Stylish and competent

Nervous Arcs & The Body in Time
Edited by Spinifex Press
1995, 239pp.
Reviewed by Afrodity Giannakis Nervous Arcs & The Body in Time is a collection of poems by two Australian poets, Jordie Albiston and Diane Fahey. It is divided in two sub-collections: Nervous Arcs by Albiston and The Body in Time by Fahey. In Nervous Arcs the poems range from intimate ("Uterus" from where the title expression "nervous arcs" is found, "The Deep Wait" and "Eight (Love) Sonnets"), to more removed ("Frida Kahlo: An Exhibition"). There are often explicit social references, particularly obvious in poems like "A Nice Afternoon": [...] sun women in bras on fifty-foot screens I am trying to feel spring on a nice afternoon strolling along in singlet and jeans spying the idea through unmade-up eyes trying not to hear loud men in slow cars. [...] "Anorexia: An Etymology" also makes clear the social implications of the topic: [...] Public interest. Next to the diet page the quiz on thin thighs the survey Must Love Be Fattening? The newspaper never lies. [...] Jordie Albiston's style is daring and forceful. She doesn't follow the orthodox conventions of syntax and grammar and fragments her lines, even her stanzas, within syntactical units. This unconventional form is skilfully employed to fit in with the poems' content, and is functional and expressive. The syntactic fragmentation in particular, gives the collection a breathless, panting tone, which is in keeping with the poet's anxiety. In "Cancer in June", this anxiety reaches a peak, with the extreme disjointed form matching Albiston's expression of despair: [...] and the lung surrender its breathing its breathing for the black-coated gasp how does it happen this burning this sermon of mud [...] Jordie Albiston's technical competence is also seen in her ability to take conventional poetry genres and give them a new twist, like the sonnet in "Eight (Love) Sonnets" and the nursery rhyme in "Nursery Crime", where nursery rhyme conventions take on a playfully dark, menacing character. Nervous Arcs is a brilliant collection. At first encounter, I found it rather obscure and pretentious, but I was soon enchanted by it as I was drawn into its breathtaking dreamlike stream of consciousness world. Diane Fahey's collection The Body in Time consists of five sections, entitled The Body in Time, In Love and Hate, The Middle of Life, In Memory, and Sites. Her preoccupations include her childhood and development through time, Greek myth, feminism, art, landscape and ecological themes. Fahey's themes are expressed through a variety of styles, sometimes in an introspective manner (appropriately employed in poems in the section The Body in Time), at other times in a more removed and descriptive way (as in Sites, with poems like "At Wentworth Falls"). Overall, The Body in Time is written in a clear and accessible style. I found the more personal poems most effective. In these the style is often quite abstracted, as in "Time's Light, Time's Darkness": [...] in a half-lit room, white spaces in the memory contracting inside time's darkness. Other poems have a more conventional narrative form, for example, "Whenever it Was": [...] I remember the red chalk apple on the board — A for APPLE, and my mother's squashy tomato sandwiches, and being so unhappy [...] On the whole, I wasn't deeply affected by The Body in Time. However, it is competently written, with a wide variety of interesting themes and stylistic approaches. The book Nervous Arcs & The Body in Time is well worth reading, especially for Jordie Albiston's poetry.