By Robin Loftus
Catchfire Press, December 2000
ISBN 0 9577330 2 X
In his introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Ellmann talks about how modern poetry is about "the primacy of the imagination, its power to invest the external world with a new light, or even, as many would contend, to transform it altogether, to invent what W.H. Auden calls alternative worlds." Poetry at its best skips the need for the formal sense making of prose, the need for linearity, for a story, and jumps straight to the beating heart, an instant recognition between writer and reader; an epiphany. Robin Loftus' new collection of poetry, Backyard Cosmos, is a small collection, almost more of a pamphlet than a book, containing 50 pieces including a few haiku, but the work has that transformative quality which Ellmann refers to. Some of the poems are light, delicate, taking on subject matter like nature and the seasons, and others are rich, heavy, dealing with motherhood, love, death, grief and the ultimate subject of poetry; what it means to be a human being. All of the work is gentle, even when angry, and conservative in its readability, its ease on the page and the beauty in its imagery, revealing the occasional hints at humour, particularly when dealing with overwhelming tragedy, death, desperation or loneliness. Nature imagery features strongly, as one would expect with a poet whose home overlooking the Pacific Ocean sits within her bio. The poems resist neat classification, but broadly can be divided into bird poems, mother/daughter poems, specific major catastrophies or event poems, poems which deal with death, grief/depression poems, feminist poems, and her own defined haiku, nocturnes and the envoi (the concluding ballades).
The bird poems start the book, each of them using the metaphor of the bird to call forth some deeper meaning, such as the first poem, "bird of joy", which provides a nice juxtaposition between human pain and the happiness in a bird song. "birdman", the second poem provides what seems to be a relatively straightforward admiration of a hanglider: "an embodiment of air/a rainbow caught/in the sun's gold spin". There is the birdlike alighting (and disappearing) of a visitor in "arrivals and departures", and again the beautifully done juxtaposition between human pain, helplessness, and a bird’s death in “silver-eye”, or the almost Haiku-like “Ping!” of a bell-bird in “bell-bird”. The reality of a “bird’s swift wing” in “missing in translation” marks the painful limitation of words.
 |
