My Animal Life by Elspeth Findlay, Dangerously Poetic Press 2024

I’ve become acquainted with Elspeth’s poetry during the last five years, from hearing it spoken aloud as we’ve both taken part in the Poets Out Loud readings in Murwillumbah (in the Northern Rivers region of NSW). She has also been involved with the nearby Byron-based group Dangerously Poetic, which has recently published her long overdue first book, My Animal Life.

I knew from her performances that Elspeth’s poetry was arrestingly good – both highly entertaining and very well crafted. I didn’t know just how good until I read this collection.

She’s clearly had a strong connection, from childhood, to the natural world, the inhabitants of which she brings to life in vivid word pictures, something we see in ‘Hawk’

You watch me wary
eyes full of sky
dark with warning.

and, in a verse about catching the fallen bird in a blanket to rescue it,

… enfolding you is
like holding thunder.

She sometimes writes in the voices of the animals and birds she describes, and clearly knows them well enough to do so successfully: in ‘Shrike Thrush Song’

chest thrust out and all puffed up,
I open my black beak and sing my serenade …
I sing to my beloved and she, (as always)
pretending not to care, is busy preening
with only half a beady eye on me.

in ‘Cat-itude’

Twilight’s veil makes failing
light work for our eyes
brings the things that move
and chirrup out from under stone
and leaf …

She is good at evoking humans too. The first poem in the book, the loving reminiscence ‘Birdwatching with Mother’, begins

So much a child my gangly mother
sitting open legged on the splintery stairs.
Green wing of her skirt spreading
over knobbly knees, bare brown
toes always in motion.

Often, with equally keen observation, she describes humans in terms of
other creatures:

The Builders

Here they come roaring down our drive,
………a bang up bunch of tradies,
a rackety, fueled-up gristle of mad nest builders,
………brilliant cockatoos

or in ‘Germaine’

Question time, she’s sometimes kind,
but impudent mice are picked clean …
Hers is a thorny nest of provocation and dissent.

This traditionally slim volume, 74 pages including front and end matter, encompasses a range of material from the very personal, such as the poems in the final section, ‘Eldering,’ to pieces about drought, flood and ‘Northern Rivers Fires 2019′ in the ‘Anthropocene’ section. In all the poems, she pulls you in to share her experiences and point of view with a mixture of surprise and recognition. The poems and their subject matter are alive and immediate, both enthralling and enlightening.

No-one else writes quite like her; she has a very distinctive voice, and a very engaging one.

The publisher should be commended, too, for clear, readable print, neither
tiny nor pale — a pleasure too seldom encountered.

 – Rosemary Nissen-Wade

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Rosemary Nissen-Wade, formerly Rosemary Nissen, started making poems in childhood. She was a widely-published performance poet in Melbourne in the eighties and a teacher of Professional / Creative Writing. Some major life changes brought her to live in the Northern Rivers region of NSW in 1994, where she interacts with local writers and has embraced the online poetry world. Her most recent books are ‘The Pentridge Trilogy’: Breaking into Pentridge Prison, her memoir about introducing poetry workshops there in the eighties on behalf of the Melbourne Branch of the Poets Union, and Letters to a Dead Man, a chapbook spin-off from the memoir; plus a new edition of Blood from Stone, the anthology resulting from the prison workshops. Paper Birds, a collaboration with Melbourne poet Helen Patrice and Americans Delaina J. Miller and Leigh D.C. Spencer, published by Content X Design, will be released this month, along with a new, anniversary edition of their earlier collaboration, She Too.

My Animal Life by Elspeth Findlay is available from: https:// dangerouslypoetic.com/ publications/