By Dr Willo Drummond
Delivered as a launch speech on Saturday 27th September, Better Read Than Dead, Sydney
Gold Digger
by Lisa Collyer
Life Before Man (Gazebo)
ISBN: 9781763600935, September 2025, Paperback, 140pp, AUD$29.99
It’s an honour to be here today to launch Lisa Collyer’s fiercely intelligent new collection Gold Digger.
Picking up on the bold work of her first book, How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (Gazebo Books, 2023), this collection of sharply observed poems speaks into women’s spaces and experiences that have historically been relegated to the shadows, existing in the narrative margins, behind the distorting lens of patriarchy and the male gaze.
The wry tone of Lisa’s debut remains in this collection, with her sharp eye turned to women’s bodies, their labour, their loves, longing and loss across history and via a range of intertextual exchanges.
Across five sections Gold Digger traces interpellations of woman across the lifespan and flips the script on many well-worn tropes and frames. The women in this collection are not only ingénue, mother or whore; they age, they change and all the time they “wrestle in the dust of the common world”¹
Opening with Lisa’s Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize shortlisted poem ‘The Grape Picker(s)’, the collection traverses literature, the littoral zone, the switchboard and factory floor to reveal the lives of working women in all their nuance, challenge and complexity. From stenographer to sex worker, to prospector panning for gold in the title poem ‘Gold Digger’, to long haul truck driver, and writers too, the multifaceted and often unacknowledged labour of women is illuminated in these poems across generations.
If we think of poetry as encounter, as I like to do, in these pages you will encounter a rich spectrum of female life. There are guileless girls, yes, but also, perimenopausal crones revelling in pleasure without consequence. In the poem ‘[Dis]Gracefully’ for example, the subject celebrates “inbuilt obsolescence”: the thrill of a hot flush after a spanking that will not require the morning after pill.
The women in Gold Digger exist beyond and reject the role that feminist and philosopher Luce Irigaray termed “the more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies” (25). They exist working, living, thinking, being more than “beautiful object[s] of contemplation” (26). They are, rather, subjects who contemplate. Who act. Who desire. And many of them do all of this amidst the pronatalist pursing of lips at the thought a woman might not want kids (‘Bespoke’).
Lisa’s first book and my own shared a common thread in that they both explored the lived experience of the childless woman in the 21st Century. This theme is continued in Gold Digger with wit and literary expansiveness, as it’s woven through a broader web of constraining narratives in which women are enmeshed.
These poems and the women in them push back at the pronatalist assumptions outlined in Laura Carroll’s book The Baby Matrix: assumptions that limit the life path of a woman to a procreation, to being a bearer of fruit. The women in this book tear at the seams of “that old arc you copy after copy / to reproduce the same old story” (‘This Is Not A Fruit Bowl’). These women are more, more, more, than the story says they can be, even as the story continues to say it. They cannot be contained. If they are vessels, they are vessels that cannot be accurately parsed. In ‘This Is Not A Fruit Bowl’, we are reminded that the “interior” of a woman, even one who might not serve the expected function of bearing fruit, “is vast”.
There is a grounded and sensuous quality to many of the poems in Gold Digger, poems often arising from the earthy and the quotidian. From olive, bread, pizza. From fish and rosemary, as we see in the stunning ‘Ligurian Brined’, where the speaker is siren seductress learning to roll her ‘r’s like an Italian lover should.
Italian culture is woven through many of these poems, but never with an easy nostalgia. Instead, Lisa uses cultural frames and tropes to challenge notions of the ‘natural’ and various cultural expectations. In this way, and in several others, the work in Gold Digger is self-aware and self-reflexive. The collection often questions the so-called sisterhood for example, such as in ‘Fur Flew The First Time’, where we see women “scrimmaging for scraps / without code”, or in ‘She Can Never Have Enough’ where each of us is a performative understudy “self-depreciating over a single / grey… until / the final swoop to replace you”.
Similarly, the poems bring a self-reflexivity to issues of ageing and appearance—the collection is utterly clear eyed in this—poems such as ‘Age Dysmorphia’ trace moments of a seemingly unavoidable complicity for women in an oppressive, ageist world.
In her introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, the poet Carolyn Forché argues that poetry allows readers to bear witness to atrocities. The poems in Gold Digger are not poems of the war zone in a traditional sense; thought they do bear witness to a world hostile to women’s very existence. A world in which women are “damned if you do & damn dames / who cling to a daydream” (‘Why Doesn’t She Just Leave Him?’). A world where the first of thirteen uses for ties in parliament house is “a talking stick of gender deafness” (‘Thirteen Uses For Ties In Parliament House’). Women living in a world where even though we are told “barbie can be anything” (‘Barbie Is Not Enough’), the female leader of our nation collects “tears” in a “pocketless jacket” (‘Does My Bum Look Fat In This’).
Significantly, Gold Digger doesn’t pull punches when it comes to naming the very real physical dangers women face on a daily basis. The latter section of the book is unflinching as it traverses the omnipresent gender violence navigated by women in the contemporary moment. A context in which a woman on her way home from work, and, forced to choose between two violent fates might plainly state: “I’d rather be stabbed / than raped” (How Not To Die [At Work]).
Gold Digger is a bristling invitation. A challenge and a call to attention. It demands an opening of the eyes and ears to lives lived vivid and vital despite the social context in which they are lived. This is a collection as galvanising as it is refreshing, and I congratulate Lisa and Gazebo Books on its publication. If you identify as a woman, you will feel seen in these pages. If you neither identify as a woman nor have spent any of your life socialised as one, prepare to have your eyes unpeeled. I commend this fierce collection to you. With Lisa, I invite you to bear witness to these bold women, being and doing, but no longer waiting to be seen.
Note
¹The phrase is borrowed from Ralph J. Mills JR, who argued this was a quality of the poetry of Denise Levertov in Contemporary American Poetry, New York: Random House, 1965.
Works Cited
Carroll, Laura. The Baby Matrix, LiveTrue Books, 2012.
Drummond, Willo. Moon Wrasse, Puncher & Wattmann, 2023.
Forché, Carolyn (Ed.). Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press, 1985.
Mills JR, Ralph J. “Denise Levertov: The Poetry of the Immediate,” Contemporary American Poetry, Random House, 1965.
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Dr Willo Drummond is a Sydney poet, researcher, sessional lecturer and supervisor in creative writing. With interests spanning the ecological and cognitive humanities, she writes about creativity, human and non-human animals, gender, disenfranchised grief, and the fragile landscapes of identity. Willo’s critically acclaimed debut collection Moon Wrasse (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and commended in the Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry. In 2024, Moon Wrasse was selected as one of 6 Australian poetry titles to feature in the annual Aesop Queer Library. Willo has been the recipient of a Career Development Grant (poetry) from the Australia Council for the Arts (2020), shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award (2022), the ACU Prize for Poetry (2024) and the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award (2024), runner up in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize (2021) and long-listed for the Liquid Amber Poetry Prize (2024) and the Grieve Writing Awards (2021). Her work has been anthologised in Best of Australian Poems, 100 Poets and elsewhere. Willo’s doctoral research in creative writing (2019) was awarded a Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence and included a volume of original poetry in dialogue with the poetry of Denise Levertov and with Levertov’s personal index to the Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1946, trans., R.F.C. Hull). In 2023-24 she co-edited, with poet Stuart Barnes, ‘Queering Ecopoet(h)ics’, a queer themed issue of Plumwood Mountain, an Australian and International Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics.