SOS

Abstract

SOS brings together thirty-two poems by Claire Miranda Roberts written in Scotland (‘Departure’) and Australia (‘Return’).

The first section ‘Departure’ deliberates over British wildflowers (the iris, the magnolia, the lotus, the tulip and snowdrops) and the landscape (an orchard, a rainbow) all the while leading the reader toward a reimagined biblical garden. These poems encounter violence at the same time as they double back on their own perceptions - repeating images and refrains and asking questions into silence. The smaller poems in ‘Departure’ ask us to stop at a magnolia tree, or stand above spring snowdrops, and pause. Solitude enters and returns as both something we suffer from and something we desire. The poems in ‘Departure’ take a prismatic approach to nature that responds to botanical language, archival materials and poetry itself, in an effort to renew some of the most fragile images from the Romantic and Sentimental traditions. ‘Departure’ ends with a free translation of the biblical Song of Songs, wherein the female voice prevails.

In contrast, the second section of SOS is more personal. In ‘Return’ the lyric I is the poet’s own voice after she returns to Australia. Trapped in solitude by the pandemic, these poems are born from looking out the window. Instead of Romantic British flowers, she observes native Australian flowers (boronias, mallees, banksias) as well as introduced garden species (narcissus, camellia, jasmine). While confined, the author also begins to unravel her maternal family lineage. The landscape is explored for the truth it hides and exposes in its rivers and undergrowth. Gaps in the lineation allow for poems to be read both across and down or as fragments where information is missing. Like ‘Departure’, in ‘Return’ the author draws upon archival material, yet even within this elevated language the natural world is, ‘chanting’.