Poetry

Jakob Ziguras – widely published in Australian literary magazines and the recipient of prestigious poetry prizes – was born in Poland and came to Australia as a child with his parents in 1984. He studied fine arts before completing a doctorate in philosophy, which he teaches (he is also a translator). Much of this background is in evidence in his poetry. In recent years he has lived in his birthplace, Wrocław, Poland, translating contemporary Polish poets while working on his third book of poems, Venetian Mirrors.

In a 2010 interview, Tobin Siebers, the author of Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics, argued that ‘[d]isability still seems to be the last frontier of justifiable human inferiority’. At the same time, he suggested, the evolution and success of modern art owed much to ‘its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful’: ‘No object has a greater capacity to be accepted at the present moment as an aesthetic representation than the disabled body.’ A central problem for Siebers was the disconnect between ‘two cultures of beauty’. Could the ‘aesthetic culture’ that celebrated disability influence the dominant ‘commercial culture’ that stigmatised it?

In this impressive, 1,000-page volume, Christopher Childers has collected almost all that remains of the highly prized verses that were written in Greek and Latin to accompany performance on the lyre. This collection of ‘lyric verse’ provides a roll-call of the greatest poetic voices to emerge in antiquity. Some names, such as Sappho, are still familiar to many today. For others, such as Ibycus, their star has unjustly fallen and the fragments that survive tantalise us with their potential.

In 2014, while judging the Forward Prize for Poetry – one of poetry’s most prestigious awards – broadcaster and author Jeremy Paxman declared that ‘[p]oetry has connived its own irrelevance’. Paxman was talking about his desire for poetry ‘to engage with ordinary people’, to speak beyond the borders of sandstone institutions and for poets to become what Shelley called ‘the unacknowledged legislators’.

As I began reading Elfie Shiosaki’s Refugia, shocking reports were emerging from the Western Australian coronial inquest into the death of sixteen-year-old Cleveland Dodd in Unit 18, the youth wing of Casuarina Prison, a maximum security adult prison. Before I had finished the book, the news came through of the death of another Indigenous teenager in custody. Decades after the devastating report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, with its clear and urgent recommendations, little has been done to keep First Nations people out of custody and safe when in custody.

Australian poetry has always had a particular affinity for birds. This can be either infuriating or indispensable, depending on whom you consult. We might blame Judith Wright for this affinity – or the British pastoral tradition. We might blame the big prizes associated with ecopoems. Or we could just admit that birds are actually really cool and totally worthy of our poetic attention. Kate Fagan intuits all this with Song in the Grass, and she both leans into it and subverts it in equal turns.

Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.

In Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Joseph Acquisto borrows a definition of poetry from Phillipe Jaccottet: ‘that key that you must always keep on losing’. Attempting to know its subject, poetry reveals that there is always more to know. But the French poet’s metaphor, for Acquisto, does not mean ‘simple contingency’. It suggests ‘a complex play of certainty and doubt … that actively resists coming to a conclusion’. We might say that poetry expresses the friction in human experience between time and permanence.