By Carissa Chye
In today’s aggressive attention economy, Kate Fagan’s new collection of poetry, Song in the Grass, makes quiet, insistent demands on the reader to surrender to radical, sustained attention. Arranged into five sequences, the thirty-six poems weave finely tuned environmental observations into varying stories of life and place, rendering tautly the human experience through Fagan’s unrelenting attention to the details of the material world. The poems press themselves up against the reader’s instinct to skip and skim over the text, urging a contemplation of what it means to pay attention to poetry, and what it means when poetry itself becomes a mode of paying attention to the world around us.
Song in the Grass, Fagan’s third full-length collection, comes more than ten years after her last poetry book, which was short-listed for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. Compellingly, the gap between her first and second published collections was also a decade. One gets the sense that poetry for Fagan is a meticulous, deliberate art. This is made eminently clear in Song in the Grass.
The collection opens with ‘one year one garden’, a striking poem comprising thirteen enjambed lines of bird names – and nothing else. At first glance, the poem seems to be a dense wall of words, impenetrable to the reader (especially one without any ornithological inclinations). But Fagan’s poetry is nothing if not a study in harnessing attention.
The hinge between the poem and its meaning, I realised upon re-reading, lies in its title. Reading ‘one year one garden’ alongside the poem, I was struck by how it gently ekes out an understanding that this poem is about time and place, about memory and recollection, about being present and choosing to stay present in the moment.
The poem both enacts and testifies to the raw specificity of lived and witnessed moments. These are archived repeatedly in Fagan’s poetry – here in something as domestic and mundane as bird names, which nevertheless yield a sonorous philosophical richness when strummed like the notes of a musical score.
Fagan’s impulse to list reemerges in the final poem, ‘The Midnight Charter’, which she says was written over five years on a mobile phone, and which relies on a poetics of repetition to force a slowing down of readerly attention:
I wrote fire
I wrote darkness
I wrote to translate speech
I wrote a crescendo in every nerve
I wrote so I could hear
I wrote beneath branches
I wrote howling in suburbs
Again, I found it tempting to skim through the text block of repetitions; but in compelling myself to read purposefully, I became sensitive to the way the scope and scale of the phrase ‘I wrote’ undergoes contextual shifts in each line: breathing and expanding into the infinite and immense, then receding back into the intimate and concrete. The poem performs a breathing, cosmic connection between the poet, her craft and her world, insisting on the pleasures and politics of writing attentively within one’s present time.
The archive – or list – is a complex mechanism for embodying some of Fagan’s most pressing preoccupations. Often, list-making is employed as a poetic measure for capturing the ephemeral traces of life, for affirming a ‘here-ness’ and ‘now-ness’ that Fagan is remarkably attuned to noticing. She writes in ‘Thinking with Things’:
We love things so much that listing each one allows it
to arrive permanently
It became clear as I was progressing through the book, however, that Fagan’s list or archival poems resist being solely a phenomenological celebration. They also pulsate with endless possibilities, infinite connection and hope for new transformations. Fagan elaborates in her author’s note, ‘Lists never pretend that everything can be known or accomplished; they are always unfinished, provisional. They are always referring to other things.’ In ‘Portable Craft’, which she dedicates to the poet Lyn Hejinian, she writes of the fundamental contingency and interconnectedness of lists (and really, of poems):
… A poem is a list of everything that happens in the
poem. A poem puts a moth in my hand. A poem cares so
much it devises things to care about. I observe a poem.
Things are happening to it. Branches move in and out of
frame.
Here Fagan asserts that the list/poem transforms constantly under the reader’s gaze – it is an alive thing that urges re-reading and re-listening to.
Indeed, Song in the Grass impels the reader to listen. Not just to what Fagan calls in her title poem ‘a lyrical index’ of life, but also to the way the poetry itself instructs one to attend to it. As Alison Croggon writes, Fagan’s poetry is one ‘that teaches you how to read it’. Croggon’s observation reminds me of Lucy Alford’s thesis that ‘a poem might be better understood not simply as a gathering of formal features, but as an instrument for tuning and composing the attention’.
This lyric possibility engendered by Fagan’s poetry is perhaps the clearest note sounding through this collection: within a present that clamours with grief – ecological, social and political – the profound possibilities for reconnection, reinterpretation and recalibration remain present, if only we will slow down and listen for them. Fagan advocates for this with a poetic voice that seems to have grown remarkably (and almost impossibly!) more assured since her last collection. It is confident in its precise observations, unerringly poised in its linguistic alertness, and unabashed in its choice of what to pay attention to.
Song in the Grass was first published by Giramondo Publishing in 2024 and has an RRP of $27.00. It is available from most online and local retailers.
Carissa Chye is a current student in the Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Sydney.
Cover image by GSP editor Finn Zucchi, used with permission.
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