Barbara Temperton’s Ghost Nets, published in 2022, is her fourth collection, interweaving Temperton’s long-term inspiration from landscapes (particularly that of Western Australia) with personal experiences of bereavement. While Royal renders the artifice and performance of grief in The Drama Student, Temperton houses her poems in the natural world, turning to its soothing logic in the face of loss.
The collection’s title gestures towards a core theme of the book, the entanglement of grief and nature (fishing nets lost from boats are known as ‘ghost nets’ because they continue to fish, trapping marine life and debris). Divided into five sections named ‘Adrift,’ ‘Entangled,’ ‘Cruising,’ ‘Gyre,’ and ‘Surfacing,’ these emulate the cyclical nature of both a ghost net at sea, and loss itself. Like the net, Temperton patiently gathers and collects moments, memories, and details, letting them accumulate in her poems.
Temperton guides us through the journey of water, and how it can make sense of loss. Water is what carries the ghost nets out into the sea and what pulls them back in from the shore. In ‘Ghost Nets,’ the ocean is what snatches away the speaker’s dead friend’s name written in foam, makes a dead gull’s body wash up on the shore (2). After all, water is part of a cycle — it passes through us and re-enters, through rain, piss, tears, sweat, absorption. It never disappears but instead shifts into different forms, conforming to whatever container it is in. Water is an ever-present and ever-flowing motif in this collection, speaking to the porosity of loss — how it can leak across, into, and through the shape of one’s life.
The section/poem ‘Gyre,’ true to name, is a swirling vortex, memories of Temperton’s father accumulating like foam on water’s surface, intercepted by vignettes of the natural world (49–53). “Rivers flow into inlets / inlets to oceans,” which reflect the shape of this poem; blocks of text trickle into the next line (52). The staggered lineation and fragmentation have the effect of slowing down the poem, something I liken to what Denise Riley writes about in Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), the way time warps after grief, “an altered condition of life” (19).
In this poem, nature overlaps and melds with her father — he is “hibernating like the ancient tree he is named for,” his finger “down-curved like the bill of an ibis” (50). With references to the “felled trees” or the “fern bowed by hollow bone,” Temperton recognises that loss is integral to the natural world, which humans are undoubtedly entangled with in Temperton’s poetic universe (51; 52). When “the password fails me” and the “red-winged fairy-wren” appears, Temperton depicts nature as a place where, like the seemingly random flight patterns of birds or the contours of a tide, loss begins to make sense (50).
When it comes to the bestial, dead animals also make an appearance in this collection — from the death of beloved dogs in ‘Ballooning’ to a raven crushed into bitumen in ‘Not Another Poem About Road Kill and Ravens’ (30; 62). These images serve as a dual metaphor, representing both the inability of the dead and the inability of animals to express themselves (to us, at least) through language. Temperton writes the raven’s body as a vector for language — feathers as “calligraphy,” “the mess of its head remains on the road, where no-one can reclaim it” (62). This transforms the fairly quotidian tragedy of roadkill into a palpable metaphor for the ways in which death and loss can render language unintelligible, turning it into something that cannot be re-claimed.
In the poem ‘Clot,’ Temperton employs line breaks and spacing to echo the void, splitting words away from the poem’s main body (68). The use of negative space creates a sense that the poem is floating, as opposed to Royal’s frenetic, weighty clusters of words. Grief is sketched out here through absence, the possibility of death looming through a TV show or a crucible cracking in a hot furnace, emulating the poem’s own breakage (68). As the poem spirals, the space around isolated words like “crucible,” “cracks,” “inside,” accumulates and pulsates (68). The poem rejects any readerly obligation to fill in the blank, absence has its own weight.
Temperton’s work is at its strongest when she writes about the natural world in an ecological mode, something she does with an almost devotional attention. However, that careful attention is sometimes lost when she adopts a more sociological approach. For instance, the series of poems in ‘Cruising’ feature a speaker “speed-dating South East Asia,” which is an uncomfortable and uncritical way to describe tourism in this region, given the widespread fetishisation of South East Asia (38). In ‘Hunt Street,’ the imperial lens appears again as an unexamined default when the speaker of this poem imagines herself and her brother as “valuable white horses” chased by “Arab traders” (the other children) (12–13). Yes, the horse is also a metaphor for freedom, and while the poem does filter this image through the imaginations of children, these ill-considered tropes are grating in what is otherwise a tender, thoughtful collection. Like water’s cycle through many forms and landscapes, Temperton’s collection is a recognition of grief and the change it brings as innate to life—and something to be observed with curiosity and wonder. With enough patience and time, attention can become understanding.
Speaking to and against each other, Royal and Temperton add to the polyphony of voices making up the long and ongoing tradition of writing grief. Both collections examine grief as a type of knowing. To grieve is to remember; to understand time as non-linear; to know that language encompasses absence; to experience fragmentation as an embodiment of loss. This brings to mind a Chinese saying I recently learned: ‘even when the lotus breaks, we still stay connected.’ Even when bitten into or broken, they remain attached through thin, filament-like threads. When I Google images of lotus roots, their delicacy reminds me of spider webbing. This fine mesh of threads can be likened to grief’s singularity as experience and multiplicity in expression, how when the single thread of a life breaks, there are many ways to stay connected.
