In Apples and Oranges: Adventures in Poetics, Stuart Cooke concedes that his ideas “talk to one another, but how they do this isn’t clear. I can’t shake the idea that each of them makes sense only in relation to one person.” This is the challenge of the lyric essay. Readers must be willing to piece together disparate fragments: ideas, information and idiosyncrasies. This is also the lyric essay’s beauty, its textual alchemy. Personal experiences and scholarly knowledge intertwine, generating transformational and often surprising insights.
Transformative Practice
Cooke is interested in poetics in all senses of the word. Several essays in Apples & Oranges are reflections – personal and scholarly – on poetry. Cooke offers new observations on poets, national and international: Robert Gray, Philip Hodgins, Francisco “Kokoy” Guevara. He is also interested in poetics as a “theory of form”, a transformative practice. His essay on Mexican writer Sergio Pitol begins with a contemplation of the way writing can “reverberate through you, like an extra heartbeat”. He ends the collection with a meditation on the voiceless language of trees: “a deeply sensual poetics of touch, permeation, transformation”.
Holden, too, considers poetry and broader poetics. Formally, she takes her readers on spectacular flights through literature, philosophy and history. Her essay The Age of Incredulity, for instance, correlates the “blaze” of poetry with a consideration of “enchantment” as a consoling impulse. Here is a delicate and leisurely dance through ideas. As Holden puts it, “why must an essay dash like an arrow to its arrival, piercing and startling as it goes?” She leans into the uncertainty at the heart of the lyric essay, what the writer Jennifer Sinor calls “questions, hesitation, and unknowing”.
Cooke’s essays represent a body of work accumulated over some years. He writes of the pandemic, his grief and gratitude, his colleagues and mentors, including poet Martin Harrison and ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose. He reflects on “daily life and news feeds of melting icebergs in Antarctica” and describes journeys across Chile, Brazil and Mexico. In this, Cooke tends towards the lyric essay’s collage or mosaic shape. “The world is not just the sum of the things that are in it,” he writes. “It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them.”
Holden’s book is more contained. Five of her six extended essays were written after her recent move to Dharawal Country: the Illawarra in New South Wales, south of Sydney. She muses on themes of belonging and “homefulness” (“the home sighs for what you think”), gender (“women and their homes: a womb, a tomb, a gallery, a prison, a refuge, a body”) and family (“under all our paths in life run the footprints of our parents”). Holden is aware of the complexities of what “home” might mean. She doesn’t shy away from imagining homes with “private horrors” – illness, domestic violence, death. This is another characteristic of the lyric essay: the capacity to hold contrasting ideas, to allow for the plural.
Hidden Conversations
Where these books come together is their contemplation of what it means to be Australian in a global context. Cooke and Holden compare Australia with other locations and nations, searching for what Cooke calls “hidden conversations between them”. Cooke is drawn to the Americas. In one astonishing essay, he traces the split of Gondwana and the evolutionary journeys of the Araucaria species to become pehuén trees in Chile and Norfolk Island pines. The tree’s stories are unified by the figure of Cooke himself, escaping from Australia, while also recognising that he is “more typically of Australian history than he would ever admit”. In another enlightening essay, he makes the case for Brazil and Australia as “mirror images … both marked by a European anxiety to do with the sheer magnitude of the space”.
Holden yearns northward to Europe and the United Kingdom. Much of her collection is a rumination on her profound relationship with classics of European literature – from Lucretius to Simone Weil, Enid Blyton to Rainer Maria Rilke. Describing her family’s love of “continental” literature and history, Holden writes: “we went out each day into Australia and came home to some other country.” But she also acknowledges: “I am made of Australia … it’s in my cotton clothes, the swiftness of my friendliness, the relaxed way I raise my son, an ease with distances.”
There’s another undercurrent in these collections: an anxiety for Indigenous people and their (lack of) presence in Australia’s narrative. Cooke cites poet Peter Minter’s criticism of Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray’s Australian Poetry Since 1788. The anthology’s discussion of landscapes, observed Minter, “is purified of its real, indigenous history”. Cooke argues for an Australian poetics that not only centres Indigenous voices, but embeds itself in Country. He states that “proper recognition of Indigenous priority – of First Nations – should involve an understanding of Indigenous landscapes … animals, plants, spirits, [which] are as integral to culture as human beings”.
Holden, too, displays a concern for First Nations people and cultures, but appears to be more hesitant about articulating her complicity as a settler Australian. She asks: “And for us in Australia, what of our houses, built on land taken by others by violence or insistence: is it possible, really, for us – all of us except those few on traditional Country – ever to be homed, to enjoy our homefullness, to be at home? Is there a hint of insidiousness in the “us” and “our” in the sentence, even as it is collected into “all of us”?” Elsewhere, Holden writes: “the age of the Indigenous civilisations is so preposterously great, yet their material remains largely invisible”. Perhaps this is a matter of who is seeing?
Tactical Ignorance
In her essay Everywhen, Indigenous author Mykaela Saunders points out that “Many Australians find time distancing and alienating. History is everything that happened before they were born; events feel far away to them … This is a natural outcome of belonging to a culture that actively tries to distance contemporary life from the past.”
Holden concurs when she writes “Australian history is a great big gloopy puddle to most people, and our ignorance is tactical”. But when she describes an “invisible” Indigenous past, she is inadvertently enacting what historian Lorenzo Veracini calls “the settler colonial non-encounter”. Settler Australians (me included) have a responsibility to work with, learn from and listen to Indigenous people who are willing to teach and share their knowledge. As colonialism scholar Lisa Slater argues: “If one gives up on the ‘truths’ of settler colonialism – not just the relentless worry and pity, but also knowing who I am in relation to Indigenous people, Country, social issues and Australian colonial history (and present) – there is a possibility of reimagining our political models.”
The lyric essay, it has been argued, is an antitoxin to our poisoned world. Author and academic David Carlin has proposed “entangled nonfiction” as a space to reconceive the Anthropocene beyond the human. Writer Christine Howe has made a compelling case for the form as a site for decolonisation: a “common ground” for reconciliation and respect. If non-Indigenous writers engage with the work of Indigenous writers, the lyric essay might become more expansive: more personal, more political, more planetary.
Living in the Illawarra on Five Islands Dreaming Country, Holden has an opportunity to be guided by the generosity of Elder and writer Aunty Barbara Nicolson and the work of Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison. She can learn from Indigenous scholars like Anthony McKnight and Crystal Arnold. In Shapeshifting: First Nations Lyric Nonfiction, Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven declare their ambition to “shift the shape of the Australian literary landscape and the ways in which the whole of genre nonfiction and its craft and construction is considered and expanded into the future”. The book is guided by Indigenous ways of being and knowing, drawing on “cultural metaphors, such as gathering, weaving, tracking and backtracking”. The form is not just connected to place, but inseparable from Country.
Cooke and Holden have written essays that are vibrant, provocative and moving. But I can’t help feeling a need for even richer encounters with place. How much more resonant might all lyric essays be if non-Indigenous writers actively learned from Indigenous writers? What could be more transformatory, for non-Indigenous people, than to learn how to form an embedded relationship with Country? What greater way for us to be planetarily entangled?
