Extraction of Arrows by Kathryn Lomer | Anne Elder Award Winner 2003

Kathryn Lomer’s debut poetry collection, following her novel The God in the Ink, opens with full feeling. Blood, summer air, and sticky juices mix in a heady, fragrant hedonism. A mango comes alive: a “summer heart” with “chamois skin” and flesh split “as if by magic”. It’s a slippery, sensual awakening, a beckoning into the first of three parts, each distinguished by extremes of love and loss, from immigration to motherhood and back out again.

Part One is particularly heavy with metaphor as bodies echo into the landscape and through time, made solid by these resonances of shape and sound.

When you lift my thighs onto your hips
we are a form as old as the gingko tree,
our silhouette unlikely but inevitable.
Your hands are a mother’s on my skin, your words
seashells I will keep on a windowsill
with fragile purple urchins
that float to one small bay
where I have seen stingrays mate. (4)

Soon the poems’ speakers actually venture outwards into the shipyards of Benalmadena in “Squid Fisher” or post-war Prague and Vienna in “Vellum” and “The Freedom”. In these forays into specific histories, Lomer focuses on the intertwined pursuits of love and labour.

Timber moulded under a lover’s fingers,
compliant as skin, and concealed wooden bones
from harsh middle sun. Sometimes you laid
a woman on the floor of an unfinished hull,
let the scent of freshly tooled oak
fill your lungs, then breathed it into her. (5)

It’s a romantic posing of hard work alongside reward that positions the reader for a series of poems about Irish immigration to Australia. In particular, “Limericks’s Son” traces a lineage through Tasmanian colonisation and settlement to the present day.

We knew it as thrumming beat and ribtickle rhyme,
not as howling town wrapping steel river, hungry town
of whiskied blood and tackle boys, a place to ditch
your turpitude, canvas-sway across the ribcage
of the world to begin again in underbelly.
You were not the first — a path worn like centuries stone
by forebears dragging linkirons. You were not alone —
blood-thick brothers propping craven hearts. (14)

Here, the speaker summarises the condensation of love and labour, unspoken colonial violence and individual resilience as

the miss
and hittery of it, the snatchery of love, with its tattle-tale
offspring who grow into men. Life, my grandfather
used to say, is a bubble in a bath. Crying’s no good,
you’ve gotta laugh. (14)

The stiff-upper-lip attitude of this grandfather is familiar from a certain generation. In Lomer’s poetry, it opens into a more rounded, encompassing understanding of loss as a partner to love; a partnership that forms the necessary tension between the past, present, and future. A later poem, “Potato Cutters” recalls Seamus Heaney’s poem “Clearances” and his own memories of the family bent over buckets of potato peel in silent ritual.

Clearances

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

Lomer’s rendition turns the scene to alchemy, imaging a justification for suffering that informs the duality of love and labour in this collection.

I am their slavey — I bring sweet billy tea
and scones in tea towels, watching blurring fingers slow,
jam tins of lime obscure cut flesh, limbs stretch.
Tea looses monosyllables from stiff tongues;
smoko releases a hurry of winged talk,
which dwindles away like spent breeze
to a whisper of whetstone, the settling of bones.
They resume creased silence as if putting on a set
of old work-clothes, fall into dreams
and wonder, at afternoon’s end, how all those sacks
were transformed, base metal into gold. (19)

In both Lomer and Heaney’s poems, the potatoes glow like precious metal, transformed by the careful work of the speakers’ family. The transformation is tenuous and tense, protected by silence and a shared understanding of what’s at stake in this ritual task. This poetic romanticisation of these scenes gently elides the grimmer underpinnings of suffering in these families while also attempting to illuminate a silver lining around their labour.

The same martyr-esque characterisation reappears for Lomer in “The Weight of Longing” in the recounting of a past relationship reignited around a funeral.

I can’t raise my head. I deserve it.
Houses gossip, one to another,
like wind whispering tree to see, and others know.
Someone comes and sends you on your way,
nurses wounds. But I want stigmata,

something to show for all the pain, not this gourd-skin,
smooth and reliable. The bruises have almost gone
by the time I know I am pregnant. (23)

This grandiose conception of suffering and its inverse, love, is the backbone of the collection as Lomer encompasses both family, history, and culture and violence, colonisation, and suffering within the lineage of the body. The wood of the ship-makers and ring barkers becomes the body, becomes stone, petrified by all it has seen.

I was once wood;

see the figures in my grain.
Now I am beyond stone,
silicified, parted from the live world
but present, a witness. (25)

The second section continues the heaviness of history and metaphor from the first but by zooming in on one particular lineage: motherhood. Women’s bodies are scarred by c-sections, “An indigo line from extruded navel to pubis” (29), or de-stigmatised in collective movement, “bodies streamlined, weightless, perfected, chanting ah-oh-mm in time with strokes, meditating in water” (30), while the warmth of sensuality grows cold, “Prostaglandin spreads like cold honey” (31).

The process of motherhood, pregnancy, and birth makes the body hyper-real and all-demanding.

My belted waist reads the violent story of my uterus,
green-lit numbers tracing seismic peaks and pinnacles.
I lean on the machine, breathing hard to scale

the heights, watching a numbered display as if
the current were reversed — controlled electrocution —
waiting for subtraction to herald pain’s ebb. (31)

Once again the body melts into a landscape; both the circumstances of motherhood and the mountainous land making demands on the body in a worthy suffering.

In a return to the grandfather’s motto, “No Use Crying” contemplates the “after” of motherhood as an ever-present stretching towards the horizon.

Where are the elders —
the ones who would tell me
that in the second month of autumn

the day of the blue rabbit
is favourable for love?
I am a passing phase

whose slow time beguiles.
I am something from nothing
like the fizz in beer.

Still, a longing hatches in my ribcage.
This is my lemma,
a rubric learned at the breast,

that life is a tesseract,
its fourth dimension love. (34-35)

The tone here has shifted considerably from the hearty resilience of “Potato Cutters” with paradoxical metaphors that place contented love out of reach. This radical shift in the speaker’s relationship to their ancestry and the cycle of life comes about through motherhood. Lomer conceptualises motherhood as a reorientation, a recalibration towards the world around another body. A writer gets caught in-between worlds in “Everyday Ophelia”.

I have one ear on a Janet Frame mnemonic —
Read Over Your Greek Book In Verse — the other
cocked to baby squeals. A quarter-tone shift,
delight to distress, and I leap, leaving water trails
like a puzzle, to bring him in. (36)

Then, in the titular poem “Extraction of Arrows”, the new mother tears up an old garden to start a new one and learns to trade acquiring knowledge for sharing the old with her child.

I clear oregano, which — had I known it —
eases the pain of childbirth,
or extraction of arrows. I leave
the sage bush for our throats
and tell you its name means to be well. (40)

Instead of the stagnation of self in “No Use Crying”, the recalibration becomes an opportunity to revel in the present.

You see, I’ve been given a second chance
to pay attention to details.
I’m learning the names of whales,
seahorses, sharks and frogs,
parts of insects, leaves and fish,
all about waves and why there are rainbows;
everything is suddenly equally important. (40)

That being said, the isolation of new motherhood bursts apart in the third and final part of the collection, which sees the speaker travelling again and playing with language.

Our landlord is a retired pompiere.
I translate fire fighter and he mouths fractured sounds,
goes away giggling. (47)

In three parts, this collection presents three meditations on love. The first the intertwined love and suffering represented by family and ancestry. The second between a mother and a child as a re-understanding of the world. Then the third, once the speaker has returned to the wider world through travel and a reclamation of voice, where the final poems read as grim challenges to love to withstand illness and disability, war, and imprisonment. Fear, rhetorical questions, and “the if only, the what ifs, the relentless living it” (60) colour the final section of the collection with its inconclusive rumination on the limits of love.

The sensual, open woman of the opening poems has grown a lot between then and the closing poem, “An Honest Woman”. While reflecting on her history of loves and marriages, she closes the collection with a hard truth:

She hears a man say of his gaolers,
I love them, and is shamed by her limits. (66)

If Extraction of Arrows is the tracing of a woman through heady rendezvous into motherhood and out the other side, it touches on all the major milestones of sensuality and sensation, miracles and identity, and the realisation of one’s humanity and fallibility that comes with age and accumulated mistakes. The collection is a gentle lyrical undulation that doesn’t lose any of the hardness of living through love, suffering, and change. While the romanticism of the early poems fades throughout the collection, Lomer’s poetic voice continues to complicate love and connection through time and circumstance.