Jane Williams reading at the launch of undercurrents

undercurrents by Jane Williams’, Ginninderra Press 2023,  was launched by Adrienne Eberhard at The Hobart Bookshop on Thursday 29 June 2023.

Thank you for joining us tonight for the launch of Jane Williams’ latest collection, undercurrents, published by Ginninderra Press. Like most of you, I imagine, I have been a fan of Jane’s work for a very long time, over two decades now, lured by its seeming-simplicity that masks the undercurrents beneath.

I first met Jane at a Tasmanian Poetry Festival, organised by Tim Thorne, when my second son was a baby in his pram. Jane, who is the same age as me, was attending one of the sessions with one of her daughters who was in her late teens, and it both amazed and gladdened me to meet this poet who had already published a number of books and raised two daughters. It gave me hope that both were possible, that anything was possible! Jane’s poetry, as I came to read it and seek it out, confirmed this; in her poetry, anything is possible. The ordinary becomes the extraordinary, the ubiquitous becomes sublime. Humans are angels, and the holy is found in our everyday lives. Jane’s poetry works a quiet magic – from seemingly simple ideas the extraordinary bursts.

Jane is a grandmother now, and those teenage daughters having turned into young women with their own daughters. (And this fills me with hope, too, being the mother of three sons!). Family and the influence of family are palpable concerns in Jane’s poetry – in this most recent collection, there is a wonderful poem where Jane recognises her mother in the mirror, after reminiscing on the similarities in their lives. The poem ends with the lines, “Each morning in the mirror/as eyes assess skin’s delicate hold/my mother’s daughter greets me kindly/one more fold in the soul’s origami”. Jane’s ability to make connections, to see the significance in small things, and to deftly find the words for this are apparent here. “The soul’s origami”, its folds and its unfolding, its blooming into new shapes and makings . . . In the poem, ‘Matriline’, Jane explores these connections further, recognising the things we share with our sisters and mothers and grandmothers; in her families’ case, “longevity, adaptation . . . [and] embellishment”, along with falling for “escape artists”, and “gravitating towards backdoors/trapdoors, souped-up revs, high-octane kisses”. This open-eyed, wry, self-deprecating/family-deprecating list culminates in the wonderful final lines, that seem to me to be so emblematic of Jane’s way of seeing the world, and of her poems:

We keep on and if imagination has anything to do
with it, let us imagine this: granddaughters sourcing feathers
from the imagined Book of Phoenix, chewing frankincense
gum open-mouthed, painting eyelids gold or sapphire –
little flame-throwers intent on life. For as long as we are able
let us cheer from the sidelines, sometimes join in –
apprentice to their warble and shimmy, their deeper respect
for wishbones

 – ‘Matriline’

What grandchild could hope for anything more than a grandmother who wishes such things for them, a grandmother who is a poet and an alchemist?

Teenage daughters to mothers to grandmothers and great grandmothers, suggests a great unspooling of time, and time is another theme that echoes and unravels in Jane’s poems. In ‘Window of Cloud’, the poet mentions her own age, and from here the poem moves to Mars, to maps, to the vast expanse of the earth itself, to sun “blinking” an “ancient morse code”. In ‘Terra Form’ we learn of “blooms of jellyfish older than dinosaurs”, and our human form transmutes to a “terra form”, to the other worldly, the earthly, the more than human. Jane writes of “unpeopling her poems” and arrives at the recognition that “time itself/is no longer the enemy”, not when we see the “wonders/contained in each second -/230 beats of the honey bees’ wings/300,000 kilometres of light.” Again, this wonderful juxtaposition of the tiny and infinitesimal with the large and the vast and the unknowable. And again, in the poem, ‘Reach’, Jane writes of a plastic water bottle lodged in a tree, well out of reach, wanting “to hurl it back through time past the/moulding and mixing, the heating and drilling, back before/black gold fevered and fractured our bonds.”

This idea of the bigger-than-life, the beyond-our-comprehension, the depths and the vibrations of all we do and think and say is another preoccupation of Jane’s. Her poems are never just about the thing itself, just as we are so much more than our thoughts and feelings and responses: “What is the more we long for?” (‘This Embroidered Life). In the poem ‘Meta’, Jane describes her inability to understand the mechanics of a bread machine, delighting however, in its folding and mixing, and the miraculous burgeoning and blooming of the dough. The poem is a piece of meta text, in itself, because by the end, it is no longer about bread or machines but about the act of writing itself: “this poem once written twice read/becomes less and less about bread.”

This could be the epigraph for the whole of this collection. Each poem is about far more than it describes itself to be, and the collection as a whole has the wonderful resonance of a Buddhist chant, the om reverberating throughout the body, throughout the room, throughout the universe. For me, this is exemplified in Jane’s poems that make mention of rats – and there are a few of them in these poems. Somehow the rat, that creature that carries the plague and is a thing of potential terror to many, becomes the representative of home, of safe harbour, a familiar. A wild creature that is also a domesticated creature in its reliance on food scraps, chicken coops, warm spaces in walls and ceilings. The rat inhabits two worlds; the human and the animal, the domestic and the wild, and somehow, this is what Jane’s poems do too. They are humble and deeply human, and concerned with human concerns, they are personal and self-effacing, and yet they are large and glorious in their scope, in their capacity to make connections between the humdrum of our lives and the ineffable.

Two of the poems at the end of the collection explore this idea in their titles and in their reach: ‘Hum and Fray’ and ‘Thrum’. In ‘Thrum’, the final poem, Jane describes her house and home, and its close proximity to a laundry and a bakery, where she “wakes to the hum of industry, all the whir and hiss, chugs and clunks and the world smells like/freshly pressed linen and hot cross buns as if it were an endless preparation/for the second coming.” She describes the garden where “sparrows freely come and go/from their nests in the guttering and there may be a rat or two/in the crawlspace below belonging no more or less than piston/or pump, drum and drainpipe, than the fans and gaskets/holding in check the quicksilver of our own desire spinning/as we are on this shared axis which for all the known worlds/feels like home.” Here again, in this fabulous sprawl of a poem, Jane explores what makes us feel connected, what brings us back to ourselves, what anchors us and makes us whole, and in the busyness and activity of industry, of cleaning and making, right next door to the garden and backdoor, life tingles and resonates and ‘thrums’. In ‘Hum and Fray’, Jane spells it out, echoing EM Forster’s ‘Only connect’. In this poem the ancient past and the domestic present, the small and the large, the inevitable and the things we wish we could change, plunge on, charging towards the future: I am going to end by reading ‘Hum and Fray’, and in the process, launch Jane’s newest collections of poems into the world, into the ether, where they will hang and glow like stars, reminding us of what really matters:

Hum and Fray

What does it matter whether
we ignited in space
or crawled our from the sea
if such questions merely serve
to distract us
from our sense of belonging
from our active belonging.

By us of course I mean those
for whom wonder too readily
morphs into near-useless
analysis. Pass the petri dish.

Once we believed lemmings fell
from stormy skies
then
we got on with our days.

Now plagued by face values
we have become perilous these warming degrees of separation
as the rhino and the honeybee
as the sea turtle and her finite sons.

Still the world turns and us with it
every imbalance gravitating toward its centre
coaxing us into unthinking moments of awe
into nullifying indifference
and the imagined power that brings.

Hush . . .

humming at the edge of our senses
all the live wires of common existence
desirous and willing to reconnect.

 – Adrienne Eberhard

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Adrienne Eberhard is a writer and teacher. Her sixth collection of poems, is currently being translated into French by Catherine de Saint Phalle, and will be published in Paris in April 2025.

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Undercurrents by Jane Williams is available form https://www. ginninderrapress. com.au/ store.php?product/page/2941/ Jane+Williams +%2F+ undercurrents