Beyond the Border by Owen Marshall and The Interview Rose by Elizabeth Smither

Better known and comprehensively celebrated as a writer of fiction, Owen Marshall returns to a genre less familiar to him in Beyond the Border. This is Marshall’s fourth volume of poetry, each having been published by a different press. Its author is nostalgic and reflective, an elder gesturing at the preciousness of pleasant moments.

Unfortunately for those looking for subversion and surprise in poetry, the poems of Beyond the Border echo the smug, doomed cadence of a stand-up comedian who habitually leads off with the phrase, ‘Have you ever noticed how…?’ and goes on, wryly but ploddingly, to the obvious end of their observation. ‘Bipedal Advantage’, one of many examples of this rhetorical structure in the collection, begins:

Why do we rule the earth despite so many other
creatures bigger, faster and just as bloodthirsty
as ourselves?

After taking a few lines to ponder why evolution didn’t, for example, grant dinosaurs the skill of opera singing, Marshall concludes:

                                    Fiddling challenges and
intrigues the brain, prying reveals so many secrets.
Perhaps if we released a foot from the responsibility
of locomotion we would gain the further intelligence
to enable us to live more happily within this world.

Marshall rarely resists the urge to use the end of a poem to summarise what led up to it. He explains himself; he answers his own questions. Each poem is the size of a single thought, uninterrupted by doubt.

Though Beyond the Border is loosely formed as a collection of mostly occasional poetry not bound by a rigid conceit, the subjects of aging and mortality appear frequently. This is a writer looking back and taking stock; a writer who can’t help but reduce childhood to something sunny and simple:

That eagerness to climb the dinosaur slide, an
open-mouth smile as they descend it. Such
joy when they’re gifted that swing to the sky
such naturalness with which they treat their
fellows, seek company or take a mother’s hand.

Throughout the collection, the speaker’s tone is usually affable but impersonal, tending to take a clearly defined stance and argue it through generalisations. So I’m tempted to commend Marshall for writing a poem that attempts to define poetry and titling it ‘Whatever’, imbuing it with an ambivalence that’s at least more complex than other poems in the collection like ‘A Simple Joy of Memory’ or ‘Luddite Rant’. But when Marshall spins the poem into a list — usually a form that unleashes a poet to write as uncannily, as discordantly as they’d like — his flavour of abstraction is disappointingly prosaic. A poem is ‘both / comfort and challenge’, ‘the eye of the storm, the heart of the matter’, ‘personal or not / at all’; it is ‘a language we wish we understood’.

This collection is Marshall checking in from late in his career, surrounded by comforts for which he is plainly grateful. It doesn’t reach any higher than that.

Deadline pressures recede and the worst that happens
is to be late for lunch. I suffer no rebuke when found

 

tending the garden in my slippers, or sleeping in the
afternoon. Memory has such special places and friendly

 

faces that have gone on ahead. Best of all is my wife
beside me and my family growing larger, louder about us.

There’s a lighter touch and a more delicate rhythm to be found in The Interview Rose, the twentieth collection by past poet laureate Elizabeth Smither. The poet’s technical skill, particularly in her awareness of scale and balance, is clear here, paired with her trademark unshowy conversational style.

This collection is characterised by its domestic setting and its poet’s love of reading closely. Smither’s literary references — which form the skeletons of many poems in The Interview Rose — might be grouped together, uncharitably, as sharing a twee politeness. Smither is taken with Jane Austen’s heroines, particularly the title character of Emma, who she commends for her psychological probing: ‘She could have been an analyst before Freud’. Meanwhile, she harbours a gentle frustration for Sense and Sensibility’s guarded Elinor Dashwood in contrast to her more honest and mercurial sister, Marianne:

Why does there always have to be
one liar in every assemblage
attentive to niceties as the fringes

 

the way a blind, lowered over a sill
has these soft silken tassels
to conceal the unspoken truth?

Measured in tone, these poems — small packages of literary analysis — repeat the gesture of most of Smither’s work in the way they gnaw at a small detail to reveal a larger question. The same probing technique can be seen throughout the collection in poems that focus on the tiniest inanimate objects, their diminutive size and, to put it crudely, their cuteness: a ‘flamboyant fabric rose’ to adorn an outfit for an interview; runner beans ‘sliced into green splinters / with pink seeds showing through’; a cello that, ‘when a woman or a girl plays it, / it looks like horseback riding, mane / and tail far flung to music’. Smither insists on the loveliness of these brief frames, and sometimes the loveliness is the whole point, or rather, the point is the poet’s choice to praise it: the choice to look for a second longer, the choice to choose something beautiful to wear, or to cook for those we love, or to coax music from a wooden form.

The scope of these poems is often tiny. In The Interview Rose, Smither mostly focuses on events that take up the space of an hour or a minute, homing in on their fine details and only occasionally introducing a sweeping gesture of summary. ‘Two Poems About Cows’ are exactly what they say they are — one about cows listening to Mozart on a transistor radio, one about cows crossing a river — and Smither brings us right into the centre of each moment. It’s hard not to feel stilled by these gentle, lucid pieces.

Remember cows have large eyes and long lashes.
In the adagio movement they lowered their eyes
and in the allegro movement they raised them.

 

Seldom can a public concert provide
such satisfaction. The cows as critics
their beautiful eyes, their listening.

These poems don’t travel very far; they’re less intent on transformation or proclamation than on capturing a character, a place, a second in time. ‘Requiem’, the briefest poem of the lot, is an impeccable example of a piece that resonates far beyond its length:

The trampoline instructor’s wake
sends her adoring pupils into space.

There’s no clutter in Smither’s poetry, which is not to say there’s no spontaneity or delight. Those elements emerge through the closeness of observation and the tenderness of Smither’s language. She’d rather a poem be small, unfussy and calm than for it ever to veer towards melodrama. There are, however, delicious rare crescendos of attitude, as in ‘The interview confession’ whose speaker concocts an unspoken response to a hypothetical ‘difficult borrower / at the Library Information Desk’:

Inside I am wild
with unspoken answers. ‘Madame,
why don’t you go to the end of the wharf

 

and jump off. There might be a shark
or you could swallow poison, lie flat
on the railway tracks, facing the train.’

Smither’s speaker is one you want to spend an afternoon with. She’ll point something out that you wouldn’t have noticed on your own, and then, when you thought you were happy sitting quietly, she’ll draw out from you a startling laugh.