Lithosphere
Ben Walter
ISBN: 9781923099685
Reviewed by ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN
Ben Walter’s poetry collection sits between a rock and a hard place. It’s difficult to do nature writing without tumbling into a didactic crevasse, or bathing in the seductive, never-ending wellspring of descriptive language. But the poems that Walter hews together are curiously delectable in their deviance from both. The term ‘lithosphere’ was famously coined by the geologist Joseph Barrell during the early 1900s to describe the earth’s crust; the rocky outer shell that sits between the atmosphere above and the asthenosphere below, where things start to heat up and become liquid. The geological theme calls to mind Walter’s 2017 novella, titled Conglomerate (published with the Lost Rocks series by A Published Event), where he writes of a group of bushwalkers hiking in the southwest of Tasmania. A sense of propulsion emerges as the distinctions between the hikers and their surroundings are dissolved by walking, speech and muscle movement. The narrator poses the question: “How to square such sensations? The inner and outer slowly eroding, a curse on their bodies and a blessing for their minds.” This sense of oneness suspends his hikers in the present, giving them a brief reprieve from the halting anxiety of debt, familial illness and relationship breakdowns, being surrounded by the “indifferent plains that let them wander where they wanted.” This may be another nod to Gerald Murnane, a feature of another one of Walter’s stories, ‘Landscape Within Landscapes’, from his collection What Fear Was (Puncher & Wattman, 2021). It’s a sense of escapism that imbues Lithosphere as well.
At a time when writers are compelled to respond to the urgency of the current moment, Lithosphere retreats into obscure intricacy in a way that is both intriguing and baffling. Stones have evidently preoccupied Walter for a while, as we have gone from his novella, Conglomerate (2017) to the poetry collection Lithosphere (2025) in the space of a decade. True to form, these poems are amassed from publications over the years. There is granular detail on every page, with delicious morsels of verisimilitude. You might expect to be bored by a book about rocks, but Lithosphere is full of delights. The strength of this collection is its geographical multiplicity, the way it shows the faultlines between nature and people, pastoral and urban, suburban and wild landscapes. There’s a sense of friction where Walter seems determined to write against the grain of more popular lyric poetry in nature writing, and one that has titillating results. But some of its poems feel a little bit stubborn in their opacity—almost as if they are trying too hard to hem themselves into their own little niche.
Nevertheless, Lithosphere encapsulates the multiplicity of Tasmania beautifully, such as in the poem ‘Knocking’: ‘
and open walls
framing a view
of the cold,
a painting
or triptych
of spooling fog
the suburbs and
all the same sun
(p.9)
It is an experience one has when looking through windows in Hobart, where different parts of one room could show the mountain, river, or an industrial park. It frames these snippets with a collage-like texture, challenging the idea of wilderness as a pure or remote concept that exists somewhere far away. Instead of wilderness being a place cordoned off, everyday objects are animated by their own wildness. In ‘Knocking’, the stone huts are animated by “draft-drunk doors.” In ‘Apples’, fruits are characterised by their names in proximity to young people:
… croftons and jonathans,
bustling eyes, other names like children,
older children waiting in the fields;
(p.70)
Here, I was reminded of how teachers often use the apple skin analogy to describe the thinness of the earth’s atmosphere in comparison to its overall mass—if the atmosphere is the apple skin, then the lithosphere is the crunchy outer layer. It makes you think about the atmosphere as something precious, rather than a limitless expanse to be polluted ad infinitum. Perhaps in a similar way, what Lithosphere does best is make us think more closely about the natural world—close in a literal sense. For example, in the poem ‘Mt Styx’, nature is portrayed as an ailing body: ‘gum splints on the roads; /the fractures are healing,’ (p.39) This image reminded me of Anna Krien’s 2017 Quarterly Essay, The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia’s Climate Deadlock, where Krien likens global warming to a fever. It’s a way of flipping the concept of ‘the environment’ inside out, bringing it from an idea that exists on the margins of the human experience and into the physical centre of it. This is the kind of nature writing that gets under your skin, reminding us that the earth is inseparable from its human inhabitants, that the hard border between the self and the world outside is itself a fiction.
Other phrases in ‘Mt Styx’ that lampoon linguistic flexibility are ‘regeneration burns’, a term loosely applied across Sustainable Timbers Tasmania’s harvesting operations to justify its wholesale razing of forests. The ‘mythic river’ mentioned here belies the river Styx’s naming. Running from the Needles, or Mt. Mueller (also the title of another poem in the collection), the Styx River in Tasmania is punctuated by fallen trees, and so it was colonially known as the ‘River of Sticks’ until the spelling was changed, according to the journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen’s Land. Of course, the Styx is also one of the rivers of the underworld, as well as the name of the Greek goddess. According to Hesiod’s poem Theogony, the monster Echidna may have been born to Styx, but this isn’t explored in Lithosphere.
Walter’s voice is brusque, his narrator’s stoic landscapes made up of ‘grinding stones’. The phrase brings to mind the process of digestion in dinosaurs, breaking down the tough fibres of cycad plants by ingesting rocks to assist the gut bacteria. This ruminative mode is a feature of Walter’s nature writing. What if we were to look at the stones beneath our feet as organisms with lives and stories? Or even just look beneath our fingernails and acknowledge the fact that we are all made up of microbiota? Animals and plant life make up more of our microbiome than anything else. As writer Jane Rawson writes in Human/Nature, human bodies are more like swamps than a discrete entity. Ben Walter’s Lithosphere abounds in such littoral zones. From the cover image of the dead tree flooded by lake water to the poem ‘The Oysters Roar’, where there are ’rounds of unshucked applause / bursting from the silt.’ Oysters filter pollutants from the sea, turning food particles into pearls. Geographies are shaped by their underlying geologies. The ‘pink and white stones’ at the end of Conglomerate are reminiscent of the boulders across Tasmania’s west coast, which are known as conglomerate rock for their being many rocks ground together under the weight of glaciers.
It’s the slow transfiguration of a landscape that makes this collection so enjoyable, and at some points a little under stimulating. The collection feels too contained at times, and perhaps a little too safe. These are poems that are hard and sparkling and perfect, splendid in their fixity. But maybe that’s the point.
ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN lives in lutruwita/Tasmania, where she writes, rollerskates and sells flowers. You can usually find her snipping mountain gum on the side of a highway somewhere.