Thistle
by Kate Maxwell
ISBN 9781764106870
Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK
Thistle, Kate Maxwell’s third poetry collection, is a book depicting the trajectory of a life, choosing, as its approach, a dipping in and out of time. The collection is dedicated to the poet’s dead mother, whose late-onset dementia is movingly recalled in the elegiac “The Forest and the Trees”:
When she’s finally gone
not like this
not this
slow scrape of self
pieces of the past
falling
like potato peelings
around her slippered feet
…………………………
ever searching, ever trying
to recall the question
she can’t answer
(pp. 7-8)
This poem is echoed in “Into the Forest” in the final section of the book:
If you ever want to find my mother
Follow the tissues:
those crumpled,
hardly damp, thin cotton clouds
held to twitching lips,
………………………………….
Like an ancient Gretel,
she’s still leaving trails,
flagging out her one-way journey
into deeper woodlands
(p.100)
2.
and has its conclusion in the evocative “Believe”:
I used to believe in clouds
until the roar of a Boeing 737
dissolved my Kinder innocence,
back when I’d paint stick-figure
me and stick-figure you
floating in a bright blue sky.
Yet, while reason reminds
there is nothing above
nothing to hold in the heavens,
I believe – like ice crystals
suspended in the atmosphere –
you too, are somewhere
(pp.102-3)
“The Forest and the Trees”, and “Kaleidoscope”, both appearing in the opening section of the collection, serve to trigger childhood memories, beginning with “Beyond” – the poet’s recollections of a small country town and her yearning for the extraterrestrial:
I would lie: palms cradling neck,
listening to chirp and croak,
drinking in jewelled black,
brighter than neon, higher than the highest
high-rise, more distant than a million strangers.
(p.4)
The book’s title, Thistle, and the back-cover statement “Life doesn’t always bloom the way you expect. Sometimes it prickles,” suggest that a number of the poems will deal with life’s disappointments and irritations. These poems, many of which appear in the second section, are a delight – humorous, perspicacious and cutting-edge, providing social comment. In “Waiting in the Queue” Maxwell presents us with the graceless male ahead of her, who
flicks his card
over the machine
without a word
to the smiling waitress
or busy barista
then clutching coffee
almost collides into a pram
3.
as he wades through
humans in his way.
(pp.48-9)
In “Colossus” she takes aim at those unnamed “who could hope to govern the globe”, as:
A set of opposable thumbs does not grant me dominion.
Primates, possums, birds – even some frogs
could hold cutlery, if so inclined.
…………………………………………………..
yet still we wail at the height of the moon.
How dare it be higher or brighter than us!
the billionaires cry, punching holes into space
just to show the damn universe who’s the real boss.
(pp. 57-58)
“Basking” is another such poem, where the unnamed protagonist is immediately and amusingly identifiable:
The mogul’s getting hitched again
at ninety-three. He can’t seem to make one last
past his plans for an afternoon nap
and world domination.
…………………………
an empire so layered
in flashy fabrications
that he cannot place
where he left his last wife
or whether he had one at all.
…………………………..
Each crevice sprawled across his chin
a final line in the sand
for each bride
who wasn’t what he ordered.
(pp.62-3)
The third and final section of Kate Maxwell’s book, including the already discussed “Into the Forest” and “Believe”, encapsulates a time of looking back and reflection. The beautiful opening poem, “I Cannot Build a Shelter”, engenders a sense of determination to make the best of a flawed and often disappointing world:
4.
from hollow sticks in the grass
snapped with cold fingers broken
with boot crunched by the claws
of brush turkey feet hurled skyward
in storm and too damp to burn
too fickle too thin to build shield
from the wind that might thatch
a tense weave against chill of the night.
(p.77)
But I will build shelter within these small
words a home for my yearning layered
in script sealed in dry ink patched
with hubris and hope wrapping heart
with the wishes of how it could be
(p.78)
However, humour is not lacking in this deeper, more introspective section, and there is still room for irony and wit at the expense of some of the challenges of modern living. Proof of identity, or even of being human, is one of the more annoying of these, as in the poem “Prove Humanity”:
Check a box
to prove you’re not a box
of whirring parts
wired circuits or stuff
you just don’t understand
then when the box
learns to recognise
our patterns, ways
………………….
then they’ll have to
set the sentient
new challenges −
(p.82)
Subject matter of the poems in Thistle ranges through personal, political and environmental to keenly observational, and Maxwell is not afraid to reveal heartfelt emotion, or satirise some of the absurdities of the human condition. Experimentation with poetic form and astute wordplay add to the mix, ensuring a multi-faceted perspective. Readers will find much to enjoy in this collection, the more poignant poems continuing to reverberate long after a first reading.
MARGARET BRADSTOCK is a Sydney poet, critic and editor, lectured at UNSW for 25 years, has been Asialink Writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Poetry collections include The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes, the first Australian anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret won the Banjo Paterson Poetry Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017. Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024) is her ninth collection.