University of QLD Press (2024)
Reviewed by Sean West, StylusLit
This is a collection to be read in a car on a long road.
I finished reading Madeleine Dale’s luminous debut collection, ‘Portraits of Drowning’ while on the road from Meanjin (Brisbane) to Mparntwe (Alice Springs). I read the last few pages aloud to Country, surrounded by a panoramic view of wide open plains, as Dale writes:
we step into the bright day
of what we have caught
and spoken onto the land.
[Providence, 75]
Surrounded by red dirt, holding a book so buoyed by water, felt significant. Dale’s work is at turns elemental but also mechanical, delighting in rusted autopsies. Cars trundle and shudder as they move through this collection, as does Tamborine Mountain, where she grew up.
Horses don’t know how to keep off an injury —
they run with open flesh and cracked bones.
I keep three envelopes of hair: mane, tail, and a palmful
of fine brown coat. I turn fourteen in a field.
[Crush Fracture, 34]
With this turn, Dale offers something of herself, dipping a toe into confessional verse — where she hovers but does not linger. I always picture this poem taking place in the Dale family’s backyard with their empty training paddock haunting the frame. Perhaps a by-product of being mentored by Bronwyn Lea is that horses will nuzzle into your poems forever. Or you could chalk it up to Dale’s rural upbringing. Either way, the Mountain looms.
Tamborine Mountain’s presence lurks just below the surface of the above excerpt and more overtly in the neighbouring poem ‘To the Silkworm’ where Dale writes:
There are five roads
off this mountain; the water never gets that far —
we are very jealous of the table. I’ve drunk
at least two possums. They drown in the tanks
and decompose through the taps. [35]
As Jarad Bruinstroop, fellow Thomas Shapcott Prize winner, reflected at his own debut launch of ‘Reliefs’ [UQP, 2023], a collection’s composition is largely a process of ‘topping and tailing,’ weaving poems into a cohesive tapestry, letting one feed into and speak to the next. Dale regularly and seamlessly finds new ways to hold neighbouring poems up next to each other, challenging her reader to pay attention and listen closer to her soft-spoken poems.
We’re there with Dale when she writes in ‘Okinawa Glass’ that “I preferred the lie. I love that shit.” [40] or in ‘Sketch of a Man at Harvest Time’ where she asks of the reader, “Is that enough for a poem?” [42] This is Dale’s sly wink to the reader, which is so characteristic of her voice. We nod our head and agree with her speaker, who is at once charming, vulnerable, and oozing with dry wit.
How masterful Dale is at the balancing act of offering so much and so little of herself to her reader. The poet camouflages herself in rich, meticulously-crafted layers of metaphor. The magic of it is that her work still remains entirely accessible unlike some of her influences, where their language is so illusive and abstract, the work becomes almost impenetrable. Brenda Hillman, one of Dale’s key influences, nevertheless packs a punch in her collection ‘Pieces of Air in the Epic’ [Wesleyan University Press, 2005]:
[…] the combed paint takes a line
from Hamlet—a point in fact
that hesitates. How strange to give up wanting. Life’s
action amazes you.
[Echo 858, 57-62]
Here, Hillman steps outside of the canon, inviting her reader into the poem through a sliver of direct address. Dale’s work is similarly layered with literary allusions, ecological ponderings, and historical reimaginings. But where Hillman’s work is airtight and at times inaccessible, Dale’s voice is more capacious, as if poking holes in the box housing her readers-as-silkworms, allowing us more space to see the light and breathe her in:
Men argued
over her mind as she stepped out of the text
and into the water.
[Eleven Portraits of Drowning, 4-6]
Much like Hillman, Dale’s contemporary lyric voice glistens with meta references to ‘the text’ or ‘the verse’ as a liminal space. I believe this is where Dale is most comfortable, in the imagined space around a text or historical account, flexing her creative muscles particularly where women or extinct species are concerned:
Hand the girl a blade,
the verse is fat with them. Their high arc and quick fall
are the oldest songs we have. She’ll know how to do it:
open a seam in the stanza and slip out the belly
of blind Homer like a new child.
[Give Andromache a Knife, 56]
Like Hillman, Dale revels in stepping outside the text to explore gendered and ecological violence and how history writes (and fails) women and fauna. The throughline is often water, the same way Hillman meditates on an element and lets it colour her work at length. Dale’s poems capture water in its every shade, charting beyond prosaic blues and greens.
Upon rereading Dale’s collection, I’m reminded of how her peer and close friend, Shastra Deo, launched her own debut ‘The Agonist’ [UQP, 2017], dedicating her book of deeply intimate poems to her family and stating for the record, ‘none of these poems are about you.’
Dale has pulled off a similar magic here: her speaker guides us through crystalline waters, muddying them at will. ‘Portraits of Drowning’ is a text to come back to as ritual, a bright lure catching our eye, snagging us again.