Night Reversing by Morgan Yasbincek | Anne Elder Award Winner 1997

This slight, acute collection, published by the Western Australian Freemantle Arts Centre Press, won both the Anne Elder Award and the Mary Gilmore Award as a debut poetry collection in 1997. Later, Morgan Yasbincek went on to write two other collections of poetry and a novel with her third poetry collection, White Camel published in 2009 by John Leonard Press, being shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.

Night Reversing is a collection structured without sections and with the majority of poems without capitalisation or punctuation, which has the effect of blurring the poems together in a continued stream of thought and sensation. Due to the subject matter, the collection seems embedded within a female perspective but the near complete absence of character names and frequent use of generic pronouns leaves the collection’s perspective ambiguous, omnipresent without any identity markers. The tone shifts between hazy surrealism and sharp moments of painful recognition leaving the reader on edge throughout, searching for a resting place that doesn't appear.

While there are no discreet sections, there are groupings or thematic flows as the poems shuffle through related images or arrangements. In the opening poems, for example, “a hundred years of sleeping”, “sleeping”, “see me”, and “tomb” all feature sleeping literally or as a metaphor for death. In particular, “a hundred years of sleeping” and “tomb” tap into myth and fairytale to imagine a body as monstrous and dehumanised.

“you can’t open your eyes because the lids have

grown over

your hair carpets the room, nails coil out

heavy as horn” (7)

These initial instances of bodies and their senses are visceral and vibrant with an intensity that allows the body to seep into the surrounding landscape. In “selvedge”, light is like “plasma” (12), roads are “veins of malcontent” (12). Yasbincek’s potent imagery throughout the collection is evocative and works to develop a concentrated atmosphere of unease that particularly pays off in the latter half of the collection. There are some poems that contribute to the atmosphere but seem overly committed to metaphor at the cost of being vague and forgettable. For example, “death of the angel” reads like an unfinished fragment that leaps from its last line but never lands.

“when i found her hideout

she broke like

blown glass

fell silently

from the pages

she knew i’d come for her

come back to the diary

but not this soon

she’d prepared her testament

counter arguments

she was devoted to love

she imprisoned children“ (16)

From the focus on bodies, sensations, and death in the beginning poems, the middle group shift focus slightly towards male-female relationships, especially within the family. “hole in the wall”, “laundromat”, and “jack” form a triptych of character studies that slowly introduce more explicit scenes of violence against women around which the final poems of the collection centre. Lines like, “her father pushed her mother pushed her through herself” (18) or “which mum needed / like a hole in the head” (20) are subtle hints at violence with enough plausible deniability to sweep the threatening subtext under the rug.

The intensity of violence increases as the collection continues with an abusive grandfather in “she is teaching” interwoven amongst the lessons passed from mother to daughter over generations of a family.

“my grandmother is teaching me how to polish the floor

we put rags on our feet and dance

through the minister’s house

we lie still for her husband

but he still beats us and we cry over our bruises in the night” (23)

Two of Yasbincek’s most successful poems capture the rushed, gluggy feeling of shame after a scene of abuse. “stepfathers” is an eerie, skin-crawling glimpse at a sinister relationship.

“handover is that intimate gesture

when they know you won’t tell

their pact is made on your skin

its stain raises spies

now that you can’t be trusted” (35)

While “shame” depicts the more universal experience of street harassment.

“she’s caught without thinking suddenly his face

is red rubber angry shouting go away go home go on piss off

there’s no one else she stands drenched in his long long seconds” (36)

The effectiveness of these two poems lies in Yasbincek’s balance between physical, sensorial detail and mixed, abstract affects of fear, anger, and shame inextricably tied up in these experiences of violence.

Yet, as the violence increases in the poems, Yasbincek correspondingly increases the metaphorical parallels between women and animals in such a way that they define the latter part of the collection. In “amphibia”, “cows and bulls”, and “a survival thing” women are drawn into connections with frogs, cows, and chickens, respectively. As a woman observes a cow in a field behind “a low barbed wire fence” (34), the repetition of “she could probably just step over it” (34) is mournful, reflective of the persona’s similar feelings of entrapment. Then, an ill chicken sparks another moment of reflection on vulnerability:

“the vet says birds will conceal signs of illness

to protect themselves from the flock

usually it’s too late by the time you notice

it’s a survival thing” (39)

The culmination of the alignment between women and animals through their experience of violence and suffering is the particularly distressing poem “izzie’s dog”. In four parts, Yasbincek recounts the experience of a woman in an abusive relationship where she’s held to certain beauty standards, “and still your hair is not black enough / or blond enough, eyes not blue enough or brown enough” (43). Part of the woman’s commitment to the relationship involves abandoning her dog, possibly leaving her for dead, a common tactic used by abusers against their victims to demand loyalty. In this poem, Yasbincek’s unspecific pronouns take on a slight surreality as the woman turns to ritual bordering on witchcraft to solve her problem.

“you re-read her

and commit rituals over her books

trying to bring her into your skin

if only you believe hard enough

your eyes develop an irritation

the red makes the green iridescent

you want to die like her

anorexic and pure

you eat raw soaked chickpeas and poached egg whites

you drink air through yellow teeth

you would give anything to see your dog again” (43)

The “her” shifts between lines to ambiguously encompass a writer, a competitor for her partner’s affection, her dog, and an amorphous, mythical “her” that lies just on the other side of the next poached egg or self-help book.

While the connections drawn between women and animals as victims of violence is well-trodden ground across art, academia, and activism, especially since the late 90s, there is an air of naivety to the subtle reflections in these poems which then jars rather effectively against the explicit violence in the latter part of the collection. It seems that Yasbincek means to acknowledge the simple but painful truth that many women don’t see the threat until it’s too late.

The final poem of the collection is an unusual departure from the rest. Titled “Canada Poems”, it appears as a kind of coda, a suite of prose poems comprised of vignettes that trace the sentiments of the rest of the collection across a narrative of a trip from Australia to Canada. Beginning on the cross-pacific plane ride and including a wedding shower, a trip to a slaughterhouse, a night at a bar, and a trip to a museum displaying First Nations’ artefacts, the anecdotal poems ruminate on connections between family and strangers and between people, nature, and animals as represented in rituals that seem both mundane and remarkable.

The first poem introduces the many-hour plane trip in second-person, immediately drawing the reader into the familiarity of the uncomfortable proximity of strangers and the oddity of air travel: “You are flying at 36000 feet. You are asked to observe the no smoking sign, you have a choice of beverages with lunch, you must fasten your seatbelt” (48). Some of the poems seem to chime with other poems from earlier in the collection like this one echoing the line of mothers and daughters in “she is teaching”, even including the unease of the unspoken:

“Her mother explains to another passenger that they are four generations, from great grandmother to great granddaughter. The passenger seems pleased, but notices that the issue is contentious; for there are silences held down between the women, suffocating the spaces between them.” (49)

A graphic depiction of a slaughterhouse and the slaughtering of pigs is similar to Ariana Reines’s 2006 collection The Cow. The violence and its mundane ritualisation as pigs file in one after the other cracks the tone of the following prose poems. Yasbincek slips into more surreality at a wedding shower where the ritual of opening presents becomes brittle and absurd, amplified by the repetition of language including the use of “gift” 13 times.

“The gifts are carried from the gift table to the head table by the bride’s future sisters-in-law. The bride opens the card, thanks for woman responsible for the gift, passes the card to the head bridesmaid who notes the name of the gift giver. The head bridesmaid then watches as the bride opens the gift and notes the gift next to the name. The gift is held up for the women sitting in the semi-circle to see. The gift is passed around the semi-circle, examined by each woman, and taken back to the gift table. Ribbons are taken from the gifts and tied onto a paper plate to make a bonnet which the bride puts on when all the gifts have been presented.” (52)

Later, the speaker’s grandmother is haunted by a dream and chased up the stairs by it. A man likens himself to a grizzly bear, entered into the cult of manhood through his gruesome hunting stories, but it turns out that all the men at this bar are bears: “Lone Star Saloon cave bears dance on, no photos allowed. Well shit, who’s going to believe there really are bears here if I can’t take a photo?” (54)

In the closing scene of “Canada Poems” and of Night Reversing, a family visit a museum where First Nations’ artefacts are displayed on “[m]annequins with black plaited hair, faces and hands painted gloss red-brown” (55). The visit is unsettled with the daughter refusing to enter and the speaker having trouble grappling with the “confusion of respect” (55) given they “should never have laid eyes on the bodies of the spirits — exposed behind glass” (55). This experience changes things, shifts the speaker’s perspective when she says, “My senses are jammed. I cannot get back” (56). In a rumination on destiny and direction, on the relationship between people and the earth, the speaker challenges assumed meaning and imagines a utopia without misunderstanding.

“Whenever we go anywhere we have to discuss the possibilities of the directions we’ve been given; what they seem to mean, what they could possibly mean. We are finding our way into unfamiliar streams, in our attempt to decode the spatial logic, we are always lost, until we find a destination. … There would only be a dialogue of vibration, only a straining, a reaching into the widening space. If i were earth and grass, there would be mountains where we touched and mist where you lie against my skin. Where is this place? Where is this place?” (56)

While it’s possible to see connections between “Canada Poems” and the rest of Night Reversing, the sequence seems to stretch forward to Yasbincek’s future work examining the world through a spiritual lens, rather than necessarily illuminating the tight, sensorial poems from her debut.