Waiting for the Southerly. Susan McCreery. Ginninderra Press.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Susan McCreery, the poet, has a book of poetry to her name titled Waiting for the Southerly. It was published in 2012 and was commended in the 2012 Anne Elder Award for a first book of poetry published in Australia. She has been published prior to that including the poem ‘Rock Fishing’ in The Best Australian Poems 2009 – edited by Robert Adamson. Adamson took ‘Rock Fishing’ from Poetrix, Number Thirty-Two, May 2009. The poem ‘Rock Fishing’ is dedicated to McCreery’s mother and is one of the best poems in Waiting for the Southerly. The first three stanzas read:
You used to fish off rocks
under whiskered cliffs
where crabs eyed me sideways
clicking like mice bones.
I watched your skill
with knife and knot,
your toughened skin
stained with gut.
I peered in pools
gummed with limpets,
anemones tugged my fingers
like blissful newborns.
The similes in the first and third stanzas are where McCreery thinks laterally. There is also something happening in every line in these stanzas. Also, there is some nice imagery in these stanzas. The poem ‘Wanting’ is all in one clump:
To save on shoe leather
my grandmother chose
grass verge over path.
My mother longed
for the shiny bugle
in the secondhand shop, pressing
nose to window on the way to school.
I tend my vegetables, wear
three-dollar skirts.
My children devour toy
catalogues – those lolly colours
preserved in gloss
undo all the old stories.
This poem has clarity. Also, McCreery’s poem is deftly divided into components. Each component from the poem cleverly makes a point about her grandmother, mother, herself and her children. An extract from a poem that is all in one clump is ‘Slippers’ where two people live together:
that night she stares
at the dark ceiling
as his dry hand
moves up her nightie
& onto her breast
fleur called today she says
This extract is hilarious. It is deft as the ampersand in the second last line. In ‘Foreign Harvest’, McCreery moves from the domestic to the otherworldliness of Greece:
Back in the village
it’s been a good day’s work.
I’m weary. I hear an old man
ask another who I am:
xeni,* but she hits well.
I’m proud, and for a moment
imagine I belong.
*xeni – foreigner
Here, in this stanza, McCreery shows some strength. Too much strength can be tiresome, but McCreery has just the right amount. In ‘Impossible Blue’, there is just the right amount of point in the last stanza of the poem – written after the Haiti earthquake in 2010:
This hue, the waves, that brown girl
in a bubblegum suit
and all along the sand
dried clumps of weed
like hundreds of corpses
waiting, waiting.
The last two lines here display an admirable social conscience. Also, McCreery’s poetry has character. And, in Waiting for the Southerly, she is very much a family woman. In her poetry she shows consideration for her immediate family – her partner and her children. She is also interested in domestic things in her deft poetry. These include things like describing the surf from her house, deftly. It all adds up to a book of poems that are clever, soulful and nice.
Michael Byrne 