Cheese Tree) as part of the substance of her work.
The second section of the book, subtitled ‘In the Company of Lovers’, includes poems written in response to personal memory, influences from art and experiences of music. Many of Fry’s poems are striking for the way they capture a sense of heightened momentarity. In ‘One Night in November’, the poet recalls listening to Schubert’s fantasie for four hands with her beloved, expressing the music’s light yet heady embrace, and the night passing slowly, utterly intimate yet ‘each to our own realm/the earth too holding us’ (31). In ‘The Long Sequel’, passing instances of a shared life are briefly highlighted, new ‘seasons/rolling in’ (28), some celebrated in new flowerings of Zieria and Clematis.
Among the most interesting poems in this collection are those that engage with art. For example, ‘Before the Border – after Rosalie Gascoigne’s Feathered Fence (1978-79)’ evokes the landscape around Canberra, its high open country. The ‘fences’ of Gascoigne’s installation, made up of gathered bird feathers and worn leavings, are assembled as a series of soft barriers, offering a kind of gateway to country as she arrives on a visit from the north as she passes the nearby Weereewa lake (Lake George), spurring memories of ‘our past in the capital’. Other poems in this section refer to vivid works by Davida Allen and Laura Jones – ‘because nothing unravels you/like the face flowering your mind’ (44).
The third section of To Speak of Grasses, ‘Walking Each Other’, is similarly immersed in nature, landscape, family and creativity. However in this section, Fry includes a commemorative historical poem ‘Always Flying’. This is a response to the 3D film Fire on the Water and its use of Arvo Pärts’ composition Fratres, which she encountered on display at the Shark Bay War Memorial, in Denham WA. The film recounts the World War II battle between HMAS Sydney II and HSK Kormoran off Shark Bay. Fry writes of how the music enhances the assemblage of the screen narrative, the ‘shrill sounds of a violin’ which ‘heighten the flames’, softening ‘for the sinking/of the boats’ (60), and honouring the many hundreds killed in the battle. There is horror here, but also wonder, at the power of creative expression to convey the depth of loss.
Kathryn Fry’s poems in this collection are sensitive and eloquent, reflecting a distilled sense of being, lifting us from observation and contemplation to the realization of connection.