The compulsion to make lists is not purely of diagnostic interest to psychologists or the domain of scientists and accountants but also a potent and complex poetic mode. Song in the Grass, Kate Fagan’s first collection of poems in more than 10 years, brings lists, hymns, elegies and lyrics into an enlivening, idiosyncratic conversation.
The list is recruited by Fagan, not as a detached method of categorisation but as a way of reaffirming interconnectedness in a time of ecological crisis. In “Thinking with Things”, she writes, “We love things so much that listing each one allows it / to arrive permanently”. And in “Portable Craft”, list-making “makes me feel lighter. Writing the index, I am / like blown glass or an arrow of geese”.
The book begins with “one year one garden”, a poem populated entirely by 50 birds, and ends with “The Midnight Charter”, a long, capacious anaphoric poem on writing attentively within the tumultuous present. In this poem, and in “My Breath Is a Swallow”, the list becomes a chain of transformation, where each poetic line plants a word-seed for the next. So the poem’s title line leads to “The swallow arcs into distance / Distance becomes a changing cloud / The cloud carries rain that peels onto objects arranged / as cold stones on a mountain.”
Fagan’s poetic voice, too, resists categorisation. Often the writing is bracing in its clarity, warmth and lyric compression, particularly her poems of family and home. Just as often, the poems demand careful reading and re-reading to absorb the oblique relationships between their motifs.
Many poems, too, are tributes or “letters” to other writers – Dermot Healy, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Pam Brown and Martin Harrison, among others – whose intimacy is reflected partly in the way Fagan adapts these writers’ voices to her own thoughtful ends. She is also a musician and songwriter and while many of the poems emerged from collaborations with composers, these are not lyrics that rely on instrumental accompaniment for their impact but rather seem more like fragmented prayers to the natural world.
As a reader and writer of poetry, I’ve become sceptical of writers capturing birds in their poems, using them as shorthand for epiphany or tragedy. Fagan, however, clearly has a deep love for birds in themselves, not as symbols or devices. “Alarm Call in Nesting Season” is one of the most heartbreaking and lyrically astute “ornithological elegies” I’ve read in years.
Giramondo, 96pp, $27
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
June 29, 2024 as “Song in the Grass”.
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