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The Striped World, Emma Jones, 2009, Faber & Faber, £9.99, ISBN 978-0-5712453-8-3

The blurb on Emma Jones’s striking debut collection, The Striped World (overtones of the cages, tigers, birds, real or imagined throughout the book) refers to her ‘tidal imagination’. This seems an extremely apt description for her rich and encompassing approach to a range of subject-matter, deeply weighted by history – particularly Australia’s colonial history, and that of the world in general. There is something ‘tigerish’ about Jones’s forays – wild but earthed, with surreal lifts and classic or religious references.

Born in Sydney and educated at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge, she has already received considerable notice as winner of the Cardiff Poetry Competition and Australia’s prestigious Newcastle Prize. Also, she was recently shortlisted for the 2009 Forward Prize First Book Award. Her poems are dramatic, laced with ironies and fired by surreal imagery, shifts of pace and telling metaphors. Her first one, Waking, about being born, gives the flavour, as the poem bounds along, juxtaposing interiors(‘twitch/inside’, ‘waking’/birthing, ‘shifting of curtains’) with the great ‘world’ outside – a world still with her, as she tunes into a universe...

Here it is again, light hoisting its terrible bells.
As though a world might wake up with it a –

...

For twenty-five years I’ve been waking
this way. There was one morning

when my mother woke and felt a twitch
inside, like the shifting of curtains.

She woke and so did I. I was like a bird
beating. She had no time for anaesthetic...

Now she says the world and I were eager
from the start. But I was only waking.

Paradox, reversals. Images of the world, nature, light, birds, parrots, rebirth, occur again and again along with other motifs throughout the book. She exults in the flux, its dynamism. But there are painful recognitions too.

One of the best poems, Zoos for the Living, explores the displacement of the town of Adaminaby for the Snowy River irrigation scheme. This is a highly political piece, stamped with colonial-references: terra nullius, A B Paterson’s famous Snowy River pastoralist ballad, the destruction of nature and of human lives. However, in Part II of the poem, time and drought have wrought their revenge, as the old drowned town reappears, now turned ghostly:

And old Adaminaby asserts itself. The steps of the church
assert themselves; they step to the blank air; in a curved world
they look to heaven. And now drought undoes the flood, and
                                                                              dry things
glitter; the roads refasten like bones in a ballad; the buildings
                                                                                       shift
to their absent bricks; and chimneys ride the air like flutes.

The next and final stanza posits that this Adaminaby ghostliness is far from empty and useless. It has its place and will not be overlooked by history or reality.

Throughout the collection, Jones shows herself as quirky, witty, searching – a jester, deliberately playful but serious, punching out ironies, interweaving symbols, and displaying poetry of great energy. She is decidedly a voice for the future, illuminating the everyday, achieving great immediacy and resonances, albeit taking risks. Here again is her questing ‘I’ voice, this time as a character from an Ovid tale, a girl who becomes a tree, playing on being and difference, on being and becoming – tracking immediacy, and talking of her new leaves:

I’m not that happy. It’s not important.
And I’m not sad. It’s good to be a girl,
and a tree, with the wind in it. It’s good
to move in the wind, and to move the wind.
My leaves all move. They sing, and make the world.
                                                                              (Daphne)

Jones wants a ‘green’ world that ‘sings’. She is preoccupied with perception and change, with otherness and doubleness – with situations and their opposites (being/non-being, life/death, worldly/otherworldly, belonging/adrift and so on). A painting makes “the day in its own image”. (The Painting). Passionate and driven, her poetry with its forthright, energetic rhythms and daring range of subject-matter is often reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich.

Jones is above all concerned with belonging, and retrieving what has been lost. This illumining of the tragic is most evident in her long prizewinning poem Zoos for the Dead, a surrealist exploration of the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their parents. Jones is masterly in her interpretation of this story through an expansive monologue told by a person who has been given a parrot called Narcissus, ‘the survivor of an atrocity’, the last speaker of a lost language, its owners (the last of their tribe) having died. The poem has as many questions as it has answers. Above all, it and The Striped World as a whole, show Jones’s great talent, her commitment and willingness to take risks, and her alertness to the poet’s task as witness.