Recent Works Press (2024)
Reviewed by Melissa Ashley, StylusLit.
Weathered, published by Recent Work Press is South Australian acclaimed novelist and poet Rachael Mead’s fourth collection of poetry. The book is divided into three segments: Travelling with the wrong map; Chlorophyll & Casein; and Contact Tracing, and explores themes of travel, place, climate change, grief and loss.
Mead’s poems squirm and bristle with material sensuality. Her intensely rendered imagery is searing and pulsing; it is vivid and pungent; it’s sleety and bracing and eggshell fragile. It whispers in one’s ears like a poetry-lover’s ASMR. Powerful metaphors invite the reader to linger and savour every line: ‘knowledge is an odour, / acres of shelves stacked to the wall.’ In the poem ‘Pacing myself’, the Alps have gizzards. Feeling despair during Covid the speaker observes: ‘My mind is the bathroom mirror / after a shower,’ her sense of self reduced to fog. Mead is a virtuoso of cadence and rhythm, crafting her stanzas with sinuous lyricism: ‘let the wind snarl in the trap of your hair’.
Many poems were written during Mead’s far-flung travels: Italy, Antarctica, Finland, Horseshoe Bay, and the reader is generously transported to each destination. The speaker is rarely still. Indeed, there’s an extended metaphor of walking and footprints throughout. Butterflies apparently taste with their feet and Mead’s ambulatory metaphors are similarly turned upside down. ‘We are learning to walk the ancient way—quietly, shoulders loose, / skimming the earth until the soles of our feet have ears’. In ‘Pacing myself’, the poet, travelling in Italy, observes: ‘I am learning this place with my feet’. And she has decided to slow down, for she has discovered that ‘My steps are a rosary.’
Place and its myriad meanings are central concerns. Mead, an archaeologist, knows how to excavate a site and sets her tools and measuring equipment to the job. ‘There are a million ways to know something. This is one of them. / I’m walking this valley but seeing it with words,’ she writes in Credo. She is deeply conscious of her different subjective relationships to any given place, be it as a tourist, an adult returning to their childhood town, or an inhabitant of an environment threatened by climate catastrophe.
Moving on foot through the landscapes of her poems, Mead seems to have drawn down the creative mindset of the habitual walker, a catalyst for her reflections and meditations. It’s as if Mead has recorded – and reframed in eloquent language – the fleeting ideas and thoughts one experiences in such a state. A passing back and forth between the interior and exterior, the internal and external. As if her eyes and skin have become a sieve, and the scents, textures, pictures, sounds of the environment she is exploring entering her pores and lodging in the tissue beneath. Interacting with the memories and knowledge and emotions embodied there. As Mead’s readers, we are fortunate to have been brought along: we can feel the abrading wind, the grainy dirt, the rub of the backpack on her shoulders.
Features in Mead’s landscapes become touchstones, particularly the places she knows deeply, inhabits and revisits. Writing about Horseshoe Bay, Mead reflects, ‘I love this place like a dog loves its human,’ a line that perfectly conveys her joy at visiting. We know exactly what she means. In this place the speaker is both ‘dumped’ by a man, and ‘dumped’ by the sea, the two experiences brought together to express the helplessness and disorientation, the ‘brutal shock of metaphor’ she feels. Mead writes so vividly and precisely about Horseshoe Bay that when she stops to eat, ‘chilli squid and a cold glass of wine,’ it’s as if we are sitting across the table from her, tasting the chili and seeing the condensation on the glass.
Weathering features a handful of category poems – they contain directions, instructions and observations about various activities and events – that are fresh and innovative. The poem ‘Beaufort scale for internal weather’, for example, throws the pathetic fallacy of the weather being related to human emotions up into the air, and, using idiosyncratic word choices, playfully creates new associations and connections. In highlighting our overreliance on meteorological metaphors to describe our moods, the poet creates many new little gems: ‘Sunlight hits mirrors with direct honesty;’ ‘thoughts are scattered and sentences crackle with static;’ ‘a fresh breeze implies cleanliness and health. This is inaccurate.’
Two poems about making Taleggio cheese, one with traditional methods and the other using 21st century equipment, are set out like recipes. They interweave the ingredients and cottage and industrial processes – the machinery and utensils – with a lyricism that depicts cheesemaking as a kind of sensual awakening. ‘Scoop the bowl through the curd, wrists circling in a delicate churn;’ ‘Let the cows lick the salt from your hands,’ reads the method traditionale. In the industrialised version, one of the steps is to: ‘Fill vat 1 with raw milk and flick the stirrer into motion.’ Another involves cupping ‘some curd in your hand. You can tell when it’s perfect, the silkiness / gathered sweetly on your palm.’ The speaker, who is visiting Italy, has played a little trick on the reader, enticing them with the rustic method, but then undercutting it by making the industrial process just as seductive. There are no binaries here.
‘I am in the empathy business. I want to knock you into another skin’. Not only does Mead evoke the specificity of the places she visits, she’s also a surgeon of emotion and mood, exploring jealousy, love, family, friendship and grief with vulnerability, honesty and blistering wisdom and insight. In some poems grief and loss follow the speaker like daily companions. Running in the rain, trying to escape them, she encounters ‘A soft grey drift [which] like a good cry / in the morning leaves you / teetering on the brink all day.’ Perhaps inspired by Les Murray’s collection, Translations of the Natural World, two poems explore Mead’s grief at the death of her lifelong friend and fellow poet Alison Flett. ‘Summer 1978’ deploys an experimental structure, emphasising that grief will not be contained, it exceeds all boundaries of language, self and day-to-day living. Loss shatters identity; fragmented and fleeting memories arise and overwhelm the bereaved: ‘sisterpink and babyoil / hollowcheek mum cigdrag ‘ wobblehouse on watershine’. The private world invented and inhabited by the women’s friendship is evoked using elemental grammatical structures, powerfully expressing a bone-deep state of loss: ‘toosoon skinfret bodygrief.’
The threat of environmental catastrophe ticks like a metronome in the background of the poems. ‘Catastrophic Fire Danger: Level 6’ uses understatement to acknowledge the bitter irony that days ‘like these’ are no longer particularly extraordinary. The speaker, inhabitant of an increasingly fire-threated landscape becomes ‘climate clickbait.’ Enduring, surviving the threat of the destruction of one’s home and neighbourhood is not dissimilar to experiencing warfare or occupation; ‘This day is bloated with tea, dread and tedium/– as long as a life.’ The speaker’s most precious possessions, ‘passports, poetry, / our history glued in albums’ wait by the door.
In ‘Stand,’ the collection’s last poem, the speaker appears to have been atomised by a prolonged period of grief and stasis: ‘Two years I’ve lived as if in a cul-de-sac,’ reads the opening line. The closing stanza is bleak: ‘When you find yourself living in a graveyard / packed with monuments to loss, please, /old one, can you teach me how not to fall?’ But between these difficult lines, the poet experiences freedom and hope: ‘In dreams I soar with bar-tailed godwits, /guided by gut and stars over the vast blue curve.’ In Weathered, our existence, our being, is timeless, dynamic and entropic all at once. We live ‘Halfway between magma and starlight’ and our ‘world is torn.’ Thankfully, we have Mead’s extraordinary voice to weave sense out of it, to build a container for our confusion, like a backyard bird making its summer nest.