Aria. Sarah Holland-Batt. University of Queensland Press.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Sarah Holland-Batt, the poet, was born in 1982. She has lived in the United States and Australia. Holland-Batt is the author of three award-winning volumes of poetry, Aria, The Hazards and The Jaguar, and a book of essays on contemporary poetry, Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry. She is also the editor of two anthologies of contemporary Australian poetry, Black Inc’s The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017. Her first book, Aria (2008), was the recipient of a number of national literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the Anne Elder Award. Her second volume, The Hazards, was published in 2015, and went on to win Australia’s foremost prize for poetry, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, in 2016. Holland-Batt’s third collection, The Jaguar, was published in 2022, and received the 2022 Book of the Year Award from The Australian. Holland-Batt is Professor of Creative Writing & Literary Studies at the Queensland University of Technology. Holland-Batt is a traveller and is worldly. This extract from ‘Un bel di, vedremo’ finds Holland-Batt overseas in Aria:
Pinkerton, come back to me, it is spring –
the cherry is blossoming, everywhere
this threadbare white and pink.
I have tried calling
but my voice will not carry
over the dark water
and the grey-throated cannons:
Paradise, I have known –
return it to me.
This extract has a certain sweetness about it in Aria. ‘Stormclouds over Mexico’ has a certain amount of imagery:
Quetzal birds crying among the palm nuts.
Starving dogs. A twin-engine plane droning like a deerfly
in the distance. Summer vacationers drinking rum
in caftans. The fine quality of Caribbean sunlight, tinted
with the gathering dark. Three men dismantling
a Ford Thunderbird in the alleyway, and a teenage boy
painting its last standing door aquamarine. The heart’s
lightness. Then the sun failing. The squall blowing in.
Grey, then flame-blue and black cumulus. Rows
of thatched huts withstanding the downpour;
the hard straw knuckling down. Everything just preparing
for the time it will become something else. Waiting it out.
With her imagery in this extract, Holland-Batt displays a touch of the imagist in Aria. This is a necessity if a poet wants to create a sense of atmosphere. If a poet wants to create humorous poetry, this is healthy, also (‘Letter from K – 1812’):
What a mad picture – I in the mud,
in my good dress, the bemused horses
bending down to investigate! I couldn’t help
but laugh, especially with those dear serious men
hovering so anxiously . . . It is nothing, I know;
the sole excitement in a day, like all the others,
unfailingly black with you so distant in T.
But I thought – o, if only you had seen me,
perhaps you wouldn’t begin your letters, Immortal Beloved –
In this extract, in Aria, Holland-Batt is funny. The last line is the clincher. ‘Laughter and Forgetting’ also has a good last line:
We have no name for this wilful happiness.
We just wake to it every morning, in love,
but one always loving the other a little less.
In ‘Laughter and Forgetting’, Holland-Batt is honest in Aria. In ‘Table Addresses Cleaver’, Holland-Batt writes a monologue:
The arctic joy of a clean
spine; the dull nub
of the heft. You, rusted
murderer, filleting splice –
how many throats
have you split
easy
as soft grapefruit,
tremors pumping
still air?
I soak up your blood. I receive
everything and ask for nothing.
This poem has originality in Aria. It is short but not slight. Also, Holland-Batt delivers her poems in a cool, controlled, measured voice. Her poems are natural. Her poems are concentrated. Holland-Batt also never misses a trick with titles. When Aria was published, Holland-Batt was in her mid-twenties. Forget the exuberance of youth, in Aria, Holland-Batt writes with maturity. Aria is poetry with intelligence, grace and skill.
Michael Byrne 