POETRY Tintinnabulum Judith Beveridge Giramondo, $27 A lot of fine and exact things have been written about Judith Beveridge’s poems over the years, about her brilliant imagery, her formal skill and her emotional power. In Tintinnabulum , her first collection since her selected poems, Sun Music , came out in 2018 and won the PM’s Literary Award for poetry, all of these qualities are again on display. So, in looking for new ways to describe the work of this much admired poet, the thing worth emphasising is how her unabashed love for the natural world cuts through in this new collection.
For Beveridge, this loved world is the one we share with animals, birds, oceans, trees, starlight and the moon. But it is also inextricably bound to the synthetic world of us human animals as well. Her work fashions a bridge between these elements, showing us how, at a sensory level, all things are interwoven.
Judith Beveridge pays homage to American poet Wallace Stevens in part of her collection. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer That includes the internet, of course. If, for instance, you were to Google the phrase “cuttlefish poems” you would find a rather scanty canon of which the Italian Eugenio Montale’s poem of the 1920s, Cuttlefish Bones , is for me the highlight.
But now, happily, with the publication of Tintinnabulum you might also find Beveridge’s The Cuttlefish , with its “glaucous eyes like galls” and “the blood’s verdigris tang”. Likewise, a search for “leech poems�.