The Hazards & The Jaguar. Sarah Holland-Batt. University of Queensland Press.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Sarah Holland-Batt, the poet, was born in 1982. Her first book of poems, Aria (UQP, 2008), was the recipient of a number of national literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the artsACT Judith Wright Prize, and the FAW Anne Elder Award. Her second book of poems, The Hazards (UQP, 2015), went on to win Australia’s foremost prize for poetry, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2016. Her third book of poems, The Jaguar (UQP, 2022), received the 2022 Book of the Year Award from The Australian. The Jaguar features many poems about her father having Parkinson’s Disease. An example of this is from the poem ‘Neurostimulator’:
The transhuman future
arrives for my father
as a matchbox purring in his chest –
battery pack biohacking
his brain, titanium ingot
shrink-wrapped in skin.
A wisp of silver cable
running up his spine is visible
only in silhouette
when he turns his neck –
subcutaneous ripple
threaded to his cortex.
Holland-Batt has this thing sorted out. Holland-Batt has a clue about her subject matter in this extract in The Jaguar. In the third section, after the stress of being with her Dad, she kicks up her heels a bit in The Jaguar (‘Parable of the Clubhouse’):
When it ended, he said I had never let him in –
as if I were a country club with a strict dress code
and he’d been waiting outside all those years
without his dinner jacket, staring in
at the gleaming plates of lobster thermidor,
scores of waiters in forest green blazers,
and the stout square shoulders of other men
who alternated tweed and seersucker over the seasons,
silver cloches ringing them in at dinner like bells –
so I said, maybe you’re right, maybe that’s how it is,
when you wanted a table I was always full,
when you want a table in the future I’ll be full then too,
I’m booked out permanently, and no, you can’t borrow
a coat, you have to bring your own, that’s our policy.
The first line of ‘Parable of the Clubhouse’ is funny. The rest of the poem is spirited and cheeky. Also, in the third section of The Jaguar, the extract from her poem ‘Mansions’ is about both the mansions themselves and the men who build them. The women partner the men:
I think of the women
who love them, those men who made these mansions,
and of the space inside them for love,
the high-arched ceilings of it, the echoing corridors
lit by Tiffany glass, the milk-and-white swirl
of leadlight windows in harlequin patterning,
all those diamonds breathing in light.
‘Mansions’ as well as ‘Affidavit’ and ‘Cipriani’ in the third section of The Jaguar, have a certain opulence. Holland-Batt shares this opulence with the reader. In ‘Empires of Mind’, Holland-Batt shares the predicament of her Father with the reader in The Jaguar. He cries for Winston Churchill and women around him react in a certain way in this last stanza:
And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus
croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark –
unsettled, loud, insatiable – the unutterable fear
rippling through them like a herd of horses
apprehending the tremor of thunder
on a horizon they cannot see but feel.
‘Empires of Mind’ has a good last line. Holland-Batt says the most with her endings. In The Hazards, ‘Collioure/Love Poem’ is an ekphrastic poem (a poem about visual art) which has a good ending with the consonance of ‘to’ and ‘room’. But the rest of the poem works well, also:
An open window
on the Mediterranean.
Mid-afternoon.
Yachts
leaning
in salmoned light.
A green sail
leafing
into distance.
Salt breeze
deliberating
what to do next.
And the luxury
of turning
back to the room.
This poem has clarity. Also, there is a vividness about the poem. The reader can almost see the visual art. ‘The Quattrocento as a Waltz’, in The Hazards, has an imagist component to it, both auditory and visual:
Open the window: outside is Italy.
A fat woman is arguing over artichokes,
someone is dying in a muddy corner,
there’s a violin groaning in the street.
In these lines Holland-Batt has a touch of the imagist, a necessity if a poet wants to create a sense of atmosphere. While these lines do not rhyme and Holland-Batt generally eschews it, there is the odd occasion where she uses sporadic rhyme in The Hazards. This is the case for this extract from ‘Medusa’, which is Italian for jellyfish:
Malice swarms through me in a surge.
I know that flare, that bitter reason.
And I will float and flower
in my season.
Holland-Batt is not constrained by rhyme. However, she uses it to her advantage every so often. In another section in The Hazards, there is this extract from the poem ‘Possum’:
Possum running bristle-bellied through the night
and grunting up the tree. Possum in the early hours
scrabbling in banana mash, moss-nosed
scavenger possum on skinny forepaws
raw pink ears and juiced face,
possum thick with the musk of possum,
possum of the gutturals, umlaut vowel possum,
daylight possum jammed up snoozing fat
in the window well . . .
The repetition of the word possum is deft and is sustained for rest of the poem. The extract is also cute and playful. There is also the extract from the poem ‘Of Germany’ which starts the third section of The Hazards. Holland-Batt zooms in on a certain German city before focusing on other things German:
of Berlin, and the promise of Berlin
on a Monday afternoon, of love
and of Germany, of the scrawny Dalmatian
running free in the Englischer Garten
and the word Kleine which is clean as crystal
on the tongue, of your crystalline laugh
and the question of the doubled key . . .
Holland-Batt has a certain worldliness in her poetry. She gets around and her poetry is the beneficiary of this. The same goes for this extract from ‘O California’ which is one of the best poems in The Hazards:
I want to ride the long smooth tan body
of California, I want to eat the bear of the flag
of California, I want to roll like a corpse off the highway
of your chase scenes, I want my perfect teeth
preserved, California, my teeth buried
in the earth like a curse, California, and won’t you show me
where the bodies are kept, California,
won’t you show me, show me, show me.
Holland-Batt has an affinity for places. Also, something is happening in every line of this extract and it is concentrated. The rest of the poem is also concentrated. In other poems in The Hazards and The Jaguar, Holland-Batt has something happening in most of the lines. This is fine as long as the poems are concentrated to a certain extent. The poems are. Some of the poems in The Jaguar have a sense of fun and her poems about her Father are moving. The Hazards has poems about animals that are well-researched. Both books have a visual quality. Both books are about places Holland-Batt has travelled to. Holland-Batt has interesting subject matter. There is no line of development in Holland-Batt’s work. Both books are good. Both books contain poetry that has intelligence, verve and charm.
Michael Byrne 