Good Grief by Coral Carter, Mulla Mulla Press, 2025, was launched by Liana Joy Christensen at The Perth Poetry Club, May 16, 2026.

As the ongoing work of decolonisation continues, people of good will are attempting to learn what it means to be Australian in a way that does not deny any of our history. The necessary conversations must keep happening in the legislature, the boardroom, the schoolroom and most significantly of all in the imaginations of our cultural workers.

There is no decent place to stand/
in a massacre/
but if a [poet] takes your hand/
then go and stand with her.

This slight rephrasing of Leonard Cohen’s words kept arising when I spent time with Coral Carter’s important new collection, Good Grief. 

Carter’s work is indelibly Australian, her poems are green shoots in cultural landscapes that have been ravaged with griefs, both personal and apocalyptic. The work embraces country and characters and imagery you would find nowhere else but right here. At times, the unvarnished working-class language conjures for me the work of Bruce Dawe. The blunt Australianisms of “Young Jumbo”, for instance, carry echoes of Dawe’s poem “At Shagger’s Funeral”, while deftly eviscerating the homophobia often endemic in country towns.

This is just one example of how Carter’s work cuts across the deeply familiar tropes of Australian culture. She does not erase them, but rather sets them in a broader and more nuanced context, deconstructing neat and sealed narratives that preclude further thought. This is strongly evident in ‘The Family Women Called Him ‘The Old Man’’ Nothing is simple in this work. The Old Man in question is viewed as the title proclaims from the point of view of “The Family Women”. At first blush he is the very epitome of the rough bush war hero of the Anzac legend, a generous man. Yet the whispered commentary of the women hints at sexual predilections that are far from admirable. The refracted portrait of “The Old Man” cannot be reduced to a simple cliché for good or for ill.

This kind of complicating enlargement of the cultural view is sophisticated. It is what I characterise as a third evolution of postcolonial creative work. It builds on, yet moves beyond, the necessary earlier stages of satire and reversal. Leah Purcell’s brilliant play and subsequent film, The Drover’s Wife, based as it is on Lawson’s canonical short story, is a case in point. It does not deny what was good about the story, but pans out to reveal the history that was not included in the narrow world view of the original. It seems to me that Carter’s striving towards truth-telling does the same. 

There is a tender bluntness that permeates her work. Identities and pain are explored in a way that leaves space for all the losses, the multiple griefs. Listen to these lines from ‘The Red Quondong Seed Earrings’, for instance:

My house is built on the dunes
where wild quondongs grow.
My house is one of a subdivision covering
the cockle middens and stone chippings—
sacred site and gathering place.

Thieves know
quondong is no longer
the pie our mums made—
stewed fruit with a dash of sugar
decorated with finger-rolled pastry roses
baked until golden, served with cream.

Thieves know
at eighty dollars a kilo it is now
a five-star fruit appearing on flash menus—
braised kangaroo tail with quondong mash
quondong coulis with wattle seed ice-cream
barramundi with quondong jam.

Carter’s work is remarkable in its capacity to delineate each stratum of loss. She is unashamed to claim her own, yet maintains a respectful awareness of the larger losses of cultures and histories that precede and surround her. For my money, she is the AntiHanson: A sorely-needed force to be reckoned with!

Good Grief comprises six sections, the first two of which address the dying and death of her mother and father. Carter is an artist as well as a poet, and this shows in the unflinching rawness of her imagery. She does not shy away from the brutal details of a drawn-out death, which renders the opening stanza of ‘These Things Happened’ viscerally confronting. Yet this same grounding in physical pragmatism becomes elegiac in the concluding lines of ‘Building the Coffin’:

Mother was quality control.
We stood aside with our end-of-day beers
as she ran her hand over the scorched pine,
stroked the liner, smoothed the pillow.
Whispered—good.

The tone of the poems is by turns humorous, tender, savage,

I ranted in his last hours about
The Point, doubting there was one,
and when finally he had gone, I
thanked a merciless god I didn’t
believe in.

Carter works in various forms throughout the collection. There are several excellent examples of prose poetry, a visual poem or two, a small selection of ekphrastic work. I am particularly enamoured of the haibun which occupy a whole section of their own, as well as the following example, which opens the mother poems: 

Everlasting

The paper daisies she broadcast into her native garden have
heaved themselves up, bent and bright green under the weight
of red sand. She won’t be here to see them flower but they
will self-seed after that.
distant rain—
I shake sand
out of the gauge

The exquisite, spare simplicity of this poem delights me, as does the whole collection. Carter’s work is never sentimental, and the precision of her pen inks an accurate cartography of the heart. In the skillful hands of this poet, grief is indeed good.

 – Liana Joy Christensen

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