Natural and Not

In the May 2016 Poetry, which features Australian poets, Robbie Coburn describes “moving through the dirt beneath the thick rushes.” Michael Farrell mentions a lightning storm that “comes to cook the grass and rinse it.” In her essay “Australian Poetry Now,” Bronwyn Lea points to “the presence and potency of the Australian landscape” as a longstanding theme in her nation’s poetry—and throughout the issue, the natural world is both present and potent. Jaya Savige’s “Magnifera” begins:

Ripeness was a semitone below
the bone clef of the elbow

keying the rain-slicked
cyclone fence: the firm, saclike rind

of a warped minim, golden
drupe note for which we longed.

Stone fruit are fine tutors.
This one unseals a sensual nose hit.

This poem tinkles with musical terms: “semitone,” “clef,” “keying,” “minim,” “note,” even—further down—“punk” and “belt.” In this context, the weave of the cyclone fence might remind us of the lines of a musical staff. The elbow that “keys” it serves as its clef—a pun, since “clef” comes from the Latin for “key”—and the ripe fruit, the “minim,” as its opening note. (“Minim” refers not just to a musical half-note, but also, in calligraphy, to a short vertical stroke—a double-meaning that, like the rest of the poem, links music and words.) That “golden / drupe” is a mango, the fruit of the “Mangifera indica”; as a half-note inscribed on a staff, it both symbolizes and enables music.

Indeed it does. In its own way, “Magnifera” operates by “semitones,” by sounds that evolve subtly from line to line—an echo of the musical concept of “semitone,” the slight adjustment in pitch between half-steps. Thus “below,” in the first line, turns into “elbow” in the second.

But Savige isn’t merely playing with sound. He has recombined the letters in “below” to produce “elbow”—and accomplishes similar feats throughout the poem. “Rain-slicked” yields “saclike rind,” “golden” yields “longed.” Later on, “rich static” becomes “scratchiti” and “frangipani,” “rain-gap fin.” When Savige writes that “Stone fruit are fine tutors,” he doesn’t just mean that these drupes can educate (a reference, perhaps, to the Tree of Knowledge). He also means that “stone fruit,” reorganized, produces “fine tutors.” By the same token, “fibrous pith / is birth pouf,” indeed.  Can you find other instances of such recombinations? (Hint: for a particularly impressive example, examine the last line of the excerpt above.)

What might such verbal evolutions suggest? They could echo the “ripening” process, or the “warping” that process can involve—or even the magical transformations implied by “goblin’s pot.” Such a shift has altered the poem’s title: the term for the tree that bears mangoes is not “Magnifera,” but “Mangifera.” Savige’s transposition unlocks new implications for the word—of magnification, perhaps, or of magnificence.

Like “Magnifera,” Ali Cobby Eckermann’s “Thunder raining poison” locates itself firmly in the Australian landscape. Yet where Savige describes a natural ripening process, Eckermann points to a most unnatural atrocity, one that poisoned the terrain. In the 1950s and 1960s, the British government secretly conducted nuclear tests at Maralinga, an area of South Australia that had long been home to indigenous people. The results were dire: lasting contamination of the land, as well as illness, death, and displacement for locals. The poem begins:

a whisper arrives. two thousand. two thousand or more. did you hear it?

that bomb. the torture of red sand turning green

the anguish of earth turned to glass

did you hear it? two thousand. two thousand or more

yams cremated inside the earth.

While Savige deals in song, Eckermann deals in whispers—a quietness that suits the secrecy of the tests. These lines describe the “torture” of sand, the “anguish” of earth, the “cremat[ion]” of yams—all terms that generally apply to people, not to places or things. Yet in this poem, the land is as sensitive, and as frail, as a human being.

Throughout, Eckermann offers the refrain “two thousand. two thousand or more.” On each occasion, the number refers to something different: “two thousand or more / tears we cried for our Land,” “two thousand / years of memory here,” “two thousand or more / times I asked for truth,” “two thousand or more / trees dead with arms to the sky.” The repetition emphasizes the scope of the damage: the bombings affected countless spheres of life, from emotion to memory to conversation to landscape. It responds, too, to the poem’s initial question: “did you hear it?” With all its reiterations, this poem insists on being heard.

“Thunder raining poison” was inspired by an installation of the same name by the Australian artist Yhonnie Scarce. Scarce hung 2,000 blown-glass yams from the ceiling of a gallery; the effect, according to the exhibition catalogue, is a “cloud-like structure”—a reference at once to the welcome rainclouds of the desert, and the poisonous clouds unleashed by the bombs. It’s an allusion, too, to the fate of the Maralinga soil. The bomb blasts were so hot that—in sickening contrast with the natural, gradual changes of Savige’s mango tree—earth turned into glass.