South in the World (Lisa Jacobson, UWA Publishing)

Recalling the fate of Icarus, the opening poem in Lisa Jacobson’s South in the World lists ‘Several Ways to Fall out of the Sky’. The last way, she offers as a punchline, is one with which those of us who live our lives at ground level will be familiar: ‘Remember unwashed clothes, wisdom not yet taught to kids; Pets gone hungry, the goldfish, the goldfish …’ Yes, worrying about all that would bring you down to earth. Jacobson’s latest volume often attends to this tension between the poetic and the everyday. Prosaic, worldly things are transformed through the poet’s eyes into the extraordinary (as in her depiction of a trip in a passenger aircraft in ‘Take Off’, devoid of cliché), or else the extraordinary is brought down to earth—literally in Icarus’ case. Her style is vivid and immediate, her subjects, while sometimes everyday, are always handled deftly, unpredictably and with a sense of freshness and surprise. Jacobson’s recent verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, won the poetry section of the 2014 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and she is regularly up there when the major literary awards are in the offing. This new volume is likely to be up there too.

Andrew Wilkins is director of independent press Willkins Farago and a former publisher of Books+Publishing

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews