Word Pigment

Page 15 January–February 2009 Word Pigment Lisa Wilde Aretrospective can present the double pleasure of the work itself and an in-depth look at an artist’s journey. This is what the handsome new collection Poems 1980–2008 by Jan Owen gives us. Containing over two hundred poems, this book is an almost thirty-year look at work by this talented and sensitive Australian poet. Jan Owen was born in 1940, and her life— past and present—in Australia’s less urban settings provides the frame for many of her poems. She has also traveled widely in Europe andAsia, with poetry residences in Venice, Rome, Paris, and Malaysia— locales which figure in her work as well. The winner of numerous poetry prizes, Owen has published five volumes of poetry prior to this one, and work from each is included in this collection along with a booklength selection of new poems called “Laughing in Greek.” “First Love” is the first poem in the book, and it is an apt choice as an opener. Subtitled “Titian’s Young Englishman with a Glove, circa 1530,” it humorously describes the fourteen-year-old poet’s secret perusal of an art book during physics class where she falls “for an older man, and anonymous at that, / hardly ideal— / he was four hundred and forty-five.” By the end of the poem, the girl’s obsession with art has become life when she marries “a European with cool gray eyes, / a mustache, / pigskin gloves.” The influence of art on life (and life on art) is a refrain that reverberates throughout her work. “Seascape with Young Girl” presents another aspect of Owen’s territory and poetic talent, capturing a human being in a moment. It is a poem about almost nothing—a girl on her way to the beach who consciously will not notice a boy who is trying to be noticed. Yet from the first lines, “The heat seethes dragonflies, / their sheen, the exact color of flight,” I am transported. By the fourth stanza, the girl in the poem has crossed the dunes and made it to the beach: the light bleeds silver on water; a rainbow sail windsurfs the inshore green and cries of gulls and children thin into air, pure as the notes of a pipe. At this point, the poem is almost breathing on its own, making the leap from a literal moment to a place in the realm of human feeling. This quality— slowing down and deepening time—is what many of Owen’s poems achieve. Another theme signaled in the first section (“Boy With a Telescope,” 1986) is personal memory. Owen began writing poetry in her thirties, while she was a mother with young children, but she has said that it was her brother’s death in an accident in 1977 that really motivated her to get on with her writing. Referring to his death in a 1993 interview, Owen stated, “It was then that I changed direction and realized I wanted to write about our childhood. There was a real anxiety about everything that had been unrecorded in my life.” Most of the memory poems are collected in the fourth volume in the book, “Blackberry Season.” In some ways, the life she is describing in her Australia of the 1940s seems far away, with ink pens that you dipped (“Ink”) and “quince suet pudding wrapped in the Racing Sheet” (“Quince”). At the same time, I was struck by how much felt familiar. Though half way around the globe from the US, Owen feels rooted in soil not dissimilar to the northern Midwest where I grew up—a place where blackberry picking is a ritual (“Picnic”) and bridge parties are still regular events (“The Bridge Party”). And these poems are not nostalgic—Owen’s language is precise and direct, capturing the vividness of the experience. There is the neighbor in “Chook Lady,” who keeps chickens: At number 12, Mrs. Brody ran an Old Folk’s Home in a shed by the fig and the fence: ten untidy old girls in grubby white who smelt. Or the family pet in “Rogerdog”: “Our dog was sharp as his snout, a perm of...