But Now, by Phyllis Perlstone. Puncher & Wattmann, 2022.

Phyllis Perlstone’s most recent poetry collection, But Now, celebrates the trajectory of a life. The preface alerts us to the scenario we are about to enter, from the time of the second world war, through the Great Depression, to a life-style in modern-day Barangaroo. Perlstone’s forte is meticulous description, metaphors built from the surrounding environment, each moment expanded to its limits.

The opening section, ‘Portraits: Points of Viewing’, highlights aspects of a family history, while acknowledging the ephemeral nature of what was taken for granted:

the present charges the words of once-were
to go from then to not knowing enough
having only a space to look across

In ‘Self-Portrait’:

suddenly
you’re not on that spot
after all you’re not where you were
Another likeness composed
might open on a new plane
……………………………
Self-portraits flutter and fail
their reconnaissance of you
with or without you wanting
 …………………………….
depict you
sometimes as a stranger 

The next section, ‘The Seasons Where You Are’, touches more specifically on the contrast between past and present, as well as early travel away from the city, resulting in “an intermittent desire to get away from the discontents of its civilisation, towards the beauty of its shores and trees” (Preface). The opening poem, ‘My Father I Remember’, details his hard life and resultant anger, speculating “what if he’d had another life/ not working in a factory.” In his time off, he taught his children to love the natural world: “it was my father invented for us/ those sweet beach days.”

‘To Darwin and the Kimberley’is an evocative sequence, with some stunning descriptions of bird-life, underlining the poet’s instinctual response to nature:

An egret points its beak along the estuary
stares towards the fixity of the shore’s
long rounding-off of lines

the bird is white-still
only its shadow on the water
shakes

it lifts
moon-coloured
where everything is blue or green

and hangs legs folded
under a trapeze of its wings

sky art before it’s disassembled

Within this sequence, the poem ‘Broome: a Story’ confronts the negative view of Aborigines held by the bus-driver, countering it with a lyrical reminder of the Yawuru pearl divers “robbed of their land/ Their children kidnapped.”

The third section, ‘Constructing a City’, takes us to contemporary Sydney, the last remaining sandstone walls, glassy buildings “steeling our senses”, so that

inseparable
from
your pursuits

you look
for a green
interruption

Past houses and rooms are remembered, and a number of poems are identifiable as written from Barangaroo, although it is rarely named in them. As Perlstone says in the Preface, the location “is a frame for most of the poems…they cover life in our city, as the hard history of a certain part of it.” This is seen early, as a contrast to the past:

Yet now we find ourselves…….. where we live in the city
Barangaroo….in see-through heights …..aspirations 

Later echoes confirm this: “lights on the casino across the water/ night lights on the construction site”; “More gloss than light/ the harbour-water/ is cut through by ferries”; “I can watch the swiftness of a river-cat/ or low moving cruiser/ to know I’m exactly in the present”. The poems ‘Balcony over Construction Works by the Sea’, ‘The Excavations’ and ‘The Bridge’ complete the picture.

Given the empathy earlier expressed by the poet for the Yawuru people, some mention of Barangaroo (the woman whose name it bears) and the First Nations history of the area, might have contributed further innuendoes to the way it weaves past, present and future together.

However, the final section, ‘Politics and Anxiety’, moves on to a hard-hitting sequence of poems that bring us into the contemporary world of corruption, ongoing war, Government inaction/inhumanity and the constant placebo of ‘The News’:

 

what’s the point in knowing their cries
out of earshot …………….we can imagine still
we sent troops didn’t we ……to kill?…………here are children
men and women running
ministers and members of parliament …….. you can see them
through your cunning

The poem ‘Vertigo’ encapsulates the emotions of the concerned citizen through its central metaphor:

Sea’s giddy wake cranks anxiety to a pitch
that speeding launch …….. the horizon ….its thrill’s edge
a line you’re walking parallel to
……………………………………………
you’ll feel the height – the deepening
in the oscillating sea’s
fall

And, of course, there’s the looming shadow of climate change, the loss of the green world, “as more roads widen/ pushing trees and plants/ away”.

But Now is a collection of poems for our times, a warning, couched in compelling and poignant imagery.

 – 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 Beiing 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). Editor of Antipodes, the first Australian anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret won the Banjo Paterson Poetry Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017. Her most recent book is Brief Garden (Puncher & Wattmann, 2019), with a new collection, Alchemy of the Sun, forthcoming in early 2024.

But Now, by Phyllis Perlstone is available from https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/but-now/

 

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