Launch (extract) of Nicola Bowery's poetry collection 'married to this ground'
Manning Clark House, Canberra ACT - August 7th, 2014
If you want a book that will take you into the heart of landscape you’ve never seen before, married to this ground is the book that will take you there. But this is not a book where you escape the world. This is a book that sharpens the way in which to observe reality for what it is…
There are three parts to this collection: here, a geography of marriage and elsewhere. No matter which section you are reading, birds insinuate themselves into the words. I counted at least 8 out of the 22 poems (over a third) in the middle section where kookaburras, goshawks, black cockies, magpies and gang-gangs are woven into not just the text but the emotional truth underneath…The outcome of this is we see clearly what it is like to be so married to the landscape, so aware and part of the environment, what’s there becomes part of everything that is written.
The second part maps out the territory one often treads in marriage. Nicola takes a 360 degree view of daily life as well as the demands placed on an intimate partner in an effort to understand the other. The trek to the mountain top where all partnerships are strained to the limit, or the valleys of green when we things go right, is covered. Two poems for instance, illustrate this fine balance. In the title poem a geography of marriage Nicola writes:
writing this is also a holding of breath
what do I say
what can I say
that is not both loving and treacherous?
Counteracting this, we find these words in On your return from the northern hemisphere:
there’s electricity in the air
the charge of the other returned
the electricity of two-ness
the percussive beat of the solitary
meets the cymbal clang of the traveller
such a sharp mixing of tunes of hemispheres…
Nicola doesn’t thrust herself into every poem even when she is using the pronouns ‘I’ or ‘me’. By this I mean what she observes, we see in our own lives. There is universality in what she writes from personal experience….
More poems from Nicola Bowery's poetry collection 'married to this ground'
moments
Invocation, 'as lichen'
Re-greeting Australia the motherland
the bed