The Ease of Eggs by Benjamin Dodds , 5 Islands Press 2025, was launched by Debbie Lim at Benledi House in Glebe on 28 September 2025.

I feel very honoured to be launching Benjamin Dodds’s third collection The Ease of Eggs today. When Ben first asked if I’d launch his book we’d actually only met in person for the first time a few days before, at another Five Islands Press launch, for Alison Gorman’s debut collection back in June.

However, we were Instagram friends and had been admirers of each other’s work from afar for quite some time, and I realised that if there was an Australian poet whose book I would want to celebrate coming into the world it would be Ben’s.

I’d already been so impressed by his second collection, Airplane Baby Banana Blanket. Since then I’d kept a particular eye out for his work in journals and was always very happy when I spotted a new Dodds poem out in the wild.

Ben’s second book, for those who aren’t familiar with it, explores the dubious social experiment in the 1960s and 70s by the psychotherapist Dr Maurice Temerlin who raised a chimpanzee called Lucy as though she was a human daughter within his own family.

It’s a fascinating read, as well as being one of the collections of Australian poetry that has stood out and lingered, often uncomfortably, in my mind for a long while after.

It also showcases Ben’s skill for narrative, his inventive use of form, and his sharp yet sympathetic eye for intriguing subject matter. All qualities that I recognised again in The Ease of Eggs.

And so to the new collection. Before Ben sent me the manuscript, he mentioned that it wasn’t written to a specific subject as was Airplane Baby Banana Blanket. The Ease of Eggs is, in fact, much more myriad and eclectic, more a personal Wunderkammer of poems.

I think you’ll agree that the cover artwork, which is by the American artist Larassa Kabel, gives a wonderful sense of this. Notably, all these diverse objects and creatures depicted are shown interconnected by a single unbroken thread.

Can I also just mention Ben’s poem and section titles? If there was a poetry award for the most excellent titles, I would happily nominate Ben. Here are just a few to whet your appetite: ‘My Ibis Is Not Your Ibis’, ‘Purging the Apes’, ‘Rozelle Window on Two Consecutive Days’, and ‘Ridley Scott’s Alien with Moth’.

A Dodds poem may be as likely to be set in a classroom as on a farm paddock as on a film screen. It may take the form of couplets, stepped stanzas, a concrete poem, a list or even an erasure.

This effortless slipping across settings and subjects and forms seems to reflect his lively curiosity, a relishing of the tangible world, and a playful sense of risk. Occasionally, there are also darker undercurrents.

Ben’s poetry never comes across as ostentatious. It pushes its language and form in proportion to its considered thought and emotion. He seems to know that a poem only becomes stronger and more human for this.

The Ease of Eggs contains 40 poems divided into five sections. We find poems responding to film and art, poems stemming from his life as a primary school teacher, poems referencing outer space, adolescent sexuality, a rural upbringing and the realities of Sydney housing.

Its variety, for me, is part of its pleasure and appeal.

I think a good poem is able to hold something of the paradoxical. The poems in this collection are generous yet astute, vulnerable yet brave, skeptical yet kind. Ben’s poetry is far from strident but nor is it afraid to challenge the status quo with a gently raised eyebrow. I admire all these qualities in his work.

But poetry isn’t served well by generalisations so I’d like to draw attention now to some of the individual poems that stood out to me.

The American poet Jane Hirshfield says, “A good poem makes self and world knowable in new ways … Part of its work, then, must also be to surprise”.

I love the jolt of the fresh and unexpected in Ben’s work. These lines, for example, from the poem ‘Surrogacy’, which references the children’s animation film ‘Dumbo’, and describes the hard work of the stork who delivers the baby elephant to its mother:

Just a domestic flight,

but imagine the sweet relief
at unlocking his beak, the tension
headache born of bearing an elephant child.

What a great trail of juxtaposed images, all pulled together with a satisfying speech music.

In a Dodds poem, new portals can open within the seemingly mundane. 

For example, in the poem ‘Space Age’ early childhood memories of a mother’s bra during nursing morph into the moon suits manufactured by Playtex ‘to swaddle men against silent death’.

In the second section of the book, titled ‘In Loco Parentis’, which contains poems about teaching, the poem ‘Save Them’ describes a hypothetical training scenario of a children’s classroom under attack, and then muses to what degree the teacher holds responsibility.

There’s a terrific line: “Adult empire under audit”. It struck me that this notion is never lurking far throughout Ben’s work – this awareness of the potential cracks in societal authority, of a certain lawless chaos beneath the surface.

Later, this poem asks us: “What lengths to keep small/ bodies whole?”.

And of course, no easy answers are provided.

There’s a mercurial quality to this collection and as I read it I also became increasingly aware across many of the poems, of a sense of the constant subtle shifts in power that can occur within a relationship: whether between students and teacher, siblings, housemates, or even anatomical specimens stored in a museum.

A memorable poem is ‘The International Prototype’, which refers to the prototype of the kilogram weight, which resides in Paris and is the gold standard by which the kilogram unit should be measured.

As we learn, however, the prototype is becoming lighter, even though by seemingly negligible degrees, implying, theoretically, that the universe is getting heavier.

Here’s the final stanza:

Lost across more than a century’s life
is barely a dust-speck’s
amount of her matter;
so little of something
as to be nothing,
but while she diminishes
by any degree,
the universe puts on weight.

These eight lines showcase some of the strengths of Ben’s poetry: the canny observation of the easily overlooked, the leaps across time, place and space, the economy of music and, finally, a shift in which our experience of the world becomes larger and wiser.

I really like this notion that the minutest change might have much bigger repercussions. Maybe one can even read it as a metaphor for our own small human actions.

A word that’s mentioned more than once on the Five Islands Press website as a descriptor for the poems in The Ease of Eggs is kindness. The dictionary of the American Psychological Association says this: “Kindness is often considered to be motivated by the desire to help another, not to gain explicit reward or to avoid explicit punishment.’” 

There is a quiet altruism to many of these poems that isn’t didactic or performative. At most, there’s simply an appeal for a similar care and consideration as we go about our daily lives.

This quality of kindness is perhaps most obvious in the poem ‘At the Birth of a Calf’, which also contains the lines that give this collection its title.

I’m hoping Ben will read this poem in a moment so I don’t want to steal his thunder but it’s a stunning poem that brings together beautifully his unflinching descriptive eye, emotional restraint and an empathy that doesn’t tip into sentimentality.

The poem describes a cow who is having a difficult birth, and the speaker wishes to alleviate her suffering.

I’ll read just the first couple of stanzas:

She has two heads today

Her own gentle skull leaks exhaustion
dribbles into the grass she chews
but here’s a new appendage
a second face
wet velvet under rigid tail

Something has stalled within
her warm walls snagged
as it dragged its long way out

 I think these might be some of my favourite lines in the collection. There’s a tough beauty, pain, heart and life. Big things but in microcosm, which is, I suspect, how poems can best help us to see and feel.

But I know we’re all looking forward to hearing some of these poems in Ben’s own voice.

I’m going to steal some lines from his poem ‘Surrogate’ which could be said to describe Ben well as a poet – he is, I’m proposing, an ‘agent of plot progression, [a] class act who only weeps in transit’. And I mean that in the very best of ways.

You might think of this book as a kind of spaceship in the form of good words and good will. I invite you to climb aboard and enjoy the surprising views, the tender angles of our sometimes absurd human lives. Congratulations Ben on the launch of The Ease of Eggs.

I think the poetry universe has just put on weight.

 ─ Debbie Lim

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