Sanctuaries is the 16th book of poetry Diane Fahey has penned over a long working life. The maturity of a seasoned poet is telling. I sensed a kind of wrought-up haste to cut to the chase, and impatience with anything that besmirched clarity, and, in the later reaches of the book, vivid strokes laid down in the artist’s sketchbook that draw attention to what is left out. I even sensed a kind of hands-on-hip stance of, “do I really have to keep saying this all over again?” But, of course, she does. This book is all about birds. And the title, Sanctuaries, implies, I think, that at least within these pages, ‘our feathered friends’ can find a haven, are honoured with an unsentimental depiction of their beleaguered lives.
The first section, ‘The Mirrors,’ delineates with magnificent restraint, in a suite of eight poems, the story, as far as it can be known, of a flamingo called Greater, who was of advanced age when he was set upon by youths in the Adelaide Zoo in 2008 but “fought to come back […] so that he won a stay of life, / dying in 2014” (16).
From ‘Backstory,’
The lads, one a ward of the state, all from the ‘outlying districts’, then sped off through the streets — nothing to see here, their victim, after all, ticked so many boxes, almost, you might say, asking for it: frail, with a foreign otherness, strange-coloured, voiceless, and having nowhere to hide. (15-16)
We almost might think that that would be the end of ‘the lads.’ After all, what is the likely end of such a bachelor mob? You only have to watch the news to suspect that it often doesn’t end well. But Fahey, with infinite grace, imagines another strategy. She summons up a fantasy within which she sits down with “those youths, now men” and wonders what she might say (33).
From ‘Encounter,’
Or perhaps I would simply wait on through the silence until one of them chose to speak, or they all, as suddenly as birds, lift into flight, got up and left? I would wait on until someone came to an empty chair to look into my eyes, to challenge me, the both of us held there, hoping for hope, for some new imprinting. (33)
Because so many people, not all of them poets, attribute unproven, unproveable, and even anthropomorphic characteristics to birds, I was reassured by the foreword by Gisela Kaplan, AM, who assures us that “Diane Fahey is ever so insightful and always correct in even the smallest glimpses of biological or behavioural aspects of a species she observes” (11).
‘Paired Brolgas,’ from the second section, ‘Zoo Birds,’
Untranslatable flows of feeling between them, they saunter around this crabbed space wherein they’ll mate, nest, charm each other with dance. (46)
Jizz is a useful word in the bird watcher’s lexicon. It is the “overall impression or appearance of a bird garnered from such features as shape, posture, flying style or other habitual movements, size and colouration combined with voice, habitat and location” (Wikipedia). Fahey’s jizz, as a poet, I would characterise as a kind of austere accuracy, and a modest, darting modus operandi. And then a sudden flash of colour.
‘Camouflage,’ from the fourth section, ‘A Summoning of Birds,’
a trompe l’oeil of frogmouths a swatch of rogue bark travelling upward: the tree creeper an undulant mat barred with brown, stone-grey, black — a ptarmigan hugs scree, dead bracken, the spring earth nightjars, an uncanny match with gravelled roadsides, leaf fall — harmless swipers of insects, feared harbingers of death the face and breast of a snowy owl, at one with her albino world wings, vertiginous eyes, furnace-yellow (67)
Ottaway and Fahey, Fahey and Ottaway, are both Australian poets, no doubt about it. But their habitats are so different, and their voices are in completely different registers. Fahey, if I may be almost impertinently playful, is slinking beside a stretch of still water — a chain of ponds, or a lagoon — and when she emits a plangent tone it echoes around the landscape disconcertingly. Whereas Ottaway is shrieking away in the treetops, unfurling a gaudy crest. But both of their books have been privileged by publication, because of, one can only surmise, exceptional behind-the-scenes dedication to the cause, to a cause, of a few powerfully motivated individuals. I do wonder at the small presses. Just exactly what are they getting out of it? I do know what I am getting out of it. I am colouring in my mind map of the ecosystem of Australian poetry.
