David Lumsden

Marcella Polain’s latest book of poems continues her lyrical exploration of personal experience. Her earlier collections centred on immigrant life, shadowed by a violent history, in the adopted context of the Western Australian wheat belt. In the new poems, which occupy more than one third of the current volume, the emotional terrain has thickened, and the range of experience has expanded to include midlife concerns of failing health, ageing parents and death. ‘So this is what life is,’ Polain writes, ‘nausea, vertigo, migraine, cramps.’ One poem describes the extra chores of helping her mother, and ends: ‘Last Sunday you couldn’t remember who I was or / what you wanted me to buy for you.’

‘Read monkeys for pre-existence’ wrote the twenty-nine-year-old Darwin in one of his notebooks, pondering Plato’s assertion that our ‘imaginary ideas’ derive from the pre-existence of the soul. Two years earlier, when HMS Beagle had returned from its circumnavigation of the world, Darwin was still a creationist, albeit one who had entertained doubts. Keen to capitalise on his wide-ranging collection, and to make a name for himself, he arranged for various experts to examine the specimens. Fairly quickly during the ensuing discussions, Darwin realised that his doubts concerning the stability of species were ready to burgeon into a new and disturbingly materialist worldview.