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Flight Animals
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January 12, 2020
One thing that surprised me in reading this collection was the frequent appearance of the haiku, a form which Bronwyn Lea executes with great skill. None of the poems in this collection are organised by rhyme, except for her free translations of Omar Khayyam, and she experiments with a variety of free verse and stanza forms which are mostly irregular metrically; she has several poems in free couplet, tercet, and quatrain stanzas, some with regular line lengths and some with changing line lengths. But the exception to this varied collection of largely free forms is the haiku sequence, which Lea makes into a kind of strict variation on the tercet stanza form. Many of these poems have a confessional or erotic aspect, to which the haiku seems to be well-suited, since it usually revolves around a startling image.
Lea's eroticism is often tied up with nostalgia: throughout the collection we move from the pathos of 20th-century tragedy and prescription drugs ("Girls' Night on Long Island") to love and its loss ("Antipodes" and "Falling Back to Sleep").The imagined act of lovemaking is the occasion for a haiku-like revelation in "Antipodes:" "in the low light of the afternoon, I saw / it is the movement more than the man / that I love," raising early on in the collection the question of the body's identity and its relationship to its movements. These heavy moments are interspersed with more general reflections on place, the body, and the nexus 'poetry-page-map-body-movement.' The pathos is a confessional pathos, and throughout Lea seems to be writing about what it means to write and map the body, especially through poetry. In both "Seven Feet & Where They're From" and "Contemplating Chaos at Burleigh Heads" we focus on the image of the body as a "craggy line" that runs from the head (the original subject of the John Forbes poem to which "Seven Feet" responds) down to the "weightbearing arch" of the foot which is its support and rhythm.
Lea also thinks about the bodies of animals and plants, however, and sometimes the mapping of the body relies on the recurrent figure of the flower or the titular 'flight animal.' Trying to look after a rare rose, the speaker of "Grandiflora" says "I took my shears and cut and cut and cut. / I was searching for some meaning, / for some hidden living, / or even a moment or two of green," and I detect a note of bathos in this contemporary Georgic, in which pruning (maybe like the cutting, krinein, of the literary critic) is configured as an interpretive move. This move concludes in "My Nepenthe," in which the speaker has to "point to / the moment this mid-/vein rejects the confines / of its leaf and say, this. / I am this. " The mid-vein is described as some "green umbilicus," a botanical mother figure.
The bathos I mention is in the figure of the speaker unable to quite keep a plant alive -- "I should have watered it more" -- and the underground humour of the majority of the collection becomes explicit in "Catalogue of People," which is a very funny although still reflective list of binaries into which people may be categorised. They are all non-exclusive disjunctions, though: "those who like Wordsworth and those who prefer Coleridge. Both are predisposed to owning cats" and the seemingly although not quite paradoxical "those who speculate about two types of people and those who speculate about continuums. The latter are caged in a paradox."
To return to formal features, Lea's enjambment is continually surprising, and a key part of the richness of several unmetered stanzas. In "Ode to a Gymnast" we get the following description, which moves from a description of the phenomenon to a kind of phenomenology of the viewer: "it is not a woman that I see / but a play / of light / on my retinas." Each of these individual lines could be read as a different stage of the movement from sensual object to decoded impression, and the rest of this section of the poem goes one step further, answering the question lingering throughout the collection of what a body really does when it moves through the world, "The splendour / scorched in my mind becomes / a part of me / a luminous / component of my body," ending with a subtle rhyme I've only just noticed.
Lea's eroticism is often tied up with nostalgia: throughout the collection we move from the pathos of 20th-century tragedy and prescription drugs ("Girls' Night on Long Island") to love and its loss ("Antipodes" and "Falling Back to Sleep").The imagined act of lovemaking is the occasion for a haiku-like revelation in "Antipodes:" "in the low light of the afternoon, I saw / it is the movement more than the man / that I love," raising early on in the collection the question of the body's identity and its relationship to its movements. These heavy moments are interspersed with more general reflections on place, the body, and the nexus 'poetry-page-map-body-movement.' The pathos is a confessional pathos, and throughout Lea seems to be writing about what it means to write and map the body, especially through poetry. In both "Seven Feet & Where They're From" and "Contemplating Chaos at Burleigh Heads" we focus on the image of the body as a "craggy line" that runs from the head (the original subject of the John Forbes poem to which "Seven Feet" responds) down to the "weightbearing arch" of the foot which is its support and rhythm.
Lea also thinks about the bodies of animals and plants, however, and sometimes the mapping of the body relies on the recurrent figure of the flower or the titular 'flight animal.' Trying to look after a rare rose, the speaker of "Grandiflora" says "I took my shears and cut and cut and cut. / I was searching for some meaning, / for some hidden living, / or even a moment or two of green," and I detect a note of bathos in this contemporary Georgic, in which pruning (maybe like the cutting, krinein, of the literary critic) is configured as an interpretive move. This move concludes in "My Nepenthe," in which the speaker has to "point to / the moment this mid-/vein rejects the confines / of its leaf and say, this. / I am this. " The mid-vein is described as some "green umbilicus," a botanical mother figure.
The bathos I mention is in the figure of the speaker unable to quite keep a plant alive -- "I should have watered it more" -- and the underground humour of the majority of the collection becomes explicit in "Catalogue of People," which is a very funny although still reflective list of binaries into which people may be categorised. They are all non-exclusive disjunctions, though: "those who like Wordsworth and those who prefer Coleridge. Both are predisposed to owning cats" and the seemingly although not quite paradoxical "those who speculate about two types of people and those who speculate about continuums. The latter are caged in a paradox."
To return to formal features, Lea's enjambment is continually surprising, and a key part of the richness of several unmetered stanzas. In "Ode to a Gymnast" we get the following description, which moves from a description of the phenomenon to a kind of phenomenology of the viewer: "it is not a woman that I see / but a play / of light / on my retinas." Each of these individual lines could be read as a different stage of the movement from sensual object to decoded impression, and the rest of this section of the poem goes one step further, answering the question lingering throughout the collection of what a body really does when it moves through the world, "The splendour / scorched in my mind becomes / a part of me / a luminous / component of my body," ending with a subtle rhyme I've only just noticed.
Displaying 1 of 1 review