Category: verse novel

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Author, Book review, Fiction, Magabala Books, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, verse novel

‘She is the Earth’ by Ali Cobby Eckermann

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 Fiction – paperback; Magabala Books; 96 pages; 2023.

I am partial to a verse novel (although I have only read a handful), so I was keen to read Ali Cobby Eckermann’s She is the Earth, which was longlisted for this year’s Stella Prize.

The book is a luminous love letter to Mother Nature, including her life-sustaining ecosystems, weather patterns and landscapes.

In many ways, it reminded me of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, but instead of looking at Earth from above, it looks at Earth from the ground up and presents it as a living, breathing organism.

I am staring
at the new day

it grows brighter
and brighter

the sky and the sea
defined by blue

as if breathing now
the water is tidal

inhaling first
exhaling next

the horizon
a definition
(page 59)

This long-form poem is comprised of meditative, two-line stanzas. It’s minimalistic yet brims with rich imagery and pulses with life.

Repeated motifs — of birth, of breath, of “sun and moon and sky”, for instance — abound, creating gentle echoes that deepen the reader’s understanding of the work as you progress through it.

And just like birth, it begins with a sense of violence…

exhausted I am
unable to breathe

I scratch for air
my mouth a cave
(page 5)

But moves towards a more gentle way of being:

from the cosmos
I learn my place
(page 80)

That “learning my place” is a central theme. References to other life forms, such as birds — brolgas, pelicans, owls, for instance — reveal how everything in the natural world has a role to play — and a path to follow.

do not diminish
the role of the mother

do not diminish
the role of the father

do not diminish
the role of the child

do not diminish
the role of the ant
(page 81)

The author, a Yankunytjatjara woman from South Australia, has long struggled to find her place in the world.

She was forcibly removed from her family as one of the Stolen Generations, which caused long-lasting trauma, powerfully evoked in her extraordinary memoir, Too Afraid to Cry (2012). In 2017 she was the first Indigenous person anywhere in the world to win the international Windham-Campbell Prize.

She is the Earth is her first book in eight years. An eloquent review of it in The Conversation sums it up better than I can:

She is the Earth is unlike any other book in Australian literature. Of the works Eckermann has written to date, it could well prove her most enduring.

I read this book for my ongoing #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. To see all the books reviewed for this project, please visit my Reading First Nations Writers page. 

Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, John Kinsella, literary fiction, Poetry, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, Transit Lounge, verse novel

‘Cellnight: A Verse Novel’ by John Kinsella

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Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 208 pages; 2023. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

When it comes to local novels, I couldn’t get more local than this one. John Kinsella’s Cellnight is set in Fremantle, where I live, and is dotted with references to familiar landmarks — the Roundhouse, Esplanade Park, Rous Head, South Mole lighthouse, the CY O’Connor statue et al — and offshore shipping lanes, such as Gage Roads and Cockburn Sound.

It tells the story, entirely in verse, of the visit of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet to the port city in the early 1980s when the Cold War was at its height.

At the time Fremantle was a hotbed of non-violent protests against US nuclear warships arriving in port. (This fascinating online report by David Worth goes into more detail about the demonstrations.)

of an inlanding
eye, but coast
imbued
and the carrier
Carl Vinson
all all those
anti-nuclear
groups of Fremantle
you weren’t part of
but overlapped
at protests
confusing the issue —
the Project Icebergs
and others

At the same time, Aboriginal deaths in custody were in the headlines, specifically that of John Pat, a 16-year-old First Nations boy, who died while in the custody of Western Australia Police in 1983. Four police officers and a police aide were charged with manslaughter but were acquitted by an all-White jury and reinstated. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, “Pat’s death became for Aboriginal people a symbol of injustice and oppression”.

In Cellnight, Kinsella brings these two important historical issues together in a compelling narrative that fuses sonnets with vivid, almost cinematic, storytelling.

The tale is framed around a homeless man who lives beneath the limestone cliffs on Bather’s Beach in Fremantle. He is arrested for demonstrating against the nuclear-armed US Seventh Fleet and while in police custody witnesses the brutal bashing of an Aboriginal boy. He does not intend to keep this to himself.

At three am
a young
Noongar kid
is brought in
and abused
and kicked
and thrown
until he is limp
around a circle
of constables,
the sergeant watching on.
You yell,
you say
I will tell all
to the world.
And you get a thumping.

The book, set in both the past and the present, explores systemic racism and abuse, politics, protests, colonisation, disenfranchisement, environmentalism and history through the medium of poetry.

There are beautiful descriptions of nature and the sea — all under threat by progress and development — and even the lines describing the mess and noise and pollution of a working port and the hustle and bustle of the river traffic have their own strange beauty.

all the taking
for granted
as boats grapple
curled surf
and tubes
are bisected
all swimming
over weedbeds
all ripping
out of shoalfish
all boats on canals
loud as settlement
all taboos
and respects
all sacredness

The quick-fire pace of the stanzas means it’s hard not to rush to the end, but readers who take their time will find much to admire in this carefully considered blend of stunning imagery and social commentary. It’s a book that demands more than one reading.

John Kinsella lives in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, so this book qualifies for my ongoing #FocusOnWesternAustralianWriters project. You can find out more about this reading project, along with a list of Western Australian books already reviewed on the site, here. 

Author, Bloomsbury Circus, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, sarah crossan, Setting, UK, verse novel

‘Here is the Beehive’ by Sarah Crossan

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Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury Circus; 288 pages; 2020. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

‘Here is the beehive.
Where are the bees?
Hidden away where nobody sees.
Watch and you’ll see them
come out of the hive.
One, two, three, four, five!’

So goes the nursery rhyme that lends its title to Sarah Crossan’s debut novel, Here is the Beehive.

The bees hiding in their hive represent the narrator’s deeply secretive world, for this is a compelling story about one woman’s adulterous affair and the pain of hiding her grief when her lover unexpectedly dies.

I read it in two sittings, unable to tear myself away from it. It was akin to watching a car crash. And yet there was something strangely beautiful about the tale.

This is despite the fact that the narrator, Ana, isn’t a particularly nice person. She’s deceitful, self-centred and not exactly reliable. She uses her high-powered job as a lawyer specialising in wills and estates as a cover for staying away from her marital home for long periods so she can carry on her affair with Connor.

And then, when her lover dies after a three-year-long elicit relationship, she gets to meet his widow, Rebecca, because she is the executor of Connor’s will.

Yes, it’s a bit twisted. And that’s probably why the narrative works, for I was itching to find out what would happen next; what outrageous thing would Ana try? Would she ever confess her secret to Rebecca, share her grief or break down in front of her own family? Any wonder I couldn’t put it down.

Verse novel

One of the most interesting aspects of Here is the Beehive is the way that the book is laid out. I’ve seen it labelled a “verse novel” because the story is broken into stanzas. There are no large chunks of text. Each paragraph is surrounded by plenty of white space, another reason why it’s so easy to read.

And the prose is beautiful, filled with exquisite observations, achingly human sentiment — little jealousies, bitterness, misplaced compassion — and all-too authentic insights into marriage and family life.

And did I mention it’s written in the second person?

You kissed my face
on a bench in Coldfall Wood
and told me you were sorry
about the woman and her sick child,
and sorry I never had time to stop
and sorry you couldn’t take care of me
and sorry you were married
and sorry I was married
and sorry also for yourself.

Here is the Beehive is an intense, immersive read, the kind that gets under the skin. It’s a simple yet stunning piece of work. More, please.

Author, Book review, dystopian, Fiction, London, Megan Hunter, Picador, Publisher, Setting, UK, verse novel

‘The End We Start From’ by Megan Hunter

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The end we start from

Fiction – paperback; Picador; 144 pages; 2018.

Apparently British actor Benedict Cumberbatch enjoyed Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From so much his production company bought the film rights. It’s easy to see why he was so enamoured of this debut novella: it’s powerful, evocative and lyrical.

Set some time in the future, it follows one woman’s journey to survive the floodwaters that have engulfed London and forced its residents to seek refuge elsewhere. The woman’s journey is complicated by the fact that she has just given birth to her first child, a boy, and all her energy and focus is devoted to him. The world outside, descending into chaos, appears to be of no concern.

Z is real, with his tiny cat skull and sweet-smelling crap. The news is rushing by. It is easy to ignore.

When her husband fails to return from an outing in search of supplies, the woman is forced to travel alone with her newborn, setting up home in a refugee camp and, much later, on a secluded island.

But this isn’t a book that you read for the plot. It’s essentially a “mood piece” written in sparse sentences, one per paragraph, that resemble lines of poetry. Indeed, I’d describe it as a prose novella, because it feels very much like reading one long poem. (No surprise, then, that the author is also a poet.)

Everything is scant on detail. There are no names, beyond Z for the baby, R for the husband, G for the mother-in-law and so on. And we never really know what’s going on in the world outside because the book is very much focused on the relationship between the mother and her son.

As much as I loved the beautiful sentences in this novel, the oh-so perfect word choice and the lovely cadence and tempo of the prose, the motherhood analogy soon wore thin. The message — that maternal love remains undiminished even in the most dire of circumstances — began to feel a bit laboured. I think I just wanted more from this book — and I was never going to get it.

That said, The End We Start From has much to recommend it, not least the exquisite beauty of the prose and the lovely, languid nature of the storytelling. It’s certainly not your typical dystopian novel: our narrator is caught inside her own experience, raising a child and is focussed solely on her domestic realm. It’s a haunting and elusive tale of survival — but it’s also one about hope and of savouring quiet, often fleeting, moments of joy.