Unearthing what has been buried: Angela Costi reviews 'Earlier' by Rosanna E. Licari

By Admin on June 26, 2024

Earlier by Rosanna E. Licari, Ginninderra 2023.

Rosanna E. Licari's first multi-award-winning poetry collection, An Absence of Saints, UQP 2010, took both personal and public pasts into reimagined terrains. Her second, Earlier, Ginninderra 2023, builds on this focus of going back to explore, and to amplify existence in its various domains and manifestations. Her research is vast and in depth, including the Nāsadīya Sūkta (The Hymn of Creation, Rig Veda 10:129), a scientific discovery of a hominid named Lucy, and the harsh migration history of colonial Australia with the establishment of the Bonegilla migrant camp.

The sixty-seven poems are divided into six sections, each beginning with a line from a poem in that section. As a whole these six lines/headings are tantalising poetics:

perhaps the loneliness wanted to share its darkness

no skullcap will fetter ideas

a bristling corpus that stretches and champs

the doctor will join my head, heart and life lines

the soft rain presses the day into eucalypt leaves and bark

a brisk wave slaps my face

In the first section, science and divinity are connected in poems dealing with the origin of life, Darwin's attitude to angiosperm/flowering plants, and a study of the oculus (eye), auris (ear), nasus (nose), oris (mouth):

The spirits of water and ice came with the wind. Sculpted by
them, you became long and narrow, breathed slowly to
regulate your climate. In summer, the wildflowers burst into
a world of sun that seemed to last for only a moment and you
looked quietly at the strange, emerging creatures to get the
measure of the kill.
..................................................'The Vagaries of the Head: A Contemplation' '3. Nasus'

Earlier is an immersive composite of free verse and lyric found in condensed stanzas and in cascading spaces with intermittent words. This is a collection adept at employing the requisite form for the subject or theme of the poem. For example, in 'Drifters', which is a homage to phytoplankton and an ecopoem, the lines and spaces drift in and out as if in the sea:

& their cloud-seeding gas
...............spreads through evaporation, swelling
cumuli that wander
...............like pregnant dugongs
over humid, verdant canopy.

On the rainforest floor,
...............the three-toed tracks of cassowaries.
The rumbling weather echoes in their throats.
........................................................... - 'Drifters'

In the second section, there's a focus on unearthing what has been buried and reclaiming what has been surpassed. A number of poems deal with discoveries of fossils, including the poem about Mary Anning who was the first to find the complete skeleton of a Plesiosaurus. Anning's ground-breaking work in the early 19^th century was recognised much later, in 2010. Licari's poem, 'Mary Anning discovers the plesiosaur, 1824' begins with a magnified rendition of Anning's work life, integrating the poetic names of her discoveries:

These objects you dig around seem
as normal to you as breathing –
snake stones, devil's fingers and verteberries.
They are everywhere in the limestone and shale|
of Lyme Regis. You sell
curiosities, medicinal and mystical.

In this one-page poem, Licari provides a complete story, and advocates for her in the final stanza:

Mary, no one wanted to believe,
let alone have you enter the wood-panelled halls
trodden by men, and only men
while you held the remnants
of the Jurassic
between your pick and fingers.
........................................................... - Mary Anning discovers the plesiosaur, 1824

In the section titled 'the doctor will join my head, heart and life lines' there are a number of poems drawing on Licari's ancestral roots including her family's escape from war in the former Yugoslavia, the death of a baby cousin during Tito's reign, and the return to an estranged birthplace, Rijeka, Croatia. As her inheritance is one of upheaval and seeking refuge, there is a reliance on stories passed from generation to generation as a way of keepsake and archive. In several poems, the mother voices the storyline ('Exiles', 'Oliver' 'Le Madonne') for her daughter, the poet, to record.

Further, this section speaks directly to 'head, heart and life lines', as it braids body and mind, showing how a mother's dementia begins and builds. This is deftly done by way of disrupting a chronological account and using a particular form in 'New Histories'; a long poem comprised of seven unaligned, unjustified parts across four pages:

6.
Prepare for the day
when new histories transform
into no history. The voice on the phone
asking, Who am I talking to?

The use of dialogue between the mother with cognitive impairment and her daughter in 'New Histories' is arresting. In addition, the mother's new stories threaded through the poem create tension between truth and fabrication:

2.
Now I am more my mother's mother
than she is mine. And Africa means
something to her. She says she went to
Addis Ababa. It's in Ethiopia, you
know?
........................................................... - New Histories

The endeavour to acknowledge the new storyline in 'New Histories' reminds me of Julie Goyder's published thesis about actively listening and collaborating with people living with Alzheimer's disease. Goyder states:

When storying is seen as a way of creating human relationships, stories told by people with Alzheimer's Disease begin to make more sense. When these stories are seen to be dysfunctional, the reasons are often to do with a lack of response and collaboration, a collaboration which is a necessary factor in all everyday story function.
........................................................ We'll be married in Fremantle, Julie Goyder, Fremantle Press, 2001

The narratives throughout Earlier are compelling, whether they're family based, environmental or etymological. For example, in the poem 'Paradeisos' where this word's origins are contained in the poet's 'wild garden'. The word paradeisos, πᾰρᾰ́δεισος in Greek, meaning: a park; paradise, the garden of Eden', taken from the Persian word, paridaiza, referencing:

1. the garden owned by the Persian nobility
2. enclosed park, pleasure-ground
3. denoting the state of future bliss
........................................................... - Oxford, Wiktionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionaries

All three meanings are evoked in 'Paradeisos' with its prose-like structure, opening from word to a world, creating 'A renewal of spirit' with 'The hum of beating wings'. But reminding us that this glorious garden with its 'bees', 'dragon fruit', 'scents'… is 'earth's yield', with its random uncertainties, accidents and invitations:

Between the fronds I shape, secateurs nick flesh and blood
tastes of iron. Alone, looking up, my sarong slips to the
ground. The cloudless blue belongs to me.
........................................................... - Paradeisos

Unravelling multiple associations is something Licari does deftly in Earlier. In 'Young Love, Botany Bay' there are three narratives that entangle and bind superbly: the young lovers, the relationship with fathers, the place itself, and how it's been corrupted by overdevelopment. 'The Bay remembers the spawning grounds / with every gasping take off.'

Earlier is an inspiring collection, in turn, inspired by Licari's curiosity and intellect:

I often write outside my subject area (double major in Italian and drama). I love watching documentaries and reading about science, evolution and the natural world. I am constantly curious about what's out there and how it happens.
.......- Licari, InReview, 'The rhyme and reason behind how to ignite that poetic spark'

The work and creative output of ancient poets, scientists, archaeologists, visual artists such as Margaret Olley, as well as the study of lizards, insects, and many varieties of birds, enter the poetic orbit of Earlier. There is a skilled merger of micro with macro, familial with foreign, research with memory turned into one memorable line after another… documenting what underpins discovery and legacy.

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Angela Costi is based in Naarm. She is also known as Αγγελικη Κωστη among the Cypriot Greek diaspora, which is her heritage. The author of six poetry collections, including Honey & Salt (Five Islands Press, 2007), Lost in Mid Verse (Owl Publishing, 2014), An Embroidery of Old Maps and New (Spinifex Press, 2021) and The Heart of the Advocate (forthcoming, Liquid Amber Press, 2025). Funding from the City of Melbourne enabled her to produce four video poems, which are published in Issue 29 of Rochford Street Review. Her poetry, essays, microfiction and reviews are in a wide number of national and international literary journals. Angela can be found at https://www.facebook.com/AngelaCostiPoetics/