Tais Rose Wae notes that while some of the poems of Riverbed Sky Songs were written before her son’s birth, “most were written under or beside him while he slept during his first year” (72). Having “complex and displaced relation to the origins of [her] personal Aboriginal ancestry,” Wae felt that “[m]uch of [her] family history and stories around lineage seemed to become reshaped or remembered, especially in those early cathartic moments of becoming a mother” (72). The volume is divided into three sections. The first section, ‘A Mother is a Country,’ has the subtitle ‘to Unlearn, to Remember, to Return,’ which foregrounds the need to unlearn settler colonial ways, to consider memory and dream, even when there has been loss of collective memory, and a return to Country. To some degree this echoes the poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann, an influence on Wae’s work. Wae has acknowledged the significance of other First Nations writers on her work as well, including Tara June Winch, Bruce Pascoe, Joy Harjo, Samuel Wagan Watson, and Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Wae’s volume is written from Bundjalung Country, also known as the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. The opening poem, ‘Epilogue to Ceremony,’ speaks of a dream of “you” “in the rockpool fringed with grass / where the water moved womb-like” (11). The water’s “undulating circles” not only signal bodily contractions but the “spiralling” cosmos that presages the “journey home” of her child “from the inside out” (11). A “red belly black snake” also becomes a “messenger” (11). As in Fagan’s collection, there is a desire to name all that is there. Whereas Fagan turns to the birds, Wae writes, “I wish I knew the word for every fish / that bathed in that current too” (11). There is an acknowledgement of her own lack of language through displacement, and of names being “without words” that the “scribbly gums” know “how to say” (11). The gaps within the line reinforce her displacement. It is with her child’s presence that the poetic speaker can begin “unravelling myths from the land / with your love and my hand” (11).

Like Fagan’s front cover to Song in the Grass, the front cover to Riverbed Sky Songs emphasises what is made by hand. It features one of Wae’s own weavings, a spiral made of green raffia edged with pearls that were a gift from artist and Elder Julie-Anne Smith. In an interview for Warp and Weft magazine, Wae has stated that all of her “art mediums and processes are inevitably intertwined” and her weaving, like her poetry, emerges “more [out of] the desire to tell a story than to work with very technical […] styles.” She further elaborates:

I think of my practice as being quite watery and river-like, it expands and grows with me as a way to express that change. There is no real destination and I leave a lot of room for experimentation and reflection. There is also this sweet spot that exists between rest and creation, and the more I slow down into the ebbs and learn from what arises in the stillness, the more I am able to return to myself and create from a space of integrity.

(Warp and Weft, 2024)

Narungga poet Natalie Harkin notes in her essay ‘Weaving Blankets of Story and Hearts of Gold: An Archival-poetics Praxis’ that “weaving is one means to strengthen identity and relationships across generations, invoking personal memory and storytelling, and intimate connections with ancestors.” Just as Harkin learned weaving from Elders, so too did Marshall Islander poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner learn weaving from Elder Terse Timothy. In a blog post on her website, Jetñil-Kijiner writes that Timothy herself, “[d]espite the absence of a teacher, despite elders buried with the instructions still grasped between fingers, […] pulled strands from an emptiness, from a void and a hunger within herself and she created.” Like Terse Timothy, Wae is self-taught. Her weaving is undertaken alongside other rituals “both individually and as a family” in the forest-surrounded home she shares with her husband and son (‘Weaving the Threads of Life: The Proust Questionnaire with Tais Rose Wae,’ Sèn Magazine, 2024). Being first in a large family to attend university, “complet[ing] a poetry collection felt like a very isolating and abstract concept within the realm of what [her] childhood-self felt was possible” (Sèn Magazine, 2024). Having a poem be runner-up for the 2020 Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers also provided impetus to pursue a larger poetic project. Wae acknowledges the support from Bundjalung editor Grace Lucas-Pennington and “conversations shared” with Samuel Wagan Watson (71).

Wae shares that “[t]he same strips of bark or river pearls or sea urchin spikes or silk or snake bones” appear in both her weaving and her poetry (‘How Artist Tais Rose Wae Explores Nature Through Her Weavings + Poetry,’ The Design Files, 2023). The innovative spatial dynamics of Wae’s poetry also draw the reader’s attention to the materiality of words and what lies around them. ‘Oysters’ writes of “blood love / unbroken” through a shell, yet is conscious of the “silver of salt of mother tongue” in “oceanic Country” “where you always are” (13). The shell is a relic but the poem gestures towards an oyster, a being that can be “press[ed]” “against your heart” (13). The “grain of sand” can “become a pearl,” the pearl being a gift of love (13). The poem connects with Wae’s husband Heath Wae’s painting of the same name, as well as to her other creative practice of weaving. As with the weaving that appears on the volume’s front cover, another of her weavings, ‘From Upon the Riverbank, a Pearl Flowers Endlessly,’ uses gifted river pearls. ‘Other Words for Love’ continues the trope of the mollusc as emergent child, with the sand moving “around you now” (15). There is a sense of being “awash” in a foam of “seaweed and salt and sorry”, the “sorry” being a part of the alliterative rhythms of language that is “strung against the sky / and memory of the shore” (15). Wae’s lyricism has the musicality of a human lullaby but also a sense of connectedness to the rhythms of the more-than-human. The sense of a lullaby in the poem is heightened by the alliteration, particularly of the letter ‘s’ and the sounded repetition of ‘s’ words like “soft” and “smoke” (15). What is suggested to be ‘other words for love’ are the more-than-human. The sky is as significant as the water. In ‘Riverbed Sky Song,’ the sky is metonymically “an ocean floor of knowing” that is “painted in iridescent treasure / beaded […] like pearls in young hands of memory” (16). The poem foregrounds both textual, textural, and cosmic formation. The moon signals the “temporal and tender” (16).

‘Silk the Mountain’ likewise suggests the textural, with “silk” being one of the fibres used by Wae in her weavings. In the poem it is, paradoxically, the “still notes silked from she-oak” that are upon the speaker’s tongue, with the speaker growing “that seed into a poem” (17). As with Fagan’s ‘Our Mother’s Heart,’ there is recognition of renewal that comes from an observation of “watching the seed grow” from “the bushfire” (17). Just as Susan Stewart discerns that poetic making can be “a counter to the oblivion of darkness,” Wae draws attention to the life qualities that might come out of destruction, whether of bushfire or “flood waters” (Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 2002: 5; Riverbed Sky Songs: 17). ‘This is a Poem’ is one of many of her poems that undertakes a ritual of healing. In it, Wae writes of spending a “lifetime weaving a cloth of beauty / and wrongly naming it fury” (20). Observing the moon’s waxing and waning becomes restorative, “as if medicine” (20). In also having her “body beating like soil while carrying life,” the speaker “come[s] to know the feeling of nurturing the seedling into a tree” and of stories “stored in bone and in blood passed down.” This results in “peace” both in daylight and moonlight (20).

Wae’s ‘What is at the Centre’ is similar to Fagan’s ‘Elegy for a Felled Eucalypt’ in focusing on a tree’s significance as holding up an ecosystem, “how it feels,” according to Wae “to hold everything up” (25). Yet whereas Fagan mourns the destruction of the tree, Wae’s poem is about the process of becoming part of the tree’s ecology. “I float in your centre of softness my mother” (25). The song is the song of the tree “with milk and solar verses sung” (25). As with a number of Fagan’s poems, there are poems that have a spiritual orientation, such as ‘Mother Prayer’ (27). Just as Fagan counters the colonial archive with those of plants in poems like ‘Future Green,’ Wae likewise contemplates “the landscape library” in ‘Second Skin’ (32). She points to the “river red gum,” bearing the traces of ringbarking, still being a “cradle” that is “second skin / mapped / on fingertip / and carried by lip” (32).

‘Second Skin’ is from the second section, ‘Within Womb,’ which is subtitled ‘Waiting Song and other Sounds of Longing.’ Poems like ‘To Weave a Day’ emphasise the day as constituted by a series of actions: “listen,” “weave,” “gather,” “think,” “make,” “see,” “learn,” and “call” (36). Others like ‘Imago’ consider lifecycle and inter-generationalism, turning to the metamorphosis of a butterfly as a way of understanding or being taught “about becoming and being a mother” (44). The final section, ‘Dreaming of Dreaming,’ is subtitled ‘In search of things Taken, Forgotten, Unknown.’ ‘Then, Again’ notes how the speaker “tried to say this is a protest / and in the end / […] wrote a love poem again” (53).

Both Fagan and Wae sit with their creative practice. They embrace a slow art in considering how poetic practice can constitute acts of relationality and care, and how the maternal — in all its somatic connection — is particularly meaningful to understand our co-extensiveness lives. Fagan’s readers have waited over a decade for Song in the Grass. Riverbed Sky Songs was written across a period of five years. Both collections will continue to sound and resound — with their music of a reflective life — long after reading.