Displaying a fondness for language itself over the confines of settings, characters and narratives, Ainslee Meredith’s debut collection playfully amplifies tenuous realities through deft unexpected, previously almost inconceivable touches. Her irreverence is for words themselves, aware the world she’s writing them from is immune to her protestations. Drifting from France to Quebec to North Dakota and beyond, the poems in Pinetorch experiment with the lives of inanimate objects and turn common linguistic perception of phenomena inside out to craft stark, strange poetic objects which resonate through their resistance to easy understanding.
In surrealist fantasies and misremembered pastorals, Meredith is drawn to peculiar moments, understated though not quite ignored, which allow her passage into a universal mode. On the planes she finds herself on, everything is malleable – adjectives can be verbs, the psychological can be physical, the nuanced can be turbo-charged. The recurring images ground the audience some – time is measured insistently, by clocks and by lives, directly and by the things that happen while its passing; it is kept, lost, forgotten; pasts don’t pass and futures can arrive too late.
The control over language is sometimes astonishing – the intelligent deployment of a formidable vocabulary and the weary, woozy juxtapositions are startling – and Meredith easily calls her poems back when they spiral too far from home. Each poem is dense, folded full of tangents accidental and deliberate, but often this does a disservice to the sparkling voice and cordial pacing – it is easy to get lost in these poems, easy to feel a little abandoned as Meredith skips to a higher register or slips back toward the surface. The prose poems are particularly overwhelming and suffer from an abundance of signification. Such problems are curtailed some by the brevity of the poems and the collection, Meredith’s austerity demanding the audience hang on every line. That doesn’t make it any easier to connect with the characters or the worlds they inhabit but sentimentality isn’t high on the list of priorities for Pinetorch – these are poems about the capacity of language to inhabit a world apart from the routines of the conscious mind.
Rating: 3/5
Pinetorch is presented by Express Media and Australian Poetry as part of the first New Voices Series poetry collection of 2013.
