Andy Jackson’s Human Looking (Giramondo) won both the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry and the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 2022. The book’s title possesses a canny doubleness that can inform us of how we might enter the collection: life is, to a large degree, a cumulation of looking, both as observer and observed, and this looking is always human, that is, flawed, partial, dismissive, adoring, indifferent; while to be human looking implies that what is being observed is not considered human at all.
Jackson lives with Marfan Syndrome, including severe curvature of the spine, and his poems give a visceral account of what it is like to be considered “human looking”—to be on the margins of society because of the way we appear to others. “Microbiome” reminds us, however, that to be human is to be inhabited by a profusion of non-human life, and that these microbes dining at the body’s “soft table” are “always hungry / unfussy.” The speaker, then, offers up his menu: both somatic and psychogenic, including “starch, sugar, paper and ink,” “hesitation in the face of violence,” and “the scent of the skin of the one I love” suggesting an intimacy with the microbes that is almost erotic, reminiscent of Donne’s flea.
Microbiome
While we live, we ourselves are inhabited
– William Bryant Logan, ‘Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth’
In the earth, prepared and silent, what will I
be offering you? It’s said the menu opens
with the liver and the brain, for their wealth
of enzymes and water, the heart
before the bones. But so many of you
are already here at this soft table, always hungry,
unfussy. I’ve been feeding you protein,
fibre, starch, sugar, paper and ink,
self-consciousness, the crimson jolt of the rosella
in the leafless tree, my own dying cells,
hesitation in the face of violence, more water,
the scent of the skin of the one I love,
confusion with almost everything else.
And what will you make of all this
turning? Warm compost, what remains.
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Author: Thomas Moody
