The house of your being is slow burn febrile abeyance, there is an absence of cover, no promises or protection. Plenty of demands. You will not be contained or constrained by the roles made for you, the old, marked cards. You live at the core and as an exile in your world. You live within but will not outlast the night.

Rebecca Cheers sings a life and career incandescent, singed and stymied, strewn with the dynamics and debris attendant on a woman defiant of her times and their delineations. She reconstructs the life of Anne Brennan: dancer, demi-mondaine, and descendant of the country’s most celebrated Symboliste poet. Christopher Brennan evidenced an uncomfortable co-existence with the sites of his calling and creation, at odds with the establishment and societal stability, dying sick and poor. Anne takes this to a further remove and then some. Her life’s blood is thrown up “as blood-streaked sputum swells / to fill the last inch of her lungs” and into the heady mix redolent of visceral dreamlives: a girl, woman, succubus, nightmare vision of death, screaming red lines through verse which can hardly contain her (‘October, 1929’, 14).

The bohemia Anne Brennan inhabits is not only the eastern seacoast (pace Peter Kirkpatrick, who is referenced several times here). She travels in and through different layers of intergenerational reality, where systems of support lack solidity, and survival is a matter of your mates or maîtresses, of chutzpah, charm, and coincidence. Cheers notes drily that “it differs for the fairer sex” when it comes to finding food, support, or somewhere safe to sleep: “no confident Domain-bench kip / for the girls, no alley-piss unmolested” (‘Miss Matthias’ Survival School for Girls’, 6). It is against this unsteady backdrop that Anne dances, sickens, survives, and is split asunder.

At the outset of her story, when she “rolled into town / with nothing” we are presented with memories of her earlier life, in vignettes and flashbacks (‘Not Playing’, 7). She remembers how her father’s Mosman brewery-house caught fire when she was a child. An area now genteel suburbia, then the setting for late industrial disintegration against more ominous views of the harbour: its black water and “sparks like stars” making up a tableau more sinister than later inhabitants might dream of in their nighttime meanderings (‘Mosman Boat’, 25). Back in the present, the adult is hungry and burning up in a succession of inner-city rooms; pawning parental baubles and ditching it all, casting off from redundant relationships to stay alive, if not entirely afloat. Her life creates within and around it an aesthetic of a certain kind, played out and replayed over countless generations and each with its own bitter twist. Types of consummation put food and baking paper together as text, words curling off the page as butter and “the grey tang / of graphite” (‘Volumnia’s Strudel’, 27). So, among the options is to “eat yourself and starve / with feeding” (27). Efface yourself, if not entirely erase your identity, for what is an identity if not one of many to be recreated through a succession of unsteady harbour city mornings?

So Cheers proceeds through the documents and depths of Anne’s life in a series of sketches with passion, assurance, and skill: she makes the reader sense the survival of the artist with the odds stacked against her, in a house where the cards are water-stained and show flecks of mould at their edges. This poem is the ‘Salon ohne Decke’ or “room without curtains”: open, exposed, and flickering around the edges of a rough image the likes of which accent the more surreal tropes of erasure and loss also found in Andre Breton and W. G. Sebald (22). The room is stripped, leached, exhausted, used. No covers, blankets, quilts, layers. Space without protection. Nowhere to hide. Make your own history, if you enter here. Bring your own palimpsest. The sun dries out her skin, she has her “needle in one hand / too hot to grip / the other swims in fabric / fingers slack” (22). Tension, need, burn, and release. This returns as the Wilmot St. house, façade, and history in ‘Stratigraphy’: gilt, bones, shards, and McDonald’s. Bathetic as the parting of Anne Brennan, if not her burial, with “lipstick on a fork / a few bad cheques / an outline pressed / on unwashed sheets,” this imprint hangs over an abyss: “in all things […] there is a pit” and no-one escapes its proximity or can evade the traces of burning at its edges (‘neé Brennan’, 46; ‘Methods of Love’, 24).

One of these collections starts with trauma at its outset, the other builds up to it in increments. ‘Salpingectomy’ is where Anne is ripped apart, the tragedy and loss that the collection’s sketches foreshadow. The poem’s title refers to the surgical removal of one or both fallopian tubes, effected on Anne as a brutal and definitive form of contraception: the belly sliced open, the infections, pain, and through it all the absence of any right for the woman to control her own body. A white-hot, searing work, this is the longest single poem here and makes for difficult reading. It encompasses lists of diseases and a litany of pain, and “a million stories’ guts” given that this was done to so many (39). Yet, Cheers tersely admits: “We don’t know what Anne wanted / Or what she got” (37). What we can conjecture, in the background, are the voices of Anne’s unforgiving counterparts. Live on your own terms, but do so alone, as the object of societal castigation, and take the cuts, incisions, chlamydia, and like infections as your due.

I am not sure if Cheers deliberately chose the title No Camelias in response to the Italian film The Lady without Camelias, from 1953. In the film, Michelangelo Antonioni directs Lucia Bose in the title role, as a young woman from a modest background struggling for respect and a livelihood in the male-dominated world of the cinema industry, uncertain which roles she is expected to play. As for the absent flowers? White camellias have been long seen as a symbol of innocence (see Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance) and red camellias regarded as a sign of romantic love (for Coco Chanel, among others). The mythical Lady of Camellias, in popular nineteenth century fiction that drew in the likes of Alexandre Dumas, was a courtesan who would wear a white camellia during the days of the months when she was available, whereas a red specimen indicated she was indisposed. What to make of no camellias at all, if indeed there is this connection? Does their absence indicate Anne Brennan’s independence, having relinquished hypocritical morals and mores, or does it signify a state of being devoid of innocence but also without romantic love: life in “the sunless streets / of Sydney” (‘Wattlebirds’, 28)?

Back in these times, Cheers, “born a hundred years too late / to be a pale poet” knows that laughter cures, or if not then there’s always the option for something strong that “clears the path / from rotting / lungs to mouth” (‘Fuck the Camelias’, 49). Anne’s identities survive in this country of the present we arrive at through our nightly peregrinations, uncertain as to whether we actually do things differently here. Cheers marks Anne’s passing as an invisible cortège through a succession of red brick blocks as way stations to a burial, with glimpses of sunlit water en route. Her tropes remain: the harbour and an endless search for asylum, vital crossings in the presence of madness and loss. Meanwhile, life continues; people finding their way along the cracked and convoluted paths that promise to lead out of improbable Edens. Facing up to fire and water, perennial and proximate.