A slow steady rip. This understated acute read of personal politics shows how choices made in the grass roots of the everyday create flourishing diversity or a dry monoculture that wilts as seasons tighten. The price of war always already falling due.
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The writing, gut-punching strong. Relentless seductive words circle in and out of this memoir opening all the openings. The canyon as metaphor, names drop like cannonballs, trauma leaks with all the other waters. The invitation. Come, drown in here. Writers: ‘Tribe’/Sacred.’ (211).
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Water is the saga of all time. To follow a drop over centuries is one way to rest against the holy prayer that makes up the bulk of our bodies. Here is Nisaba, a god/de celebrated on ancient tablets and inked skin.
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Patriarchy’s brutality. A father, ‘implacable and terrifying’ (37). A husband’s interior horror show with the ‘unending discomfort of a cold, monotonous dream’ (95). A woman with a ‘confined foggy, numbing’ pain that explodes into agony (259). Nothing about this book is easy.
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Alps wall-papered on readerly consciousness, angst waits with the reader, finding room after exquisitely depicted room. Facts as stories, the reader, like the narrator, drawn into a fascination with almost anything. The knives as complicated as the Swiss. The timing, just so.
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A ‘redshift eclipsing’ slowly revealing the rot of occupation (16). A ‘fermented tongue’ this work, it flicks with exploratory readiness to act, like that tiger snake surprised on the path (30). Here is ‘what rots in the wound’ (75). Venom as antidote.
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Solidarity and strength in this life story, hope feathering: ‘… as the voices coalesced and echoed an almighty cry of ‘Ceasefire Now! Ceasefire Now!’, it was possible to believe that the whole world was contained within that space’ (63). Read, reread, repeat.
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Love here is agile and more than. A book holding more weight than its few pages: reasons for leaving the homelands of Scotland, a divine found in touch and place, and how decisions made by force are resisted by coalescent common ground.
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Lived red-lipped eighties told through sharper eyes, seeing clearly now as well as then. The ins and outs of bright-light St Kilda, the politics of learning in know-it-all Carlton, and most brilliantly, the work daughters do in leaving and becoming their mothers.
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Mettle, metal, well-met, this poetry weaves threads of love, fight and family with an honesty that connects the soul to the panther’s upheld fist. The openness is a gift: ‘one of the starting points/between you and me/is here on this page’ (3).
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