Jennifer Kornberger (right) with 5 Islands Press publisher Steve Meyrick at the launch of The Twilight Observatory

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The Twilight Observatory by Jennifer Kornberger, 5 Islands Press 2025, was launched by Liana Joy Christensen at The Corner Room, Ode to Sirens, Fremantle, July 25^th, 2025.

Along with a handful of very fortunate people, I’ve been with the poet and her poems through the long years during which this work was conceived and nourished. The resulting collection showcases Kornberger’s unique sensibility and voice. The settings and themes of the poems are not circumscribed but set free to range across wild terrains of geology, geography, history, politics and philosophy.

This is an inherently risky approach, which in less skilled hands might have resulted in a kind of poetic pick-and-mix. If you prefer a comfortable package tour of safe poetic subjects, addressed in standard ways, this may not be the collection for you. The Twilight Observatory demands of a reader the willingness to take risks, to engage with matters beyond traditional borders. This challenge is something not everyone has the ovarios for, as Kornberger wryly notes in ‘Before the Italian Voyage’. But hers is not cryptic poetry and nor is it self-indulgent. 5 Islands Press has an ethos of publishing poetry that is both intelligent and intelligible, and this collection lives up to that and more. Discerning readers, with the appetite for adventure, will be amply rewarded. The poet has an exquisitely attuned intelligence that is equal to the breadth and depth of the material she engages with.

Because such a degree of poetic originality is unusual, I have reflected deeply on where the poet’s power resides. The first principle I derived was that Kornberger’s is — in itself — a poetry of first principles. The deadwood of centuries of habituation is simply not tolerated. This poet will see past all shopworn observations, cliches, turning an unerring and laser eye on all that she chooses to investigate.

That word investigate brings me to the second reflection. In the poem ‘Theory and Practice of the Rainbow’, section 2 are the following lines:

In Switzerland, you are mentored by a physicist whose expertise is the rainbow. He is unsure what to say to a poet, but you have a grant from the Australian government to make a bridge between art and science, so

he agrees to demonstrate the rainbow as Rene Descartes did several centuries ago

At the simplest level, this gives the reader a context for the content of many of the poems: the nature of light and seeing being a prime preoccupation of the twilight observer. I believe it also contains a clue to something much deeper. It is not just the content, but the actual technique of crafting the poems, that is akin to Renaissance science. I would characterise this as a sophisticated form of soul-infused empiricism. Such an approach to poetry is as uncompromising and rigorous as any scholarly or scientific quest. In this way Kornberger has indeed built a bridge over the ever-widening chasm between science and poetry and has elevated both by refusing all forms of received wisdom choking the banks on either side. The resulting work is rich with unexpected images:

Postcards from Bali: 2. Rooster at Tejakula

It has the bronze chest of a zealot, obsidian green tail feathers; again,

it’s stalking away from us, its red comb a wave of exclamation marks

And no poet could fail to resonate with these lines.

Words to Turn a Long Illness

. . . homemaker for vagrant ideas, days spent policing commas, snapping lines of poetry like dry spaghetti ……into different lengths

Soon you will be hearing a rich selection of poems read by the poet that will amply demonstrate that the work bristle with original insights. Here is just one slightly longer quote to whet the appetite.

Waking in Absentia, 2. In the Presence of Other Tongues.

You wake outside the English language, sample its fine, inbuilt weaponry,

its arsenal of truths, penchant for subjects, scrapbooks of Eastern philosophy, its tendency

to mend the broken crockery of the world with frost and you hear what these men of Stolac hear:

the distance from any prayer,

the speech of a people who appear to have killed Even a resurrected god, unwittingly, methodically

And gone on to set up shop in the void, To furbish it with more and more details,

The whole café regards the goodly tip You leave next to the cup and saucer.

It appears somehow despicable An indifferent apology

for what your grammar could do to their children

The audacity of Kornberger’s flights of imagination are thrilling (‘The Marriage of Evelyn White’, is just one such startlingly original example). At other times the poems are intimate, personal, tender and ferocious by turn. And there is frequently a sly sense of humour that provides a necessary leavening to the density and seriousness of the works. There is so much for the reader to discover for themselves in this remarkable collection, I will only offer one final example.

I am particularly enamoured of the climactic work in the collection: ‘Annotations to a Missing Poem’. Never departing from the poetic integrity that is the hallmark of her work, Kornberger created a prismatic poem, one in which the many facets of the work that precede it catch fire and coruscate. This is a sublime choice, one that could only be made by a poet working at the height of her considerable powers.

Many years ago, when our small writing group, the Pears, heard Jennifer speak one of her longest poems for the first time, I was swept up by a rare exhilaration, a feeling so strong that my response to the listening was “That was worth getting born for!”. Today, as the full spectrum of the finished collection shines into the world, those words hold true a hundredfold. I might be envious of those of you who have such delights to look forward to for the first time, but for the fact that the exhilaration only deepens with each reading. The Twilight Observatory is a collection that ought to grace the shelves of all who love poetry. As a gift to others, it is priceless.

 – Liana Joy Christensen

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Liana Joy Christensen is the author of Deadly Beautiful — Vanishing Killers of the Animal Kingdom and two poetry collections. Wild Familiars and Unnatural History. Her poems have appeared in various literary publications internationally, nationally, and very locally –  two are inscribed on the Busselton Jetty Her essays and poetry have won many awards, and been shortlisted for major prizes, including  the Newcastle Poetry Prize. She has a poem in the February 2025 edition of New Scientist. 

 

The Twilight Observatory is available from https://www.5islandspress.com/product-page/the-twilight-observatory-by-jennifer-kornberger

 

 

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