This is my eight post on books I took with me on my brief escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. (I’ve actually been home for a while, but the blog is still catching up.)
Sophia Wilson, Sea Skins (Flying Island Books 2023)
Sophia Wilson was joint winner of the inaugural Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets in 2022. Originally from Australia, she now lives in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The poems in this collection reflect her attachment to both countries: there are poems based in her Australian childhood, and a number about the fraught history of colonisation in Aotearoa, as well as evocations of its land. There are also poems that bear witness to her experience as health professional (one poem mentions ‘the unbearable silence of asystole’), translator (most notably in ‘En Cas d’Urgence’, which switches among English, German, French, Spanish, Greek and Chinese), and manager of a wildlife refuge. That is to say they deal with an astonishing range of subjects.
If I had to generalise, I’d say the book’s central concern is the assertion of the human as part of nature as opposed to abstraction and mechanisation. But as soon as I’d written that sentence I read four short poems that only fit this description with quite a bit of mental contortion.
As with a lot of contemporary poetry, a key feature is a compression of meaning, which means that precise meaning is often elusive.
The poem on page 74 comes with a dedication: ‘for Valeria’. It’s an elegy for a friend who has died:
Nello Specchio d'Acqua You were a glass blower, un soffiatore di vetro hands of silica and carmine You lifted a globe, il tuo capolavoro Within it two dancers cast crumbs to pigeons A window opened to the sea You were the blind man crossing a piazza I was your white-tipped cane On the bridge, at the centre, above the grey you were the singer, the song I was the street sweeper, gathering dust You were a magician, un pagliaccio intossicato dancing across the square I was the guide in a maddened crowd You were a tramp passing by - a mirage in a watery mirror adrift on swelling tides You were wasted, skeletal - maligno il cancro, il tuo fiore in gola You were sinking foundations, eroded façade a stone lion slipped beneath tidelines The sea swallowed our steps - you were swallowed in steps invaded through doors, the walls of your neck your mouth's floor – la tua lingua They gave you a tube for a windpipe I measure the loss of you in tides You were scattered at the rate of tsunami There was a glass blower, un sofiatore di vetro who lifted a globe, il suo capolavoro I was a street sweeper, treading water You came dancing across the square (for Valeria)
This is a lovely evocation of a lost friend, with references to their experiences together that are cryptic, but not so cryptic as to be frustrating. The friend was clearly Italian, a glass blower, who died of cancer of the throat. The scattering of Italian phrases is a way of honouring the friend’s cultural heritage. (A number of poems in the collection do this with Mãori words, wth a similar effect of honouring difference.)
A specchio d’acqua is usually translated as a calm expanse of water. As specchio means ‘mirror’, the emphasis is on the surface reflection rather than other watery qualities – so the phrase could also be translated as ‘watery mirror’ (as in stanza four). Most of the other Italian phrases are pretty much explained in the text: capolavoro is ‘masterpiece’; un pagliaccio intossicato is ‘a drunken clown’.
The first stanza introduces the friend as an artist, and focuses on a glass globe created by her, a glass globe containing two dancing figures.
The next three stanzas riff on that image, describing the poet’s relationship to the artist in terms of two figures in a setting that suggests Venice: the big square, a group of tourists, a bridge, water. The poet was mundane, ‘gathering dust’; the friend magical, a drunken clown, a mirage, a singer, an exotic beggar. It’s not all one-way – the ‘I’ is a white-tipped cane for the friend as blind man, perhaps implying that she brought some groundedness.
Then the poem turns abruptly to the friend’s final days, wasted and skeletal. Interestingly the key information is left untranslated: maligno il cancro, il tuo fiore in gola, ‘malignant the cancer, your flower in the throat’. It’s as if the poet can’t bear to say the words in her own language. In what follows, the images of Venice are no longer of romantic waterways, bridges and tourist-filled squares, but ‘sinking foundations, eroded façade’ and the threat of rising sea levels. The cancer invades the friend’s body like floodwaters, in steps at first – and then, in the third-last stanza, leaving all thought of Venice behind, with the overwhelming force of a tsunami.
The single-line stanza, ‘They gave you a tube for a windpipe,’ interrupts the metaphorical elaboration with a moment of brutal literalness. There’s no need to name death itself: this tube says it all.
The last two stanzas turn again. The first of them reprises the poem’s opening movement, condensing it into three lines, but now the friend is no longer addressed directly. She can only be spoke of in the third person – ‘There was a glass blower’. The poet now recalls herself, not as gathering bust but as treading water ,an alrernative way of saying the same thing, that paves the way beautifully for the final line.
And the final twist: the friend can be spoken to again – and the vital image of her as she first appeared reasserts itself: ‘You came dancing across the square.’
I so get this! A friend of mine died recently. There was a wonderful farewell gathering where her many achievements were celebrated, and her qualities as a friend eloquently evoked. I can’t think of her without a terrible sense of loss, but at the same time my mind keeps returning to an occasion when, a fifty-something woman exultant at having won a game of canasta, she leapt onto the card table to do a wild, stomping victory dance.
I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Sea Skins.
Me fail? I fly! 