A rendering of threats: Stephanie Green reviews 'Critical State' by B. R. Dionysius

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Oct 4

Critical State by B. R. Dionysius, Calanthe Press 2022

The poetry of B. R. Dionysius in Critical State holds continuity and rupture in tension as he explores the encroachments of the Anthropocene on distinctive Queensland regional environments. Focused around the poet's nature observing adventures, the book is divided into five sections which reflect the diverse habitats of the state. These poems capture the beauty and terrible loss of wild creatures and places, and joyful glimpses of survival and recovery.

The book offers an appealing variety of form: shorter poems intersperse longer poems with lines often extending through successive verses, creating a sense of flow and transition. Many of the poems are cameos of experience, recounted almost as stories immersed in vivid tangibility. In the first section, 'The Wet Tropics', a journey to the Lockhart River reflects awkward realisations with "the garish vehicle's intrusion" scaring away a white heron, and the wonderful contrasts encapsulated in the image of a flock of Torresian imperial pigeons whose "wings grip the air like we sink into a foam cushion". This poem is one among many that remind us of the ugly impact of the human, the 'petrochemical triptych' of "plastic chair, esky, thongs", and the haunting "trail of death" that the travellers manage to escape.

Dionysius's ornithological expertise is evident throughout book, which is, in part, an accounting of endangered species. Awareness of the need to care for Queensland's species diversity is evident in the muscularity of poems like 'Palm Cockatoo', a bird "like a cast iron oven's stovepipe as it tips its head to look you in the eye twenty metres below the lowland rainforest". Harried by forest habitat destruction and hunters seeking its black feathers, the poet tracks the bird "through sound, nuts cracking claw to mouth", conscious of intruding into the forest world as, "you watched each other for a red hour. The only noise the breaking of the world and only one of you doing their part".

Critical State tackles much more than ornithological decline. In the second section, 'The Red West', we are introduced to Gastric Brooding Frogs and Black-throated Finches, Ornamental snakes and Desert Rat-kangaroos. In 'Spinifex', Dionysius captures the remoteness of place as, driving through remote country, he "pulled over like a road rage victim" to see

... an Australian bustard's severed
head, floating haint-like, the broken centre line
of its neck rising like a magnesium flare over
the prickly grass field; this interwar zeppelin
cruising to its destiny.

Many poems in Critical State set out to shift point of view, with humour, irony and pathos, as Dionysius imagines himself in the position of creatures endangered by pollution and human conquest. Perhaps the most eloquent of these is the very first poem in the collection, 'Gouldian Finch', a lament for the once-verdant country where the finch ranged, its numbers now "reduced to the long thin wisp of a paint brush." In the third section, 'Wide Bay', we meet the Mary River Turtle, "famous for dying young", and the rebellious 'Spotted Tailed Quoll' with its penchant for invading chicken coops "because they are there". After all, he asks, "Who else will upset your order, mess up the room". While the collection as a whole expresses a deep sense of despair and fury there is also beauty and delight here, as in 'At Play with Grey-crowned Babblers', we meet birds who "pry secrets from the trees" uttering "chirrups that/ crawl up your back & infest your head like happiness".

Dionysius writes in his short Foreword how, as a boy, he "saw firsthand the consequences of the destruction of the Brigalow Forest (Acacia harpophylla), that belt of wattle that once stretched from the Queensland border right up to Townsville". The scope of forest-clearing and the urgency with which it needs to be addressed is strikingly evident in the fourth section, 'The Darling Downs', where the force of this destruction has shaped one the most powerful poems in this collection 'Brigalow: An Extinct Pastoral', where he describes the machines that "clawed/ through six million acres … carnivorous in their vast appetite" and "the silvery-leafed acacias" consigned to "history's hothouse".

Evidence that humans, too, are vulnerable to the consequences of environmental destruction, is woven through the collection, for example, in the fifth section, 'The Great Southeast', the human body becomes a dying universe metaphorically ravaged by the "signal flares" of the predatory disease, 'Black Lung':

where the stars have
collapsed into themselves
packed so tight together that the atoms are crushed
& cannot breathe.

This is a well-structured and attentively edited book published by Calanthe Press, based in Mount Tamborine and named in honour of Judith Wright, Australian lion poet and prominent environmentalist and peace activist. Mindful of the connections, Dionysius dedicates his last poem to Wright. It is a fierce acknowledgment of her legacy: "She was the flint of eco-consciousness that was fiery born", her words reminding us, "never yield, never yield".

I found Critical State a richly rewarding and instructive collection to delve into, both for the power of the writing and as a rendering of the threats and losses that surely demand an urgent change in private and public attitudes. Notes are provided at the end about birds and other creatures appearing in these pages whose populations are vulnerable to extinction. With this book, Dionysius adds to his already significant contribution to Australian poetry, including as founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. Critical State is his ninth poetry collection.

- Stephanie Green

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Stephanie Green is an Australian writer, widely published in literary magazines, creative anthologies and scholarly journals, most recently, StylusLit, Axon, Text, Meniscus, Not Very Quiet, Live Encounters and Burrow. She has released a volume of collected prose poems, Breathing in Stormy Seasons (Recent Work Press, 2019) and a selection of short stories, Too Much too Soon (Pandanus 2006). She is also an Adjunct Senior Lecturer with Griffith University.
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