Sarah Holland-Batt, "The Jaguar: Selected Poems"

 

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and critic. Born in Southport, Queensland in 1982, she grew up in Australia and the United States, and has also lived in Italy and Japan. She holds a first-class Honours degree in Literature, an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Queensland, and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was the W. G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar for 2010-2011. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, an Asialink Literature Residency, a Château de Lavigny Fellowship, a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

Her first book, Aria, was the recipient of several literary prizes, including the Anne Elder Award, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize and the Thomas Shapcott Prize, was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards, and was commended for The Age's Poetry Book of the Year. Her second book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Prize, and the John Bray Memorial Poetry Award. Her third book, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize, the Queensland Premier’s Award for State Significance, and the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, and was named The Australian newspaper’s 2022 Book of the Year. The Jaguar was also longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the ALS Gold Medal, and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize.

About The Jaguar: Selected Poems
With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt’s books of poetry up to her stellar prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia’s best-known and widely read poets to many readers for the first time.

Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batt’s cosmopolitan poems engage with questions of loss and extinction, violence and erasure. From haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua to the devastations and transfigurations of her father’s long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things. Her portrayal of a much-loved father trying to cope with Parkinson’s Disease touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry.

Her poetry is charged with a fierce intelligence, and an insistence on seeing the world with exacting clarity—as well as a startling capacity to transform our understandings of the familiar through the imaginative act. The poet’s piercing gaze is also frequently turned inward, offering a dissection of the self that is by turns playful and sharply ironic.

The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes of The Hazards (2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies of The Jaguar (2022), which challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. 

You can read more about The Jaguar: Selected Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Jaguar: Selected Poems, by Sarah Holland-Batt

Empires of Mind

Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks,
in the gardens, under a shade sail, 
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.
Midway through a lunch of cremated schnitzel
spoon-fed by the carer with the port-wine stain
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.

In the night he cries out for Winston Churchill.
During his morning bath he cries for Winston Churchill.
When the nurse does up his buttons he will not stop his weeping. 
When the therapist wheels him to Tuesday piano
my father ignores the Mozart and cries for Winston Churchill.

He cries not like a child seeking absolution, 
not like the mourner or the mourned, but free and unconstrained
as one who has spent a long time denying an urge
and is suddenly giddy and incontinent in his liberation.

The cleaners are unmoved. The woman 
who brings his hourly cup of pills is bright as a firework 
and goes about her round with the hardness 
of one who has heard all the crying in the world 
and finds in that reservoir nothing more disturbing
than a tap’s dripping drumbeat in a sink. 

But the night supervisor is frightened 
in the early hours when the halls ping 
with the sharp beep of motion sensors and my father’s crying. 
His longing for silence is fierce and keen
as a pregnant woman’s craving for salt and fried chicken, 
as my father’s crying for Winston Churchill. 

And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus
croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark—
unsettled, loud, insatiable—the unutterable fear 
rippling through them like a herd of horses 
apprehending the tremor of thunder
on a horizon they cannot see but feel. 

The Gift

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: small, 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. His crying comes as a visitation,

the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderly

as a nurse measuring drops of calamine

from an amber bottle, as a teen at the car wash

wringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracle

to see my father weeping this freely, weeping

for what is owed him. How are you? I ask again

because his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate,

his moods bloom and retreat like an anemone

as the cold currents whirl around him—

crying one minute, sedate the next.

But today my father is disconsolate.

I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again.

I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade.

I hate myself for noticing his poetry—the triplet

that should not be beautiful to my ear

but is. Day, year, decade—scale of awful economy.

I want to give him his present but it is not mine

to give. We sit as if mother and son on Christmas Eve

waiting for midnight to tick over, anticipating

the moment we can open his present together—

first my father holding it up to his ear and shaking it,

then me helping him peel back the paper,

the weight of his death knocking,

and once the box is unwrapped it will be mine,

I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,

every day I will know it opening in me.

Catherine Cole, "Slipstream: On Memory and Migration"

Catherine Cole is Professor of Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, Merseyside. She is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. She has published ten books including novels, a collection of short stories, memoir, academic monographs and edited collections. She has been a visiting fellow in the UK at UEA and in China at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. She also has been a writer-in-residence at the Cite International des Arts, Paris, and in Hanoi, China, UK and Australia. She has peer reviewed for the Australian Research Council and the Literature Board of the Australia Council. She was twice a member of the Professorial Committee for the Australian Research Council’s Excellence in Research Assessment process (REF) in the Humanities and Creative Arts. She has reviewed research and curriculum in the Creative Arts and Humanities in the UK, China, New Zealand and Australia. She has published with University presses, major publishing houses and small press publishers. She also has judged leading writing awards in Australia. She is currently on the Board of University of Cambridge Press (Crime series).

 

About Slipstream: On Memory and Migration

Slipstream explores the ways in which migration changes the lives of those who migrate. It draws on the experiences of Catherine’s family who migrated from Yorkshire to Sydney after World War Two as ‘Ten Pound Poms,’ also called ‘Australia’s hidden migrants.’ The memoir examines the impact of migration on the children of migrants, especially those born in the new place. ‘As happens in so many migrant narratives,’ she noted, ‘the drive for a better life for their children became a kind of family mantra, a way of confirming my parents had done the right thing, however painful. In many ways Slipstream was my way of expressing my gratitude to my parents for the sacrifices they made when they left their homes and families behind.’

What made their journey as Ten Pound Poms of great interest, she noted, was how the family transplanted Yorkshire into Sydney’s south-western suburbs. ‘When you think about it, their journey was remarkable. They came from large families in a mining village not far from Barnsley and had never travelled much beyond it. Yet they travelled up to Glasgow to embark The Empire Brent and sailed for 5 weeks to a new life in Australia. Twelve thousand miles is quite an adventure when you’d never left Yorkshire.’ 

Catherine’s research also drew on a range of resources in the UK. She spent time in a number of museums and archives, most notably the Maritime Museum in Liverpool, the Central Library in Glasgow – the city from which her family sailed - and the Barnsley Town Hall archives. Field research involved trips to Royston and Barnsley, exploring the towns and landmarks of her parents’ lives before they left for Australia. Catherine remains fascinated by the ways in which the experience of migration spreads from generation to generation, affecting those born in the new place as potently as it affected those who left home. ‘My childhood in Sydney was spent listening to stories about my parents’ former lives in the UK and I felt very torn between my two different identities. I wasn’t unique in this. My school friends were Lithuanian, Italian, Polish, Finnish, Dutch, Scottish – all of us watched as our parents adjusted to their new lives, torn just as they were between the old world and the new one.’

You can read more about Slipstream on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the memoir. 

 

From Slipstream: On Memory and Migration, by Catherine Cole

Any aspirations our parents might have had for themselves seemed to have burned out with their migration and the establishment of a new home – surely their great trip across the oceans, their building of a house and garden, two new Australian children and a new job were enough? The house lingers in us all, though. It aspired to roses and the thrift of making do, those perversities of expectation where a house became the inanimate representation of what our parents’ long sea voyage really had been about – a nice home on a quarter acre block halfway across the world, the mortgage paid off as quickly as possible. Thus, we return to our childhood home through memory, our world shrinking, receding as nostalgia claims us. We return to Bachelard’s world of ‘motionless childhood … motionless in the way all Immemorial things are.’ Our childhood homes gone, all the hopes and struggles of building a new home in a new place are replaced with a middle-aged nostalgia for the childhood homes we left. ‘Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality of those at home,’ Bachelard said, ‘and by recalling these memories we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.’

Our family home in Bankstown also retains a tyranny of memory. Now both parents are dead, my siblings and I rarely talk about the house, nor about those unsettled early years when we became Australians, in theory at least. The house might rise before us when a memory needs verification. Was it then? Where was that? Waiting for older siblings’ memories to act as the binding agent for something not quite formed. Our parents can’t be asked at all. But the dead speak through photographs and tape recordings, in a flickering family home movie of us all standing self-consciously in front of the flowering jacaranda opposite the back door, its bell flowers drifting above us like purple snow.