Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar: Selected Poems is a very substantial volume bringing together work from her three collections published in Australia. Its sumptuous production chimes happily with the style of her writing: culturally sophisticated and highly intelligent as she clearly is, it’s above all the seemingly effortless sensuous evocativeness of her work that makes an impression from the beginning. Bloodaxe’s generous spacing and the poet’s fine rhythmic sense allow these impressions to flower in the mind.

‘Exhaustion’, from Aria, the first collection represented here, can illustrate the physicality of Holland-Batt’s writing at the basic level of literal description:

One afternoon I went into his silent study
and found, behind the tidy compartments
of paper-clips, rubber bands and push-pins,
an old, red tin – the relic of my grandfather’s oils,
wedged at the back of things. Horse-hair brushes,
graphite stubs, a frayed bit of string. And nestled in
the smudged stippling of china white and cerulean,
a solitary tube of cobalt blue, its crimped end
folded over and over until nothing was left.

Well written and promising though this poem is, it seems to me to have limitationsof a kind that are not characteristic of Holland-Batt’s work. We’re to learn more about Holland-Batt’s grandfather – an English architect and artist – and much more about her own father, whose study this perhaps describes. And of course the contents of the tin, particularly the folded and refolded paint tube, metaphorically express the idea of exhaustion in general and invite us to reflect on its different manifestations. However, the relation between the literal and the metaphorical levels of meaning in this poem is relatively static, and you need to read the poem as a whole for it to emerge, as it does in that haunting last line. What’s already exciting about most of the poems in this first collection is how sensuous perception is heightened and vivified by the transformative power of the poet’s imagination and by her ability to fuse differing modes of perception. In the first three lines of ‘Late Aspect’, for example, synaesthetic metaphors describe the sounds made by windchimes and cicadas in terms of tactile, kinaesthetic and visual sensations. Sensuously quickening our imaginations in this way, and personifying the night, Holland-Batt is able to give concrete force to the abstract sensation of being a bystander to the night in line 4:

As for the veranda: it is empty.
A windchime sieves the air, and the cicadas
emerge like metal stars.
The night is preoccupied with its own story

Such lines are a pleasure to say partly because of the sensitivity with which their cadences make impressions succeed each other as if we were bodily present on the veranda, listening, looking about, noticing one thing after another and thinking about our place in the scene. In this way they’re typical of how scene-setting and description work in The Jaguar as a whole.

Another way in which Holland-Batt’s transformative imagination works is in bringing pictures to life or using pictures as doorways to her own creative scenarios. A lovely example is her 13 line poem ‘Athenian Jar’, apparently based on Exekias’s famous black figure amphora showing Ajax and Achilles playing a board game. Stepping through Exekias’s image with its austerely limited black and red colour scheme, Holland-Batt makes Ajax address Achilles in a way that creates a living vignette in which time moves in the stillness, in which sounds are heard as well as sights being seen, and in which we are drawn into the speaker’s own internal bodily awareness:

Night strangles the island, cousin,
yet we play on and on. Absence thickens
my throat. In its hollow your spear
clinks on marble, moonlit
rats scatter like obols, and a ring
of mesh gleams at your neck.

In the second half of this remarkable little poem, such sensuous evocativeness becomes merely the starting point for a tantalisingly elusive shimmer of suggestions about the sad vanity and inescapable necessity of the two heroes’ efforts, perhaps with implications for human effort in general. There’s a resonance with the paradox of stillness evoking motion in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, but also, I think, a more distant resonance with Holland-Batt’s father’s situation as it is later revealed.

In fact many of Holland-Batt’s poems take their overt inspiration from pieces of art, music or literature. Clearly these things are of immediate intrinsic importance to her. The poems that result are rich simply as responses to the art works in question. However, I think they’re also a way of obliquely crystallising emotions rooted in personal experience, in line with High Modernist thinking about artistic impersonality. So, I think, are poems of landscape, in her native Australia and in America and Italy. Poems from her first two books – Aria and The Hazards – give glimpses of what seem to be personal stories related to these objectified emotions. It’s in the third book – The Jaguar – that this narrative mode is most fully developed. In particular, there are many moving poems about her father, about his life in England and then in Australia, to which he emigrated. We learn that he suffered from extreme neurological degeneration and incapacitation as a result of Parkinson’s Disease, undergoing what ‘The Gift’ describes as a seventeen year long process of dying or rather of waiting impatiently for the release of death:

In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair
garlanded by summer hibiscus
like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche.
A flowering wreath buzzes around his head –
passionate red. He holds the gift of death
in his lap, oblong, wrapped in black.
He has been waiting seventeen years to open it
and is impatient. When I ask how he is
my father cries

What’s remarkable, both disturbing and poignant, is how strenuously objective the poet is in describing her father’s suffering. ‘Garlanded’ and the simile in line 4 suggest emotional detachment by their sheer startling incongruity, though reflection reveals a deeper aptness to this incongruity: many of the saints so portrayed would have been martyrs. The image of the gift of death, reminiscent of Rilke, again acts as an emotional filter, distancing and depersonalising the daughter’s account. As the poem develops, it details the father’s pain and degradation and shows the daughter’s helplessness to alleviate it, culminating in the stoically toneless, ambiguous recognition that

I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,
every day I will know it opening in me.

The final sequence, ‘In My Father’s Country’, takes stock of her father’s life with an apparent candour reminiscent of Confessional poetry but in a way that leaves response to the reader, without the emotive pressure I associate with the confessional genre. It’s also without the fizzing linguistic and metaphorical exuberance of most of her other poems. Rightly so, much though I enjoyed those qualities when they were present. The sober plainness of all but its first poem is vital to the impression of clear-sighted honesty that the sequence gives. As well as being moving in itself, this gives the whole volume a powerfully dramatic shape. After all the playfulness and transformative energy on display earlier, in its climax the poet seems to confront hard, inescapable truths head on.

I hope I’ve managed to convey something of what makes this such an enjoyable and richly rewarding book. It’s only fair to say what it doesn’t try to do. This is a book of Art with a capital A. Poetry with such a finely burnished finish, whether focused on sculpting beautiful cadences and patterns of sound and achieving the maximum sensuous evocativeness, as in most of the volume, or on achieving the maximum analytical clarity, as in the final sequence, doesn’t offer the illusion of impromptu conversation or spontaneously shifting thought, so we have little of that sense of the poet as a relaxed, intimate interlocutor that is one of the pleasures of reading Elizabeth Bishop, Fleur Adcock, or any number of more minor figures. What we have instead is a thrilling sense of almost total immersion in or absorption by a world of heightened physical presences and intensified feeling. In what were to my taste less successful poems the effect could become too rich but taking the book as a whole I enjoyed its artistry and illuminations immensely.

The Jaguar: Selected Poems by Sarah Holland-Batt. £14.99. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 978 1 78037 704 9.

I wrote this review for The High Window and I would like to thank the editor David Cooke for permission to reprint it here.