Gazebo Books, 2023
Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit.
Western Australian poet Lisa Collyer’s debut collection is challenging, confronting and exquisitely crafted. She addresses feminist concerns in poems about ageing, beauty and desire as well as speaking the unspeakable in autobiographical poems about living with the limitations of the female body. Infertility, childlessness, termination, domestic violence and sexual assualt are front of mind in Collyer’s work but she also tackles environmental concerns — female bodies and the plight of the planet are linked by themes of grief and a race against time.
This book—shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewitt Award— has five distinct sections with intriguing titles: ‘Women Squeeze my Breasts to Check How Much Time is Left,’ ‘And I Evolve Teeth,’ ‘Orbiting Junk of Missing Persons,’ ‘You Can be Anything with a Tan’ and ‘A Magic Trick to Slip Through…’
The elements of variety and surprise allow for a single reading even though this book is 168 pages long— Collyer has a talent for first lines and delights the reader in her play with form: there are prose poems, poems with numbered sections, strikethrough poetry, contrapuntal poems, haikus and many other approaches.
These are clever poems written for the curious and intelligent reader. They bristle with references to popular culture, travel, fashion, mental health and Western Australian sites and settings including the Bibbulman Track.
The painful issue of infertility permeates the pages in visceral poems such as ‘Mine’ where Collyer uses an extended metaphor about mining to heartrending effect:
…I am disfigured
by the weight of gold
A scar trucks
on an open pit
across my pubis
They extract a girl
a gift of gold
supposed to be mine:
We bury her blue …
Motifs and symbols such as eggs, birds (‘A Rare Bird’), seeds, nuts (‘Floral Bodies’), fruit, needlework (‘Needlework’) and clocks (‘The Timepiece’) are literally threaded through the poetry in this book. The first poem in the collection —’How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up’—is where eggs are first used symbolically to represent human ova but also heartbreak:
… At thirty-four, I try to conceive but each month an egg cooks
defective. I wish I had Alice while touring Malaysia to help
me order eggs sunny side up. The first question I’m asked is
if I have children. I learn to say, belum (not yet) for the truth
is unpalatable …
Collyer has written a clutch of poems about the beauty industry. ‘The Beauty Police’ is a poem about double standards: the constant efforts women need to make to meet accepted beauty ideals. Occasionally, there is a nod to Collyer’s Italian lineage where, for instance, she:
…tame[s]…
fur lined lips tied to Mediterranean
roots—
…
I detangle self from family
trussed to tresses. A domination
of foreign threads …
Another striking poem, ‘Abnormal Beauty,’ is one of a number of poems that deliver the reader to suburban domestic settings such as department stores and hair salons where we discover that the poem’s narrator:
… like[s] products that remind
me, as a woman, if I see something for myself, it should benefit
others …
… I’m drawn to the abnormal
beauty catchphrase finding it familiar, but I’m distracted by a
Socratic line of questioning. What is abnormal beauty? And can
you provide an example?
Collyer’s poems are one call-to-action after another, and this is just as evident in her eco poems that address issues such as climate change, destruction of habitats and biodiversity. In poems such as ‘To the Sea, ’she writes of sea life choked by plastic:’
We face down
the Anthropocene
sieve breath
through plastic
fragments of breath
and in ‘Biota’ where the poet refuses to mince words,
A vegetarian trades chemical, offsets his emissions with a
nitrogen fix of
green lentils.
These are poems with a sharp outline. Poems about grief stretch to poems about human decomposition such as ‘Mediate on Death’ prompted by a Guardian article by Mo Costani —‘Life After Death: The Science of Human Decomposition’ in 2015:
…Inter my liquid mess
of bruised decay into a soft tissue slush
let flesh-eaters bunk in my colonies
bacterial guests feed —a spleen, a heart,
a death march to a microbial clock,
lock joints and throw away sovereignty.
In this poem, as in many others, there is meticulous work with assonance and internal rhyme that gives Collyer’s work a musicality that encourages reading of these poems out loud. A good example of this is in ‘Hostile Design’, a poem that is centred on the page but with a random stanzaic pattern of white space to create temporal and visual pauses:
…
We commute amorphous but my resistance fissures
a mirror shroud, my chipped tooth mechanism.
Hostile design acupunctures bird soles and metal studs
make for a rough ride skate on concrete sliders
and I wonder why it smells of piss …
Collyer’s striking use of imagery fosters a deep and immersive connection with her reader. For example, in ‘Bildungsroman,’ a poem that unpacks the ‘two hundred and eighty-three steps between childhood and home:’
A school girl’s scoliosis forms a question mark
and asks, why me?
and this beautiful image in ‘Wet Breath:’
Rice flags wave me down. Blue lips
in a waterlogged padi field …
Particularly in later poems Collyer employs wry humour and playfulness but there is still a radical awareness of the perils of capitalism and consumerism in her stroll through suburbia, the poet italicising words from street and business signs:
Troy for Lawnmowing is nailed to a telegraph
pole out processed by Affordable Artificial Glass just past
The Mole Clinic
One-page poems are like islands with a blank page beside them that enables a deep reader focus and there are no page numbers and few endnotes, except to acknowledge lines drawn from Bukowski, Scott Fitzgerald and Maher in the poem ‘Dishonour.’
There is an intricate web of connections and relationships that Collyer uses to tie her work to other texts, allowing layers and nuance, drawing on cultural references and shared knowledges. The poet draws on her wide reading of other poets including John Kinsella’s ‘Window Shopping at the Taxidermist’s,’ Hera Lindsay Bird’s ‘Children are the Orgasm of the World,’ Kevin Gillan’s ‘to Nannup’ and Adrienne Rich’s ‘Diving into the Wreck.’ There are also many references to novels, films, newspaper articles and objects.
Despite Collyer’s wryness and wit throughout this collection, there is an anger and a restlessness at the heart of this work. The cover design by Phil Day captures the rawness inherent in Collyer’s poetry. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to you: there is a depth, honesty and sophistication here that will both move and impress.