Two Tongues (Maria van Neerven, UQP)

Two Tongues is a memoir of language and memory told through poetry. Mununjali woman from the Yugambeh nation Maria van Neerven structures the collection in three chronological parts, tracing her life from childhood through to an adult voice shaped by both the wounds and wisdom of her people. The poems shift between English, Yugambeh and Aboriginal English to reflect the layered identities and histories that shape van Neerven’s world. We learn of her childhood marked by her father’s war-haunted silence, her mother’s endurance, and the uneasy lessons of assimilation. In later poems, van Neerven writes of motherhood and renewal, where love and language become acts of repair and continuation. The experimental form of Two Tongues feels alive. One page is almost blank, the next is crowded with deliberately scattered syntax. In “queen who split our world into pieces”, the neat spacing of anthemic lines mirrors its God Save the Queen reference point. The poems seesaw between portrait and landscape layout, their visual disorder a deliberate device that leaves the reader unsteady, presumably caught in the same emotional current as the poet. Two Tongues is not a tidy collection but a living, multilingual body that pulses between grief and love. It is not an easy work to move through, with language that cuts, stutters and reshapes itself. Yet by the end, this reader felt something close to gratitude that a work so raw and deliberate exists, insisting on remembering what Australia too often chooses to forget.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Eman Mourad is as an Australian-Egyptian emerging writer based on Gadigal land. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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