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Babel Fish by Jillian Pattinson

by
November 2015, no. 376

Babel Fish by Jillian Pattinson

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 75 pp, 9781922186690

Babel Fish by Jillian Pattinson

by
November 2015, no. 376

Halfway through her first full-length collection, Babel Fish, Jillian Pattinson quotes Borges's famous argument: 'Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.' Her whole book does its best to embody this idea.

As its title 'Waterline' implies, the first group of poems here is loosely unified by water references, from the semi-scientific language of 'Communion' through to the T.S. Eliot-influenced poems, 'Ambiguities' and 'Estuary'. 'Estuary' elaborates a 'death by water', comparable to Virginia Woolf's suicide.

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