Circadia by Judith Bishop
UQP, 2024

gawimarra gathering by Jeanine Leane
UQP, 2024

The circadian rhythm is homo sapiens’ response to Earth’s orbit of the Sun. A top-down process instigated by neurotransmitters, it trips the nervous system, hormones, circulation, and muscles to rise with sunlight and sleep with darkness. The sleep part of the rhythm is not truly unconsciousness, rather, it’s a descent and ascent through gradations of brain wave frequencies. At its lightest it’s realistic dreaming; at its deepest it’s a sort of paralysis. This state of temporary sensory deprivation not only allows our body to metabolise and grow; it also allows our brain to decide what to remember.

The title of Judith Bishop’s Circadia creates a neologism from circadian and arcadian. Pondering the implications of this word, I thought about how the associations of the two concepts meet. Perhaps circadia suggests that the rhythm of sleeping and waking is an idyllic state. Bishop says in an endnote that it references Nicolas Poussin’s painting, Et in Arcadia ego (73); I wonder, then, if the book’s title implies that darkness lurks always within light. If neologism is intended to pause the vocabulary and deliver a more appropriate addition to it, then it could be one definition of poetry.

But what if the vocabulary contains a word made fit for purpose — a word that contains its own expansive resonance? Jeanine Leane’s gawimarra is imbued with the deep knowledge residing in this Wiradjuri word. Yet Leane goes a step further. On the cover is a parallel, English translation: gathering. The translation and alliteration are generous offers. They provide a point of connection between Wiradjuri and Anglophone readers, and perhaps also represent Leane’s own relationship with these languages. Leane repeats this translation a few more times within her collection, and each time it heightens the poems’ yearning and demand to be “free and untranslated” (‘Biladurang Untranslated,’ 65).

Reflecting the diversity of poetic tradition and style offered by the UQP catalogue, Leane’s gawimarra gathering and Bishop’s Circadia are beautifully produced, tightly edited, and spaciously designed. They are very different investigations of poetry’s contribution to the process of memory.

With a weakness for epigram, I found my reading of Leane’s gawimarra punched by very short verses which open each of the book’s three sections and are sprinkled throughout. They are like pinholes of light, developing a single image from Leane’s banks of memory and metaphor.

Steel Trap

My memory is a steel trap where
the release clasp is permanently jammed.
Things go in but they can never go
out again. They are lodged – permanently.
Stuck forever in an inescapable maze
of time, of place, of detail.
Collective history captured projecting
on a never-ending reel
across the screen of my mind.

(20)

‘Steel Trap’ describes the nature of gathering that Leane achieves in gawimarra. The book takes in broad horizons of historical time — from precolonial scenes of Wiradjuri life in the opening poem, ‘The Gatherers’ (4-6), to Leane’s reclaiming of the ruins of a homestead where her Aunty was enslaved as domestic help (‘Unfinished Business,’ 66-67). This timescale includes what is yet to come: in ‘Your Last River’ the Murrumbidya/Murrumbidgee speaks: “Think of me. Like I am your future” (86). With ‘Steel Trap’ Leane describes this vast memory in ambiguous terms. On the one hand it sounds like a traumatic purgatory of unpruned recall, but the steel trap also suggests a strong visual sensibility (‘a never-ending reel’); generational blood memory (‘lodged’); and a ‘collective’ responsibility for remembering kin and Country that have been overwritten by the colonial archive. In gawimarra this river of memory is both unbidden (‘inescapable’) and essential to the work of (‘permanently’, ‘permanently’) accounting for those denied by colonialism.

Leane achieves this directly through her poetic memorials to individual Blak matriarchs who have shaped the course of her life. These poems are epitaphs, eulogies, letters and albums combined: verbal monuments that inscribe the events and impacts and Country shared between Leane and these larger-than-life women. In ‘Sista-Cuz: Tracey Phillips 1961’ the poet addresses her “Sista-girl, Cuz and Friend” in reverse chronology (41), mapping Phillips’ current relationships in grandmotherhood back to their shared school days. These poems are intensely intimate, they invite us to witness a private message whose public declaration is more important than a pact with the silent reader: “That’s you and me Sis in the classroom under the cross […] We bit our tongues then didn’t we Sis” (42). This testimonial quality is a significant element of the book’s reclaiming work, accumulating an undeniable record.

While Leane’s steel trap mind cannot release its capture, it continues to gather more. A senior figure of literature, nevertheless Leane positions herself in gawimarra as a learner, honouring her teachers and narrating her recovery of Wiradjuri language in later life. In ‘Yanhamambirra – Release’ and ‘Wiradjuri Dictionary’ Leane shares the staggering vulnerability and fulfilment of becoming immersed in a language from which she was unwillingly separated (73; 74-75). In many of the book’s poems she credits Aunty Elaine Lomas for Wiradjuri interpretation, including this one:

The space of my emptiness is a chasm so deep so wide
I’ll fall to endless nothing without your words to cross it.

I have starved for you to feed my soul nourish my
blood to strengthen my bones. ngadhi bagurany
dhalbur (ngadhi bagurany dhalbur)

(‘Yanhamambirra – Release,’ 73)

It is a humble and humbling position to read, but it only makes Leane a more powerful voice — for here she is writing in not one but two languages at the full force of her purpose as poet.

As Wiradjuri flows into the collection, I gain an understanding that perhaps for Leane, English is a tool for communication but not a technology for sharing deeper knowledge. In ‘Heal Country. Heal our Nation.’ (55-57), she documents the widespread renaming and misnaming of the continent as “toxic” sickness that must be “erased” from the living body of Country (57). By repeating the overwriting of original place names, Australia permits itself to avoid closer engagement with another way of knowing who and where we are. However, as Leane suggests in a different poem, “the air does not hold these syllables / nor does Country remember their words” (‘Of Colonial Poets and Bridges on Wiradjuri Country,’ 83). Colonial naming cannot alter the meaning of Country, the “highest power” (83), which precedes and supersedes the signs and the maps.

Judith Bishop’s early career research in linguistics focused on intonation in Aboriginal languages. In Circadia, as in all her poetry, tone and musicality lead her attention to experience. In contrast to the expansive temporality of Leane’s collection, Bishop’s poems are of a more micro scale. Many are literally time-stamped in the title or footnote, signalling that they be read as notations of events, a capturing of personal, domestic time that becomes forgotten simply because it competes for attention and filters away. In this way, Bishop’s poems resemble the work of dreams.

Evening / 23 June 2022

As if to trace the decay
of what we saw long ago
in the storm-grey mirror,

the path we revisit
becomes a mute prompter,
leading us quiet

beside the mannered houses
the silence of class
taught to look the other way.

No—I don’t know what to make of a reality
that being made of mind thrice
shattered like a window.

Vision is a gift. It was given us once.
We ought to have known
what loving meant.

(8)

While the titular date is too early, I can’t help but read this poem with reference to the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Elegy finds its way into the tone of these diary poems, whether in mourning for lost time or for a more specific but unnamed referent. Like dream, elegy might also be premonitory.