Approaching Stephanie Powell’s Gentle Creatures one might imagine, based on the title and cover art, that this is a collection of sentimental poetry. One would not be entirely wrong, but slightly misled. While sentimentality is sometimes considered a dirty word in critical circles, there is a rightful place for powerfully activated sentiment, and this is where Powell thrives. Split in two, the collection first navigates a return home after a period abroad and being subsequently interred within COVID-19 lockdowns ad nauseam. The second half of the book then drifts through childhood, girlhood, and a swift ascent into adult relationships, tied closely to reflections on body, puberty, and family.

Tonight, dressed like Marlene D
white shirt, tucked
thin fabric,
nipples looooooose and long, kissing the green,
kissing green and
brown oak with embossed edges.

(‘Jehovah,’ 9)

In the opening poem, ‘Jehovah,’ the reader is introduced to Powell’s intentions. An exceptionally close observational gaze references the world around the narrator and transforms it into something larger and more strange than what it might at first seem. The scene is a blend between suburban and country, sensation and object, “on a half-acre outside Launceston / rows of chairs / rows of chairs / rows of chairs” (9). This is the pace of the collection. The majority of the poems are written in free-verse and rely on enjambment to generate a rhythm which at times flows freely and at others labours awkwardly, as in ‘A shooting on Kyverdale road,’

Yo-yoing calves, 
in heart murmur rhythm –
            a stilted infarction.

(21)

These lines speak to the larger sense of the collection, that there are pockets of Powell’s world’s flesh which have grown necrotic through stillness and neglect. The suburbs are so full of the signs of life, but conspicuously absent any active characters save for policemen after the titular shooting (“Combing the junction – / swinging rows of boots” (21)) and the “faces of old women pulling trolleys. / Calm but hurried, fresh but harried” (22). The blurb conceives of this collection as one where “gentle creatures are in the house, snuffling through the pantry, messing up the bed, taking up all the quiet spaces,” a strangely odd advertisement which does not seem to align with the collection I have read. It took a moment to see past the less potent pieces which follow ‘Jehovah,’ where lines like “In ringing ears an / announcement of / hearing damage, / lapsing with the / pulse of the cistern” do create an ambient sort of drowsiness and malaise (‘Conversations,’ 11). However, once the reader sinks into the darker tone and flourish of the collection, Powell’s skill for harsh image opens into a superb aura of oddity.

A tram inseminates a concrete pillar, caught in the reflection of a
large office block, a worm
becoming stone. Bell ringing at the point of petrifaction. Another
papery day is folding into the shape of a sun declining over this, a bee-
sucked metal flower. A measly quarter-acre of city block.

(‘The city: in quarantine,’ 34)

I found myself wishing that the collection could have leaned more wholeheartedly into the subterranean depths of Powell’s writing, where she remakes the suburban world within her gaze. Just why is it that the world around her narrative voice feels necrotic? We are held close to the narrator’s perspective, especially in the opening half of the collection where scenes of driving dominate – driving at night, driving in winter and summer, driving with the radio on, driving through the “Double exposed / eucalypts and fence posts” (‘New World,’ 23). That most of these poems were written during and following Melbourne’s long, harsh COVID-19 lockdowns reveals a likely genesis for the somnolent darkness. The narrative voice, whether a version of Powell or someone else, is extremely successful in conjuring this dark mood, actively revealing and obscuring the answers which we readers are allowed to receive.

In the eponymous poem ‘Gentle Creatures,’ Powell offers clues to a fight, or a larger conflict, and exemplifies her skill in observation and placement to build stories around an obscured emotional core.

I hover,
         at your shoulder,
amputated.

[…]

And inside a
symphony, chiming
through an afternoon
that endures us
                I pull another
black bin bag

(24)

This sense of holding the action at arm’s length is characteristic of Powell’s writing in this collection. She alerts us to conflict, but she does not let us see beyond her perspective – direct and skillfully achieved through her employment of white space and line breaks. If there is a feeling that perhaps some further artfulness could be realised through the application of alternate formal constraints besides Powell’s standard free-verse, the answer can be found in the suite ‘Movements’ (26, 27).

The cul-de-sac trees sway like wronged women
                           remnants of domestic disasters 
                                         left out for hard rubbish.

(26)

Here the images are strange and powerful. They carry a current of the abject within the crisply conjured domestic where “a suburb told in fractals / glitches between bin nights, Christmases” weaves in and out, in and out of focus (26). Leather belts linger, a striking recurrent image in three of the seven scenes “like the conclusion of a violent act” (26). These belts represent patriarchy, capitalism, the overarching boundaries of the suburban Melbourne which most of this collection functions within. This is where Powell’s collection really shines, when she trusts the power of her metaphor.

In an interview with Arianna Lucente for RN Breakfast, ABC Radio National, Powell says that “Gentle Creatures is all of us in the quieter moments.” To paraphrase, she discusses how she learned early on that, through close observation of the world around her, little moments become conduits for truth about domestic situations. We see how this lesson is applied in the second half of her collection, titled ‘Birthday Dresses.’ This section seems to open, to expand, becoming less concerned with sinister undercurrents, and continues with a mostly free-verse poetic structure. Here Powell luxuriates in nostalgia and reflection, “being young is difficult but / when you’re thirty you’ll sleep less” (‘Princes Freeway,’ 74). The shift in tone offers a change of course from the solemnity of the first half of the collection, but I think one could argue that each section might operate more powerfully if published separately. However, there is still a strong link between them; the language and quality of image Powell uses.

Suck, suck, suck-ing
the house’s marrow. I am
literally chewing up the scenery.
I suck the spoon as I lay the grass
seed. What a fine machine I am.

(‘Machine,’ 88)

The poet is certainly at her best when she leans into her harsher observations and metaphor, when she eschews safety and goes cut-throat. This is a wonderful collection which hovers between worlds which are both familiar and strange. Stephanie Powell has a talent for transfiguration and sleight of hand. An object under her focus is never just an object, it is a weapon or a gift.

Kangaroo Paw and Gentle Creatures stand together as two contrasting treatments of landscape, history and home. For all of their stylistic differences, Claire Miranda Roberts and Stephanie Powell are equally concerned with a centrally ringing question; who are we when we leave and who do we become when we return? To interrogate this idea the two poets travel along vastly different roads, yet they find a shared answer: it is the act of looking that has changed them.