Reviewed by Angela Costi
Gardening on Mars
by Jane Frank
Shearsman Books
October 2025, Paperback, 110 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1848619654
The title, Gardening on Mars, intrigues. Will it involve intergalactic insights? A theme of cultivating plants in our challenging soils? Motifs of extraterrestrial landscapes? Not quite, as Jane Frank’s third poetry collection does take us travelling but with a substantial focus on the interconnected environments of our inner and outer worlds. It is Earth that is walked and returned to us via Frank’s rare choice of images sequenced with unexpected details. The first poem, “Mount Glorious on a Spring afternoon that felt like winter”, is more than a description of verdant layers on a rainforest trail. We could very well be on another planet or in a surrealist painting or dreamscape as each encounter on the walk is a discovery:
Fallen logs with moss fur coats
rose by the sides of the path
like beasts
and we stroked them as if they were lost pets.We were inside a snow globe
but it was raining leaves and small hard seeds.
No water fell across the rocks
where a waterfall had dried to red dust
but we waited for incrementstree ferns tucked in fig elbows,
a high crisscross nest—
the home of what we did not know.
Knowing so little can be a comfort:
Frank reminds us that the unknowable is just as significant as the known. Perhaps, more significant. The drive for knowledge of every single thing that comprises our planet may very well compromise our awe. This wonder with a mix of reverence is a throughline in Gardening on Mars. “Sonderings” opens us to modes of connecting beyond ourselves, reaching for answers, but settling for questions:
Cars are Pandora’s boxes:
hold unknown languages,
inventories of thought,
sagas tunnelling through cities.
This evening’s imaginings
are eternities hidden in codes of headlight.Will anyone else read the page of clouds with me tonight?
On the following page is a long-lined poem with an interesting title, “Farsickness”, again a strong one-word title is deployed to capture the unreachable:
In the fernery beneath
the verandah of the old house, there were thousands of white
stones on top of peat that shone in lunar light. Here, above
the horizon line, there are dozens of moving specks and I
wonder at the light-drenched prism of a bird’s mind, and how
you can be nostalgic for places you have never been. Space is
utterly silent but this pen requires gravity for its quiet ink to flow.
As Frank compels us to launch into her poems with her one-word titles, it’s her longer poem titles that have us catapulting head-first into the body of a poem. Their curious juxtapositions are irresistible: “Forever is a Pool with a False Floor”, “Recollections of the Last Male Northern White Rhinoceros”, “Lunch on Stormy Day with Visible and Invisible Lines”, “Watching Hang Gliders with Leonardo da Vinci at Tamborine Mountain”, and “You do not see less by looking at a field out of focus with a magnifying glass”. This final long title is a direct quote from visual artist, Gerhard Richter. In this intertextual poem, which is in dialogue with Richter’s reflections about his creative process, again we are reminded that the unfocused, blurred, and therefore unknowable is paramount:
a fuzzy gaze focuses
the mindHe makes us choose
between a feeling
and a photograph
so these mysteries in grey
or dull green
help me remember
a squeegee through the multilayer
flatbed of my own past—
Engagement with art and use of colour to signify emotion is another constant in this collection. The ekphrastic poems are repainted with layered word-strokes to activate empathy for the subject matter. In “La Casa Azul” with its epigraph, “after photographs of Frida Kahlo in her garden” Frank reaches for something more to be said for a figure we are all too familiar with, and her intricate monologue is arresting:
surrounded by the rooms of me –
my eyes weeping shells. Mosaics
that spell my name in a kitchen
of turgid fruits; the glass ceiling
makes sense of my brokenness.
The white crocheted bed where I
assign the colours – soaring pink
of Aztec joy, green of sadness, yellow
of madness and fear, the cut red
of melon death flesh, that sweet
electricity of my deep blue tender fire.
The poet’s compulsion with language merges with the artist’s compulsion with composition. Frank advances this idea as her poems sojourn into the painterly. The use of “Chagallian” in “Why this Messy Blue Paradise?” evokes gardens and lovers, red shapes moving to blue figures and spaces:
wreathed in boronia
and bottlebrushburnt sienna pinks
in the gum’s noisy barkToday I can’t remember
the shape of your lipsbut don’t you think
the wildness of love
is the most orphic thing?Soon rain will fall
in the ninth storm in nine days
Frank’s father, Lex Frank, who has passed and was a painter, is highlighted or alluded to in a number of poems. These are standout poems that seek what is lost as in “Elysian”, and pay tribute to what is inherited:
You think of Miró saying that a bit of thread
can set a world in motion. Each composition is a place—
real or imagined—so you start with what’s small:
chlorophyll flowing through the canal
Sometimes it’s good to tilt the landscape,
to imagine the place you’re in from the air instead
so the hills have a chance to echo. You pray
for happy accidents like unintentional
backruns in wide, buttery backgrounds. (“What Starts and Ends with Space”)
Whether it’s the use of alliteration, as in the final line of the above excerpt, or sibilance, as in “silver leaves/for eyes” (“Soft Fascination”), the impact of these devises strengthens the collection’s atmospheric, curious encounters. Frank’s accomplished poems carefully and skillfully guide us across poetry’s terrain. Throughout this gathering of over sixty poems, there are surprise plantings of mellifluous lyric alongside absorbing syntax. Gardening on Mars orbits Frank’s poetry into national and international spheres with its exemplary associations about what is strange with our familiar.
About the reviewer: Since 1994, Angela Costi’s creative gatherings, including plays, reviews, short fiction and essays, have been published, performed, broadcast, awarded and translated. Her recent poetry book is The Heart of the Advocate (publisher, Liquid Amber Press, 2025). She received the High Commendation for Contribution to Arts and Culture, Merri-bek Award 2021, the national Katherine Sussanah Prichard Poetry Prize 2022, the University of Canberra’s Health Poetry Prize 2024 and was shortlisted in the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2025. She reviews poetry for Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review and Rochford Street Review.