Here is Melbourne poet Emma Lew speaking to the Australian Book Review in 2019 about her approach to writing poems:
“Writing a poem, for me, is an experience that blurs consciousness and the unconscious – the one relentlessly and obsessively advancing and checking the other. It begins usually with a line or a rhythm or both that I set down and run with, develop, push out from. I keep lists and lists of lines jotted down in a series of exercise books; lines gleaned from overhearing, from mishearing, from reading and misreading. Improbable lines, nonsensical, hypnotic lines; lines that have struck me purely for their nuttiness, or for their arresting syncopations or tones. I’ve stored up line upon line over the years, and I turn to them for something to start with, sometimes changing words or syntax, then seeking other lines that seem to connect with the first, then others and others – until I can start to see a kind of sense and tone emerging, and I try to nurture this thing and shape it and see what it seems to be trying to say, to adumbrate, to offer. It’s been frustrating, but over the years I’ve seldom been able to write anything with a ‘deliberate’ subject. It’s always been a matter of the poem coming into being and me, its humble, toiling servant, eventually stepping back and beholding something of my self – my pining orphan self, my besotted pupil self, my steely, dour agent provocateur self, my serial killer self.”
Reading Lew’s poetry often takes us to those liminal spaces between the conscious and unconscious she mentions above, where we can experience both an awareness of unusual intensity and a trancelike stupor. “Snow Gold” exemplifies this almost incantatory power. A propulsion of images build upon one another without effacement, so that a swarm of shadow lines and ghost images trail throughout the poem, sometimes to return, sometimes to simply linger in our subconscious. They give the poem its unnerving affect, which seems to exist in the “grey hour” the speaker refers to “when mourners become lost and follow the wrong coffin.” We are uncertain of both time and place: what army moves in a manner that would allow a troupe of musicians to follow? And, even if they could, what troupe of musicians would ever follow on their heels? We too, feel that the poem is leading us someplace familiar yet disorientating, where winter arrives “in one jump like a wolf” and the commonplace becomes pregnant with mystery.
Snow Gold
So, on the heels of the army, our troupe moved.
I gave birth in the street and night nailed the great city to the earth.
I saw the plague stalking like a stranger whose language I could not
understand.
My sores were dressed, my handkerchiefs hemmed.
It is one thing to listen to the heart and its murmurs.
A strange woman came to see me, saying that she was my lover’s wife.
It was the twilight hour that is called the 'grey hour', when mourners
become lost and follow the wrong coffin.
We walked a little way together and the talk burned like agate.
I know they say that one should speak well of the dead or not speak at all.
The winter came in one jump like the wolf.
An eye grew sightless because there were frightening scenes I did not
wish to see.
I had talent for the noble virtues of blind faith even then.
An agile acrobat threw his plank across the ditch.
The wine now travelled from mouth to mouth.
The sentry’s face clouded over, and he wept at the prompting of my
fingers on the strings.
So the young men paid their precious francs.
The wagons pulled out to the east like a sunburst.
Of course I sang, like a log covered with ice.
We lived unbuttoned through the black country,
taking such great mouthfuls of bread, as though we were seagulls.
What was I besides the strength of my shadow? I climbed up on the trains and tossed down coal. The wind blew and merged with me, my childhood and my life, my passions and transgressions. Even if they weren’t gold, the trinkets glittered. I often wonder how unpenitent people could live under a sky. It was that kind of Tatyana I had come to be. Let my father say as many harsh and stupid things as he likes, but the skin of my hands was like fine snow.
First published in Heat
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Author: Thomas Moody
