The Strange Matter
by Ali Jane Smith
ISBN 9781763600911
Reviewed by DEBBIE LIM
The cover of Ali Jane Smith’s The Strange Matter is a painting by Phil Day. A jumble of everyday objects appear at close range, almost monumental, unrecognisable. A luminous circular object in the foreground could be an ashtray or the moon.
Inside, there is no contents page or page numbers, nor any dividing sections or notes to the poems. Poem titles are minimalist, such as: ‘Things, Feelings’, ‘Visions’, ‘Getting Close’. It feels somewhat like poetry as Trojan horse – slipping in somewhat mysteriously and with few contextual clues.
The 41 poems in The Strange Matter tend to the disarmingly conversational in tone and discursive. The language is direct and unadorned, with a relaxed and playful approach to form. Many poems take place in the space of domestic routine: in the kitchen, walks to school and public bus rides in the poet’s locale of Wollongong.
However, rather than mundane places, Smith seems to see these as playgrounds and petri dishes where life’s ‘matter’ is encountered and even transformed. Often the poems in The Strange Matter tilt into surreal daydream.
From the opening poem ‘Sit Off’:
The person who leaves a chair in the middle of the room overnight
is always you yourself. It is there in the morning.
A reminder of your good intention to just sit, and think, like
a statue, a theoretical physicist, a kid with wallpaper opposite,
someone with spending money, or Rod Stewart.
The title ‘Sit Off’ seems a subversive play on ‘standoff’ with its associations of confrontation. To stay and sit in the moment, Smith might infer, is a worthy act. The poem ends: ‘I was just sitting here/ thinking/ did we already listen to the other side?’ This ‘other side’ is ostensibly the B-side of an album but also the flip side of life: the moments we overlook.
The ‘matter’ of the collection’s title is key. In one sense, matter refers to the ‘issue’ at hand. In scientific terms, matter is the material substance made of atoms that constitute the observable universe. It exists in different states, most commonly, solid, liquid and gas.
Smith’s poems brim with everyday ‘matter’: gum leaves, coffee, bees, knives, the moon, toast, deer, lichen, clouds. The list could go on. All matter, by definition, is affected by inertia, which prevents a material body shifting from its state of rest. In many poems, we see this inertia overcome as ‘things’ transform into other things:
The bird is like the tree, the bird is like the flower/ the wallaby’s fur is the colour of shadowed bark. (The Language of Flowers)
… things the fire makes from sand, ash/ lead to other things/ rearranging atoms in time …
(Thorny, Juicy)
In ‘Aubade, Yeah Nah’, Smith writes: ‘it’s a lot/ every day beginning with something/ a warm drink, bread, an egg/ and everything, the bowl of compost/ the past/motes.’
Here, ‘something’ becomes ‘everything’ and a daily breakfast suddenly slides into the molecules of the past. Even the title suggests a fluid mixed state: the formality of ‘aubude’ is contrasted with the colloquial ‘yeah, nah’.
This push-pull tension between opposing states is also explored in ‘Ostinato’. An ostinato refers to a ‘stubborn’ repetition of a musical phrase or rhythm. The poem describes the ambivalence of a mother torn between a romanticised view of the moon versus her practical reality:
Oh moon, oh moon, if I loved you as I should would I keep gazing?
But I’ve got trivialities to get back to, don’t you know, moon, about the dishwasher
about tv shows and knitting and making a sandwich for tomorrow?
It ends:
I’ll see you in the morning, moon, walking to school, look kids there’s the moon
pert in the dayblue sky, the moon, the moon, imperfect, impermanent
sometimes impacts arrive, we’re still working it out. Go round again.
Twelve long lines extend beyond the left page so that several words spill onto the right-hand page. With slightly shortened lines, this poem might have fit on one page as a sonnet. But I suspect the poet wanted to avoid such a neat conclusion.
Ultimately, this is a fallible and fragile moon. The final ‘Go round again.’ is inspired, suggesting doubly: ‘give us time and space to figure things out’ but also a plea for the moon to reclaim its full magnificence.
A notable number of poems are set on public buses, which provide structural continuity across the collection. A bus trip is also a liminal space (between origin and destination, inside and outside) where serendipity can occur.
‘Quarry’ describes an encounter by the speaker and her son with a talking Rusa deer which boards the bus.
My son turns to stare, and I twist too
a hand on his quickened ribs. I’d like
to touch that thick, chocolate-coloured coat.
The smell of roses on its breath exotic enough.
The deer nods, sets us at ease
With a comment on the weather.
It’s been a mild, dry autumn
Not much feed on the escarpment.
“We come down to your gardens at night.
Eat what we can ‘till we’re chased off.”
Underlying the whimsy is tension between humans and the natural world. The Illawarra region where Smith resides is home to a high population of feral Rusa deer managed by culling. Sympathy for the deer’s plight is conveyed via poignant humour. The typical power imbalance between animals and humans is reversed, the deer easing the awkwardness for the humans.
The motif of wealth recurs across the collection. One of my favourite poems was ‘Mogul’. Short enough to include in its entirety, I admired its compression, subtle music and emotional restraint.
Mogul
How long since he’d sliced and salted a tomato?
There was almost nothing he touched:
silverware and bed covers, expensive notebooks
sometimes the floury crust of a gourmet burger
the younger skin of a grandchild or subordinate.
Somewhere, another old man walks through
an overgrown paddock on a morning
without frost. Waist-high in feed and weeds
the tips of his fingers touch grass and thistle
the destruction he has fostered his whole life.
The two quintains initially appear to be a straightforward rich-man versus poor-man comparison. However, complex questions are raised: what forms can poverty take? What are the generational responsibilities of power? When is growth damaging?
Both scenarios contain paradox: the myth of Midas echoes for the wealthy man for whom ‘There was almost nothing he touched’ but the farmer brushing his hands against overgrown weeds also experiences a contradictory abundance. Stylistically, this poem seemed atypical within the collection, providing a welcome contrast. I would have loved more poems in this vein.
In ‘Thorny, Juicy’, gold appears as ordinary objects melting into a precious present moment:
gold of sunsets
gold of heavy earrings dragging at a lobe
gold of breakfast potatoes in San Francisco
gold of BBQ chips
the gold of molten glass
….
gold of tea
getting cool enough to drink
because the atoms slow
it is today
it is today
How do we experience abundance in our lives? It is not in economic terms, these poems suggest, but the ephemeral details in slow time that already surround us.
As one reads, there is a growing sense of organic accumulation that attains its own quiet richness. In the final poem, ‘Storm Front, Roll Cloud’, the speaker states:
I’ve been looking at my hands holding the knife,
at the skins, pips, cores, stalks
at the sink filling
I’ve been looking at tiny writing on packets
I’ve been looking at daddy long legs in corners
at huntsmen stepping from crannies
the knotty hair of sleeping children
jar lids, special offers.
There’s something generous and democratic about a random list. Natural sits against manmade, animal against vegetable. The only necessary order is sequence. These poems seem to question the notion of hierarchy, the idea of order as permanent state.
Frost claimed that ‘every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world’. Perhaps for Smith a poem is an attempt to slow time in order to savour the world’s ‘confusions’ and juxtapositions.
These lines from ‘Entirely Different and Unexpected Things (said Schoenberg)’ could be a microcosm for the self’s memory:
why do the things that stay with you stay with you
are they caught on just two or three hooks
tiny velcro burrs in thought and experience that collect
musics, fabrics, patterns, light
a piece of buttery foil sliding around a plate
In The Strange Matter, an individual’s experience seems a part of larger unknown processes in constant flux. However, it is also abundant with the revelations of a life’s tangible daily details. In ‘The Language of Flowers’, Smith states:
I’m writing happy midlings.
Endings can be downers, easy ways out, or revelations
but I’d like endings
to be estuaries, full of nests.
If a poem is sensual artefact, a constellation of thoughts, a constructed space for possibilities to brood, then The Strange Matter is a book richly populated with such nests.
DEBBIE LIM was shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2022. Her chapbook is Beastly Eye and her debut collection, Bathypelagia, was published by Cordite Books in 2025 and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. She was born in Sydney, where she lives on Darramuragal land.