Who Is to Say

By | 1 May 2014
That Parisian woman who did not like

her children is long gone while I remain,

who love my own too much. Although


her red armchair still occupies the space

beneath the window in your study.

There was the day we tried to move it


but the chair refused to go, wedging

its bulk against the door frame.

Some things are not so easily disposed of


and besides, I like that chair; the way

it holds me when I sit in it to read.

Who is to say what makes someone leave


and brings another in her place?

Only that all past lovers leave

their sultry trace.


Farm girl, you call me, despite mid-age,

working in the garden or fetching mail,

still in my pyjamas, past midday.
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Lisa Jacobson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her verse novel, The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press), won the 2014 Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Award. This book was also shortlisted for four other national awards: the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the Stella Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and, as a manuscript, for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five Islands Press), was shortlisted for the National Book Council Awards. In 2011 she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, the U.S. and the U.K. She has studied literature at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe. Her new poetry collection, South in the World (UWA Publishing) will be released later this year (2014). She lives in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.

http://www.lisajacobson.org

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