I’m away from home for two weeks to escape the worst of Sydney’s winter, and have brought a number of physically small books with me. I’ll blog briefly about each of them, focusing as usual on page 76. Here’s the first.
Angie Contini, fierCe (Five Island Books, Pocket Poets Series 20023)
fierCe is part of Flying Islands’ series of more than 90 hand-sized books of poetry. It’s a striking little book – its poems are accompanied on almost every page by exuberant collages.
The collaged images come mostly from the vegetable kingdom and from classic and Renaissance art. I recognise, for example, the ancient Greek statue of Laocoön wrestling the snake, some Hieronymus Bosch, some Botticelli. The overall effect is of decorative tumult, with plenty of naked bodies and flourishing mushrooms, as in the cover (to the left), which sadly is the only one in colour.
The poems are also tumultuous, but here the nakedness is emotional, evoking what a note on the inside front cover calls eco-despair, plunging into dark places and, in the final sections, emerging from them. The four sections are: ‘eCo-propheCieS’, ‘dISencHantMEnt’, ‘rEsiliEnce’, ‘timE’, ‘Re-enChantmeNt’ and ‘tranSformations’. (The unorthodox use of capitals is restricted to these headings and the book’s title. As far as I can tell, it’s arbitrary, a generally unsettling device, perhaps echoing the tumult of the collages.)
There are many wonderful things in the book, especially the poem ’body’ in the final section, which looks back at the ‘rabid waltz’ of an eating disorder.
My plan to focus on page 76 hit an obstacle: the page is blank. Page 77 is also blank, except for the word ‘Re-enChantmeNt’, the title of the fifth, second-last section. So, on to page 78.
Beneath a row of what I take to be dancers on an ancient Greek frieze, there’s this small poem:
old soul come with your wind into this wake wearing thistles and gauze make me a feeler again
The poem is a turning point in the book. Having emerged from ‘the bleakness of ‘timE’, we pivot towards ‘Re-enChantmeNt’, that is, a recovery of magic and meaning. This poem is an invocation opening the section. It could almost be a response to the old Anglican hymn:
Breathe on me, breath of God, fill me with life anew.
Both hymn and poem use the metaphor of wind/breath for inspiration. But where the hymn addresses the Christian God and asks for new life, drawing on the scriptural sense of new life in the spirit, the poem has to define, or at least suggest, the object and purpose of its invocation.
I take the ‘old soul’ to be a kind of Jungian Self, one’s deeply unified humanity, transcending the circumstances and accidents of time and place. It manifests here ‘wearing thistles and gauze’. Once I got past the image of James Thurber’s ‘I come from haunts of coot and hern‘ cartoon thrown up by my recalcitrant mind, I realised that this line brings into focus the relationship between the book’s images and words. ‘Gauze’ signifies the clothes of the classic dancing figures, and ‘thistles’ stand in for the natural world, not always comfortable but sometimes beautiful: so the line, and the images, suggest a reaching for stability in nature and in the long history of art. [Added later: I asked a couple of friends who hadn’t read the book, or this poem, what the phrase ‘thistles and gauze’ suggested to them: thistles, they said, are likely to sting, and gauze can be used as a bandage. Fair enough, I thought, the old soul is aligned with nature that can both hurt and help recover. That works too.]
There are two more words that stand out: wake and feeler.
Without the context of the book as a whole, wake is open to two meanings. It could place the poet in the disturbed aftermath of something, metaphorically the passage of a large vessel. Or the poet could be about to sing at an event held after a death. In context, the latter feels more likely: there have been poems of depression and anxiety, of despair: this word powerfully suggests that those states have led to a kind of death.
Re-enchantment is to be a kind of resurrection: ‘Make me a feeler again.’ I love that line. It reminds me of the wonderful lines from George Herbert’s ‘The Flower‘:
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing.
Angie Contini is calling on her old soul to restore her to that condition. The opposite of despair isn’t hope, but feelingness, aliveness. On a day when the premier of New South Wales has announced that measures to reduce this state’s emissions won’t work, when we’re told that the Gulf Stream may be about to fail, and the Antarctic ice has failed to regenerate this winter, the temptation to go numb is strong – this little poem is timely as a reminder of the emotional work that needs to be done.
I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of fierCe.
Me fail? I fly! 
