The Space between Memory and Hope : A review of Backyard Cosmos
she was a garden wild with flowers
a landscape to grow in
when she died
there was only sand a million years dry
to run my bone-dry hands through
and no oasis.
The intimacy of a mother towards her daughter, the intensity, terror and love are all apparent in the delicate writing of "daughter, I call you this":
You travel with me, girl.
In sleep, rocking like music,
Like the cradle in my primordial dreams
Rocking all night in the terrored dark
Till the sun bursts whole from the ocean's wound
And healed again, I walk in the blood bright day.
The combination of motherhood and grief is also powerful as in the memory of murder in "days of grieving": 'Remember me/I am all your daughters.' Death on a grander scale, but always viewed from the perspective of the intimate, the personal sensation, as in "forbidden city" which looks at the Tiananmen Square massacre;
or "edges" which looks at Sarajevo: 'One wakes/sleeps, dreams - it's all the same,/until one day the edge finds you/umaware/and shards of mind fall heartlong/as if forever/and can never quite return.' Or the melding of the personal pain of a dying dog, the death of a baby possum and the East Timor massacres in "too much dying". Sitting as they do next to poems about the male desire for power such as "afternoon teatime" or "blokes", one again is aware of the small, the personal and the individual in every great tragedy.
There is humour here too, lightly hinted at, wry, hidden in poems like "kicking the kitchen blues" where the spuds are left "to their
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