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” would surely take you to Wordsworth’s The Leech Gatherer , but perhaps now also to Beveridge’s “slimy phial” and “fat phlebotomist”. It’s worth saying too, that far above and beyond Google’s holy net you’d find the delicate land and sea world of words that Beveridge has been inhabiting for a long time.
Judith Beveridge’s unabashed love for the natural world cuts through. In a poem such as Animals In Our Suburbs 1960 , Beveridge pries open her own formative and free-ranging analogue habitat, where “No one kept their cats inside. No one took / their animals to the vet.
” The sense here of a careless or pre-anxious suburban age is not only a memory but a yearned-for quality in the poem, made especially memorable by the kind of magnified observations of animal life that are often enough the close-to-the-earth domain of only small children. Despite the emphasis on sound in the title of the collection, Beveridge, as ever, relies most heavily on visual comparisons to help convey the off-the-page reality of all these creatures. Yes, a lot of the focus involves supposedly uncharismatic fauna and flora, and while the cruelty that results from animal and human relationships is obviously a key concern, she is neither programmatic about vermin nor dogmatic.
The effect of her persistent use of similes, though, is to flatten the hierarchy by rendering the creatures she depicts as level travelling companions in a highly connected world, alongside our own eclectic cultural objects. Hence, bluebottle stingers are compared to “soap bubbles on top of small bags of laundry bluing”, a brush turkey’s wattle is likened to “a collar of cold omelette”, early-morning cockatoos are compared to a “freight train shrieking us awake” and stars filling the sky to “change in a tip-jar”. The infra-ordinary texture of these likenings at times hints at a local humour but “likenings” is the right word for Beveridge’s signature technique, where very little exists in an atavistic or singular state.
Yes, nearly everything is likened to something else as a way of capturing it as pure phenomenon. “Nature” is repeatedly compared to “culture”, to such an extent that the distinction begins to dissolve. In Beveridge’s hands this is all life, fruit bats flying over “like sheets of carbon paper”, or the surf’s “dubstep”.
It’s a one-in-all-in world, one streaked with pollen as well as noise, with chaos and tragedy, alongside the poet’s joy. An important aspect of this joy is Beveridge’s devotion to the art form through which she is singing. There is a feeling of loyalty to craft in her work, in Yeats’ words to “sing whatever is well made”, and perhaps an understanding also of the limitations of what her kind of poem can do, which is to celebrate and lament in both surreal and conservative form.
The book’s middle section, Walking With The Poet , brings this sense of self-reflexive making to the fore, paving the way for the playfully light riffs of The Bizarre Bazaar , a homage to Wallace Stevens that uses some of Stevens’ own and most tropical ingredients. Stevens was, of course, a sonic virtuoso and a flamboyant imagist, but he was also a poet for whom conceptual thought was a core inspiration. Beveridge’s iridescent homage touches on all this, but it’s interesting to reflect on how Stevens’ work was in constant philosophic debate with the mode of likening that Beveridge’s poetry employs so often.
Behind The Bizarre Bazaar’ s obvious enjoyment of Stevens’ palette and repertoire lies his consciousness of the impossibility of language to capture what it can only simulate, the thing-in-itself, “the nothing that is not there”. In this way, intentionally or not, Beveridge’s homage becomes a celebration of the emphasis on style that flowered as a direct result of Stevens’ philosophical questing. That our own queen of similes loves this modernist sage’s work so much shows us that for a poet to endure they must not only sing simply but also be as layered as life itself, sufficiently layered in fact to allow all kinds of readers, high and low, here and there, to enter.
The price of admission should never be as simple as subscribing to the poet’s view. Gregory Day’s most recent novel, Bell of the World , was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award. The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger.
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