Opening with a poem set during lockdown, this book contains others about art-gallery visiting, being at poetry readings, dog-walking, and thinking about the news, family, films and writing. This makes it sound like a hundred and one first collections but, bit by bit, an autobiography builds up: a Welsh Labour MP granddad, an eccentric but beloved mum who died young, a little brother likewise, a scholarship, and a youth of peace activism with the customary hassles:
[…] I wonder
why they bothered to tap our phones: we were not the stuff
of martyrs. But they kept it up: mysterious silences, unusual
faults on the line. […]
Then teaching in China, migration to Australia, parenthood, more education, and getting wryly older:
[…] me and my generation,
the survivors so far, just doing what we can
with interesting clothes and our accumulated skills
in politics and culture. […]
What also builds up is the nimble but conversational voice. It uses long poems with long lines to correct itself, digress, pile up phrases in apposition and ask questions to the air. It’s intensely self-conscious: ‘There were other things that could have been written here, in this stanza,’ says one poem. ‘Do I give the details?’ asks another. It includes writing tips expressed as self-discoveries (‘you can measure/ the density of the writing by the extent of the terror that precedes it’). It’s satirical about cosy murder series and Hollywood films (‘Somehow in moments/ of high drama there’s always the Stars and Stripes/ dead centre in the screen’), but chiefly about itself: ‘See – / I can feel a spasm of political commitment rising/ unstoppably from somewhere in my mind, and all/ we were talking about was clothes pegs’. What I most liked is how it conveys that oddly chatty despair about the big things that’s so contemporary
Miserable weather he said and I said no it’s
lovely weather for the garden and this might be
the last cool summer ever, we will look back
from the arid future […]
[…] and say, do you remember
that final year of normal […]?
while carrying on, at micro-scale, a contented life
[…] We get off the tram and walk
a few blocks to dinner with friends and also people
we barely know. Histories of trade unions,
the knowledge of awards, […]
Its incomer’s enthusiasms are evident in the Melbourne placenames, Australian English (‘tradies’, ‘pollie’, ‘barrack for the Dees’) and local artists/writers (Sybil Craig, Rosie Weiss, Michael Farrell); there’s even a poem, gently sceptical, about the poet’s citizenship ceremony (‘swearing/ in the gobbledegook of Empire/ to find our place on the team’). ‘I want to be disinherited,’ she says, thinking of British literary influence. Structurally, there’s lots of revisiting, right down to the feel of comfortable shoes and Gramsci’s line about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will, that matches the humorous discursiveness of the individual poems:
My Crete poem sits there in its first draft: pencil,
prose, incorrigibly sincere with a worrying streak
of, horrors, can you believe it, nostalgia.
Caroline Williamson’s work was entirely new and unexpected to me (I’d initially misread Sydney’s Vagabond Press as Glasgow’s Vagabond Voices) but was a great find. Indeed, from the evidence of recent magazines (‘Dido’, in Overland, especially), it looks like it’s getting even better.
Guy Russell 25th October 2024
