Janis Freegard is equal parts jester and scientist in her debut poetry collection. Meanwhile, Airini Beautrais shares an offbeat sense of humour in her second.
Janis Freegard’s first full-length collection orders its poems into classes, using the taxonomic categories invented by Carolus Linnaeus in the 1700s: Mammalia, Aves, Amphibia, Pisces, Insecta, Vermes. Interspersed between these are prose poems that spiritedly imagine, and affectionately mock, events in Linnaeus’s life.
Knowing Freegard has trained in plant ecology, and flicking through to see titles such as Order Rodentia, Arachnocampa luminosa, Coleoptera, I half-anticipated more diligent orderliness: entranced, microscopic examinations of the tiny pistons and circuitry that move life along in its busy, myriad forms.
Yet, as the first Escapade of Linnaeus hints, Freegard is equal parts jester and scientist. Sometimes poems only fit their class because of the briefest flicker of an animal presence on and off the page: the collection is as much about human follies, infringements, betrayals and tenderness as it is about the habits and habitats of our animal cousins. Thus in the Aves section:
the child we never had
would be starting school now
he is blond and wears a blue jacket
I hold his hand on the way to the bus-stop
Yes it is a kingfisher
(he’s very advanced)
In puns, riddles, prose poems, list poems, playful false starts, deliberately literalised metaphors, a loose pantoum, unrhymed couplets, free verse, cod (or, rather, reptilian) media statements and parody, Freegard happily madcaps her way around – and pushes against – Linnaeus’s categories.
The book’s overall arc is from a paradoxically jaunty, assonantal, half-rhyming indictment of Homo sapiens in Descent to praise and celebration of Linnaeus, who shares the poet’s appetite for knowledge and compulsion to describe. This shape suggests that even as the biosphere faces ecological disaster, science sends out a shaft of hope. One of the little luminous lamps protruding from our collective foreheads (along with imagination and empathy), it might still shine a way out of our “covetous, gluttonous/ransacking, plundering/ravenous, ruinous” ways.
Airini Beautrais, too, has a background in ecological science, and although her subject is more overtly the cross-currents between people, she shares Freegard’s slightly offbeat sense of humour. Western Line often echoes the deliberately underplayed idiomatic style of her prize-winning first book, Secret Heart, and its sense of the absurd perhaps owes something to prose-poet James Tate. (Although Beautrais’s work speaks without his sense of being relentlessly pursued by personal tragedy, where even the nonsensical is hounded by loss.)
The result is a magpie of little walk-on cameos of the strange, with Beautrais invigorated by the random encounters, non sequiturs and disconnections of the urban landscape. Although many poems are presented as distinct sub-sets (such as love poems, charms, curses), across the divisions many frame brief moments of metropolitan encounter.
The poems – ironic and otherwise – are written for everything from lost tennis balls to a swindler. Restless, as if super-caffeinated, in their flit from love to love, trick to trick, they express cumulatively a broad affection for the world: an open, not a secret, heart.
Your tummy hangs out of hot-pants.
A new freedom propels
you around the room […]
May your tummy rest
in the small of a beautiful back.
(Love Poem for a Queer Boy)
To my ear, the grouped clusters all hit a similar rhythmic pace, rather than altering their pulse to express the varying psychological drives their umbrella titles imply. Yet if there are moments when the conceits slide close to gimmickry, Beautrais rewards us for staying the whole journey.
The long poem Glesein moves into more complicated emotional territory. Ripe with the fresh impressions of travel, it is also obliquely elegiac. Rainer Maria Rilke-like pronouncements give a muted tone of spiritual instruction, charting the ebb and flow of happiness, much as the poem charts seasonal tides of growth and decay. Haunted by departure, or a separation deliberately left unspecified, Glesein shows the first seep of a nascent melancholy. It’s as if, across the spread of this collection, we see the poet stepping out of the last clear, unambiguous light of youthful insouciance.
KINGDOM ANIMALIA: THE ESCAPADES OF LINNAEUS, by Janis Freegard (AUP, $24.99); WESTERN LINE, by Airini Beautrais (VUP, $28).
Emma Neale is a poet and novelist. Her latest novel, Fosterling, was released earlier this year.