Ultramarine for our mouths

       
       'Aria', a collection of poems
       by Sarah Holland-Batt
       UQP Poetry Series, 2008
       Reviewed by Jena Woodhouse

From the momentary stasis of ‘Pocket Mirror’, the opening poem, to the flux and elusiveness of what will not hold, what cannot be held in perpetuity, of the final poem, ‘The Art of Disappearing’, Sarah Holland-Batt’s debut collection, 'Aria', offers enthralling glimpses and eloquent vistas of the art of poetry.

'Aria' comprises three untitled sections of almost equal length. The elegiac mood of the first section is alluded to in titles such as ‘Ruined Estates’, ‘Late Aspect’, ‘Meditation on the Plums I’, and ‘Elegie – after Rachmaninoff’.
       
       The monastery is a tenantless house;
       I don’t know why I’ve come, what uninhabited
       thing in me loves this kind of vacancy:
       . . .
       Standing in a field bent with dead grasses
       I repeat the names the failing light touches:
       rabbitbrush, goatgrass; all that clutches.
       (Ruined Estates
- Mountain monastery, Sakamoto)


       Tell me, was it here the future lapsed, became an unusable gift?
       (Elegie
- after Rachmaninoff)

The musical motifs, lexis and structural features anticipated by the collection’s title, 'Aria', and by hints in the first section, which closes with ‘Elegie’, are amplified in the second, which opens with ‘Misery and Pizzicato’, a brief sketch reminiscent of a prelude, that makes reference to the Jewish composer Mahler’s turncoat conversion to Catholicism in a Vienna where Jews were ‘not welcome at the Vienna Opera’. The poem ends with Mahler’s oblique response to this event, implied in a note to the violins added to his seventh symphony:

       pluck so hard that the strings hit the wood.
       ('Misery and Pizzicato')

Memory and meditations on memory surface in this section, as in the first, framed by evocations of a variety of contexts and connotations: ‘Letter to Robert Lowell’; ‘Exhaustion’; ‘The Sewing Room’; ‘The Guest’; ‘Athenian Jar – Ajax and Achilles, 530-40 BC’; ‘The Crow’; 'Rachmaninoff’s Dream – Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, 1934').

       I am trying to understand memory,
       how it is that after all the falling and failing
       these floorboards still sing.
       ('Materials')


The elegiac tonality is sustained and intensified in texts alluding to both aria and fugue (‘Un bel di, vedromo’; ‘Letter to Robert Lowell’); and is present also in ‘Rachmaninoff’s Dream – Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, 1934’:
       
       Natalia, remember our apartment that year –
       the figs, the wine we poured
       in two goblets as if they were halves
       of a single hourglass; the campanili,
       their stone tongues, doloroso,
       hollowing night’s tempo out?
       (Rachmaninoff’s Dream
- Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, 1934 )

‘Rachmaninoff’s Dream’ encompasses the turbulent trajectory of the composer’s life, the temper and tempi of his times, on an arc ranging from rhapsody through requiem to a point where:

       Whether we are awake or asleep,
       the heart’s metronome, alla marcia,
       will beat us to the end of history.
       (Rachmaninoff’s Dream
- Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, 1934 )

The second section of 'Aria' ends on a subdued note in a poem that serves as a coda:

       Outside, a crow on a snaggled branch
       turning the same lonely notes.
       So it goes, so we love what can live without us.
       (Not a Life, But Like One)

The third section of the collection assembles poems that move in and out of time, contemplating and meditating on the moment; the ineluctable; the unattainable future; mortality:

       We wake thirsting; we never ask for much –
       Another day. Ultramarine for our mouths.
       (Matins)

       Days, days. The faces blur past
       under a sheet of shuttered glass.
       I watch the future skitter out
       as if a ream of ribbon:
       impossibly fast, and in the wrong direction.
       (Aria for a Painted Dancer)

       . . . . In the end, Orpheus did not sing
       for love. He sang for the instant he forgot
       who he was and had been, for those few notes
       shining shapelessly above the strings.
       (Enduring Ritual)

The still circle of pocket mirror that opened the collection with its implicitly Delphic injunction to Know thyself:
       
       Just to see
       glass to eye, eye to glass,
       what I am.
       (Pocket Mirror)

travels the greater circle of this collection to ‘The Art of Disappearing’, the final poem, where everything eludes the grasp of language, desire, memory, and the longed-for fixity and durability of physical structures and artefacts. Perhaps only art can stay the perpetual attrition. However, it is a conditional reprieve, for what the poet has journeyed towards and grown towards in the course of these poems is an awareness of the unattainability of the art of fixing things in position, in time, in words, and in memory:
       
       It is an art, this ever more escaping grasp of things;
       imperatives will not still it – no stay or wait or keep
       to seize the disappeared and hold it clear, like pain.
       . . .
       It is winter: that means the blossoms are gone,
       that means the days are getting shorter.
       And the dark water flows endlessly on.
       (The Art of Disappearing)

In this quietly assured, yet spectacularly accomplished debut collection, Sarah Holland-Batt demonstrates what amounts to near-virtuosity in working with both longer and shorter poetic text. Delicately nuanced as a Japanese print; animated by an unerring sense of verbal gesture; finely wrought: the poetic sensibility at work here is alive and alert to sound and sense; the poet’s eye and ear and consciousness engage with theme and language to generate verbal artefacts possessing the qualities and attributes of music and water: limpidity, surface tension, depth, without any straining after effect to detract from the reader’s immersion in, contemplation of, and enjoyment of the work.

The meditative, reflexive nature of much of the work tends to generate an annular structure and elaboration of thought and language, an almost labyrinthine inner shape, particularly in poems such as ‘Circles and Centres’; ‘Remedios the Beauty’, and ‘The Woodpile’, the last of which, in its imagistic movement and density, calls to mind an analogue of the growth rings of a tree, seen in section; whereas the shorter pieces, while exhibiting comparable compression and density of thought and language to the longer works, distil their substance to the crystalline clarity of water.
       
       Here, time rounds its edges through wire
       of nimbus....
       (Remedios the Beauty)

       …………………………It is real, this field
       of rings, orbs, cores; a narrative without fringes
       or hard edges, growth that shoots as it rots,
       accreting purpose in its circuitry, yet you find it
       wanting order. ……………………….
       (Circles and Centres)
       
It must be acknowledged, however, that the abovementioned comparisons with the annular rings of a tree and the labyrinthine are at variance with the pliancy and fluency of Holland-Batt’s composition (which one senses may have been informed by her awareness of musical composition, as well as the properties of water); the sonorous precision and perfect pitch of her poetic diction, and the tensile grace and agility of her syntax.

'Aria' is a collection to linger over, to savour, and to admire for its gifted and exquisite craftsmanship.