The poem’s unpunctuated couplets gesture toward its open-ended drama: its setting may be Darwin or like Darwin; the horse may be the girl’s first or last, but not her only; the end of the horse ride seems to be both ominous and safe. The metaphor, ‘honey-washed’, possesses classical restraint, standing in relief against the rather plain diction of the rest of the poem. The metaphor itself is the thrill that passes, squeezed and then released, in an instant. The suite moves economically through a gazetteer; abstracting the situation of the poetic voice, even addressing the reader as a bee (‘Growing’).
Unfortunately, at least half of the poems in Domestic Archaeology lack this complexity of voice, image and structure. Poems such as ‘For those who came before’ and ‘New Years Eve 2011’, which celebrate new motherhood, do little more than meditate on a single emotion. Several others, through the sheer sincerity of their emotional narrative, trap the reader within the poet’s expressive intention. The result is language hijacked by emotional sincerity, the poems turning cute or cliché. For example, ‘We Mums’ describes the speaker and her family visiting their daughter’s paternal ancestry in Tasmania:
We mums will fall for the lavender-blue mountain tapestries and while we search for words or the perfect photo to capture them, our daughter will be freed by the whispered histories reserved for those like her with island blood.
This poem relies on a cheesy extended metaphor of an albatross pair and their ‘fledgling’ who ‘will always be home’ in her dual parentage. The flatness of the metaphor is reflected by ‘lavender-blue’ mountains and well-worn phrasing, like ‘perfect photo’ and a landscape to ‘capture’. I appreciate that the poem avoids speaking for the daughter figure, who is identified as a separate, even strange (‘those like her’) party; however, it’s more strangeness for which Pilgrim-Byrne’s reader thirsts.
Unlike the balanced, purposeful selection and sequencing that makes up the book’s first two sections, ‘Cataloguing’ is rangier, both in terms of length and cohesion. It leaves the reader with a sense that Pilgrim-Byrne’s best work is sprouting here, but yet to come. There are some minor poems, including ‘Perspective’ and ‘Coraki Tattoo’, that should probably have been weeded out. Conversely, a somewhat surreal lyric, ‘Time and time again I wander’, and the book’s closing villanelle, ‘Father’s Mistress’, join the better poems in Domestic Archaeology, promising that Pilgrim-Byrne’s work is able to expand into layers for the reader to explore, unaccompanied.
