Recently I’ve been thinking about the fate of the new left and its politics. Thinking about what six decades of uneven and combined collective defeats do to a human heart. Collective defeats married, often, with four decades of housing asset appreciation. Caroline Williamson’s Time Machines has been a welcome companion in this thinking. Within it we find long lyric poems of recollection, elegy, and quotidian observation. What’s recalled is the second half of the twentieth century, a life lived in the United Kingdon, Australia, and China, by one native to the United Kingdom, maybe Wales, an immigrant to Australia. There is the presence of a certain layer of the Melbourne poetry scene. Prithvi Varatharajan is quoted in a hanging quote, there’s a description of the launch of Ella O’Keefe’s book Slowlier. Melinda Bufton is acknowledged as the inspiration for the conceit of one poem. Michael Farrell is quoted being sassy and incisive at an instance of Sporting Poets, a presently defunct poetry reading organised by Alice Allan at Compass Pizza, and previously by Bonny Cassidy at the Charles Weston (also known as the Sporting Club Hotel).

There are immediately recognisable political concerns in the poems. The liberal and left-wing concerns of one who participated in the new left, and who has a familial inheritance in the old left. These are the concerns of nuclear proliferation and war, climate change, democracy, corruption, social reproduction, poverty, work, unions, and freedom. But beside all these, there’s a concern with receptivity – the capacity to receive new experiences and people.

Don’t come here
for lifelong commitment to anything except
the moment of perception which destabilises
everything else.

(‘January,’ 9)

Williamson’s poems don’t express a position that fits easily into a received rubric of political blame and celebration. It’s odd to be told to be undogmatic and receptive in an imperative mood. But if the reminder comes correct, it will be welcome. Williamson’s book can be a companion as we try to survive and flourish despite personal and collective disasters. We find models of how to cope with suffering and how to enjoy life. Including how to survive one’s own historical epoch, materially and spiritually. That model might be simple, something like: think, observe, attend, care, love. It is, of course, seeing these imperatives in flight that offers us tutelage. Williamson offers her own queer repertoire:

intense attention, dangling
a little joke in mid-air, unheralded and no
label, no punch line – to see who gets it
and one joke leads to another, or allowing
surprising behaviour to occupy your mind
apropos of nothing.

(‘January,’ 9)

There is a determined commitment to the intellect in these poems. To thinking things through and taking your thoughts and other people’s seriously.

There are many approaches to biography in Time Machines. There are memories of a grandfather who was a Welsh miner and became a Member of Parliament (‘Merthyr Tydfil,’ 19-20). Of teaching English in China. The appealing jargon of 20th century Chinese communism. Memories of the practical solidarity of the people she met (‘China,’ 21-24). An elegy for an aunt-in-law, a fast-paced account of dense living and dense suffering (‘Joan,’ 38-41). ‘Summer of ’21’ starts with describing a dinner with

friends and also people
we barely know. Histories of trade unions,
the knowledge of awards, a shared diagnosis,
the complexities of historical allegations of
sexual assault, the same neurologist!

(47)

This is what it’s like living on after movements, after unions, after the onset of disease. Living past the end of your myth is perilous for scenes and social movements, too. In ‘Vent Vert,’ biography is recounted through scent, specifically a bottle of discontinued fragrance bought in 1970 (13-15). The bottle doesn’t accompany her

while she tries to teach
English to 20-something beginners in Beijing
and in London women’s liberation fractures into new
and independent communities, the illusion
of unity lost. The basket however is dusty
but safe.

(14)

The movement cracks but the bottle is intact. It accompanies her to Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp, then into a new partnership, and on to Australia. Based on Williamson’s description I would like to smell the original Vent Vert, even though the Fragrantica profile indicates that it’s not my thing. These poems are best enjoyed while co-huffing the scents of comrades at encampments, occupations, and pickets, poetry readings, and other such formations popular in our long 20th century.

‘Surveillance’ recounts experiences in the peace movement, and the impacts of government monitoring on morale and movement dynamics (61-64). The speaker gets to wondering who were the undercover cops, the competents, or the incompetents but despite asking declares, “I don’t want any answers” (63). This is a repudiation of the logic of surveillance and its intended white-anting effects. But the intentionally anti-curious note also recalls Anne Boyer’s mini essay about Kid Rock’s hit “Bawitdaba” (1998) and its pre-chorus: “You can look for answers, but that ain’t fun” (A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, 76-78). Kid Rock’s apostrophic “and this is for the questions that don’t have any answers” is a grouping that could include Williamson’s speaker. While Kid ends compelling us to “get in the pit and try to love someone,” Williamson concludes with a reunion with former comrades and its concordant erotics:

We have seen each other
at our best and worst, we went through so much. Have another red,
Anyone for ice cream? Te Papa tomorrow: amazing Maori art.

(‘Surveillance,’ 64)

Williamson’s ageing activist meetup is a left-wing Baby Boomer mirror to the publics of “Bawitdaba,” on history’s shores, still able to remember and to enjoy.

While sitting in Coburg library I cried reading Williamson’s lockdown poem. This was the suburb where I spent most of the 2020 Melbourne lockdowns – a nearly pleasureless myth. I was moved by its speaker’s yearning for libraries, for being in the world with others, and for understanding. Describing a morning spent on Twitter reading posts about sex and gender, Williamson writes, “I am thinking that all of this should be possible / to deal with, given time for conversations / and skill in listening” (‘Staying Home,’ 77-79). This is a utopian vision of how we could be together. Who amongst us hasn’t spent mornings reading posts by people we (never wholly) disagree with, earnest in our desire for enough time and skill. Being online during lockdown was sad, many such cases.

How is it possible for a whole
morning, a whole day, to slip through your fingers
in a drift of inattention, falling into sadness?

(‘Staying Home,’ 79)

Receptivity is faced with the imposed limits of modernity’s excessive noise and speed, and their correlate harms.

An implicit manageable-harm index is emergent in Time Machines. In ‘Elegy,’ the speaker describes the cold war of sibling conflict: “ritual yowling and not much harm done” (65). This mirrors the approach taken to being treated for a head injury at the Greenham Commons encampment with “homoeopathic drops of essence of flowers. […] Can’t do any harm I think / and take it like a good child.” (‘Surveillance,’ 63). And again, when contending with late surprises of dog ownership,

To think I didn’t know 
that there would be this dog, headstrong and playful,
natural athlete, desperate for three walks a day,
who digs up garden and wrestles with the cat
but never does her harm. How did this happen?

(‘Sonnets From the Off-Leash Park,’ 74)

Life can sustain a certain amount of harm and you can persist. These no-harm-done variations draw our attention to their opposite: too much harm. In an elegy to a sibling that died young, Williamson begins:

But this old woman was a child once who cried
out in the dark, I can’t bear it, and she couldn’t:
a human being erased.

(‘Elegy,’ 65)

There is pain in these poems, and grief, and the ungrievable, and a sense of responsibility for life continuing despite grief and melancholia – of responsibility to be obstinate in the face of obstinate loss. There is a sense that you can and should keep loving after. After your family or the movement dies or becomes unrecognisable and weird. It isn’t easy and involves tears. Williamson’s book is giving “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” and mentions this bit of Antonio Gramsci twice (72; 89). It’s giving the angel of history being blown away from the tower of debris. But the angel here is less forlorn and in a less romantic repose than their usual rendering. With more grit and stick-with-it-ness, determination to stay in and with this world. Which is where, if I’ve read rightly, we ought to be.

In an elegy to the speaker’s mother, Williamson uses the evocative phrase “a sheltered place,” summarised as “your children, your husband, your own work” (‘Requiem,’ 30). At some point our first myth breaks down and we lose the pleasure of its shelter. In both Williamson and Beesley’s books I hear voices sheltered by children, husbands, and work. Hearing them makes me envious and admiring. In reaching me these voices lend me some of their share of the world’s psychic shelter.