Pam Schindler, A Sky You Could Fall Into. Brisbane: Post Pressed, 2010.
Reviewed by Zenobia Frost
This début collection has been long-awaited. Many of its poems first found homes in well-thumbed journals-Meanjin, Island, Blue Dog, Hecate, and Stylus, to name a few-but with their unanimous song of bird and frog, they are best read together.
Schindler's poetic voice is tender without sentimentality. In her work, the natural world merges effortlessly with the human, as if each poem were born straight out of the earth she so lovingly paints. Or as if each piece were a little house-its north aspect firmly planted in the bush and its south looking out to the far-off lights of the city. This is the collection's most striking feature: the world collapses in on itself; lines blur between what is human and what is animal; what is domestic and what is wild; what is ocean and what is sky.
In A Sky You Could Fall Into, themes and figures recur throughout, weaving the collection into a cohesive whole that binds the reader into a sense of familiarity with the poems. Frogsong is the collection's constant soundtrack: they sing the book into being, welcome the morning by 'percolating against the windows,' and transcribe 'their morse-coded words, / tapping the glad rambling / letters of the rain.' Birds and possums, too, appear and reappear.
The book could be said to have four movements, though there is no strict division between them. There are poems about the character of the Brisbane bush and its inhabitants, about birth and motherhood, about death, and finally about the ocean. Again, the book echoes with how inseparable these things are. Schindler's poems commune with the reader, sharing her intimate relationship with nature. She tenderly speaks of and to the world: 'The moon is a curved hand cupped / around a mystery' ('New Moon'); 'The soft northern air / leans close like a lover' ('Brisbane Nightfall'); and, recalling a forest tryst in 'Night in the Border Ranges':
I curl that night in my hand
its thread of bell-music
to carry with me
under the dark trees
Desire is explored in a delicious triptych of poems about the constellation Orion. The stand-out of these is 'Orion and the Bunya Tree', a poetic creation myth in which the bunya tree is personified as a mother-deity, 'headfirst in the earth' and with feet 'wandering a little in the breeze.'
her vast thighs touch
but her knees are parted
and the wind smooths
all round her towering legs-
In this sensual description we have an example of the easy rhythm in Schindler's work. One line glides into the next, with momentum maintained by assonance such as in 'vast thighs' and 'round...towering'. The effect is such that the poet's craftsmanship is invisible; Schindler's poems flow as naturally as 'new glittering leaves' from Bunya Tree's feet.
Throughout A Sky You Could Fall Into, Schindler most often celebrates what in nature might be renamed goddesses in a different context; there is a strong sense of the feminine in the creativity, sexuality, and nurturing that occur in her poems. Orion, on the other hand, is at once a figure inciting desire and distant from it:
spread out in the sky
too wide for any girl's arms
The women Schindler writes of are not distant and sky-hung; they are very much of the earth. 'In Paperbark Country' juxtaposes the brief life of a blue dragonfly, 'teaching the eye suddenness', with the life of the speaker's mother. The young mother is compared to the paperbark; then, as she ages, to a lake:
cupping today's sunlight
she will hold it and let it go
Perhaps the strongest poem in the collection is 'The Little House', written in memory of Queensland poet Gloria Yates. 'The Little House' is heartbreaking in its simplicity: there is no hedging here; the poet speaks plainly of impending death and of the great strength of the woman who stood against it. The poem opens as a nursery rhyme could open-'The doctor came to visit', but the doctor's dialogue is as distant as Orion, composed of only two words from a medical discourse foreign to the poem's simple language. Every little word in this poem is 'stitched like steel', and when the final stanza comes, the reader cannot help but feel it in her bones:
How the doctors backed away.
How her heart wrapped fiercely around
the little house,
and the little dog.
A Sky You Could Fall Into is a significant first collection from a Brisbane poet worthy of considerably more recognition than she has so far received. It is a book that draws us in. Like 'the possum on the windowsill', we are tempted to curl into Schindler's poems as 'into our own dark.'
Zenobia Frost is a Brisbane-based poet and journalist. Her work has recently appeared in Overland, Small Packages, Voiceworks, Writing Queensland, and Famous Reporter. In 2009 she took her début chapbook, The Voyage (SweetWater Press), around Australia on the Arts Queensland Touring Poets Program. She is the arts editor of Rave Magazine. http://zenobiafrost.wordpress.com