Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Askew
By Andy Jackson
Giramondo
Paperback, October 2026, ISBN 9781923106772, 96 pages
Andy Jackson’s poetry is distinctive, taking on disability, illness and physical otherness in ways that are deeply visceral and moving. His latest collection, Askew, opens that perspective out, making a connection between the body of the human and the body of the Earth to explore what it means to be off kilter. This is the “askew” of the title and it doesn’t necessarily equate to wrongness. It might also just be “splintered’, a cracked mirror becoming a window, counter to expectations, or even, in a world where what’s considered normal is wrong, exactly right. The poems are both intimate and expansive, moving through embodiment to connect to the troubles we are facing as a species among species:
Each call is a pulse across the skull –
tonight, a scatter of black cockatoos haul dry lightning
from low cloud, stitch the sky to our flesh. It’s not humanly
possible to be indifferent, with all this sound, all this
silence trailing behind us. (“Indifference”)
Askew is divided into two sections, “Splintered hymns” and “Breathable thought”. “Splintered hymns” does indeed read like a series of songs, not always human: prayers, windsong and wind chimes, a scatter of cockatoos, currawongs, the “yes-yes-yes” of frogs at night, sirens, and nightingales. Ten of the poems in the collection are “after songs” a form created by Jackson, as “splintered hymns” sung with the dead. These are tributes for musicians and composers who recently died. Many of these take the form of a “Golden Shovel”, a poetic form invented by poet and professor Terrance Hayes which takes the last word of each line from a source text, sometimes poetry and sometimes musical compositions or albums. The linking between these different artistic creations creates an echo and a relationship that works like a tribute:
punching at mirrors – in this racket, care seems like a wish minced
by an economic machine that can only stun or chew minds (I
am logging off now, listening instead to these unruly brushes,
their percussive riposte, an earthing, as clock time rushes by ) (“Algorithm blues”)
Many of the poems in Askew are ekphrastic, inspired by artwork, especially the work of Jackson’s partner Rachael Wenona Guy. Jackson’s poems and Wenona Guy’s art were featured together as part of an extraordinary mixed media group show exploring notions of beauty. Jackson’s poems engage directly with the art, creating meaning not only through semantical constructs of denotation and connotation, but also through sonics, rhythms, structure and the alignment of words to mirror the visual effect of the painting. These poems are particularly sensual, as in “Kissed raw by a jellyfish” which contains empty parentheses instead of line breaks, creating a breath and a visually contained space for silence:
Your skin, as if kissed raw by jellyfish. ( ) Bones, as if filled with wet concrete. ( ) Within the diving bell of injury, any sound that reaches you is muffled, inhumanly hollow. ( ) You seethe, flail and slump, close-mouthed. ( ) There is nothing to say. ( ) Nothing that could be translated into the dialect of the everyday. ( ) There are others here. ( ) Intimates. ( ) Kindred. ( ) Not that you are capable of greeting them. ( ) Not yet anyway. ( ) There is still further to fall. ( ) Fathoms.
The title of the second section, “Breathable thought,” takes on the titles notion of spaciousness. This is more than simply slowing down the reading or utilising the space of the page to create more pauses or allow room for images to resolve, though many of the poems do that. It’s also about resisting the ‘hot take’ or soundbite of the “Extractocene, this crippled//body politic.” Many of the poems in this section use constraints like erasures and structured forms that shape how a poem is written and read to slow the reading, forcing the brain to process the patterns, repetition, rhymes, pauses and echoes, as in “Breath duplex”, a poem that uses the duplex form, invented by the poet Jericho Brown, which combines other well-known forms like the pantoum and the ghazal:
Daylight, a forgotten contract. Your eyes close
over memes which eclipse the mess of suffering.
as if this suffering eclipses that one. Your
senses, encrusted, numbed by ideas. This earth
senses your feet. When will your ideas sense the earth?
Ash writes on our backs. Slogans burn our mouths.
As with previous collections, many of Jackson’s poems focus on chronic illness and suffering, the “knotted fist” of the body defeated, hating light, “irritable, done.” The illnesses aren’t all of the body. There is also mental health/depression, the climate, bushfire, the suffering of those directly impacted by global wars, Covid, and perhaps above all, the illness of Moloch, as the term is used in game theory, a systemic race to the bottom abetted by social media, war, resource depletion, and bad-actor billionaires: “nothing is forgotten/by flesh. Even the unthinking body is absorbent and haunted.” No matter how dark it gets as the world continues to fracture, there is always the “seismographic” heart, beauty, vulnerability and tenderness, dogged in its insistence :
…I am here because it is determined to be part of
The human story, and because I have not been overwhelmed I am
Extracting the resources I need from it. Each time I come back up
To the surface smudged, shaky. Wanting kin, a species of future. (“A species of future”)
Askew is a powerful collection, full of pain, anger, and the ongoing struggle against ableism, prejudice and inequality. But at heart, it is a book about connection, cooperation, and social cohesion in the face of tough times, illness, a warming climate, and tragic geopolitics. We only have each other and that other includes the more-than-human:
Here is this awkward, sacred stillness, open
your mouth, ears, hands – the air is full of seeds.
This time, let your discomfort mean something
This cannot be the end of listening but its beginning
so we might be able to rest, breathe, nourished
on this broken, luminous path we make as we move forward
weary and determined – carried and carrying each other. (“Productivity report”)