Winter reads 2: D G Lloyd’s alive in Dubbo

This is my second post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

D G Lloyd was born in Dubbo in the late 70s. After spending some time in coastal cities as a young adult, he lives in Dubbo once again. This book is a celebration, of sorts, of his hometown.

It opens with an epigraph from one of Dubbo’s most notorious daughters, Kate Leigh, who is described politely by the Australian Dictionary of Biography as ‘a crime entrepreneur’. The epigraph reads, ominously, ‘Better dead than alive in Dubbo.’

Roughly speaking there are three kinds of poems in the book: incidents from childhood or more recent times, impressionistic images of places, and character sketches. There’s poverty and various kinds of desperation, churches and a brothel, heroin and alcohol, First Nations and settlers (I read D G Lloyd as non-Indigenous), locusts and PTSD. A portrait of the town emerges that’s unlikely to attract tourists, but it rings true – as if the poet has set out regularly with a verbal equivalent of a sketch book and come back with its pages full.

Page 76 chimes beautifully with the epigraph, being the book’s only poem dedicated to the dead:

Old Dubbo Cemetery
Uncared for, a grassy verge and 
artificial roses decorating headstones 
fallen in;
corroded shards and etchings, tilted obelisks,
a cobweb and an orb-weaver in between

the dirt and the gravel, 
oleanders,
a baby's grave marked by a small iron cross; 
the stone angel. Eyeless.
Sullen lips speckled with mould, petals 
drifting from outstretched fingers onto brown earth.

A council worker stands behind hakea wattle 
scraping his boot against the water meter. Cicadas 
chant (endless);
one of the monuments is missing an arm.
A blue-tongued lizard lies motionless beneath, 
bathing in sunlight
against a tawny, heart-shaped tombstone.

The conjures up an image of the cemetery, without editorialising or sentiment. Like most of the book, it feels artless: no rhyme to speak of, no metrical effects, no striking metaphors. Yet it holds the attention – I’ve now read it a dozen times and I’m not tired of it.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. There’s no full verb in the first two stanzas, but a past participle on almost every line: Uncared for, fallen in, corroded, tilted, marked, speckled, outstretched. All movement is in the past. What life there is, in grass, orb-weaver, oleanders and mould, doesn’t disrupt the lifelessness. The first of the two present participles in these stanzas – decorating – is as static as the headstones it refers to. At last in the eleventh line, there’s some movement with a second present participle – drifting.

As if the spell has been broken, the third stanza is full of life and action: a council worker scrapes his boots, a wattle grows, cicadas chant, a blue-tongued lizard sunbathes. The water meter, by implication, ticks. That the cicadas’ chant is endless suggests that in some way life goes on and will keep going on. One of the statues now has a full verb – ‘is missing’ – so even there there’s a hint of agency.

The final image of the lizard, the sunlight and the tombstone is already full of life, when the description of the tombstone as tawny, heart-shaped takes it to another level. The unexpected ‘tawny’ describes the the tombstone as a rich brown, weathered colour rather than the dull grey that dominates most cemeteries, but the vital associations from its usual use – of wild animals and birds, or port wine – hover around it.

Finally, the stone is heart-shaped. It would be pushing it to see a reference to the famous last line of Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb‘, ‘What will survive of us is love,’ but that is presumably the hope that led to the tombstone being shaped that way. Here the love has not survived, but its emblem, the’ tawny heart-shaped tombstone’, is part of the life that continues.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Alive in Dubbo.