DIO: This leads me to the subject of spatiality in your poetry. I think of the double or multiple presences of place, of cities and of the pastoral. How are you able to conceptualise the multidimensional aspects or events of a place and harmonise them with interior substructures?
JD: A sense of place is so important. I feel connected to many, a Japanese garden, Mediterranean islands. My hometown. Different countries, different bridges. Something happened there: history, love, friendship, a previous life. I could not pack my grandfather’s walnut tree in a suitcase, but I often sit in an Adelaide cafe, thinking and writing about it. A scent, a voice, an accent can easily evoke another entire world. Sometimes all these worlds echo each other, often they argue, but in poetry they seem to coexist or connect. Motion blur again? Poetry can allow that. Vasko Popa writes about “a world within a world”. A poem is perhaps a kind of place where all my worlds can connect, transform, be visible and hopefully offer something surprising.
DIO: The poem ‘Dresses’ in your second book The Bridge reveals this modality. If it is okay by you, I would like to include the poem here:
Sunbeams like blades play hit and miss through the windows wide open. A dazzle of daylight is all I own, the silky turn of a season. A few dresses hanging in their worn-out tyranny. A hello and goodbye are spring decisions. Daises will tell. I trace disembodied presences, the beaming patterns of first impressions, imagined conversations. Some real. Often forgotten. A few prints of the world left behind. Lost translations once loved. Loves me, loves me not. Petals, in a pocket full of hope past its date. (10)
I love the abstraction of time/duration/season in relation to the fleshy existence of land, of the terrestrial here: “A hello and goodbye / are spring decisions. // Daises will tell.” I suppose a line from your poem ‘Lost Way’ (dedicated to your grandmother) perfectly expresses the extent to which you recreate and animate landscapes: “a landscape on my dining table”. Could you comment on how you collect and carry landscapes with you?
JD: I love the idea of collecting and carrying landscapes. I carry my landscapes on my face, in my accent, in my pendant, in the pattern of my dress or I spread them on the table like the pearls of wisdom. They are the fragments of landscapes, the small pieces of evidence that migrate with me. Many are lost. In poetry, I think, they can all come together. They won’t be the same, they will be altered, translated into something else, sometimes sounding guilty, or worldly, but hopefully they can come close enough to touch.
DIO: Belgrade, Adelaide, Aleksinac, Markovo are some of the places that appear in In the Room with the She Wolf. We hear of Adelaide city this way, “I am falling in love with Adelaide / but Adelaide often tests my heart” (5), and elsewhere “I am writing my way back…At the intersection on South Terrace / I lean on the wheel and watch / the statue of a woman / a bling of promise in the sun” (48). Malaysia also takes its turn with these lines: “I find that loneliness grows in most suitable places. / A spare bed in my room is meddling with my mind…a bird flies into the roof / and screeches for freedom. / It is a sign, an ancient story. / The guesthouse opens like a lidded glass jar / but the bird doesn’t see it yet. / It takes time to find a way out” (40–41).
While The Bridge traverses a host of other cities such as Dubrovnik, Paris, Istanbul, Aleksinac (again), it returns joyfully to Adelaide. How do you describe this new gravitational pull towards or in Adelaide city? One feels this strongly from such lines: “I walk the streets between here and there / deep in moonlight, the silence / noble, the night turning back time. / I don’t mind being lost, / or late home, / the moon is behind me” (17) or these lines from ‘Terribly Nice Things’: “The long line of jacarandas / throw their petals your way…On this side of the world / we turn to each other / and away / like two sides of November / and every street leads to us” (39). The Bridge ends with the poem ‘Gumnuts’, which reveals a fresh kind of anticipated wallow in bliss, a self-possession, locatedness and rootedness:
My birthday comes in autumn now, in the golden weather. The sun has come out of hiding, and I lie happy under a eucalyptus tree. The leaves are glowing, flammable… …The red earth’s lips sucking my life softly. And I knew that I would lie here a bit longer, widespread… (70)
Is my reading correct? Could you speak about the ecological harmony materialising here?
JD: I joyfully return to Adelaide every time. Thank you for noticing the ‘gravitational pull’. It is part of me, now. We had to adjust to each other; I had to learn its offerings and went the wrong way many times. It was a long journey before the gumnuts fell on my page. It was a pleasure to discover that the best destination might be lying under a eucalypt tree. It was about finding the place but also willing to surrender to it. Perhaps that’s ecological harmony, in a way. Becoming one with landscapes. I had to cross a few borders to learn that places can be left behind. In the Room with the She Wolf was about displacement. The Bridge is mostly about tender places, crossings and connections, and arriving under a eucalypt tree at the end of book. It might be a little reckless to say I have found my place, and I surrender. But if it is, I am willing to take that risk.
DIO: You mentioned elsewhere that: “I’m not used to the quiet – I’m usually on the move. But when I slowed down, interesting things happened.” I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the polyphonic nature of centres or cities of your movements and how the multiplicity of resonance across these places factored into the question of your not being used to the quiet.
JD: Perhaps slowing down is useful after all. It allows us to begin to hear our inner voice, the inside and outside sounds rather than the mere noise, the rhythm rather than the chaos. The forgotten can rise to the surface and, with luck, a poem arrives. My favourite cities don’t become quieter, but they teach me to listen (the way a camera teaches a way of looking, perhaps). Slowing down doesn’t bring absence, it helps me to hear the shaking of the leaves, an orchestra of birds, or the little sounds the house makes in the middle of a night when I am home alone. Still, I continue to move and try to make the most of that also. There is music to be found in movement too.
DIO: In the poem ‘Unannounced’ in The Bridge, you write: “I move through life – / sometimes backwards, // often softly, / against the breeze // toward a place / where travel ends // and I land / in time to unpack” (17). This sort of lyrical philosophising is expressed across your work, sometimes through the landscape and other times through affectional connections. I want you to touch on this poetic state – this universe of words and wordlessness – as it corresponds or contrasts with existential reflections.
JD: I find every poem to be a little destination where I can unpack a suitcase of words, and hope to fill a new ‘room’ with multiple meanings and lyrical evocations that might speak to a reader. I also take delight in wordlessness, in the weight of silence, those moments of pause that can be louder than words. This is an ordinary, natural approach, rather than philosophical. Perhaps the philosophical follows, as can so many other resonances. What remains after a poem is written, or read, speaks to our previous discussion about how it can escape beyond its frame, its cage of words. All of which keeps us curious, takes us backwards, softly against the breeze, or forward towards a place where the travel ends.
DIO: Thank you immensely, Jelena, for taking the time to share your poetic insights.
JD: I enjoyed thinking more about life and poetry through your questions, David. Thank you for the opportunity and for preparing them with such care and attention.
