Theodore Ell’s first book of poetry could be easily mistaken as his eleventh. Beginning in sight is a considered and balanced collection of delicately assembled poems whose measure and craft respire with the breath of a poet who sees rushing as procrastination. Ell’s poems are trim with very little interest in excess or yelling loudly, or saying things that get said a lot, or even taking the the form of things that get said a lot. A fan of (and a fine hand at) wiry enjambed couplets in free verse, Ell ponders a vast swathe of arrestive moments that remain sharp and solid in their description while carefully deciding against density and over-accumulation.

Beginning in sight has a sense of stretched time – even while many of its poems describe moments that are sharply condensed and acutely focused. This is perhaps because it is the culmination of ten years of work, of the gentle and patient harvesting of these very moments over time. While the individual poems throughout the book share a crystalline wholeness, they remain individually wrapped in their own sharp and poignant imagery, such as the opening stanza from his poem ‘Cent’:

The scuttle of slim bronze under the tall counter –
that lost coin, fumbled from your pocket
like its minted glider from the nest-hole into airspace.

(9)

The downfall of this collection may therefore be that the poems seem somewhat remote from each other – composed perhaps by somewhat different versions of the poet himself as he has gone about his craft over the past decade or more. However, the haunting effect of collecting poems which appear so distant from each other is also perhaps precisely the theme that binds them together – like an album of photographs that contain a few sparse snapshots from a long and well-travelled lifetime.

Clearly resonant in Ell’s work is the influence of Robert Gray, whom Ell explicitly names in his acknowledgments as well as the opening poem of the volume. Renowned for his ‘imagism,’ Gray has imprinted upon Ell’s poetics an acute attention to the detailed and considered brushstrokes of his imagery. Ell is abundantly proficient in this aspect of his work and the delicate composition of images such as those in ‘Gossamer’ where “eyelids came crashing down / like shutters in the bruise of wind / rifling the grassland” and “hurl chains of spun glass –” (53). Glimmering as vivid highlights, these imagerial arrangements are deeply pleasurable to consider as one passes through the strangely large space of this not particularly large book.

Ell seems interested in what I couldn’t help but identify as a kind of poetic portraiture of the scarring of colonial settlement upon Australian landscapes. Where Leach took great pains to tell us that his poems are about stolen lands, Ell shows us with carefully painted couplets the stark images of a colonial fallout that Leach’s work merely signals towards. In ‘Freehold’ Ell describes a gale that rushes across a plain of cleared (presumably settled) freehold land whose

            […] Sheer weight mows sun into avenues, 
battles to cull loose wood and stake new orchards, 

a charge finding loopholes in the barricade 
 of settled shapes […]

(14)

The contrast of ‘forces of nature’ and edifices of settlement abound in Ell’s work, as well as the mingling of the two. Nature, uncaring and detached, ‘takes over’ abandoned, derelict, and seemingly haunted sites of colonial and neocolonial activity. That dereliction and edificial decay signify a kind of ghostly abandonment within postcolonial literature indicates our inability to distinguish a place that is peopled from a place that is settled and built upon (they must always be together!). That places may be peopled in spite of their lack of edificial settlement seems to be an idea which escapes Ell’s interest. Ell relies upon the eeriness of human absence from landscapes where humans were not only present but erected and marked out their presence upon the land. In ‘Floodplain’, “[w]here driftwood settles, fences kneel. Holed brick walls / stencil the sky’s rims on each wave” (64). The holes in the walls of an abandoned floodplain-abode open upon the sky as well as the lapping waves of a flood, leaving an impression of heavily occupied absence. Ell’s poetry in this regard behaves like an imagist’s reel of negatives; its power is contained in the contrast between what is painted and what is missing; or, the negative within the images. In the case of the “holed brick walls” of ‘Floodplain,’ we see the negative space in the missing bricks. Beneath this absence is the foreboding openness and powerful insistence of earthly forces. This negative space symbolises space once occupied by settlers, now replaced by sky and floodwater. It creates a sense of remoteness from nature and a strangeness to elemental processes. Succession in this way implies mortality and disappearance. Nature symbolises death – an anthropocentric ego-death – and the poems provide a sense of dissociation from nature, perhaps mourning a lack of human occupation within it. Simultaneously, Ell celebrates our (or rather, his own) ability to observe all the potential held within the vast movements of the elemental womb, as he does so in the penultimate poem of the book, ‘Hereafter,’ describing a sunset, where witnessing such an event is precisely what prevents us from being ghosts to nature:

            […] With first light hanging, our cups steamed.
We may have known then what it is to be ghosts,

but that was nothing. The sheer dead stop, the red face
of the sun – that was our delight: to have dazed

the morning, vexed it, forced it to hold its nerve!

(67)

I may have free-read these poems in such a way that Ell may not recognise an iota of his own intent in my interpretations, but he has graciously allowed for readers to do so at their own behest, and the beauty of these poems is that they hold an abundance of open, haunted space imbued with glass-sharp imagery for readers to while away many re-readings.