Musing on "Vagabondage", Beth Spencer, UWA Press, 2014.

I love poetry. As it turns out, it took me a while to realise how much I liked it because poetry was so heavily formalised and rigid when I was growing up that it was hard to identify anything outside of the "approved" poems (pomes what rhyme and was written by recognised poets who was doing a pome). I was barely a teenager when I was exposed to Ginsberg, although I'd been soundly beaten around the ears by English Romantics and Tolkien's Elven extravaganzas, and that turned out to be a gateway drug. It's been, if you ask some people, downhill all the way. I'm probably one of 20 Brautigan fans in Adelaide but it's not all like that: once I realised what poetry was, I wandered around through a variety of authors and managed to work out that poetry was something profoundly moving and, above all, intimate. Poetry was something that you could place into another work or stand by itself. Poetry was special.

For me, poetry is the most sensual form of expression because it is all about emotion and rhythm, conveying a feeling through the careful juxtaposition of image and the words that you use for it. Writing is a form of telepathy but poetry is often an achievement of empathic transfer, where you find yourself in the same place as the poet and with your thoughts synchronised to them. This is what is so off-putting about doggerel when you see or hear it: second-hand thoughts jangling around and mashed up just so that they rhyme, rhythm be damned. You're getting someone's impression of what a poem should be and, while this doesn't make the sentiment any less genuine, it's like listening to someone read a script at you instead of putting on the play. The emotional blood is drained and you have, instead, an empty literary fish, all skeleton, bulging eyes and tight grey scales.

I ran across Beth's most recent work, Vagabondage, because I happened to get to know her social-medially (are we saying this yet?) and the work sounded fascinating. A book of poems on her itinerant year as a camper van dweller, after leaving the house she had lived in for 10 years. It is obvious, on reading this, that Beth and I have some shared life experiences, some of which are in her past and some of which I am going through now. I am at a point where I wake up each morning to work out if I can do anything and my old abilities seem lost, although there are other days when I am my old self. In a beautiful piece entitled "The Shipwreck Coast", I can reach across through the poem and feel the uncertainty, the fear, the slow dawning of how long a (possible) recovery can take (and it may never happen). I feel it as it is happening to her and I feel it as it is happening to me.

This is why we read poetry. We share feelings and we align briefly to see through each other's eyes.

There are many quite joyful poems in here, with "Singing Us Home" a wonderful way to finish, but this is a collection discussing the issues of moving beyond the accumulations that we continue to hold on to merely because we have the space. This speaks of the nature of the itinerant, where we wander Lear-like from household to household and hope that our welcome is still good. But we fear the day when the door is barred and we are left in the cold. How do we define ourselves when we have so few of the commodities and possessions that would make such definition easy? What are we when we are simply being?

Good poetry is intimate and profound. By the end of it, you know a lot about the author. You have shared experiences and you have thought about yourself in new light. Beth's collection does all of this and is a great pleasure to read.

Beth's got a webpage where you can order your own copy on-line, if you also like good poetry about Australia, about living, roaming and about thinking about where you are and where you are going. I greatly enjoyed it.

(Brief note that I bought my own copy and this is an unsolicited review, for those who care about such things. Stop worrying about such commodity fetishist nonsense and go and read some poetry!)