Otopos by Dominique Hecq, Beltway Editions 2024, was launched in the UK by Anne Caldwell as part of the Speed dating launch at the Ekphrasis Symposium organised by Oz Hardwick and Cassandra Atherton at Leeds Trinity University, UK on July 6.

There is much to savour and enjoy in this new, three-part collection by Dominique Hecq. I found myself absorbed in a layered sense of place, where a close attention to details of the natural/unnatural world and our shifting relationship to it comes to life off the page. This focus is interlaced with a commentary on language itself, how it inhabits the body and our breath. The repetition of the phrase ‘unwrite the I from the poem’ suggests the singular ‘I’ dissolves into the work, becoming ‘us’.  The self is both present and absent.

Based in the UK, I am new to the complicated politics of land ownership, displacement, and the issues of the unceded Wurundjeri land but was introduced to these themes with delicacy and tenderness by Hecq’s writing. There is no didacticism here. Merri Creek itself is a unifying through line in the collection, a place that becomes both real and fantastical. The pandemic hovers in the background, focussing the reader on the way nature begins to take over the city of Melbourne during this time period.

I was very moved by the shift in tone in the central section of the book, where the creek becomes a setting for a series of violent attacks on women. We as the reader become the onlooker who does not act, implicated in this darker world. Hecq’s shifting of language registers from police reports to lyrical passages become acts of remembrance for the women involved.

The more uplifting tone of the final section maintains Hecq’s exquisite attention to sensory details, as a complicated love blossoms from the pages. ‘Life is a chromatic fractal slipping into dusk’ was a memorable image in this twilight world of animals and birds. Here is a musical poet capable of pyrotechnics, at ease with an extraordinary richness of forms and shapes on the page.

 –Anne Caldwell

Otopos is a triptych comprised of ‘Otopos’, ‘The Merri Creek Murders’ and is ‘Fervour’. Here is an excerpt from ‘Fervour’.

1.

At the Sacred Kingfisher Festival we danced to the beating of drums, our laughter rapturous and rebellious among the pinging of bellbirds. The air smelled of river mint wild myrtle and boronia as a red haze rose between us and the horizon line. In the bog garden we chased the wandering sun and you picked golden billy buttons and we kissed under the tessellated tower of my hair. Caped in your fake lion skin you said I reminded you of Castilla. Who is she, I asked in an intermixing of levity and seriousness. We ate steamed mussels and fried calamari, olives and hot peppers, octopus a feira and gazpacho. We drank tequila. Liked its hot spring in our bellies. We sucked on lemons and ice. Already my heart felt unparched, its chambers soft inside its suckering pericardium. You blew through the bushes and wetland bullrushes without a word like a bird or the wind itself.

Was it love’s fervency and desire we had interlaced, together? 

2.

I seek you everywhere through the grasslands and woodlands and shrublands. Through spiny headed mat rushes tufted bluebells sickle ferns and pussy tails. I tear trough spear grass and around patches of golden wattle silver banksia and swamp paperbark. At the curve in the creek where the river red gum stands I cut a heart out of its bark for a shield. The gum bleeds but I lash through wedge leaf hop bushes and rosemary grevilleas slashing punctuation save the arrhythmical lone period. For now.

I seek you in shoals of fish.

I seek you in clouds of bats.

I seek you in schoolings of tadpoles.

I seek you in murders of crows.

I seek you in the sturdiness of your name

I seek you in the word lover.

3.

I find you in music and painting and poetry. I find you in myth and make you mine. Kneading words as one would dough beyond the trammels of the self where reminiscences and expectations deflate being and slowly I rise from its shell shaping what beckons like a promise.

I surrender to the sky like a flowering gum deploying its satin.

I reach for your hand and touch only a dream blossoming spikes.

Slowly. I rise from emptiness. Shaping what becomes a prayer.

You wave to me from outside the gleaming window when out of the blue a little kingfisher flies into the glass.

Look how stunned the bird is. How it shakes itself off from shadow sheen. And flies away. 

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Anne Caldwell is a freelance writer, lecturer and editor. She currently works for the Open University and was Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund (UK). She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, Alice and the North (Valley Press, 2020) and Neither Here nor There (SurVision,2024) which won the James Tate Poetry Prize.

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Otopos byDominique Hecq, Beltway Editions 2024 is available from  https://www. beltwayeditions. com/new-releases/otopos

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