Fiona Hile [by Thomas Moody]

Fiona Hile is an award winning Australian poet whose poems move fast through unexpected turns of language and imagery. Take this line from "Snakebite with Anecdote": "In the corridor we listen to the sounds our babies make when they cry." The distinction the speaker makes between listening to babies cry, and listening to the "sounds" babies make when they cry, transforms the action into something far more clinical and uncanny. It is a distinction made travelling at such speeds that it is easy to miss, as is much in Hile's breakneck poetry which deserves an equally alert attention.

 

 

"Forget the Stars" is such a poem, which opens with the image of "taxidermied light" and breaks down into near fragmentary utterances.

 

Forget the Stars

Focus on the taxidermied light,
the quarked vehemence of splayed negation,
to rags, your britches, seeping glib intent,
sight catastrophic, given to seizures.
The curlicue scent has not the mother in it.
The fall of romance, the hold of the tender new,
programs aloft, every nerve to shudder:
ghosting monitions of the incomplete.
Either will the aching swells, apart from bliss.
Coordinates of favor, hip neath fiber strip follicle
sheath of slip chord parent display. Sensitized gift wagon
fern entrenched, the halo of the nation is the caul-throated
blood of hench, rosella'd of the peak of taxonomied childless.
Where your mottled hologram, the feathered monstor of the throttled.
Quizzical with the world, am to console, the hope for saplings
entrees the ingredient of dining undertaken. Your teeth the grinder,
your lips the sensitive house. The beds' laments' the reindeers'
horses' dreams' in halves' comeo'd sighs.

 

Comments

[Karen Beckworth]

Thank you for introducing this Australian poet to us Yanks.