From the second line of the first poem of st moon we know Kathryn Hamann is out to address the unmentionable. It was ‘downflow from septic tanks’ that watered the speaker’s childhood – a place where the grittiness of things (‘galvo tanks’, ‘stakes’, ‘holey stockings’) and taboo language ‘nature strips’ were fore-grounded. This was an Australia to resonate with Malcom Fraser’s infamous dictum: Life wasn’t meant to be easy. Only grandmother had the power to force ‘a few leaves to turn upwards’ and ‘face the challenge of the sun’. Forty years on, the bullied child realises her own triumph in a ‘dense mass of blossom’ produced by the saplings she helped plant. But the stripy bodies of bees bar her from any easy return to her source, her ‘Eden’.

Return, though, we do – in poems and in memory. We are taken back to an earlier Melbourne, one where instead of today’s cosy coupling of Anglo-Celts there was the frank hostility of Catholic and Protestant, (of male and female too) and hence a painful rift within the speaker’s cross-cultural family.

A self-administered abortion, commonplace before access to legal abortion became available in the early 1970s, has a particular deadliness within this socio-religious context. Horror must be matched with equal denial: ‘one does not grieve/ for a nothing’. But denial merely bandages and preserves stifling fear and misery, endorsing relationships based on power and exploitation. ‘there was quiet /but no peace.’

Mother, is, in the stunningly layered finish to a key poem ‘The Master/ of the misere hand/It is a shame such a superb player of Motherhood/never learnt to love the game.’ Mother is a terrifyingly larger than life figure:  ‘a woman/takes the platform at a gallop./Unable to unclasp a hand/her small son drags/like a collapsed parachute’, who can repeatedly ask a religiously inclined daughter ‘What would God want with someone like you?’

But this collection’s exploration of motherhood is not only achieved through portraits of individuals. It is the difficulties of the role that are shown to be fraught with danger. Take this sharp description of a mothers’ group boasting about their children’s achievements:

‘Faces shine

as if polished with Brasso

though a hint of green remains –

the odd slip of tarnish

amongst the gilt’

If Mother can be scary, Father can be more so. He is too often the one who abuses – physically, sexually, as in the terrifying poem, Pinocchia.  That Father (as archetype) has always carried the threat of life and death is suggested by the Australian gothic masterpiece, Drover’s Sunday, 1891.

Again, behind Father lurks the unpleasant distortion of a cruel patriarchal God - the one who demanded the sacrifice of Issac only to change his mind, apparently on whim. Such stories infected the child’s consciousness, presented in some of these poems, with an anxiety that made her extremely sensitive to the plight of the ‘sinless lamb’.

So to the poignant ambiguities of one of my favourite poems in the whole collection:

Brains

For Jennifer Christie

The final hill.

Mum calling back ,

‘Christine Kathryn,

do hurry.

Brains should be fresh

and remember never buy

if they’re dull.’

As the aproned butcher laid before us

offering after offering

Mum assessed,

‘But I need at least seven sets.’

My shoe pointed,

separated sawdust into paths

I knew would not last

till the next Wednesday.

‘Frank does love them.’

Home and the unpacking…

brains laid bare, glistened…

I filled the buckled saucepan,

dropped in a heaped spoon of salt

then lifted a small brain

it squished cold

within my hand

pinkness oozing

through my fingers

and I wondered in these folds were

there pictures of grass, of mother ewe?

The round up, shrill dogs at heel…

and in those trucks father cursed,

had this lamb been lost in the grey

matt of another’s wool?

The hammer…

wind of its falling…

1. Barked words nip…
   

2. on the table
   

3. pool forms
   

4. slow infusion of colour
   

5. cleared for a lunch of silence.
   

6. 
   

7. White flesh simmers
   

8. window clouds.
   

9. 
   

10. And in fixed time…
    

11. I skin a warm brain,
    

12. and then another
    

13. and break each
    

14. into consumable bites.
    

made sticky with flour and water

enough crumbs

from crushed oven dried bread

would cling

hiding what lay beneath.

Crowded onto the green enamel dish

Sunday’s lunch firmed up

on the Kelvinator’s second shelf.

Fried to medium brown in the fat skimmed from

Sunday’s roast,

brains soft centred were divided out along with

mashed spuds,

buttered peas and pumpkin,

three spoons of gravy,

the whole topped with bacon (two for the men, one for

us women).

Mother’s brains were crisp multiples of perfection.

If even the prospect of a favourite dinner will not allow the consciousness of the poem to escape without a queasy feeling, what can save her? Grandmother, guiding light, saint moon, denizen of Eden — provides a counterweight, a refuge in fact and in imagination. Many poems in this collection document the death or dying of the old and discarded, Grandmother with her loving personality, alone, manages to transcend time:

‘the welcome cup of Grandma tea

possessed a wrinkled skin’

Kathryn’s poetry is first and foremost the poetry of witness. To achieve these ends she uses a wide variety of strategies. These include narrative and suggested narrative, satiric quotation, a heavily ironized mordant sense of humour, some word play (ambiguities and double meanings frequently emphasised by line breaks) and of course the symbolism, we saw in Brains, which suggests small incidents carry within them layers of often more sinister implication.

Satiric quotation is at times developed, as in the self-incriminating bureaucratic voice into entire dramatic poems. At other times the listener also makes themselves felt. In this case, Kathryn’s use of juxtaposition can be vividly effective. To take a passage from Condolences for an Uncle Recently Deceased:

‘I am filled in

on the amputation;

on how – he never showed awareness.

1. Tiny mud red scorpions
   

2. eat giant centipedes
   

3. Segment by segment.
   

4. Food keeping itself fresh
   

5. for six months.’
   

Throughout the collection the observing eye is often direct to the point of bluntness. But what can, at first, seem melodramatic exaggeration often turns out, on thought, to be uncomfortably accurate. While the primary tone is documentary, the voice also modulates at times into the imagistic (with clearly focused images, dropped articles, use of present tense and minimal punctuation). Occasionally we get subtle evocations of the peripheral vision of the mind:

‘and I would turn to discover

there was nothing

not even a shadow’

Apparently at the edge of the central concerns of the collection, is its raison d’etre. The poems about her daughter Judith, not to mention the cover and all but one of the beautiful cat illustrations, celebrate Judith’s cheekiness and the development of her talent, options less available to girls in the milieu of 60s Melbourne documented in st moon!

And finally the moral stance of this very moral poetry is grounded on belief. The last poem is this prayer.

Content me

with incomplete brushstrokes

of leaves and the sky’s

illusion of solidity

Content me

with the wing-fanned reproach

of a nesting lorikeet

and the music of wind-scored trees

Content me

with patinas of bark:

that collage of what is lost

broken and reformed

Lord,  content me

so I echo your words, This

is good            Life is good

Such a prayer, of course, answers itself, if only in the moment of writing and reading. In doing so, the stripy bodies of the bees withdraw, at least temporarily, and Eden is restored. Such, I feel, is the hope that lies behind this collection for each one of us.

It is now my great pleasure to declare, Kathryn Hamman’s st moon launched! Please buy a copy for yourself…and one for a friend!

Sue Stanford