Launch (extract) of Nicola Bowery's poetry collection 'married to this ground'
Braidwood, NSW - June 14th, 2014
Let’s start with the cover —an intimate portrait, very close-up, very much the feel of the whole collection. Can't get much more grounded than lichen…Perfect cover for the book, and chosen with care, like the title. Intimacy and groundedness carry all the way through in fact…
That's the lovely double intimacy of the book: we are married, not just to each other but to the ground. It starts from the ground up. The first long section is simply "here".
Since this is a personal tour I'll just say it's full of things I personally love — every reader will find their own. Lovely sense of women's space, most particularly the portraits of her beloved octagon where Nicola writes, its books, its inhabitants (a spider), its being. You could say the whole book is a kind of woman's space, in fact....
Another thing I can't help wanting to point out because it pleases me so — the birds. They jump out of poem after poem… Not easy to do birds with words, they evade them, so it's doubly impressive that they're so alive and themselves in these poems…just to give you a sense of what Nicola's words can do:
"A robin lands like a scarlet full stop on the bowl's edge".
Describing bird song:
grebe's call: "A light chain running out fast from its spool"
gang gangs: "an equable / almost canoodling conversation"
"the king-parrot's /pinpoint note / pricking the silence"
I should stop, or you'll get the impression it's all a book of birds. In fact a huge presence in this book I haven't even touched on — the other half of the title, that word "married". If you know Nicola's work you'll know that one thing she does particularly well is the sustained meditation on a theme that's followed through in a series of poems. This word gives you the central deep theme of this book — not just marriage to ground and place, but to each other. This is a part of the tour that I can't take you on myself, it would be too much like peering in through windows, you'll just have to buy the book.
The final section is "elsewhere", elsewhere including other couples, which are brilliantly observed…And much more besides... In fact so much here you'll recognize, one way and another. All these poems keep circling back again and again to the everyday, making it feel new and intimate all over again.
More poems from Nicola Bowery's poetry collection 'married to this ground'
moments
Invocation, 'as lichen'
Re-greeting Australia the motherland
the bed