In Apples and Oranges: Adventures in Poetics , Stuart Cooke concedes that his ideas “talk to one another, but how they do this isn’t clear. I can’t shake the idea that each of them makes sense only in relation to one person”.
This is the challenge of the lyric essay. Readers must be willing to piece together
disparate fragments: ideas, information and idiosyncrasies.
This is also the lyric essay’s beauty, its textual alchemy. Personal experiences and scholarly knowledge intertwine, generating transformational and often surprising insights.
Apples & Oranges: Adventures in Poetics – Stuart Cooke (Puncher & Wattmann)
The Ruin of Magic: Longing and Belonging in Strange Times – Kate Holden (Black Inc.)
What is transformed in Cooke’s collection, and in Kate Holden’s elegant The Ruin of Magic: Longing and Belonging in Strange Times , is our relation to place: local and global, private and planetary .
Cooke’s interest in the planetary is explicit. He describes encounters with ravens in Death Valley, fish in Brisbane, stray cats in the Andes. He imagines the earth without humanity and reminds us that “music and poetry are not human inventions”.
Holden approaches the planetary through the personal, leaping dizzyingly between the collective and the solitary: “ Climate change may blot out the stars from our sight within twenty years . I read this, in silence, on the glass screen of my phone, and know not what to do at this dreadfulness except scroll away.”
Transformative practice
Cooke is interested in poetics in all senses of the word. Several essays in Apples & Oranges are reflections – personal and scholarly – on poetry. Cooke offers new observations on poets, national and international: Robert Gray , Philip Hodgins , Francisco “Kokoy” Guevara .
He is also interested in poetics as a “theory of form”, a transformative practice. His essay on Mexican writer Segio Pitol begins with a contemplation of the way writing can “reverberate through you, like an extra heartbeat”. He ends the collection with a meditation on the voiceless language of trees: “a deeply sensual poetics of touch, permeation, transformation”.
Holden, too, considers poetry and broader poetics. Formally, she takes her
readers on spectacular flights through literature, philosophy and history. Her essay The Age of Incredulity, for instance, correlates the “blaze” of poetry with a consideration of “enchantment” as a consoling impulse.
Here is a delicate and leisurely dance through ideas. As Holden puts it, “why must an essay dash like an arrow to its arrival, piercing and startling as it goes?” She leans into the uncertainty at the heart of the lyric essay, what the writer Jennifer Sinor calls “questions, hesitation, and unknowing”.
Cooke’s essays represent a body of work accumulated over some years. He writes of the pandemic, his grief and gratitude, his colleagues and mentors, including poet Martin Harrison and ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose . He reflects on “daily life and news feeds of melting icebergs in Antarctica” and describes journeys across Chile, Brazil and Mexico.
In this, Cooke tends towards the lyric essay’s collage or mosaic shape. “The world is not just the sum of the things that are in it,” he writes. “It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them.”
Holden’s book is more contained. Five of her six extended essays were written after
her recent move to Dharawal Country: the Illawarra in New South Wales, south of Sydney. She muses on themes of belonging and “homefulness” (“the home sighs for what you think”), gender (“women and their homes: a womb, a tomb, a gallery, a prison, a refuge, a body”) and family (“under all our paths in life run the footprints of our parents”).
Holden is aware of the complexities of what “home” might mean. She doesn’t shy
away from imagining homes with “private horrors” – illness, domestic violence, death. This is another characteristic of the lyric essay: the capacity to hold contrasting ideas, to allow for the plural.
Hidden conversations
Where these books come together is their contemplation of what it means to be
Australian in a global context. Cooke and Holden compare Australia with other
locations and nations, searching for what Cooke calls “hidden conversations
between them”.
Cooke is drawn to the Americas. In one astonishing essay, he traces the split of
Gondwana and the evolutionary journeys of the Araucaria species to become pehuén trees in Chile and Norfolk Island pines . The tree’s stories are unified by the figure of Cooke himself, escaping from Australia, while also recognising that he is “more typically of Australian history than he would ever admit”.
In another enlightening essay, he makes the case for Brazil and Australia as “mirror images … both marked by a European anxiety to do with the sheer magnitude of the space”.
Holden yearns northward to Europe and the United Kingdom. Much of her collection
is a rumination on her profound relationship with classics of E…
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