Sound and abundance shape the poetic vision of Judith Beveridge

It’s not that Judith Beveridge’s poetic eye is without compassion – but it is, has always been, unblinking. She continues to stare even when the sight is shocking, and she tells us exactly what she sees.

The title poem of her first collection, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987), has served my classes for years as a teaching example for writing non-human creatures. The poem does not resist some anthropomorphism, but it does succeed in making a powerful comment. Its description of a pair of giraffes trapped in a zoo enclosure is strong. This is especially true of its concluding image: one desolate giraffe lapping the urine stream of the other.

So from the beginning of her publishing career, Beveridge has refused to allow us off the hook. Always, some readers in my classes recoil from this moment, finding it abject – more offensive than the giraffes’ ongoing plight.

Review: Tintinnabulum – Judith Beveridge (Giramondo)

Twenty-seven years and seven collections on, Beveridge’s empathy is clear. Her most recent collection Tintinnabulum – tintinnabulum meaning the sound of tiny (often temple) bells – begins with a section that focuses just as squarely on other-than-human creatures. Butterflies, possums, kittens and cuttlefish all receive the work of that same unflinching gaze.

In the first poem, we watch as a butterfly struggles from its cocoon. The poem closes with:

                                                I offer you honey-water –your proboscis, thin as a human hair, sips from my hand                                                                                   … Soonyou’ll die in my palm, the only small holding you’ll know.

The heart-wrench of that final phrase both draws us back to re-read the poem and carries us into the next one, Dead Possum. Here, the narrator lifts the carcass “away with a spade”, but can escape neither the flies,

a frenzied paparazzi, assembling and re-assembling,eager to make a maggot-mass in the possum’s flesh,

nor the foreseeing of her own death:

                                   thousands and thousands of maggotscreaming, risotto-like, inside my own half-eaten head.

This stark vision prepares our imaginations and our hearts – if at all possible – for the next two poems: Animals in our Suburb, 1960s and Cuttlefish. These poems revisit the rampant, ritualised cruelty with which we treat other creatures. Yet they are delivered in a disarmingly conversational style:

                                                                                  Who’dever heard of a Lhasa Apso, Shih Tzu, or a Bichon Frizé?

(Animals in our Suburbs, 1960s)

just before the man stuck a knife into it and its gills                     leaked green blood

(Cuttlefish)

The strict six-line stanzas of the former mirror the brutal management of domestic animals. In the latter, lines trail down the page to make a shape reminiscent of the creature’s tentacles or the flow of water.

The focus is on other species, but the human is always present. In much of the book’s second section, Walking with the Poet, human consciousness – let’s call it the poet’s here – is located (finely, consistently, insistently) within small spaces in the natural world: in gaps, cracks, crevices. This close attention to small spaces, and what is embedded in them, brings into stark relief just how much space we human animals take up, how much of the world we devour.