Snail Mail Cursive by James Walton, Ginninderra Press, 2023.

As a Scot, who frequently aches to have the cockles of her cold Scottish heart warmed, the poems in Snail Mail Cursive have warmed them in the most primordial of ways.

I have an attachment to the land, weirdly, to farming, and further weirdly, to tractors. I love to watch straw balers in action and see impatient tractors fly past me on the road, loose wisps of hay swirling in their wake. Where did this love of the land and farming come from? My father, though not exactly a farmer himself, was from farming stock and would, at every opportunity, spend time on local farms helping (for free) wherever there was a need––in the birthing of calves and lambs, the repair of Massey Ferguson 425s, the herding of dairy cows from one field to another. Have I somehow absorbed my father’s deepest love osmotically? Or is there a genetic component to this? If I have genetically inherited my father’s deepest passions, James Walton’s poems have fully switched on their gene expression.

Snail Mail Cursive is an invitation to wade through the paddocks of James Walton’s life and the extraordinarily tender events of the everyday––where a farmer births a calf “another shirt ruined / the new calf breathing with me, where the lemon tree sarcastically fruits all year” and where “on this winter’s day so cold two ducks are on the chimney”. These poems are lush wholegrain sandwiches filled with nourishing observations––they are tender miracles carefully crafted into exquisite lines that I want to read over and over again.

Many of the poems are also funny, as evidenced in this stanza from the poem, “Ragnarök in the Coles supermarket car park”, where the poet:

… found Jesus
in the kitchen, late
helping himself
to the sour dough loaf
some roast beef, mustard
I thought I’d take the chance
my lower back – a small miracle …

As someone who charges up the highway of life (mostly speeding, it has to be said), these poems shifted me out of 5th gear into 1st. But it’s not enough to say that these poems make you stop and smell the roses (apart from anything, such a cliché has no place in any poetry review). No, these poems are about so much more than sniffing blooms atop a jagged stem––they are about peeling your socks off and feeling the land beneath your feet; they are about allowing the cool damp grass to poke softly between your toes; they are about sensing and feeling animals and the land as part of, not separate to, ourselves.

Look at this tender stanza from the poem, ‘I begin to wonder’:

I’ve left the will of everything
she can decide what to do
plant me to a tree or wild flowers
flesh or ash we return to the humus
top dressing for this restless orb  

Then there’s this beauty from ‘Year without television’

our heartbeat slowed
………..to the voices of radio
the dog,
head angled ears tuned in
watched,
licked at sound
there was dawdle in step
morning cracked its egg
books and toast
gave over day
we worked that paddock clean
until evening called us in …

And then these from ‘Mine is just dentistry, thus I can pray for my oldest friend.‘ Jeez, these lines made me weep:

…
thus I can pray for my oldest friend
while the aloof surgeon intercedes
to halt the spread of decades
this wily thing remorselessly pacing
our born shadow gift and terror
mine is just dentistry

a contiguous shallow emergency
for the same day as your anaesthesia
maybe I can ask for something else, gas?
journey together to a dreamy theism
take hold of our retiring years
palm to brass handle, knee to bitumen

At first glance, these poems look deceptively simple––but draw back their layers and they reveal a deep emotional complexity. They appear whisper quiet––yet bang the loudest of gongs in your mitochondria and shine a light in corners of your own paddock you hadn’t realised had been too long in the shade. These poems are a precious invitation to picture a “winter moon stitched on a light denim sky”; to imagine, “Toddlers falling off the soft chocolate of family, lips fat with mutton, mashed peas for chins“ and to laugh as the poet’s own bum is “pressed too close up beside the ice cream freezer“. In these days of high cholesterol and high adrenalin, fuck, of high everything, reading these poems made me see we are all mostly sleepwalking through life, disconnected from what matters, unaware of the rich microcosms that surround us. As I wove these poems into the fabric of who I am, I started walking taller. I started looking up.

As it turns out, I’m writing this review with my own socks off, in a paddock looking out to hills strewn with heather, there’s a pine forest to my left, a stream of dopamine trickles slowly by. The paddocks are dotted with calves and lambs; a hand-written sign for fresh laid eggs hangs askew on a farm gate; a cock proudly crows at the wrong time of day. Where else could a review of a collection such as this be written?

Reading these poems, I swear I felt my cholesterol and adrenalin levels decrease as each poem slipped into my blood stream and swam effortlessly through my now unclogged arteries straight to my heart. These poems hold more promise than any statin; then any Panadeine Fort prescribed four times daily to alleviate life’s pains; they will reduce your blood pressure faster than 32mg of Atacand (taken once daily, preferably at night).

Dear reader, inhale the soft breath of these poems and prepare to find yourself in the paddock of your own dreams, socks off, drawing all of James Walton’s life, loves and new born calves up through the soles of your feet. Snail Mail Cursive is a world of breathless lines that cut straight to the core of who you are and will leave you somehow knowing there is more to life than whatever is currently keeping you awake at night.

 – ali whitelock

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Ali Whitelock is a Scottish poet and writer living in a converted church out west. Her recently released a brief letter to the sea about a couple of things is her third poetry collection. Previous collections include, and my heart crumples like a coke can and the lactic acid in the calves of your despair (long-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2021). Her memoir, poking seaweed with a stick and running away from the smell was published to critical acclaim in Australia and in the UK. www.aliwhitelock.com

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Snail Mail Cursive by James Walton is available from https://www.ginninderrapress.com.au /store.php?   product/page/2627/James+ Walton+/+Snail+Mail+Cursive