'anonymous premonition' by Yvette Holt
published by UQP 2008 in the Black Australian Writing series
reviewed by Jena Woodhouse
Anonymous premonition, Yvette Holt’s debut poetry collection, is based on the manuscript that garnered her the David Unaipon Award for 2005. The poems reflect and articulate this poet’s many concerns, some of which are listed in ‘Under Sixty Seconds’, the author note in poetic form which appears on the book’s first page:
Human Rights/ Child Protection/ Domestic Violence/ Immigration Laws/ Social Justice.
In the same context, the poet characterises herself as:
Poet/ Writer/ Performer/ Lover/ Semi-butch/ Semi-femme/ Caffeine-free/ Peppermint/ & Chamomile/ Sipping feminist, and also: Generous/ Giving/ Thrifty/ Frugal/ Bargain hunting/ Lay-by wearing/ Credit card declining/ Broke arse undergraduate. (It must be noted that she is now a graduate, and it would take much longer than sixty seconds to document her numerous achievements.)
The voices of Yvette Holt’s poems resonate with cries and whispers, lamentation and laughter, celebration and story, as they speak of the life experiences of many, mostly anonymous women (though not only women), whose journeys and pathways have intersected with the poet’s, thereby becoming part of her extended personal narrative. Yvette Holt has said that she had a premonition of being entrusted with such a role and such a mandate, hence the present title.
The poems take their reader on an empowering transit of the collective and individual experience/s which inspired them, and in the process acknowledge what living, loving, learning and survival may entail:
I am shaped by the women in my life
Closing all the windows and cupboards
I hear babies rattling at night
Crossing the corners of my speechless bedroom
They follow me as if I have the answers
I don’t have any answers
Only too many questions
I mourn for the children
Who were taken away
I weep for the grandmothers who will never know
( Woman)
Other painful but essential issues are broached, such as untimely death in the Indigenous community (‘Close the Gap’); the disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous life expectancy in Australia (‘Against the Odds’); violence against women and children, who, while not named, are not necessarily Indigenous nor socially disadvantaged (‘The Afterbirth of Rape’; ‘The Old School Days’). Yet, when the matter at issue pertains directly to herself, the poet sometimes counters the challenge with humour or irony.
When I was 21 years of age
I broke seven mirrors
In seven days
They tell me
That’s 49 years bad luck
It’s not looking good
21 plus 49
Equals 70
Will I live to see that age?
Statistically speaking
I will cheat superstition
By death
What a way to beat the odds
(Against the Odds)
The tone becomes terser in poems such as ‘Primary Education’:
…
On my very first day at work I was asked ‘what nationality are
you’, when I told them I was Aboriginal they replied, ‘But you
look so clean’.
Last year, hailing a taxi in George Street, Sydney, the driver
asks, ‘Where are you from?’ I ask the driver to take a wild
guess, after surveying the paying customer sitting in the back back seat, he triggers the meter then casually replies, ‘You sure don’t
sound koori because you speak English very well’.
There are some days when ‘others’ may need to persevere
with my silence… because there are some days when I may
no longer have the inclination nor the fucking head space to
educate your reply.
(Primary Education)
In the seven sections of this collection, the threads of humour; social, cultural and interpersonal politics; Indigenous women’s tradition; intimacy and family relationships, are interwoven with confidence and jouissance in the deployment of language, and a warmth and integrity that emanates from the creator, whose indomitable spirit pervades the work. While the groupings of poems are an indication of a common focus, there is also a flow of discourse going on across these minimal borders.
The first section, titled 4077, introduces Inala, the poet’s home suburb, by its postcode, and deals with a selection of family and childhood themes. Part II, Inamorata, focuses on women’s business in various senses and contexts, while III, Seasonal Change, ranges through private and public terrain, touching the raw nerves of unresolved injustices (‘Close the Gap’) as well as taking a light-hearted look at more domestic scenes (‘Serving It Up’), and registering some wittily incisive observations about cultural politics at a Sydney Writers’ Festival:
Rock climbing over mountains of literature
Sidestepping landmines of woollen shawls
and middle-class teacups
Chapters of history reclaiming the wind
Political incorrectness curving the corners of acceptability
Lipstick prints pouting over recycled styrofoam cups
Leaving behind a DNA of understanding and sympathetic
gestures
I question their intimacy of 'blackfellas’' knowledge.
(A Writer’s Chopping Block)
The poems of part IV, Resilience, speak of vulnerability and the abused, but do so with restraint and compassion. Here, many of the anonymous premonitions are given form and voice. In telling of the unspeakable experiences other women have confided, the poet is able to empathise with her subjects to such a degree that these poems have been misread as autobiographical in a literal sense.
Part VI, Bon Voyage, captures the energy, excitement, and appetite for adventure and romance that the prospect of travel evokes, while part VI, Kevin, contains just two poems for and about Yvette’s brother, to whom anonymous premonition is dedicated. Part VII, My River City, embraces place in a spirit of homecoming, but notes also that some are without a place to call home, such as the homeless hounded from under the bridge in Hope Street, their precarious shelter.
Each of the seven sections of anonymous premonition has the potential to become a collection in its own right, and this is one of the many qualities that pleases me about these poems – for all their abundance, their freshness and vitality is such that the reader’s appetite is whetted but not sated.
Underlying the poems is a sense of groundedness, of strength and stability, which Yvette has attributed in large part to having been nurtured by a caring family and community. The opening poem in the first section pays tribute to the power of family commitment:
It was the late 1960s
Outside Hicksville county
In western Queensland
A clash of two cultures
The original sin
…
Workmates would remind him
And town folks would ignore her
They were always going to make it
But at the time
They just didn’t know how
…
They moved like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
So eloquent on their feet
From a small country town to the bright city lights
Together they shifted a universe
(Ballroom Romancing)
It seems to me that the eloquence, the passion and the obduracy glimpsed in ‘Ballroom Romancing’ surface in the poems of this romantic but embattled couple’s daughter, who offers an image of herself on the 423 bus to Marrickville as ‘the lady standing up in the back scratching her mind in public’, and reminds us:
Some words are like a precious ache
They kneel for no one
(Words...)