Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Brood Chamber
By Annie Mairéad Hunter
Five Islands Press
Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-9232248-22-9, $AUD26.00
Annie Mairéad Hunter’s debut collection opens with her award winning poem “Athene noctua”. It’s a powerful opener straightaway that explores grief without a hint of sentiment, casting a deceased mother as Athena, her permed hair “as cruel as a Corinthian helmet”. This is no nurturing lament. The piece is steely and harsh, with hints of Sylvia Plath, and yet there are underlying tones of tenderness as it imagines the warrior mother as a girl, setting her free to fly off as the owl that the title refers to. It sets the tone perfectly for the rest of Brood Chamber which moves through many forms of grief with rich precision and layered metaphors that encompass both a Greek/literary sensibility and the natural world:
Like an angel, dementia sweeps you up in his arms,
running your life in reverse, vignette by vignette,
recasting you in roles that need no headdress,
until at last he lays you,
helpless as a foundling,
swaddled in a box at your mother’s front door.
Only at nightfall does the owl of Minerva take flight1
Throughout the book the mother remains a stern and somewhat tragic figure, depicted in family photos with a “grimace of rage” or hallucinating in her final days with dementia. Hunter’s poems often have long lines that straddle prose and poetry, using the space to transform rage and grief into something less dark, a reclamation:
Of her three betrayals, I make three lavender beds
for the blue-banded bee. (“Sweet Fanny Adam”)
These portraits of a stern mother are offset by poems from a different mother’s perspective, a single mother, a child’s homemade cards, bad rentals, and the tender and lengthy title poem, a poem from a mother to her son worked over several decades. “Brood Chamber” with its subtitle “Argonauta argo” is delicate and beautiful, fully countering the stern disappointment of the previous mother poems, and bringing in the idea of the human and animal connection, in this case, that of a sea octopus:
If I could only
tell you—how unborn you were, your shuddering cry,
a small bone hook that lodged in my womb, a line
that reeled me out to sea—while others marched
their inch-high standards along the shore (“Brood Chamber (Argonauta argo)”)
The Argonaut appears in several poems in this collection, as a mirror to the human but also as itself, wise and vulnerable, subject to humanity’s greed. It is also a muse, our own shimmering ghost demon, or maybe even the soul:
enclosed in me you are
my solace a wit a wildness under my skin. you
are the first i wonder if all forms (a)band(on)ed
Thinning lost might be held in me as one (“apostrophe”)
“Aerial” moves to the father, a man whose character is built up over multiple poems, a handyman, whose easy-going nature (“without complaint”) provides a contrast to the mother. This one engages with an idea, perhaps in many ways, the theme of the book as a whole, that all love must culminate in letting go. The father’s launch into the air once again recalls the idea of bird flight, an image that comes up repeatedly, in poems like “Inadvertantly, My Athiest Father Makes a Religious Image” (“He is a distant creature, but eloquent in flight.”) and also picking up on the owl of Minerva taking flight in “Athene noctua”:
I lifted him high and launched him into the effervescing air.
At once, he took flight, as cypesela and samara, drgonfly and spiderling,Arctic tern and albatross. It was so like him. He didn’t look back.
As the book progresses, Hunter adds ecology to elegy, creating nostalgia through repetition, found poetry, and an engagement with the natural world, often seen through colonial, cynical, and even slightly humorous eyes as in “Questions for a Fallen Starling”:
You see, we can’t help but wonder if this is the true platter
of your body laid before us. And if so, whether we should partake
of such exquisite decomposition. Even as you drop,
your toes grip as if locked to a living perch.
Are you to be trusted?
The poems in this collection all have strong rhythms, sometimes overt in the poems with closed forms like villanelle, ghazal, or haiku, and sometimes more subtle and innate with slant rhymes like “drop” and “locked”, alliterations, and clever use of iambic rhythms. Some of the poems take a bird’s eye view, while others in this section employ the rhythms of gaelic or first nations tongues, a vocabulary of loss and oppression, poverty and theft imprinted in the earth:
What slender figure was buried in that fluid mantle? When quarry
workers broke open
the grave, they divided the gold between themselves and disposed
of the skeleton. (“Graptolite”)
One of the most powerful poems in this collection is “Whale Fall”, a poem that follows the descent of a whale as it falls to the ocean floor. As with most of the poems in this book this one works on multiple levels: literal, ecological, metaphoric, and emotional, exploring what humanity has done to the whales, created a “universe of useless things” with its hunted bodies:
…in the ruffled margins of her root-tissues–
wicking whale oil through the shrot sleeve of herself, she unfurls
from her bone sanctuary, rosy palps rising from her mucus-slick
trunk like a flame—a lamp lit for the Mysticeti, for the Odonto-
ceti—the host of her kind settling on cetacean bones like a fiery
curtain, a respiring veil.
The book ends with a stunning poem titled “Elegy”, and ode to all we’ve been and all we’ll lose, wondering if the cosmos holds it in memory:
Will its quiet indifference shame us, turn
our faces to the days of spear and digging stick,when nematode, mammoth, oak, mite, fish
mycelium and bird–the cosmos itself–wrote upon our flesh?
It’s a beautiful and moving ending to an exquisite collection that bears many re-readings.