The subjects of Peter Bakowski’s portrait poems in his 2022 collection Our Ways on Earth are often alone. Alone in morphine-fogged memory, alone with the internet, alone in the studio. In the portrait of the renowned collage artist, Joseph Cornell, he says: “I live, but at a distance from participation—” (31). It’s a phrase that might be true for all of the portraits of famous artists that appear in the collection: Caetano Veloso is in exile, trying to remember the faces and places he loves; Lucian Freud is in the studio, raw enough from the accumulation of self-induced losses to confront life on the canvas with unwavering honesty; Philip Larkin drafts a letter to a partner, in which he turns away from a shared life; Graham Greene observes life with the cool distance of the note-taker, and uses it to make art.
In a 2018 interview in the Daily Review, Bakowski said “I’m interested in the idea of turning a readers’ attention to the individual. Some nights I walk past the high-rise flats in Richmond and there will be lights on. And I think ‘each one of those lights is a person’”. His portrait poems feel committed to exploring unique individuality, finding their subjects just as they are when they are alone – making, dreaming, worrying, watching, planning – and in so doing, sidestepping generalisations about humanity. And yet the multiplicity of the portraits comes together to create a collage of humanity, in all its rich diversity.
Rigorously researched and intimately imagined, the poems so empathetically inhabit their subjects that they open a portal into the felt life of another. Bakowski has said that he was forged as a poet out of a period of intense loneliness in London as a young man. His poems commit themselves to reaching out beyond our small known world to imagine what – and who – is beyond it. This is what keeps us, and always has kept us, alive:
Wider human contact began through the language of the drums— this reaching out beyond the known is our story, our parable, which may grant us guidance through each unfolding day. (‘Checking in,’ 48)
It is impossible to ignore the fact that much of the collection was written during COVID-19 lockdowns. Although they rarely reference the pandemic directly, these poems are acute with the dual feeling of those times: a profound sense of disconnect and isolation, and a paradoxical sense of all being in it together. As our worlds shrank to the size of our aloneness, Bakowski’s portraits re-people it. They step into the daily lives, interior worlds, and intimate conversations of others: painters, writers, mothers, fathers, uncles, children, families. His poems are animated, polyphonic, voiced, alive with the energy of entire neighbourhoods, towns, cities.
From the small and intimate, Bakowski pans out to a whole-world view. With a finger on the atlas, at home somewhere in Melbourne’s inner north, he is suddenly away: in the deep American south; in Victoria’s East Gippsland; in Chelsea, London; at a market, a short boat ride from Piraeus, Athens. A nurse in a care home searches online for a new job. Petra remembers touring the world with the Russian circus. A wealthy woman suspects her husband, Harry, of an affair. A diner eats alone in Chelsea. We follow the owner of an essential oils company somewhere outside Carcassonne as she makes some changes to her will. We are in the studio with a sculptor. We are playing pirates with Wendy. We are on the phone to the ‘school mums.’ We’re in Ron’s kitchen. We are with exiled musician and activist Caetano Veloso in London in 1971; with Lucian Freud in his studio in 2004. All of it is delightfully, surreally specific. Whether they are real people or imagined, each portrait is alive with something so individual and real that they seem to reveal something true and shared about being human.
It turns out that I was living in the same neighbourhood as Bakowski during the Melbourne lockdowns, living close to Fitzroy North’s Barkly Gardens where he walks his dog in his poem ‘Diary entries in the year 2020’ (12-13). I may even have offered him that “ripple of a smile” from the “recommended distance” (13; 13). My memory of that time was of anxiety, loneliness, desperate interiority. But I also felt an acute sense of attention towards small sources of beauty in the outside world. Over my daily walks around the streets, the allotments, and Merri Creek, I would become intimate with plants and buildings, with fig and lemon trees hanging over the corrugated iron fences into laneways. I walked alone, or with friends carrying coffees and wines, and Zoomed my family on the other side of the world. But my world of encounter – like everyone else’s – was small. COVID-19 lockdowns made noticing a pastime; showed us the daily, attentive work of the poet. Bakowski turns his painterly gaze to insects and objects, the pencil, the dog walk, the fox drinking rainwater from an upturned hubcap, the spider, the snail, the puddle. Often the miniscule and mundane is imbued with a sense of importance: the spider weaves a home, the fox quenches its thirst, the pencil writes letters, recipes, shopping lists. These small things are the stuff of life; they are our sustenance and survival. Their noticing and the accumulation of noticing build to create a detailed picture, giving life a sense of beauty and meaning. Perhaps Bakowski’s portraits of individuals work in a similar way. By capturing plural moments of aloneness, they reach out beyond the individual to create a picture of humanity, charting a path from loneliness and solipsism towards a different kind of aloneness. In solitude, there is no longing, but an innate sense of completeness and companionship.
This zoomed-out view, where one views oneself not as alone but as one of millions – part of a layered symphony of life – is known as the ‘overview effect.’ The term describes the experience of astronauts when they view Earth from space: the realisation that everyone you’ve ever loved, every person who’s ever lived, every bird or fish or flower that you or anyone else has ever admired, has been on the one planet we share. Viewing the Earth this way, one sees one’s own life as part of what Rosalind Watts, Sam Gandy, and Alex Evans call a “larger whole,” as part of “a magnificent, interconnected web of life”. In their 2018 essay on Aeon, titled ‘The whole-planet view,’ authors Watts, Gandy, and Evans suggest that the “whole-planet” view of the astronaut can also be reached via psychedelics – many Indigenous cultures that incorporate psychedelics into their sacred practice hold interconnectedness at the heart of their worldview – and that the overview effect is key to curing many of our individual, societal and planetary ills. Much of modern society, they assert, suffers from an “‘underview’ effect,” where our “perspective narrows; we see fragments of the world and our place in it rather than the whole.” The ‘underview’ effect describes some of the key features of our times: individualism, loneliness, tribalism, polarisation, disconnection ¬– from our own bodies, from others, from the planet, from what Watts, Gandy, and Evans call a “shared sense of identity and purpose.”
Reading Bakowski’s portraits, and what I came to view as Munden’s self-portraits, one experiences something similar to the overview effect. Portraits capture a moment, but they contain a life, and the overwhelming sensation of reading each of them is that of coming to intimately know someone. With each read and re-read, each flicker of relation and recognition, I felt my own life – which also threads from Australia to England to Italy to Australia to England – finely connect to the lives of strangers. Not space travel or psychedelics, then, but poetry’s uncanny ability to reach across the divide that separates us; that finds us when we are at our loneliest and most isolated – in another country on the other side of the world, in a lockdown in a pandemic, in grief – for no less reason than so that we may survive. The picture of the whole ushers in a sense of truth: a journey from the isolated self to one integrated into a larger whole, to which one has always belonged, where one’s individual joy and pain is reified by its humanity. As Munden writes in the final poem in the collection, ‘Recomposed’:
I am fast becoming altogether more like myself, believable, more true. (143)
