Felicity Plunkett

For seven years after her 1963 burial, Sylvia Plath lay in an unmarked grave near St Thomas the Apostle Church in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. The gravestone, when it came, bore her birth and married names, Sylvia Plath Hughes, the years of her birth and death, and a line from Wu Cheng-en’s sixteenth-century novel Monkey King:Journey to the West: ‘Even amidst fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.’

For a long time, Antigone Kefala was thought of as a migrant writer. This lens confined discussion of her work to the territory of biography and witness and obscured the migratory poetics of the writing itself. In her spare, bristling poems and candid journals, and across her non-fictional prose and fiction, Kefala’s restive work hinges on precision and vision.

At the heart of Gail Jones’s Five Bells is a hymn to Kenneth Slessor’s dazzling elegy of the same name, published in 1939. Slessor wrote his poem after the death of journalist Joe Lynch, who fell from a ferry and drowned in Sydney Harbour. The poem imagines the death and harbour burial of Lynch, and evokes grief and memory through fractured images of water, submersion, and storm. It is a poem concerned with time, and the ways emotion disrupts time, and memory: ‘the flood that does not flow.’ It is also about place and displacement. Jones’s novel, too, revolves around grief’s disruptions, and the Circular Quay setting becomes the focus of its action on a single Saturday, and its meditation on memory, trauma, and resilience. She includes slivers of the poem as well as versions of its images.

When the ABC conducted a poll to discover Australia’s favourite poem, twenty thousand votes were cast, and ‘Five Bells’ was the winner. Naming a book after a poem, and making the poem central, as Jones does in intuitive and subtle ways, gestures towards a deep allegiance, which, apparently, large numbers of readers share. Knowing the poem well, and sharing Jones’s sense of its centrality to an imagining of the work of mourning and of the spaces of Sydney, I find her novel shimmers with recollections of ‘Five Bells’.

What is truth in poetry? This unanswerable question is central to Colm Tóibín’s meticulous and attentive reading of American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. First published in 2015, its thirteen chapters examine her poetry and its relationship to her life through an overarching lens of telling the truth in poetry, the power of the unsaid, and the impact of this on Tóibín’s own writing.

Jane Hirshfield writes a poem on the first day of each year. ‘Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me’ is one of the new poems in The Asking, along with poems selected from nine collections published since 1982. It begins with a question the world asks (‘as it asks daily’): ‘And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?’

Outside the window is a mountain: ‘For years, I woke each day first to the mountain, / then to the question.’ Counting things the speaker can make or change – ‘black-eyed peas and collards’, a pudding made from late-season persimmons, a light bulb – she observes the way the world brings sorrow after sorrow. Some are immovable as a mountain; others change, as questions do. ‘The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, / and still they surprised.’ To these she brings postcards and stamps, daily trying to respond.

Among the poem’s long lines is a couplet built of spare, clipped sentences. Stone, Hirshfield writes ‘did not become apple. War did not become peace.’ How then, asks this poem, like many by Hirshfield, do we continue to face the world’s pain?

In Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’