Circadia blends figure and ground, lyric and imagistic modes. Bishop can do all of these and more, her poetic ear acutely tuned to a wide spectrum of emotional frequency. It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that her poems about species loss are trained on an aural appreciation of marsupials, frogs and birds (‘Leadbeater’s Possum’, 10; ‘Voices,’ 11). These poems bring out an ecstatic freedom of voice: “Oh God if I were God I would multiply the doves / I would make the doves’ children / inherit the earth” (‘Doves,’ 17). It may be no coincidence, either, that crepuscular time is a dominant motif throughout Circadia. The poems dwell in those littoral phases between waking and sleeping, diurnal and nocturnal, when humans and all creatures make decisions about energy and perception.
A contrast to the very specifically situated identity, language, and settings of Leane’s poems, Bishop’s poetic voice is suspended. In ‘On Leaving’ her loving address to a suffering Earth comes from an elevated, Romantic lyricism:
Look:
there goes the parrot that flies across the strait, warm-bodied
in its feathers, orange-bellied with the blazon of dawn, iron, fire,
others wait
on the far side of the journey, they are lethal and benevolent, you see
with inner maps where you must land
(43)
Despite the neologism of the book’s title, linguistic novelty is not really Bishop’s game. Her work’s resonance is phenomenological. Like the late Martin Harrison, and with reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she uses the somatic body as a vibrational channel to be interpreted by cognition, emotion and verbal language (‘Zao Wou-Ki and the Music of What Happens,’ 50). Often this sensibility is mannered by existential, symbolic imagism:
Each tree makes a shadow on the sky as night arrives, a billowing blackness that hovers in the mind, hammering the stamp of its shape, which remains, as anything inscrutable does, like the blot in a scan, or the spectre of a dream, where the meaning resounds in analogous themes (‘Apparition,’ 16)
For me, this work is the finest showcasing of Bishop’s skill, preferable to more sustained metaphor (‘Incantation,’ 70) and arch lyric (‘Wind, Bold Fox,’ 31). There is a strong sense of European postmodernist influence on Bishop’s poetics, perhaps informed by her work as a translator from the French; though, it is not French poets echoing in my ear, rather, the somewhat chilly abstractions of Paul Celan, Tomas Tranströmer, and Veno Taufer. This tradition may be reflected too in Bishop’s multiple quotations from Chuvash poet, Gennady Aygi.
Bishop’s intersecting career as a linguist specialising in artificial intelligence training provides an enriched context for her subtle word choices and tonal inflections in Circadia. In the middle section of the book, she constructs four somewhat virtual settings using an exploratory approach to description. The structure is reminiscent of the refining process required for prompting AI image generation:
There could be someone, there, walking through a forest— upright or slightly bending—gathering, not berries, or fallen nuts, or mushrooms, but thoughts; there could be thoughts like whining insects that drill down through the air, to this someone, who is not ‘someone’ to insects, but at most might be a chemical, visual, or electrical site— (‘The Forest,’ 23)
I could happily wander in this glitched landscape for hours, its visual horizon infinitely appearing, its details forming and repairing. In this archetypal zone I could not be further from the ‘highest power’ found in Country. As a forest dweller, I recognise nothing in Bishop’s poem of the Djaara woodland where I write this review. The poem suggests that virtual intelligence is another kind of imperial overwriting — replacing knowledge that sits in relation with Earth. Yet, I suspect from Bishop’s poems — homages to missing species, the silence of colonised streets, non-binary subjectivities — that this is very far from the poet’s purpose. Functioning as dream, ‘The Forest’ sifts experience into memorable shapes. In gawimarra, Leane elicits a similar effect, of walking through remembered gates and rooms, events and conversations. Leane will let nothing more escape memory, because in gathering is the future; while Bishop seeks to hold perception only for a moment, because that makes language human.
