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ARTS AND CULTURE

Poetry in lockdown: Recent work of Hermina Burns

  • 14 October 2021
Well before the pandemic, the future for poetry’s slim volumes was looking far from healthy.  Last November, the threatened closure of UWA Press, one of the largest publishers of poetry in Australia, drew attention to the narrowing opportunities for emerging poets to make their mark.  The venerable Griffin Press, however, now under the Ovato umbrella, remains in the business of fostering ‘untried authors’.  

Proof of its commitment to getting a ‘high-quality product’ onto the market quickly are the attractively-printed debut volumes of Melbourne poet Hermina Burns, produced under the imprint of her own redoubtable Bristlebird Press. Her poems, dwelling in domestic space and in the expansive spaces of the natural world, speak directly to the cross-currents of our locked-down times: the longing for sea-change or tree-change played out in a buoyant real estate market, ‘back to nature’ exercise, the soul-searching generated by environmental degradation and climate change.

In her first collection, Against Separation Creek (2019), she takes consolation, during the separations enforced by loss and grief, in the wild beauty of Separation Creek on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Its companion volume, Bite of a Bluebottle, celebrates the intimacy of domestic space: its accidents and betrayals, the wisdom gathered in dailyness.

These are the two spaces of which Gaston Bachelard writes in his celebrated study, The Poetics of Space (1958): the space of intimacy and ‘world space’. In late 2020, Hermina Burns retains this dual focus in two further collections: Dodging the Relative, with its sharp and poignant insights into family life, and Crossing a Line, a return to her ‘triangle of state’, where ‘Bass Strait funnels Antarctic air/ driving cold fronts/ into the western district/after striking this wriggling edge of coast’. It is a coast rich in history, of ice-age tectonic shifts, of shipwreck and drownings.

The metaphor of the line — drawn across a mental map, crossed, intersecting in the charcoal and ochre traces of dancing figures, including, excluding — makes a unifying theme. It signals large preoccupations: with the loss of natural habitat and the life it once sustained, and the destruction of indigenous people and culture.

The title poem is a litany for ‘our country’s emblems’, kangaroo and emu, together with wombat, possum and wallaby, dying on the roads they tried to cross: ‘We call it road kill/ though it’s not the road/ that blinds their eyes.’ The emu is singled out in the deft little parable that opens the book, ‘the stick’. Family anecdote

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