…………I had no language
 ……….. ……….. ……….. ….for the lost–
we lived in white houses of difference

 This poem relives the arrest of Nelson Mandela and his fight against apartheid:

………………………he knew he was right.
………………………held to what was
………………………………….right;
the country made him wrong

 It also recalls memories of the poet’s anti-apartheid father, who

………………………………..worked the system
and kept it quiet – the whispered names,
…………………………………………..the safe houses of the 1960s
………………………..for friends in banished parties
………………African National Congress, South African Communist Party –

nobody talking:
the stories have gone with my father
…….to Johannesburg’s West Park Cemetery.

In a poem recording a previous era, ‘The Dam’, we learn something of the forces determining the poet’s memories and her resultant political stance: “I see us now as if from above, our tiny tracks….”, because

………….this story is also about Jacob,
his English name (I don’t remember any other),
………….who taught me to greet dumelo in Sotho,
………….who helped me to see which side of the scale was mine
…………………………………………………………………
………….……………………….………….something opened –
like a crack in the shell of the day −

Freiman continues with her “frayed, white memory:/ I would not see Jacob’s years unfold,/ his children ground to a core by apartheid”. The following poem, ‘Greyhound’, reminds us “I was eight,/ ours a friendship.”

 Another of the most significant sequences in this collection is ‘The Mother Poems’, invoking Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. As in the cover photograph of the poet’s mother:

………….……..a snapshot in a forest of birches –
a satchel on her shoulder, the child looks straight at the camera,
her heart-shaped face, a half-smile

Steered to South Africa, in 1945 they learn of the deaths of family remaining behind:

in the forest bordering their shtetl of Simnas – an entire town:
a myriad moth wings echoed unmarked graves
shade and light of birches in Lithuanian June – the same light
that shone in a four-year old’s eyes gazing at a camera lens
where a lake glinted through the trees.

The mother “emblematic in the green chair – she seemed/ to have fallen, drained out of herself,/ empty as if she would not refill” (‘Glad Family II’), the grandmother Chana “no language/ to speak the engulfing darkness”, are unable to share more of their past:

………….………….………….threads of connection
holding each tradition, lighting candles on Shabbos
……………………………eyes on the number tattooed
on the forearm of a woman in the next row
where a sleeve had fallen back.

In ‘The Well’, the poet positions herself as Isaac:

I have seen my father blind
to the pulse beneath my skin –
his task great as stars in heaven
numerous as grains of sand on the shore
…………………………………………
not seeing the sky, nor the child
whose heart beat like a bird
against the corner of a stone.

Part II of Spirit Level bases itself on aspects of Freiman’s migration to Australia. Many of the poems are ekphrastic responses to gallery artworks, as a member of the writers’ group DiVerse, often connecting with aspects of her conflicted past. Movingly significant is ‘The Names – photographs of August Sander’, detailing “Victims of persecution”, uncategorised – “the names/ ripple out from photographic surfaces”.

The sense of alienation, estrangement of the immigrant and uprooted persona, is most poignantly expressed in the poem ‘In Forster (Sand up the Coast)’, via a comparison with Scotswoman Eliza Fraser, shipwrecked on an Aboriginal island off Queensland:

on an island of sand,
alien, harsh as salt
…………and beautiful
……………………..
how she had no choosing,
had to find in the straps
of the leaf bracts,
…………learn how to seek out
the toughness

In this poem, Freiman locates herself watching a flight of pelicans, “their wings/ held by the constant wind.” Like the castaway, Fraser:

…………..…………I stood
…………on the beach
…………as if I’d left
…………my other wing
in another place –

 Just as the historically important poems in the first section flash forward to the present, those in Section II hold glimmers of the past, the elusive nature of time and memory. Freiman’s lyrical imagery, her sense of the mot juste, enhance our reading of Spirit Level.

 – Margaret Bradstock

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Margaret Bradstock is a Sydney poet, critic and editor. She lectured at UNSW for 25 years and has been Asialink Writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. She has eight published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Her latest collection, from Puncher & Wattmann, is Brief Garden (2019). Editor of Antipodes (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret won the Banjo Paterson Poetry Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017.

Spirit Level by Marcelle Freiman is available from https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/spirit-level/