Aria by Sarah Holland-Batt | Anne Elder Award Winner 2008

Sarah Holland-Batt’s poetry is no stranger to critical acclaim with her most recent collection The Jaguar winning the Australian Book of the Year Award and the Stella Prize and her second collection The Hazards winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2016. Her first collection Aria holds the record for the most wins her in career, securing the Dorothy Hewitt Fellowship, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and, of course, the Anne Elder Award in 2008. Described in the UQP blurb as “striking” and “haunting” or by Anthony Lawrence as “assured”, this debut collection is remarkably solid with a sustained vision and consistent execution. Unsurprisingly, the motif of music permeates the collection and illustrates the themes of time, repetition, and rhythm.

The collection is divided into three untitled sections that a previous reader of my particular copy has summarised as nature, art, and change, but the themes that appeared most prescient in my reading were spirit, body, and time with corresponding tones that moved the reader from awe to passion to resignation.

What holds this collection together is Holland-Batt’s steady, measured voice, painting scenes gently and with a sure hand. The constant rhythm of the language reflects the constant rhythm of the world represented as a heartbeat, the cycles of the weather, the rotating planets, and the ever-forward momentum of time. The attention paid to the rhythm of the world is what also unites poetry and music in Holland-Batt’s poetics, whether the structured sound of classical composers or set poetic forms or the more organic sounds of nature and repeated actions.

The first section opens the collection into the natural world amongst birds and trees. Amongst the landscape, though, the human gaze is somewhat precarious, as though a solitary figure amplifies the appearance of stillness and emptiness around it. In “Ruined Estates” tagged “Mountain monastery, Sakamoto”, the speaker wanders through a human space reclaimed by nature and is disturbed by the experience of being de-centred.

The monastery is a tenantless house;
I don’t know why I’ve come, what uninhabited
thing in me loves this kind of vacancy:
a weathered roof, its corners pitched to catch
the slow dissolve of needles dropped blunt
by the atlas pine, a sun less luminous
from lack of human use, the artlessly composed
gingkoes. Sometimes I think I have seen
the civilised world and had enough. (6)

There is a tension between the speaker’s need to control their environment, “I only want to see / stillness where I expect it” (6), and the underlying awe at the indifference of the natural world toward her, “I think I am stone / as the arrowheads of pines vanish / into the understory of cloud” (4).

At the same time, many poems in this collection meditate on the speaker’s parents and the complex inheritance of features, behaviours, and memories that flow through family trees. In “Tracery”, the speaker remembers heirlooms in her grandmother’s house.

If, in this life, I could see them again,
I would trace a fingertip
around their light-holding mouths:
the painted mason jars that sat, squat,
in ascending height,
on a ledge in my grandmother’s house. (12)

The position of the child’s body looking upwards to the mason jars mirrors the adult speaker gazing at the pines disappearing into clouds. This position, combined with the steady presence of the speaker’s parents in this collection repeatedly places the reader in a position of supplication both as a child and as an adult, which lends this section a spiritual quality of seeking guidance and understanding. Two poems make explicit the yearning for direction, “January: An Air” and “Circles and Centres”, where Holland-Batt uses second-person address to give the poetic voice a sense of instruction and reassurance. In both poems, the central figure is caught up in the chaos of indecision and mundane preoccupations represented in “January: An Air” as “a tiger moth” which “labours like an old Russian / peasant in Turgenev” (13). But the poetic voice is reassuring, returning the worried woman to stillness and certainty.

When thought spreads its black umbels and seeds
know there will always be this: certainty
in the middens, the junk and litter of bones,
the broken skulls of grey kangaroos,
and a dead shearwater petrified in the dunes,
its wing grazing the charged sky
of a surf blue as malice, in summer, in January. (14)

It’s a morbid kind of hope, using the certainty of death as a comfort. Two pages later and “Circles and Centres” continues the sentiment but incorporates death into the natural cycle of life, an inescapable and necessary force that the woman cannot force into submission no matter how hard she tries.

It is real, this field
of rings, orbs, cores; a narrative without fringes
or hard edges, growth that shoots as it rots,
accreting purpose in its circuitry, yet you find it
wanting order. You are digging, digging against it,
possibly for an end; going around the perimeter
of your plot, wielding your ability to crimp
and cinch and singe like a new addition
to your vocabulary. (16)

Like the reclaimed monastery, nature’s ability to de-centre the human, to humble that deep need to control in order to escape death, is made manifest in unbroken circles and undisturbed growth.

If the first section is about the tension between awe and discomfort in the larger-than-human world, the second section is turned more interpersonal, seeing the human as more deeply embedded in the continuous flow of time. The towering trees are brought down, “she knows good lumber when she sees it” (29), and instead reverberate human presence, “how is it that after all the falling and failing / these floorboards still sing” (31). The connection here is material, wood as paper, floorboards, beds, and, especially, instruments through which people transmit the sounds of their lives.

A particularly potent memory of a mother sewing clothes for her daughter captures Holland-Batt’s rich overlays of sound like memories caught in the woodgrain or woven into the fabric itself.

My mother measured the margins
of my known world there:
a sunlit annex where the lines converged,
wrist to shoulder-blade, hip, ankle, waist;
maps I would only outgrow
charted in painstaking tailor’s chalk.

Under her foot, the Singer roared;
sometimes a foxtrot, sometimes a waltz,
she treadled the peddle with a pianist’s touch. (28)

As the sounds are continually folded into the material of the world and the cycle of life, so too is the human body and the mounds of memories, expectations, and disappointments built into that life.

We had read the books. We wanted to believe
it could happen in rooms like ours: white walls;
novels beside the bed.
Outside: the snowdrift, wind raking the black birch.

Solace of the real, of the body.
Instead, immense silence, then the hingeless cry
breaking the animal darkness like a spike. (30)

The way that Holland-Batt incorporates the often under-utilised sense of sound into her poetics feels both fresh and saturated with her sonorous knowledge of classical music and the ancient links between poetry and music. The materials of sound and language drawn into materials of wood and fabric as representations of memories and inheritance provide a rich tapestry of images and references that make Aria a satisfying reading experience and an impressive debut.