Bathypelagia
by Debbie Lim
ISBN 978-0-6457616-6-5
A review by LISA COLLYER
Bathypelagia is Debbie Lim’s first poetry collection (a chapbook Beastly Eye appeared in 2012, with Vagabond Press) and is similarly preoccupied with the blurred line between human animals and wild fauna. If Bathypelagia is read in the context of production of the global shit show, the descent into the midnight zone seems a place of respite. There is a domestic feel to these poems, following a lover, a child, or the petrified remains of ordinary people in the wake of a volcanic eruption. The descent into the farthest and furthest depths of the ocean also hint to rising seawaters in the context of the Anthropocene, and the necessity to look towards havens of resilience when the lights go out.
The first section of the collection, ‘Midnight zone’ begins profoundly in the bathyal zone and is a pragmatic exploration of romance in the dark. The poem ‘Love Below 2000 Metres’ (p.3) is sensually survivalist, as sex takes place grappling in the dark, wrought out of desperation to feed, to hide, to spawn, and accidentally consummate.
It is difficult to speak of love at these depths.
Instead we live by other callings: attraction, hunger,
a fatal curiosity. Attempts at transcendence merely
destroy us. The only way to survive: make a bower
out of darkness. Or invent your own light:
worm of deception, burning weed, false ship of safety.
‘Love Below 2000 Metres’
(p.3)
If transcendence is the goal of art, then Lim’s poems are the benchmark to erasing the spatial borders between beings. In ‘My Son the cephalopod’ (pp.8-9) the zoomorphic characterisation of the small child slipstreams between octopus and infant. The camouflage of beast or baby, only a mother could love (fuelled by chemicals) with its oversized head, and mercurial moods: love and hate sidle. The poem tracks the tireless work of a parent dealing with the dependent yet independent-seeking child: their tentacles grasping for choke hazards, or projecting food for wall art. Finally, the parent’s attempts at constraint are tentacles cradled beneath the covers and the embrace of sea swell.
‘Every night
I rattle on about the moon, tuck tentacles down
and attempt to rock in a way that resembles
the movement, the approximate weight
of an ocean.’
‘My son the cephalopod’
(pp.8-9)
In the witching hour, men sleep, in a unique ecosystem on the bottom of the ocean while the speaker (perhaps female) observes and acts: a nod to the lion share caring load women carry. There is talk of coupling for reproduction and a setting free of offspring. Occasionally there is longing when a flash mob of top feeders or a sinking carcass bedazzles. But a resigned lack of romance prevails, except the sensory rhythmic patterns gently lulling the reader into a comforting acceptance of life without light.
Sometimes I miss the old life.
Occasionally, we receive fresh news
from above (a flash migration, the latest slick)
but the buzz rarely lasts. Then it’s back
to the grind as usual.
‘A Bar in Bathypelagia’
(pp.10-11)
Lim’s animal explorations are landed too, in museums or conserved in fossils, indicating the longevity of life beyond the watery depths, in poems, such as ‘A Taxidermied Sunfish’ (p.12) and ‘The Fossil Maker’ (pp.13). This continuous lineage works elegantly with the themes of reproduction, memory, and culture that emanate across this sumptuous collection, with its lullaby rhythms toing-and-froing like the baby being swooned to sleep. We too, are invited to sink and accept the darkness, make our own light, and find ways to cope.
There is tension in the second part ‘Fin, Bone’ where the domestic transforms to a suffocating cage where untamed mythic beasts seek freedom in a series of intertextual explorations. The blistering poem, ‘Love Note from the Medusa’ (p.21) uses the first-person speaker to occupy the gorgon in kinky overtures, one who speaks of agency and unyielding desire.
‘Underestimated,
I trail my tangled
boudoir, chains
lit up with toxins.
I am (in fact) not
vain, simple self-
sufficient, loyal
to the old currents
and my own
slow lacy appetites.’
‘Love Note from the Medusa’
(p. 21)
Transformation also comes in the form of bound feet, in a numbered poem, that reads like an instruction manual with imperatives on how to turn feet into lotus bulbs. The complicit mutilation is instigated by the mother on the daughter and continues (until outlawed), following cultural traditions, in an eerily prosaic tone. Beauty and abjection embrace and repel beneath the sole. There is an intersectional feminist probe: of gender, culture and class here, where the bound feet transform the woman with lotus feet into one, who is waited upon, rather than being the one to serve.
4.
Every second day
turn your ears to stone. Unwrap
the bandage and ignore her crying
as you re-bind them,
each time tighter. Remind yourself,
as your own mother did,
that there is no such thing as a truly
liberated foot.’
‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ (pp. 32-34)
Lim’s poems converse with one another, often with the the motif of stone. Whether it be ‘ears to stone’ (‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ (pp. 32-34) or passive representations of ‘Women in classical Chinese love poems’ (p.35) to the petrified ‘Bodies of Pompeii’ (p.36). Recall the Medusa? The mise-en-scene of an unexpected domestic death are bodies mid-sentence, crawling away, and halted by the infamous volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BC. The abrupt endings of each line mimic the truncated lives, yet entombed in legend, ordinary lives now transcended to museum artefacts.
‘Unburied, they weigh more than bone ever could.
They have shaken off the ash and refuse to rest. So many
stopped limbs. Mouth holes, eye holes, a balled fist.’
‘Bodies of Pompeii’ (p.36)
The concluding section ‘Air’ draws breath and brings life to ground, beginning with our museum obsession with exhibiting exotica. The violent romance of ‘Hauling the Sunfish into the Gallery’ (p. 45) speaks to the human desire of scientific classification and public curiosity. We are challenged to see our perverse curios as rebirthed, while the ungainly wrenching from the ocean is cleverly wrought in a one-way bargaining agreement between collector and fish.
‘I have noticed the fused bones of your mouth
set in their small surprised o. How, tentative,
you near my gaping window. I say only this:
think of it as a second birth, your odd calling.’
‘Hauling the Sunfish into the Gallery’ (p. 45)
Lim’s poems often sit side by side in a conversation of opposites, like ‘Captive’ (p. 50) where death (a blue ringed octopus) is caught then humanely released, and ‘Praying Mantis’ (p.51) the only living thing in a brush of dead wood. Or ‘Gift of the Sloth (p.52) another instruction manual on occupying tree habitat, and the way in which the fur of the sloth is habitat to ‘beetles, moths and mites’ (p. 52). This poem is juxtaposed to ‘Etiquette for Trees’ (p. 53) with directives of courtesy for the sake of safety in polite (arboreal) society.
‘Respect the branch tips
of others. Learn to get by
on minimal sleep (which is, in any case,
intended for the weak and mobile).
But travel your roots boldly
through darkness and to great depths’
‘Etiquette for Trees’ (p. 53)
Lim’s Bathypelagia is a collection of multidimensional expansiveness. The auricles of an ear, the habitat of sloth fur, or the plumbs of the ocean are occupied by beings of fur, fin, and flesh interchangeably. The domestic zone (a cage of sorts) is transcended with imagination that migrates beyond atmospheres, beneath and above. The lines between these zones are blurred and the status of beings transcended. A bound foot is a girl mutilated, yet elevated; or the noxious fumes of a volcano elevate everyday life to exhibit status.
LISA COLLYER is the author of two poetry collections, Gold Digger (2025) and How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023), the latter being short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award, and both published with Life Before Man Books. Her personal essay, ‘Prolonged Exposure’ is published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage (2025) with Fremantle Press. Her poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’ was short-listed for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025). She was a recent artist in residence for The National Trust of W.A. and Bundanon Art Museum. She is currently writing a literary novel on grief, booze and jazz.