Tight Bindings by Sarah Temporal is a very different collection. It features poems in a range of forms in a semi-linear trajectory, blending memoir elements with images, narratives, and themes of fairytales to rich effect. These poems are emotive and pleasurable to read, reread, and absorb, full of quiet power, sensory detail, and surprising echoes and expansions across the collection. Temporal is a prize-winning poet, producer, and educator from the Northern Rivers and this collection lends itself more naturally to review, with its invoking and layering of story, its sensory echoes, and its thematic through lines. Its three parts, after the introductory poem ‘Three Secrets’ (1–3) — ‘Breaking/Becoming’, ‘Singing’, and ‘Transforming’ — are reminiscent of the three-act structure of traditional Western/European storytelling, or perhaps the three trimesters of pregnancy.

One of the most resonant aspects of this collection is the conflation of me/her — of the narrator, of historical women, and of the women of stories. This is present from the introductory poem, ‘Three Secrets’ (1–3), in which the narrator gives birth via caesarean. In the first section there’s a disembodied but communal notion that it is the people around the bed and the instruments that gave birth to her daughter. In the poem’s middle section, the narrator is both “my” and “she” as myth and historical women “supine in stone          in bas-relief / in charcoal drawings” give birth to her daughter (2). In the final section (this poem is in three parts, just like the collection), mother and baby are physically pressed together; they contemplate each other, intimately, and we are left with the thought (that will echo later on) that the child has “given birth / to me” (3). Accompanying this poem, and others in the collection, is a QR code link to a reading. Temporal is in a candlelit room with a small audience circling her. She is tall and sure on a stool above them, reading slowly, pausing effectively so each line can be turned over.

Other poems in the collection also capture the minute or intimate and monumental all at once. Often, time collapses, as in ‘The Graveyard’ (31–32): “Return to the dusk where your daughter / Stands balanced like time on the gate” (32). ‘Under the Soil’ moves from a story of two brothers “in a book in a child’s bedroom” to depicting the child placed between the story world (“the child is in the farmhouse”) and the ‘real’ (“the child is having nightmares”); it then shifts rapidly in time and space, between imaginary and real until the child grows to a woman and the bones in the ground sing of “murder”, “slavery”, and “the inheritance they gave to me the child in the farmhouse” (40). We return, finally, to sleep again, or not sleep, and the bones which ultimately “cannot sing the truth into our mouths” (40).

The cover of Tight Bindings is an illustration of a hand reaching from a tree, a body bound up in nature, reaching for three white birds. In the poems there are textures of nature in bodies, and knowledge and consciousness in nature. There is the power of man over nature, the nature in human bodies, and also the quieter workings of nature in resistance to domination. Trees have “secret business” and quiet power in ‘Blackheath’ (7), and in the final stanza the humans embrace “the law of the storm / the way the beasts keep each other warm”. In ‘Five Pictures of My Father Chopping Wood’ (13–15), trust and strength are displayed in the poet’s father’s sure stance as he “casts the axe into the air”, but also the way he listened and held her thoughts when she was young (14). The first stanza in each of the five sections here describes the act of chopping wood in different ways, mimicking the rhythm of the axe coming down again and again. There are trees also in ‘Growth Cycle’ (27); wood, paper, mould, nests, fruit, branches in a squat poem that looks like a tree stump itself.

‘Rapunzel’ (43–51) in her tower is tree-like, growing in place, as she “Calls herself up by the roots” (43). Her sensory longing is for the nature outside her window, “eucalypts exhale their fug into her face” (43). Each of the poem’s parts has a different point of view and style — from the smothering list of adjectives and collective nouns in ‘II. The Hair’ (44): “A burden of hair. An aching of hair. / A mess of a festering excess of hair” — to the semi-academic ‘V. Portrait’ (46) that lists other Rapunzels and replications. Through to the reflective, first-person ‘VIII. Hope’ (49), which is in a similar style to some other poems, with tab-sized gaps instead of line breaks, and limited punctuation, which feels confessional to read. The final part of the poem, ‘IX. Return’ (50) is more straightforward memoir, with the narrator’s daughter peering “intently / through the windowing page”, presumably of the book Rapunzel. The poet tucks her in, leaves her to her dreams (with echoes still of the Rapunzels encountered, i.e., “smooth her soft mane”). The final lines of the poem, and the collection, indicate both hope and independence for the daughter, and for the through line of girls, women, and daughters encountered in the text. The narrator–mother leaves a “single stand of light” in the doorway (50).

Mortality and nature are interwoven as the poet narrates, in a range of styles, her partner’s illness, in ‘Close to the Sky’ (16–17), ‘And Then’ (18), and ‘After the Transplant’ (19–21). In this final one there is a striking consideration of the suspension between life and death — trepidatious, generous, and curious all at once. A moment of philosophy:

I had a vision of them— of us— humans
practising such feats upon each other.
Holding one of our own, so precisely,
so thoughtfully, in relation to death

(20)

In the fourth of five sections there is a consideration of the (literal) breath held in suspension, incredible images of the “distributed” self:

all your life’s energy among a huge forest
of machinery puffing and pulsing:
your breath transferred to a pumping bellows,
your heartbeat relocated to a cave-like screen

(21)

Again, nature comes in: a cave which calls up something ancient, dark, ongoing – shelter or danger.

Nature, decay, mortality, and maternal through lines are enhanced with gothic elements in ‘The Graveyard’ (31–32): floral and gravestone, “lace of the sunlight” (31). The poem is song-like itself as it talks of eucalypts filtering “the dead song / Of cutters and pioneers wives”; infants lie underground “wearing their dead mother’s face”, and in a dark but moving image the narrator longs to lift these babes from the earth and “comfort and kiss them and hold them / As no one has done for so long” before her own child, “who’s brazenly living”, brings her back to the moving present (31). The poems sometimes have a pronounced colour palette, too, as in the first poem in the ‘Transforming’ section, ‘The Rising’ (35–36, it follows ‘The Graveyard’, above), about daughters rising out of stories, altars, “rising like embers, like flames” (36). The poem is grey, black and red, moon pale, pink.

The poems move through light and dark, the darkness often coming from the threat of male domination and violence. In ‘Crooked Man’ (28–30), patriarchal patterns are expressed through the worn grooves of a nursery rhyme, a crooked man standing in for all crooked men. The poem ends on the weight of responsibility, how it still falls unfairly on woman to protect herself:

I still flash my crooked keys
still adjust my crooked hems
and it’s still my job to be the one
who fixes crooked men.

(30)

In ‘Now Squash the Egg!’ (37), the fairytale creature of the giant “who has no heart in his body” stands in for an unfortunately familiar type of Australian man who “calls you snowflake / calls you sweetheart / calls you late at night”. There is a blurring again of bodies/culture/nature, giving a layered sense of familiarity or embeddedness (in story, archetype, and place):

The giant who had no heart in his body
             crumbles like a tinnie, falls flat.
             Falls into forest,
             into memory

Finally, I want to mention ‘Wild and Tangled’ (38–39), which begins with a vivid invitation to the home of the beast. There’s a sense of danger in this poem, combined with desire, something erotic — want, unrestrained, for restraint and also to possess: “All you want to do is follow every rippling cloud across his face          Wrap yourself in muscle          Sleep on / growling chest” (38). The narrator thinks she is special, thinks she will be the one to reveal him: “You’re nothing like those other women / who he tore apart” (39). This poem resists an easy ending, keeping us in “scrub”, certain of danger (39).

Armand’s Infantilisms will be rewarding for discerning, curious, and patient readers, willing to read side-by-side with the dictionary and Google search (unless already deeply in the same field). Temporal’s Tight Bindings is satisfying and transfixing, placing the reader in time, on the page, and in the earth.