The poems in Debbie Lim’s Bathypelagia are wonders of animacy and transformation. As the title suggests, Lim plumbs depths with these poems, taking readers to the deep ocean, and fathoming the nocturnal hours. From the ‘midnight zone’ of the waters to the final burst into air, these poems converse with a world alive and full of intent. She writes, ‘It’s 3 am. and the men are benthic’ in ‘A Bar in Bathypelagia’. In this realm, the poet instructs us to ‘invent your own light’. The resultant poems ‘luminesce’.
Cannily constructed in three zones, this book criss-crosses between the still-barely known zones of our oceans, resemblances of domestic life – particularly of motherhood – and the deepest domains of myth. In ‘Love Below 2000 Metres’ Lim writes, ‘But here, even distance/ is an illusion’. Later, in ‘Condor’, the raptor ‘rides the thermals patient as a god’ – and in his vision, the distance also becomes illusion as the bird moves through the ‘invisible hierarchies’ of air while awaiting a body to scavenge. This rising up to the thermals is thrilling after the time spent in the depths – yet even in air, the depths remain present. In ‘Waiting for Trout’ the fish hold the ‘cold smell … deep inside their heads’; addressing trees directly in ‘Etiquette for Trees’ Lim instructs the trees to ‘travel your roots boldly/through darkness and to great depths – / they are your immense secret’. Even as the book travels toward this airy zone, it remembers and maps the fathoms below.
Lim is always precise: she uses the language of the ocean, the language of fishes, the language of scientific description. She notes the darkness that lurks beneath the ‘photic zone’, the spicules of glass sponges, and investigates the metaphorical power in Latin names, such as the millstone of the sunfish’s taxonomic classification Mola mola. Looking toward scientific names is an important part of Australian eco-poetry, but Lim looks further afield, to what lies downward when our attention falls off the continental shelf. In these waters, the result is not eco-poetic but Atlantan. Her love of this language is always evident but is also always necessary to the effect. And in her precision, Lim invites us as readers to find the same exacting resemblances. When in ‘Blue’ she communicates an exact hue – ’I am thinking/ of a gassy flame, its small hood/ wanting for oxygen. Or blood/ that’s clocked the body once’ – Lim catalogues a particular shade through the body, the world and puts us in mind of other instances of the same blue.
These poems make gestures of apostrophic exclamation (‘O colour of bruise.’; ‘O thin isthmus!’) and personification, enlivening their subjects with spirit. When honey fungus speaks, it is with ‘witchy bootlaces’ of mycelial cord and a false face made of a ‘golden cluster of bells’: the relationship between fungus and tree is one of mastery – the fungus wins out, against the ‘slow and steady pulping of what was/ one your wise old heart’. In the middle section, poems that address the strange creatures of the sea – glass sponges, seahorses, fugu pufferfish, vampire squid – mingle with the ancient stories of Medusa, the minotaur. The result is the distillation of the sea creatures into a poetic Wunderkammer: the depths hold terrifying wonders.
Even as we travel into different regions throughout this book, we find deep echoes across the volume. The honey fungus that speaks in one poem becomes the subject of warning to the trees in another. The sunfish is here taxidermied as ‘a papered gong’, there appears in kelp beds as ‘a field of floating moons’. These poems make paths that exhibit ‘old wormings, weird tunnellings’, weaving together motifs across pages, making connections – aquatic, airy, subterranean – that astonish.
