Squares and rectangles

Paul Hetherington’s Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 112 pp) choreographs its prose poems carefully, which is unsurprising from the co-author and co-editor, respectively, of a scholarly book on prose poetry and Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (both 2020). His new collection employs a lyric-dramatic mode, which Fernando Pessoa described as ‘lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters’. It features a ‘he’ and a ‘she’ with a ‘shared / Australian vernacular’, in a long, glancing dialogue. These appear most direct in nine ‘Ragged Disclosures’, each comprising three square poems which are bordered and interlinked. ‘Ragged Disclosures 1’ offers a clue to the text: ‘Their ragged / intersections make an unjoined, / searching rapport.’  The poems between these seem to represent this ‘searching rapport’ through shared experience in Rome, Venice, and various other locales, with pronominal shifts to ‘I,’ ‘we’, and ‘you’.

The language is introspective and brims with feeling, as here in ‘Snow’:

They read Chekhov. Words bring snow and
a view of a tangled orchard. Ghosts haunt the
trees, their own speech fails to catch, the air
is chary of sunshine. Someone is playing
backgammon as centuries weigh …

It can be vivid, as in ‘Sidling’, which shows the text’s preoccupation with (often ‘unjoined’) time: ‘A flight of birds; an updraught of air. I watch the estuary / fade; handle my arms, feel your touch on my skin like / drapings of silver water – a few hours, a decade ago.’ Square and rectangular poems, columns of text bordered left and right, and poems within encompassing ‘walls’ – likely connoting restriction – abound. One anomaly is ‘Francis Bacon Triptych’, where a stanza’s walls don’t meet, suggesting aesthetic/emotional ‘slippages’ (the section title) or ‘disclosures’. Another is a sequence of square prose poems with a disorderly final two lines, skittering abruptly out of bounds.