The Unintended Consequences Of The Shattering by Linda Adair, Melbourne Poets Union, 2021

When I first read these poems, of course I wanted to know what the poet was referring to as having undergone the process of ‘shattering’. So much in our world which we previously experienced as continuous or self-evident, both personally and sociopolitically, has been fragmented beyond repair. Clearly, the poems in this collection speak to the shattering effects of crises in the lives of people, some intimately known to the poet, and some whose struggles are revealed through statistics which reveal the collapse of societal safety nets and social contracts that were held by previous generations to be sacrosanct. And these lived experiences, if not ‘swept aside’, but faced, especially during times of sudden change, can shatter our sense of self, our preferred beliefs, and our certainties.

But the word ‘unintended’ makes us see that causality is being evoked here. The shattering is intended, and accepted as part of a desirable and inevitable process. But some of the consequences of that process are not welcome, and difficult to endure.

The poet has lived through some of the most disillusioning years of human history, although in a relatively fortunate country. But the ‘Quiet Australians’ Linda Adair references in her poetry, alluding to a recent PM’s obtuse electioneering comment in a press release, are shown by her empathy and moral intelligence to be carrying levels of pain which are not visible to the undiscerning eye. She is an insightful observer of these human stories. Sociological detail forms mosaic vignettes of realities lived.

Adair is not ‘oblivious to the visceral sadness/ that still abides in living memories’. And her poetry breaks the smooth surface of several silences that our society endorses, including:

Stillborn silence … the historic trope
from the blandest decades
of an allegedly lucky country
who expected women to ‘just bear up’. 

Her poetry presents individual people emplaced within their contexts, physically, socioculturally and historically:

I see that dour vertical space with its
fourteen-foot-high ceilings and dark olive walls
the afternoon light rippling through float glass
haloes her shadowed face like
a Gothic stained-glass Madonna
to her right are piles of newspapers she wants to burn …
to her left sits the gleaming jade-green Pinnock
at the head of the streamlined Formica table
postwar must-haves for housewives
confined to domestic duties after the troops came home
and a nod to her mother, an indomitable woman,
who’d peddled her way through The Great Depression
on a treadle Singer sewing machine.

We all have histories, and few of us have been afforded the leisure or the peace to examine the detailed histories of our communities or our families, or our place in them, as carriers of legacies of bloodline, of thought and experience. I find Adair’s biographical poems to be like houses made from building blocks — intricately built, with apparently everyday reportage style: factual details amassing towards a devastating final image, as in ‘The Gunner’ poem, which shows the effect of post-war trauma on a soldier, that creates potential disaster which is narrowly avoided in the present day by his alert wife:

Medalled but never supported
stiff upper lip by day
the bottom of a bottle at night.

During the first flush of marriage
the new father fought ‘Johnny Turk’ in his sleep
drove a chimeric bayonet
through the enemy’s breastbone
just in time, his wife awoke
and moved her suckling baby
before the Gunner’s fist came down.

The hard won foundations of happiness, family, the continuity implicit in the birth of children, are here threatened from within the survivor’s psyche, in part 3 of the poem, titled ‘Civilian Life’.

The emotion which breaks through at the end of that poem evokes resonant sympathy in the reader, and makes us draw imaginative circles outward from this individual scenario to consider the thousands of Australian soldiers who fought in WW1 and WW2 in the 20th century, representing their country in what the journalist John Pilger calls ‘other people’s wars’. So she humanizes the statistics we are presented with, in the news.

We see luminous portraits of the distinctively Australian landscape, and a strobe lit picture of a woman in a car, literally caught in the narrator’s headlights, and the glimpsed menace of the ‘Dingo X’, in  the poem ‘Pulpit Hill Road’. This is a prescient picture, as today we are being warned to be vigilant of dingos while holidaying in the former Fraser Island (now called by its indigenous name, ‘K’gari’). And the reference in the poem evokes the cultural resonances of the Azaria Chamberlain case, in which a baby’s mother’s testimony that a dingo had taken her new-born child, was disbelieved and mocked by the Australian media. People were living in cleared pockets of a country with houses with ‘nature strips’ and underestimating the dangers of exposure and isolation, because they were as disconnected from the country’s origins as they were from its interior.

This poem is like a short movie, which prompts internal questions: what challenges do we face, when we try to connect and engage — and create hybridity and heterogeneity of culture and society and even in a family — trying to create unity, and harmony, and coherence from the interaction of distinct individuals? When we venture beyond the protection of the cleared land? What is smoothed over? What is temporarily tamed and domesticated?

In the light of the recent work of Jess Hill whose ‘See What You Made Me Do’ looks into the prevalence and causes of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, we see the way Australian women’s personal safety is undermined in the unsafe spaces of their warlike home environments. So much is going on, under the easy going, decent exteriors Australian people present to the world.

The ‘Australian Dream’ of home ownership, based in socioeconomic aspirations, is intensified and interrogated by the poet’s exploration of how we live in these homes. Adair is balanced and even-handed, showing not only ill treatment of women by men but cruelty by a woman toward a man obliquely revealed with sharp succinctness in ‘Once Upon A Blue Moon’, a poem which has all my investigative reporter senses asking ‘What’s the story which prompted this?’ The truncated understatement of Australian idiom is used here with devastatingly damning effect.

The breakdown of social structures is felt deeply by the poet, and many of the poems such as ‘Smoke And Mirrors’ and ‘# and Counting’ are protests against the robbing of human dignity which impacts citizens, even in a stable and prosperous country like contemporary Australia. Adair’s use of italicized quotations and idiom vivifies the statistics in her most satiric poetry. The overall picture is of people being confronted by a more complex reality than their dreams and beliefs had prepared them for. ‘Dreams of fairness go up in smoke.’ A prompt to evolve, a call to go beyond the shallow and the surface of what will affirm our complacency, to imagine a more hard fought, resilient trajectory.

The reference to ‘The Voice’ in the poem ‘Enough Rope To Hang Us All’ is also a documentation of a significant era in Australia’s development as a nation, in coming to terms with our colonial history and the opportunistic marginalization of First Australians. Adair’s poetic incorporation of colloquial vernacular in this poem showcases a distinctive characteristic of her work:

this drought could be the fifth act of our national tragedy
believe preachers of economic salvation
at your own peril
someone will always make a buck from the suffering of others’.

The tenderness of the love poetry, its precise diction and caressing cadences, makes a beautiful counterpoint, in ‘The Topography Of Us’ and ‘Madonna In Shadow’ and ‘Word Play Love’ and ‘The Light Far From The Hill’, to the anger of the more sociopolitical poems. This contrast in tone, and pace, from the attenuated, pickaxe blows of the critical poetry to the flowing unfolding of the personal tributes, reminds the reader that life shatters not only what should be whole, but also the carapaces and defensive fortifications we construct around our own vulnerability, freeing us from our individualism into a wider inclusiveness, and a shared territory.

The lexical set of images drawn from the semantic fields of sewing and weaving and surgery (‘skeins of feeling’ ‘sutured to each other’) add texture and depth and complexity to the impact of the portrait in ‘Word Play Love’ of how a house becomes a home, and an attraction becomes a life partnership.

To extend ourselves beyond survival and protective self isolation, into concern and engagement with others, both sociopolitically and personally, is a vitally significant act, in a fragmenting world. And perhaps Adair’s triumph in this regard, both as a person and a writer, is, as the title suggests, ‘unintended’, but this record of the shattering of those binaries and stereotypes which compartmentalise our lived realities is a life affirming and satisfying achievement.

 – Devika Brendon

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Devika Brendon is a teacher, reviewer and editor of English language and literature. Her poetry, short stories and academic articles have been published in journals and anthologies in Sri Lanka, Australia, India, Africa, Italy and the USA. She is the Consultant Editor for the South East Asia Leadership Academy (SEALA), Content Editor for New Ceylon Writing, and a columnist and contributing writer for several national print and digital newspapers including Ceylon Today, The Mirror, The Sunday Times, Groundviews, and The Morning.

 

The Unintended Consequences Of The Shattering by Linda Adair is available from The Rochford Cottage Small Press Bookshop

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