The model is a model of the matrix, and as models are always idealising and reductive, there is an excess of material in the model object which is not relevant to this modelling instance. In the case of Malouf 's oeuvre, this would include for instance biographical details, meta-textual information, or other themes. The model object (the text) carries information (cargo) from the matrix (including cultural background) to the application (the model's intended use). In this case, the cargo is the way in which Romantic irony functions as a tool for expressing the subject's longing, but inability, to transcend the self and connect to something outside the self, which is an expression of the absolute. What constitutes this connection changes between the Romantic irony, as explored by the early German Romantics in Jena, and its contemporary application.

# **III. David Malouf**

# **Malouf: An Author in Context**

David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934, of Christian Lebanese, Portuguese Sephardi Jewish, and English heritage. Although his mother was originally from England, his father was born in Australia. Malouf 's childhood was an Edwardian one, which his mother recreated in the image of her own English background (Hansson 1991, 23; Heinke 2005, 8). Malouf 's education followed the classic English style of the upper middle classes: Brisbane Grammar school, then arts at the University of Queensland, and finally teaching positions at St. Anselm's College, England and the University of Sydney.

When it is not situated in Australia, Malouf 's poetry engages with England, but more explicitly with the continent in the form of Italian settings, as well as a plethora of allusions to German literature (Petersson 1990, 129). Malouf has identified Goethe and Thomas Mann as important influences on his writing, and his poetry references other German authors in its titles or epitaphs, such as Heinz Piontek in "Birthday Poem" and Joachim Ringelnatz in Malouf 's adaptation of "Die Karpfen in der Wilhelmstrasse 15" in "The Carp" (both from *Bicycle and Other Poems*1 ). Other influences include Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Martin Heidegger (Hansson 1991, 19). Following on from Malouf 's assertion that it is "not simply that Australia produces *clumsy* variants of Europe, it produces critical variants of Europe" (Malouf and Davidson 1990, 288), the application of Australia's European cultural heritage in the form of Romantic irony could be viewed as one such variation, albeit adapted to subject–world relationships in an Australian context.

It is certainly as an Australian author that Malouf has primarily been read. The reception of his novels within the context of Australia's History Wars and the identity crises of nationalism in the Howard years have overshadowed his poetry, which reaches from the regional to the cosmopolitan and mythical with very little of the national in between. In this respect, it reflects a tendency in contemporary Australian poetry to move away from Harpur-like aspirations of national poetry, towards extreme attention to local places and participation in wider global communities: a kind of *global regionalism*. Malouf writes of the world and of Australia from the spaces which have formed him as a Brisbane poet, not least Deception Bay. This focus is reflected in the selection of poets in the 2016 Langford collection of Australian poetry, and it can be seen most clearly in Watson's writing.

Scholarship on Malouf, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, situates his work in a national context, which was influenced by a larger discourse on Australian history and identity that was occurring at that time. Malouf 's poetic writing, however, is a poor fit for a positive assertion of Australian national identity formation, which could explain why his novels have received a great deal more attention than his poetry. Even within national literature, such as that of Australia, Ashcroft argues that writers are driven by "transnational" concerns which exceed the "boundaries of the nation-state" (Ashcroft 2013, 36). The nation in Malouf 's work is better understood as *Heimat* (Ashcroft), which "becomes the promise in postcolonial writing that replaces the promise of nation, what it may be like in the *future* but the promise of *Heimat* transfers to the present" (ibid.).

*Heimat* reflects Malouf 's views on the role of literature in the creation of a culture in Australia: specifically, to bridge the divide between the author's language as a British inheritance, and the Australian landscape. However, Malouf 's poetry also reflects the provisional nature of the very *Heimat* he regards literature as creating. In this respect, Malouf is programmatically Romantic. Romanticism's image of the human – as a being that never *is* but that is only ever *becoming*; that can never reach a definitive identity and sways between necessity and freedom, social conditioning and self-determination – is in this respect an ironic one. It is one which is paralleled in Malouf 's understanding of a specifically Australian subject, or even a specifically Australian literature.

*Remembering Babylon* is one of Malouf 's best-known novels. It is easy to understand why the book and its treatment of Indigenous characters and themes of belonging garnered such critical interest, in both the academic and popular press. Published in 1993, it emerged just after the final decision on the Mabo case was delivered in 1992,2 and at the start of the History Wars which followed. Peter Otto situates the debate around *Remembering Babylon* (as seen in *The Age* newspaper, November 1993) firmly within the context of the Mabo decision, positing that the novel came at a time when "the line between Australia's settler past and its postcolonial present was being redrawn" (Otto 2010, 231). This "redrawing" of the lines of colonial history to the present could be seen in the period between the Keating and Howard governments,3 which came to be known as the History Wars.

#### **Malouf and the History Wars**

This period saw the rise and clash of two competing views of Australian history: the "Black Armband" and the "White Blindfold" extremes. Historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, whose work focussed on the massacres of Indigenous peoples throughout Australia's colonial past, were subject to a huge backlash from conservative historians, including Keith Windschuttle, who asserted that they had essentially invented evidence of British violence towards the Indigenous population. The pejorative term "Black Armband" was coined by the historian Geoffrey Blainey, who thought that the younger generation of historians placed too strong an emphasis on wrongs committed in Australia's past (Macintyre and A. Clark 2004, 3).

The battle over the balance sheet of Australian history ultimately reflected the different political visions of the Australian Labor Party under Paul Keating and the conservative Australian Liberals under John Howard; as well as their respective voter-bases, and the narratives directed at these voter bases. Where Paul Keating pushed a policy of multiculturalism and closer ties to Australia's Asian neighbours, for John Howard, bashing leftist political correctness was a safe path to gaining conservative votes. As Stuart Macintyre writes: "The elites provided Howard with a foil for the battlers, whose achievements and sentiments they blackened" (ibid., 4). At a time when the movement for Indigenous land rights was gaining critical momentum, a narrative that did not disturb the status quo for those workers reliant on the mining and logging industries was also an existential matter. The dynamics of the characterisation of the left as bleeding-heart radicals and perpetrators of false information, polarised against the hard-working ordinary Joe, is familiar, and by no means unique to Australian politics.4 Reactions to the push to keep the atrocities visited on Indigenous-Australians in the history books and public consciousness ranged from extreme denial to a simple desire not to have to think about it. Ultimately, the History Wars were a struggle over how the country was to be defined in the present rather than the past. Macintyre summarises what was at stake:

The rewards for coming to terms with the past that Paul Keating offered in his Big Picture included greater tolerance, increased autonomy, a deeper understanding of the land and its original inhabitants, an outward-looking, productive and self-confident nation. The risks of a Black Armband view of Australian history that Geoffrey Blainey identified included intolerance of old Australia, loss of sovereignty, the tying up of productive resources, disunity, pessimism and guilt. (ibid., 14–15)

Closer examination of Macintyre's assessment of the stakes for each side quoted above reveals that a large part of the issue is not only the facts of history, but also how it is acceptable to relate to a European heritage, and what that relationship means for belonging in Australia. The History Wars became a situation where people, who in many cases had known no other home, were being urged to see themselves as, at best, immigrants.

For authors such as Malouf, who were educated in an environment still fundamentally British,5 the basic positions I have briefly described here form an important backdrop for examining the relationship between the self, the local landscape, and the authors' use of a European linguistic and literary heritage. Australia's colonial past has had a significant impact on how modern Australian literature is received, particularly in its relationship with its European and Indigenous cultural heritages. Closer attention to Malouf 's non-literary writing reveals a far more complex attitude towards the Australian identity than a "rush to resolve Australia's contradictions": instead, his viewpoint is deeply seated in ideas of Romanticism, and attitudes towards space and time, in which Indigenous relations necessarily play an important role (Otto 2010, 242). This is certainly the case in his novels. Indigenous presence does not, however, play a significant (if any) role in Malouf 's poetic oeuvre. The continued presence of Romanticism in Australian poetry when viewed in this context is not so much a product of "negativity" (Kane 1996) as an alternative mode to express the personal experiences of being Australian or being in Australia. In-between states that both reach for and reflect on the impossibility of transcendence, the use of poetic language to express concepts otherwise inexpressible, and the Romanticisation of the everyday, are at the heart of Romanticism, thus making it an extremely useful toolkit for the poetry of writers whose cultural identity is the product of a cultural uprooting.

#### **Malouf: A Romantic?**

Malouf has been a strong presence in the Australian cultural scene as a critic and social commentator, for instance as part of the Boyer lecture series, *A Spirit of Play – The Making of Australian Consciousness* in 1998 (published as a book under the same name). However, it is his novels which have gained the most critical attention. Don Randall comments that "*An Imaginary Life* claimed the lion's share of attention until the mid-1990s when *Remembering Babylon* became, and subsequently has remained, the main topic-text for Malouf criticism"; although there has since been some interesting work on Malouf 's war novel *Fly Away Peter* (Randall 2007, 182).

On the basis of his novels *Remembering Babylon* and *Conversations at Curlew Creek*, as well as his Australian nationality, Malouf 's work is often deemed to be postcolonial in its content, postmodern in its narrative techniques, and post-Romantic because of its representation of nature and the ideal of unified humanity (Heinke 2005, 10). The post-Romanticism which Heinke mentions is just one of many various permutations of the term Romanticism in scholarship relating to Malouf 's works. Existing research on David Malouf is diverse, particularly when journal articles are taken into account. However, in terms of booklength works,6 the topic of Romanticism is perennial, if not examined in great detail.

There is a general consensus that Romanticism is present in Malouf 's work. However, in detailed analysis, the term becomes more of a byword used in combination with concerns of subjectivity and national identity. The ability to create unity and meaning attributed to the individual imagination (Hannson), and the importance of mythology (Bliss), are also identified as Romantic concerns in Malouf 's writing. In Caroline Bliss's work, however, the focus is less on the Romantic idea of a new mythology, and more on Malouf 's engagement with "specifically Australian permutations of myth", which include "transportation and the exile from a distant, perhaps never glimpsed 'home', mateship, the bushranger, the lost child, and the baptism of Anzac" (Bliss 2000, 725).

Patrick Buckridge is one of the few writers to apply Romantic theory to Malouf 's work, by examining the intersections of Schiller's understanding of the sublime and Malouf 's war novel *Fly Away Peter*, as well as *Child's Play*. Nevertheless, the aspect of the sublime that Buckridge identifies as Romantic is merely "Romantic egotism" and the "Romantic illusion of transcendence" (Buckridge 1994, 167–68). This has led to the odd situation in which Buckridge's essay has been identified as one of the most substantiated examinations of Romanticism in Malouf 's work (Bliss 2000), without Buckridge actually identifying it as such.

Vivienne Hamilton remains the only author who has specifically explored Romantic genre and form in Malouf 's novels. Taking over the term from Ivor Indyk's work, Vivienne Hamilton's master's thesis examines the "post-Romantic" aspects of Malouf 's "construction of individual metamorphoses" (Hamilton April 2001, 7). Although she speaks of "the transcendent aspect of spiritual metamorphosis, achieved through [a] reconnection with primitive origins", the connections she makes to the post-Romantic are similarities between Malouf 's novels and the genre of the Bildungsroman, including the Künstlerroman subgenre. The former focuses on "the construction of the metamorphosis of the protagonists", while the latter looks at "Malouf 's construction of the artistic development of the protagonist in *Harland's Half Acre*" (Hamilton 2001, 12–14). In both cases, the focus is on the way Malouf 's novels portray the power of the imagination to transform reality through perception. In Hamilton's work, this concept of the imagination is deemed to be strongly connected to "Romantic ideology", whilst she identifies "retrospection" as a "major tenet of Romantic doctrine" (ibid., 60).

This importance of the power of the imagination as a Romantic trope is largely attached to two figures from Malouf 's novels: Johnno from the novel of the same name, and Frank from *Harland's Half Acre*. In the character of Johnno, Hamilton sees "an embryonically Romantic emphasis on the power of the human imagination and memory to transform perceptions" (ibid., 18). The most obvious example of this is Malouf 's emphasis on the power of Frank's imagination to transform perception and consequently reality, although Hamilton acknowledges that the metaphorical expression of "human interdependence with the natural world" is not exclusively Romantic (ibid., 40). Hamilton's research has been influenced by Neilsen's identification of the character of Frank as a Romantic artist figure (Neilsen 1990, 18).

In fact, many of the references to Romanticism in academic writing on David Malouf are in response to Neilsen's 1990 book. Although it only covers Malouf 's six novels existent at the time of publication, Neilsen engages with the question of poetry within his analysis of the novels, if only because of the poetic nature of Malouf 's prose. He identifies the two main themes of Malouf 's work as nationality (Australianness) and mythology. Seventeen years after Neilsen's publication, Don Randall would identify the national aspect as Romantic:

In *Fly Away Peter*, and still more clearly in *The Great World*, one can discern the influence of the Romantic conception of the need for a nation-forging, nation inaugurating epic. [As] a maker of national myths, Malouf tacitly affirms the importance of a shared lore in the production of national consciousness – again a notion that is central to Romantic thought. (Randall 2007, 3)

However, rather than exploring the exact connection between Romanticism and those aspects of Malouf 's writing which he identifies as Romantic, Neilsen instead veers into a structuralist approach. He identifies essential Straussian oppositions of "wholeness/incompleteness, nature/culture, and change/stasis" (Neilsen 1990, 3). According to Neilsen, "a persistent theme of Malouf 's [is] the problematic and blurred boundary between life and art – a metaphysical concern" and "the construction of social reality through language" (ibid.).

Neilsen views all themes and oppositions in Malouf 's work as variants on the basic sets of wholeness/incompleteness, nature/culture, and change/stasis (ibid., 45). He makes the connection to Romanticism explicit only in certain tropes, such as the Doppelganger figure and "the existential or 'romantic' hero alienated from bourgeois society and from himself, searching for truth in an absurd world" (ibid., 18). This leads Neilsen to define Malouf as a "post-Romantic" writer (ibid., 4). He uses this term specifically to refer to Malouf 's "priorities" of myth, nature, and also transcendence, which "is achieved through what Malouf himself refers to as the 'power of the imagination' " (ibid.). Neilsen's positive interpretation of the imagination set the tone for later readings of Romanticism in Malouf.

The priority of nature in Malouf 's work is also commonly connected to Romanticism. Grogan sees the Romantic in Malouf 's work in his critique of rationalism and his interest in nature and the imagination, stating that "Nature, for Malouf, is beyond all categorical capture. Nonetheless, a poetic language may attempt to regain it through images, metaphor and gestures of unification" (Grogan 2014, 28). This implies an understanding that Romanticism in Malouf 's writing is defined by the power of poetic language to regain nature in idealist terms. Grogan would say that the figure of the child in *An Imaginary Life* "finally embodies the possibility of an intimate, delicate, joyful and reciprocal relationship with the natural world" (ibid.). Hamilton also identifies a "contemporary Romantic ecology" in Malouf 's work, which would "look long and hard at the radical other of culture, the wilderness, as a complex possible model for transforming human society"; and she is by no means the only scholar to equate a positive view of nature with Romanticism in Malouf 's novels (Hamilton 2001, 32–33).

Yet if a positive relationship, or even "oneness", with the natural world is Romantic in Malouf 's work, in what context can a positive view of nature not be considered Romantic, or an artist figure cease to be a Romantic artist figure? Aside from Vivienne Hamilton's reference to Coleridge's *Biographia Literaria* and the occasional Wordsworth quote, the research outlined above asserts a Romantic connection based on a perceived consensus which does not reflect the multiplicity of Romanticism itself. Working backwards from these texts, the implication is that Romanticism consists of aspects such as a positive relationship with nature; an emphasis on the importance of mythology in nation building; the attainment of transcendence; the figure of the alienated artist and the artistic genius; memories, fantasy, and dreams which "establish a Romantic tone" (ibid., 63); the transformation of self and nature through poetic language and art; as well as certain motivic and formal elements.

Don Randall's work on Malouf comes closest to my understanding of the core Romantic model behind David Malouf 's poetry, by briefly broaching the idea of negative capability. Cached in a Chinese box series of prefixes, Don Randall writes the following:

Malouf does not become un-Romantic in his quest to forge a post-Romantic writing […], Malouf 's work manifests its affiliation with Romanticism's legacy. The writing undertakes the detailed articulation of individual consciousness, portraying the 'I' self-consciously engaged in the process of its becoming. This 'I' moreover, possesses a world-making power of imagination, and thus enables a creative conjunction between nature and consciousness. Malouf 's portrayal of intense experience of individual subjectivity and his affirmation of imagination's creative force recall Wordsworth, most particularly among the Anglophone Romantics. But the Keatsian drive to push beyond the bounds of self, to imaginatively inhabit the other – the drive giving rise to the notion of 'negative capability' – is equally pertinent to the effective reading of Malouf, and especially of his imagined life of the poet Ovid. (Randall 2007, 3)

However, despite his identification of negative capability7 as an important aspect of Malouf 's writing, Randall still follows Neilsen and subsequent authors' view that the imagination is able to successfully bridge the self/nature divide in Malouf 's work; an assertion which these Malouf scholars have made particularly on the basis of the novel *An Imaginary Life*. I believe that this is not the case in Malouf 's poetic works. This book focuses on exactly the inability of the subject to overcome the self/Other divide in the imagination, arguing that Malouf uses a model of Romantic irony to make this failure productive.

# **A Poetics of Place**

Place plays a central role in Malouf 's poetry. The desired, yet unattainable, absolute in these pieces is figured as a desire for placedness: an experience of connection with the continent which would allow for the sense of *Heimat*. This is more than an interest in spatial hermeneutics: placedness is configured specifically as transcendent and sacred. Romantic irony is able to account for this dynamic in a way that other paradigms are not. Malouf 's poetry is not, I argue, Romantic because it celebrates the imagination and its ability to imagine the subject into place. It is Romantic in the value attributed to place-making as a transcendental and sacred process. Malouf speaks specifically of literature's role in the creation of culture, of making place from the spaces on the continent we occupy. His approach to this is unashamedly hybrid:

In the choice between culture on the one hand, and geography on the other, the nineteenth century comes down firmly on the side of culture […]. The desire to stand alone, to have a destiny and a history of our own, was inevitable of course, and necessary, but it destabilised us, introducing first a resentful sense of being marginal […], then an endless worrying back and forth about how we were to ground ourselves and discover a basis for identity. […] But the belief that we must make a choice is an illusion, and so, I'd suggest, if we are to be whole, is the possibility of choosing. It is our complex fate to be children of two worlds, to have two sources of being, two sides to our head. The desire for something simpler is a temptation to be less than we are. Our answer on every occasion when we are offered the false choice between this and that, should be 'Thank you, I'll take both'. (Malouf 1998, 79)

Malouf 's comment references two major forces, with regard to the ways in which Australia has been imagined in its cultural decoupling from the UK: first, the national inferiority complex, which supposedly arose from being at the margins of the British Empire; and second, the long process of identity formation and nation-forging when freed from England's apron strings. This is a simplistic narrative indeed, as Malouf points out. That does not, however, mean that "taking both" is an easy alternative. Here, Malouf 's poetry is read as exploring precisely this proposal. "Taking both" means marrying the language and culture of Europe (which includes European transcendental philosophy) with the local environments that had become the source drawn upon to imagine Australia's identity as independent of Britain.

Malouf 's work has often been read in the context of the "endless back and forth about how we were to ground ourselves and discover a basis for identity", as Malouf himself expresses it in the quote above. However, his writing also reflects the idea that the relationship between reader and writer is more important than that of national identity. Hansson writes that Malouf regards "the imaginative act of passionate, individual reading as equal to the creative, imaginative act of writing" (Hansson 1991, 15). This is an expression of the Romantic ideal of the reader as co-creator of the work, based as it is on the understanding that all perceptions of reality are a creative act of the subjective imagination. Reality flows from the torsion of the subject's pendulum swing between the poles of his make-up as both a material and a reflective being, between the finite and the infinite. Novalis1 proposes that this moment contains and is the source of all reality (Novalis 2013c, 310).

Importantly, this pendulum swing in itself can be understood as the creative force of the imagination which moulds and remoulds the never-ending forms of the subject. The hybrid subject in Malouf 's work is like a migratory bird "still here and with us but in another / tense" (AOB 53). This is not to call the physical status of the material world into question, but the processes whereby it attains meaning. In Malouf 's poetry, the trick is "to tune/our ear, beyond what passes/ for silence" (ibid.). Novalis writes that

Ichheit oder produktive Imaginationskraft, das *Schweben* – bestimmt, produziert die Extreme, das wozwischen geschwebt wird – dieses ist eine Täuschung, aber nur im Gebiete des gemeinen Verstandes. Sonst ist es etwas durchaus Reales, denn das Schweben, seine Ursache, ist der Quell, die Meter Realität, die Realität selbst.2 (Novalis 2013c, 310)

[Ego or the productive power of the imagination, called *suspension*, produces the extremes between which suspension occurs – this is an illusion, but only in the area of the common mind. Otherwise, it is something very real, because suspension, its cause, is the well-spring of materiality, of reality itself.3 ]

This productive power of the imagination itself determines the bounds of the subject's never-ending movement between forms. To use Novalis' term, it is a meta-reality, which could be viewed as being in a dialectical relationship with the material world and the way it is both perceived and also shaped under the influence of human perception.

The physical existence of Australia is incontestable. However, Malouf expresses this same sense of the imagination's function in his approach to the relationship between literature and place: the processes by which the space becomes place involve the imagination of its writers and its readers. In Malouf 's poetry, placeas*-Heimat* is understood as taking on the role of the transcendent in Romantic irony. Within the relationship between reader and writer, and between self and Other, there remains the question of place, because these relationships are determined by the language–place relationship.

In expressing the dynamic between Europe and Australia, and between self and Other throughout his oeuvre, Malouf writes place in a deliberate and informed way. It is of little surprise that the inscription of space with place narratives should form a central concern in Malouf 's writing. Spatial hermeneutics lies at the heart of the debates on belonging in Australia, as well as in the debate on the development (or lack thereof) of Romanticism in Australia, outlined in "A Bad Romance: Rehabilitating Romanticism in Australia". Malouf has spoken and written extensively on the importance of writing in the creation of place from space. In this regard, he aligns himself with Australian postcolonialists such as Bill Ashcroft, in understanding place as

the equivalent of *parole* – utterance – rather than the potentiality of utterance that is space. Place, we might say, for both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians is uttered into being and maintained by narrative. Cultural production is marked by an ideological struggle over how Australian place should be uttered into being, how it should be represented, and it begins in the act of seeing itself. (Ashcroft 2010, 21)

Bill Ashcroft's comments adapt the work of earlier spatial theorists to the situation of postcolonial Australia. As in Malouf 's own critical work, there is a shift here, away from an analysis of the dialectic relationship between the cultural production and the physical experiences or formings of space – the "sociospatial dialect" (Soja)4 – towards an examination of the influence of cultural products (writing) in the creation of "place-images" (Shields) in the symbolic realm, which is largely decoupled from socio-geographical analysis of "concrete spatiality" in this quote (Soja 2009, 77). Although Malouf does use examples of concrete spatiality in his own critical writing, it is weighted towards an interest in the roles that myth and writing play in the spatial etchings of Australia's national imaginary.

In Malouf 's view, the way in which the landscape "had been taken deep into the consciousness" of Indigenous Australians is the same process that non-Indigenous settlers enact (Malouf 1998, 49). For Indigenous Australians, the land's features, the raw space of Australia, "had a second life in the imagination and in the mouths of women and men" through the act of "naming and storytelling and myth-making" (ibid.). Malouf 's attitude towards the reshaping of the landscape, both physically and culturally, demonstrates a sensitivity towards the layering of place in Australia, and the superimposition of European culture on Indigenous sovereignty; whilst at the same time, he is far less damning of the practices of landscaping, mapping, and renaming than might be expected:

What we did when we came here was lay new forms of knowledge and a new culture, a new consciousness, over so much that already existed, the product of many thousands of years of living in and with the land. This supplemented what was already there but did not replace it, and cannot do so as long as any syllable of that earlier knowledge exists in the consciousness of even one woman or man. A land can bear any number of cultures laid one above the other or set side by side. It can be inscribed and written upon many times. One of those forms of writing is the shaping of a landscape. In any place where humans have made their home, the landscape will be a made one. Landscape-making is in our bones. (ibid., 51)

Landscaping can be expressed as the physical change to the ecosystems in Australia as a result of colonisation. It also refers to the transformation of space into something which is created socially and culturally, and which exists in the imagination of the subject. Malouf 's use of the term "landscape" in the quotation above reflects the understanding of landscape as a human-defined vista. The word comes from the Dutch *Landschaap*, for the framed view in landscape painting (Sestigiani 2014). As such, it contains visual overtones and is also a "deeply cultural product", which "presupposes a beholding entity – most commonly, and most likely in literary texts, the human" (Crane 2012, 9-10). The poet's act of viewing and writing the landscape becomes an act of landscaping, in that it transforms land and ocean into culture.

Malouf 's view of landscape as inherently cultural, rather than nature-pure, implies an understanding of nature echoed as "natureculture":5 i.e. something which is always laden with cultural meanings. Reading Malouf 's poetry in our Anthropocene age, it is interesting to consider how Wright's questions of a disjunct between land and language remain relevant in the context of a nature/ culture divide, and are negotiated in this time of a radically diminished distance between nature and culture. Although in some poems, such as "Dog Park" or "Earth Hour", Malouf sets up an idealised naturalism in contrast to modern culture, he does this in temporal rather than spatial terms. His poetry does not utilise, and does not need to utilise, nature as a site of longing or purity.

Malouf has, however, maintained a strong interest in the topic of mapping in Australian literature. In an interview with Paul Carter 1989, he asks if Australians have a particular feeling for space and mapping because there is a "the sense in which we feel we don't know it and are always talking a little bit into something unknown" (Carter and Malouf 1989, 179). It is in this focus on provisional mapping that Nettelbeck identifies as "the post-colonial impulse of Malouf 's work: colonial patriarchy's tradition of claiming space, and thereby the conditions of knowledge, is made questionable, by a perpetual evasion of resolution" (Nettelbeck 1994b, 107). Nettelbeck's critique implies that Malouf portrays nature precisely as a site of purity and colonial longing even as she identifies Romanticism6 as a way of avoiding the colonial image of nature and

#### A Poetics of Place 77

Indigenous figures as the Other in Malouf 's writing. Nevertheless, Nettelbeck's view that Malouf 's work demonstrates an inability to resolve the tensions and conflicts involved in writing space in an Australian context is close to my own understanding of the issues at stake in Malouf 's poems. The tensions which are inherent in the relationship between the subject and its Others – animal, vegetable, or mineral – are a central concern of early Romanticism.

The understanding of nature as always already a cultural project means that "pure" nature does not function as either an ideal or a contrasting element in the model of Romanticism in his poetry. One of the most fascinating aspects of Malouf 's poetry is the way in which he takes the question of the land/language disjunct raised by Wright away from a colonial vision of Australia as wilderness, to address it in contemporary (sub)urban contexts. This move strips away the distraction of a specific nature-idealising perception of Romantic poetry and can directly address the limitations of language and literature in creating access to the Other that lies outside the self. The strategies by which the poet attempts to gain experience of the Other include an exploration of the relationship between the human and the animal. This reflects not only the fundamental interconnectedness of the human and the animal in the sense of Haraway's natureculture, but also the difficulty in actually experiencing or grasping this connection, and the unity of subject and world, on a larger scale.

The relations between world and subject become the central probing point in Malouf 's poetry within a wider frame of postmodern understandings of space. This move, however, occurs in ways which are not always unproblematic. Malouf himself acknowledges that the Indigenous peoples of Australia have long achieved what he can only hope to in the creation of place (Malouf 1998, 39). He represents Indigenous cultures as a living culture on the one hand; but in asserting that the land can carry multiple, layered understandings of place, he implicitly legitimises the layering of a European-Australian culture on top of Indigenous place. Unlike Watson, who directly engages with the permeability of these layers, Malouf 's nature/culture dynamic is not that of the European over the Indigenous specifically, but the more general relationship of the subject to that which lies outside itself.

The notion that multiple landscapes can occupy the same time and space is the logical conclusion of the metaphysical tradition in which Malouf writes. If landscape, as a place of meaning, is created in the subject then this will differ among subjects and cultures. Malouf 's own comments make it impossible to ignore the importance of spatial hermeneutics in his work, which he characterises as an exploration of "how the elements of a place and our inner lives cross and illuminate one another, how we mythologize spaces and through that mythology (a good deal of it inherited) find our way into a culture" (Malouf 1985, 3). I would go as far as to argue that spatial hermeneutics forms one of the central underlying structures of his work. However, the role of the imagination in writing the subject into place is not, I argue, what makes his work Romantic. Rather, it is the *transcendental value* he attributes to this process, as represented in his use of the Australian quotidian sacred.

There is a clear epistemological strain in Malouf 's poetry which is combined with, and related to, the subject's experience of place in a way that recalls a fundamental shift in the understanding of the relationship between the subject, space, and language in Romanticism. It is likewise related to the self–Other relationship explored in Romantic irony. In Romanticism, there is a strong focus on the role of the subject, and of language itself, in the formation of space and vice versa. Moreover, it is this aspect which bears greatest relevance to the relationship between space and the model of Romanticism explored here. Malouf 's poems reflect a model of Romantic epistemological enquiry7 . They explore the same ironic reflection on the subject's inability to experience a connection between self and Other through language as anything other than a momentary gesturing towards its existence, or the negative assertion of the same.

There is a surprising degree of consistency between the spatial frameworks utilised in these poems and the strategies with which the poet attempts to enact transcendence in any given piece. This is not to say that every single poem with one particular setting will share the same thematic content: that kind of neatness across five decades of writing would be a little uncanny. However, by grouping Malouf 's poems according to their spatial qualities for the purposes of the following analysis, it is easier to see how they function as sites through which two main relationships are negotiated: self–language and self–Other. This, then, is how I have chosen to structure my analysis of Malouf 's poems in the following chapters, because it reveals something of the nature of the poet's relationship to these places as well. The self–language and self–Other relationships form the two central thematic lines of enquiry running throughout the following analyses, which focus individually on the sites of the ocean, interiors, suburbia, earth, and the body.

# **Water**

If such a thing were possible in Malouf 's work, water would be the central binding element. Especially in an Australian context, water serves a range of symbolic functions. It is the edge first and foremost: that fine line which isolates and demarcates the continent, and which creates the country's island identity. The permeability of water becomes significant in light of Malouf 's own emphasis on Australia's island form:

When Europeans first came to these shores one of the things they brought with them, as a kind of gift to the land itself, was something that could never have existed before: a vision of the continent in its true form as an island that was not just a way of seeing it and seeing it whole, but of seeing how it fitted into the rest of the world. (Malouf 1998, 261)

This is very different from a focus on the beach, which is "often considered to be a landscape of vital importance for the nation's identity" (Schwarz 2007, 125). Malouf instead proposes that the first cultural shaping of Australia in the minds of its European settlers was one which was imported from the seafaring culture of Britain. Malouf 's understanding of this initial view of Australia is subtler than later characterisations of the continent, which ranged from a "new Eden" to "hell on earth" (cf. Haynes 2006). The way Malouf writes the ocean does not force the subject to choose between one or other understanding of the continent. It allows a dynamic exchange between elements, such as isolation and connection, Australia and Europe, the domain of the sea-creatures and that of man, and not least, the moment when the unconscious mind meets the edges of the thinking self. The ocean is a symbol of Australia's isolation (even exceptionalism, when viewing flora and fauna preserved there by its island form), and at the same time, a reminder of the sea-faring identity of its colonising nation, Britain. It is the ocean which has shaped the continent as well as our relationship to those outside its shores: at times an open channel, whilst at others it has made "little-islanders of us; has made us decide, from time to time, to close ourselves off from influence and change" (Malouf 1998, 12).

### **Edges of the Nation**

### **"Sheer Edge"; "At Deception Bay"; "Into the Blue"; "The Catch"; "This Day Under My Hand"; "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton"**

The poems in this section examine Malouf 's portrayal of the edge of the continent as both the edge of the nation and of consciousness. These ideas are entwined with concerns which run throughout his work: language, the (im)possibility of transcending the self through acts of place-making, and music. These are poems which are more about longing than belonging. They reflect a Romantic movement encapsulated in the idea of 'perhaps', particularly the first piece examined here, "Sheer Edge". The way the landscape resists its integration through naming practices is key to understanding many of Malouf 's poems and it is approached in different ways in the ocean poems examined here. "At Deception Bay" for instance, evokes intertextuality with the crab poems and musical references, combining Malouf 's repeated interest in language, the animal Other, music, and place-making. "The Catch", and "This Day Under My Hand", and "An Evening at Hamilton" show how water dissolves barriers as it negotiates structures of belonging and possession through the speaker's relationship with the ocean. Failure to take possession of the continent in the imagination in these poems is a failure of both language and literature; the foothold on the continent which writing creates is only ever provisional.

As the title suggests, the poem "**Sheer Edge**" is concerned with the edge where the continent meets the ocean, but also the edge where the thinking self reaches out towards the Other in a movement simultaneously inwards and outwards. Although it had already appeared in *Poems 1959–198*9, the piece was reused as the opening poem in Malouf 's 2008 collection *Revolving Days*, introducing the reader to the concerns expounded on in different ways in the rest of the collection. In a whimsical move, the poem is placed at the "edge" of the volume, not being afforded the status of first poem (that honour goes to "The Year of the Foxes"), but acting as a prelude to the rest. It is on the cusp between text and meta-text; and this position provides a formal reflection on its own content.

The geographical location of the poem is most likely to be Point Lookout. According to Martin Leer, this is the easternmost point in Australia, an "edge off an edge off an edge, as it were – for if Australia is at the edge of European consciousness, then Brisbane is at the edge of the Australian high culture consciousness that centres on the Sydney-Melbourne axis, and Point Lookout is at the edge of Brisbane […] on Stradbroke Island off the coast" (Leer 1985, 10–11). Cultural quips aside, the edge in Malouf 's work, "is the vantage-point from which he surveys or sees glimpses of an outside world and an interior – almost equally known and alien" (ibid., 10).

Leer's analysis taps into the myth of the "great emptiness" of inner Australia, yet the desert itself is not represented in Malouf 's poetry. This may be because the permeability of the edges of land, water, and sky are better suited to the search for unity expressed in Malouf 's work than more stereotypical images of Australia's red-sand deserts. It may also be because the idea of the desert being the great unconscious of the Australian mind simply does not reflect Malouf 's (and most Australians') own experience of place. Rather, Malouf stresses the diversity of the natural habitats in Australia:

In a continent as large as ours, there are many kinds of landscape, each of them typical of a particular region, no one more authentically Australian than another. I mention this because I am always taken aback when I hear Australians of a certain turn of mind claim that we will only be fully at home here when we have learned to love our desert places. (Malouf 1998, 48)

The interest in specifics expressed here, from which larger cultural and metaphysical applications may be construed, is typical of Malouf 's poetic works. Rather than looking inwards and connecting to the national myth of the "great emptiness" of inner Australia, in "Sheer Edge" Malouf looks outward to the ocean as darkness. In this case, Australia's borders, so important for connecting the continent with the rest of the world (particularly Europe), merge with a darkness which is to be interpreted as the limits of consciousness. Thus, the edge where the continent meets the ocean as the edge of consciousness is not merely that of the poet; it may also be that of the nation.

In verse two, the "darkness" becomes a universal factor. This "edge / of darkness" (lines 7–8) is the moment where the speech act fails; that space so sought after in Malouf 's work, where meaning transcends words. Whilst it is possible to speak of the darkness of the forest or ocean floor, the word is more commonly associated with housing. In this way, the poem achieves movement from the edge of the continent, and turns inwards to cut under the floors of the Australian home. Under the floorboards has been a liminal, dream space for Malouf since he was a child. In *12 Edmondstone Street* he describes the typical "under the house" of the Queenslander (and many Australian homes which are likewise built on a slightly raised structure without a solid foundation): "There are no clocks down here. There is not even language [...]. To come down here, up under the floorboards and the life of rooms, is to enter a dream space" (Malouf 1999, 47).

In light of this passage, the darkness of the moment when the floor falls away can be seen to connect to a space beyond language. Malouf embraces a more encompassing interpretation of the edge in his work, by equating it with the human condition. It is "a situation in which we always find ourselves; we are *never* at the centre because we never know where the centre is" (Malouf, qtd. in Leer 1985, 11). The most striking aspect of Malouf 's poems, in contrast to the national myths supposedly reflected in his novels, is how they refuse to define any fixed centre of identity, but celebrate the "spaces in the net" ("The Crab Feast", RD 109–118, line 65). This aspect is somewhat akin to Schlegel's pendulum swing between the finite and the infinite, between the self and the Other; and in Malouf 's case, between the (still largely) European subject and the environment of the antipodes.

Malouf 's comments above echo the "romantic poetics of place" which are "attuned more to longing than belonging, testifying to dislocation, while frequently also embracing, however ambivalently, the freedom to roam that is so characteristic of modernity" (Rigby 2004, 89). The centre of ourselves becomes difficult to locate when you indeed say "thank you, I'll take both", rather than embracing a single national identity (Malouf 1998, 79). This "edge" is not only to be found where the ocean meets the sky, but also between the binary pairings found elsewhere in Malouf 's work, such as those "between suburbs and wilderness; between the settled life and a nomadic life; between a metropolitan centre and an edge; between places made and places that are unmakeable or not yet made; between the perceiver … and all sorts of things which are other and that other may be the animal world or simply some other consciousness" (Malouf qtd. in Leer 1985, 11). It is no less than the issue of intersubjectivity with which the early Romantics also wrestled.

The act of "taking both", of not reaching for a definite and "pure" Australianness, but of accepting that as "children of a complex fate" (Malouf) Australians will always be of two worlds, leads to an understanding of identity and place which parallels Schlegel's understanding of truth as the movement between extremes, rather than as a fixed or definitive concept. It is this movement between two poles that allows the subject to continually renegotiate this position, with the place of truth being in the middle of this never-ending movement itself, rather than in a fixed end result. Schlegel uses the image of an eclipse to show that there is more than one centre (Frischmann 2009, 86). This is equally applicable to Malouf 's understanding of being Australian. The image of an eclipse, of the moment two worlds with multiple centres cross, expresses the moment when he says: "thank you, I'll take both" (Malouf 1998, 79). Malouf situates the subject in this movement, the moment of eclipse between the old worlds and the new.

The poem "Sheer Edge" follows the symmetrical movement from coast to civilisation, and back to the coast, with the darkness of this periphery reaching into and undermining the centre.

> Here at the sheer edge of a continent dry weed clutches, grey gulls turn from the sea and gather here, precariously building their nest (lines 1–6)

The centre of the poem then implodes in on itself downwards and outwards, weakening the aspect of the edge's spatial denomination in the geographical sense, and undermining (literally) the centre/periphery, inside/outside, wild/ domestic, and ocean/land binaries. The end of the poem drives this point home. The symmetry of movement from edge to centre, and back to edge has been completed; the edge is transformed from geographical into temporal space, collapsing time and place into one moment of sensory experience. The reader is pulled beyond the edge back into that moment of falling, moving the focus away from the continent of Australia and towards the more universal possibility of transcendence through poetry. Thus, the moment of the fall in this poem counterintuitively combines "touching" with the failure to hold. The moment of touching, of connection, is reached through poetry, but is beyond language.

> and here too at the edge of darkness where all floors sink to abyss, the lighted bar is of light the furthest promontory and exit sheer fall (lines 7–12)

The "too" (line 7) in stanza two forces the thematic connection between the two stanzas, laying the second visually under the first. The three stanzas explore three levels of perception applied to the same image. Beginning with the observation of the physical environment, this space is romanticised through a moment of the sublime. The observing subject is pulled beyond himself, experiencing a momentary loss of his own subjectivity outside the system of signs. Just as the subject slips off the edge of his own cogito, so does this second stanza bleed into the third thematically. The hope which poetry offers, the "moment of touching" (lines 17–18) is first alluded to in the middle of the third stanza, "here also may flower, / precarious as weed" (lines 15–16). This belated element in the third and final stanza shows the role of the imagination in reconciling the two different perceptions of the scene in stanzas one and two. In an ironic move, however, the imagination's power in this regard is shown to be flawed. The repetitiveness of the structure grounds the reader spatially "here" (lines 1, 5, 7, and 15), while at the same time it questions the solidity of this spatial grounding by noting the "precariousness" hold of the gulls' nest (lines 16–17).

The poem uses several techniques to highlight its own textuality: for instance, the chiastic structure of "the lighted / bar is of light" (lines 9–10), in which it becomes a thing which points only to itself. The inversion of the normal word order in the line "here also may flower" (line 15) prioritises the space "here", showing the piece to be about the nature of the relationship between space and poetry rather than the nature of poetry itself. The poem is structured around the binaries of the near and far, permanency and loss, "here" vs. "furthest" and "edge", and "building" vs. "slide off " (lines 1, 11, 1, 6, 13). The final stanza brings together the elements from the previous two stanzas in both parallelism and simile, the poem being parallel to the nest, as well as likened to it. This weakens the statement which at first appears to affirm the possibility of taking imaginative possession of the continent. The hyperbaton in the final stanza turns the simile into nothing more than a list of nouns which appear no longer dependent on grammatical structures for their meaning. This, combined with the use of the modal verb in the middle of the stanza, "also may flower" (line 15), posits the possibility of the poem bearing meaning outside the structures of language. This possibility, held in the subunctive, echoes the final lines of Eichendorff 's "Mondnachtˮ: "Und meine Seele spannte / Weit ihre Flügel aus, / Flog durch die stillen Lande, / Als flöge sie nach Hausˮ (Eichendorff 1981, 285).

The idea of *maybe* insinuated into the final line of "Sheer Edge" finds stronger expression in the poem "**At Deception Bay**" (RD 103–104). "At Deception Bay" takes up the notion that the text, as the process of creating place, cannot escape its own textuality and that the foothold the subject has on this continent is only ever provisional. The poet's place is not a corner of land made forever into home: it is an endless becoming, punctuated only by a "moment of touching" ("Sheer Edge"). As Martin Leer has pointed out, "Malouf spent his summer holidays as a child at Deception Bay: he grew up surrounded by placenames (Mt. Hopeless, Mt. Despair) which hinted at an inherently deceptive or illusory quality about Australia" (Leer 1985, 9). Leer's comments are echoed in Paul Carter's 1989 discussion with David Malouf on spatial history. Here Carter replies to Malouf 's assertion that settlers "come with the English language which they have to impose somehow on a landscape which has never known it" in the eighteenth century (Carter and Malouf 1989, 175). Carter puts forward the more nuanced view that the naming of the landscape shows the semioticising processes to be selfreflectively ironic and provisional:

There was enormous fluidity in the way language was working at that time. […] The names were provisional, occasional: they were historical events. They defied the attempts of the newcomers to make ready-made places. The names are extra-ordinary: Cape Catastrophe, Mount Dromedary, Lake Disappointment. These are names which have to do with *not* finding places; they allude to the inability of English to impose itself easily, […] it's not simply a blank landscape that's written over, it's something that has to be named *in order to be brought into existence*, but its very naming then reflects on the language which is used. Hence 'mountain' refers to a thing which is not there; 'river' refers to something not there. The names work, but in the course of it they make language very ironic: people go to places which don't exist as a result. So you have names like Dry River or Mount Hopeless where what is being said is that, although to all intents and purposes this is a thing we can call a 'river' or a 'mountain', in fact it offers us none of the things that word should imply; the landscape is brought into being as a place where language doesn't work. (Ibid.)

The importance of this comment cannot be overestimated for Malouf 's work and its situation in "At Deception Bay". What Carter addresses here is the way that the creation of place through the naming practices in colonial and postcolonial contexts can point to the fissures inherent in these self-same place-making processes. Malouf 's poetry expresses exactly this relationship between language and space in Australia.

Even as he writes place, Malouf 's writing of the landscape indicates the limits of the language from which it is created. Through his use of re-focussing between the micro and the macro spheres, the poet attempts to write both seascape and subject into a wider cosmic order:

> The sun plenipotentiary In Capricorn, bay water Jangles its bells. Stunned to a torpor On the sour-salt sunstruck surface Of noon, ghostly mud-crabs Rise to meet their image in the sun, bubbles Burst, each one a star, a gaseous world (lines 1–7)

The piece attempts to articulate a sense of transcendence. To this end, the subject is framed in a stanza of sonorous and stately cosmic movement between Capricorn (line 2) and Cancer (line 35). The poem also moves between the lyric "I" (lines 14, 16, 33) and the more inclusive "we" (lines 9, 14, 20, 23, 25), thus generalising the speaker's experience and desires. The crabs in the poem are already part of this order, and the gas bubbles produced by "ghostly mud crabs" (line 5) become synonymous with galactic gasses when "A new start explodes out of the net" (36). "At Deception Bay" is one of Malouf 's most self-referential poems, caught in a web of references to other similar poems in his oeuvre. This restricts its ability to write the subject into the cosmic order it portrays, by not transcending its own (inter)textuality on the one hand, and on the other, by invoking other poems which show the impossibility of communion with the central figure of the crab as Other.

"**Deception Bay**" is revisited in Malouf 's most recent volume. In this case, the self becomes part of the water as reflection. Yet, this is no permanent triumph, but a moment of suspension as "a boy, in his fist / the pebble that should shatter / all this in an instant […] / a self, then another / lighter, more enlightened / self in reflection (AOB 19, lines 10-18). The sea here is "incommunicable" (line 22) and the entire occasion for communication already lost in recollection. The final lines of the poems, "Into the Ever / Now of recollection" (lines 29-30) recall Wordsworth's definition of poetry as emotion *recollected in tranquillity*. In Malouf 's 2018 volume, the transcendent beyond language slips into the "Ever/ Now of recollection" increasingly. In the earlier piece, "**At Deception Bay**" however, the subject still strives to achieve unity with the ocean and its creatures, in this case, also through the poem's intertextuality. When the "bay water jangles its bells" (line 3), for instance, the poem echoes the "jangling" of the "blue nightmusic / of the Bay" (lines 1–2) in "Voyages" from the set "**Into the Blue**" (TM 78–81). This creates a connection between these poems and Malouf 's music references, such as "An Die Musik" (RD 179).

Seger interprets music in Malouf 's work as a symbol of transcendence, which is certainly in keeping with the Romantic concept of an absolute music. It follows, then, that the music of the bay constitutes one of multiple connections between water (most often the ocean) and the absolute. The childhood experiences of drowning and the threat of intrusion posed by the ocean are representative of the threatening power of the sublime: this is addressed briefly in "At Deception Bay", when, in another combination of sea and sky, "cyclones carry / salt into the foreshore gardens, into nail-holes and the nails / go brittle, blacken, snap" (lines 18–19). The "snap" of the nails in the face of this salty onslaught is reminiscent of the sublime moment in "**Aquarius**" when "something in us / snaps, a spring, a nerve" (EH 1, line 8). In contrast, the music of the bay echoes the music which the poet experiences in earthed (garden) surroundings. This music is produced within the social order, becoming part of that "ordinary day-to-day living in a place", which for Malouf offers a richness and depth that poetry should make available (Malouf 1998: 35). This is part of the process of "enriching our consciousness-in both senses of that word: increasing our awareness of what exists around us, making it register on our senses in the most vivid way; but also of taking all that *into* our consciousness and of giving it a second life there so that we possess the world we inhabit imaginatively as well as in fact" (ibid.). The music of the bay is an echo of the absolute in outer space, in water, and in the gardens and houses of Australia, becoming fainter with each reiteration.

When the surface of the bay takes on the aspect of time in the fifth line, becoming the "surface / of noon", it pre-empts the merger of time and space typical of Malouf 's poetry. In this instance, however, I would argue that Malouf 's use of telescoping does not function in the same way as in other poems explored later. Rather than injecting a sense of a lost wildness into the present, the first stanza of the poem establishes an image of an harmonious universe, of which the crabs are a part. The movement of the crabs and their bubbles echoes the confrontation with the self as Other in the mirror in "Aquarius", and the dissolution of the self in upward galactic movement in "Footloose: A Senior Moment" (EH 8), as well as in various other poems by Malouf. In the stillness of the water's noon, the crabs "meet their image in the sun" (lines 5–6). The mirror motif found in "Windows" (EH 40) and "Aquarius" (EH 1) is taken up and transformed. Where the mirror is associated with darkness in the other poems, here it is characterised as an harmonious part of nature: it mirrors the lightness of sun and afternoon landscape.

The bubbles, like the body, rise to become one with the starts of the poem, whilst containing these stars already within themselves: "bubbles / burst, each one a star, a gaseous world / poured out of the Coalsack" (lines 6–8). This movement is at once away from the darkness of the ocean (the Coalsack darkness), towards the sun, and beyond this to the darkness of the nebula. This reveals the frustrated nature of the speaker's attempts to transcend the self in similar processes. Although the "end is certain" for the crabs (line 31), "A new star explodes out of the net" (line 36), showing their place in the universe to be secured, brilliant, and unified. In contrast, the poet is denied the vertical movement of the crabs, being limited to "sideways steps and / indirections" (lines 23–24) These "indirections" are reflected in the typesetting of the poem, which sets the word "indirections" on its own line, aligned hard right. The otherwise verseless structure of the piece intensifies the insurmountable difference between the cosmic order and the human subject. Unlike the crabs, the subject's life takes "indirections", and is cut off from the cyclical nature of the crabs' relationship to the cosmos in "*their* season" (line 30, my emphasis).

In contrast to the crabs whose stars continually explode, the subject's movement is inward rather than outward. The house pulls the poet back: "we always find our way back" to sites of memory (lines 14–25). The poet cannot achieve what the crabs can, perhaps because, unlike the crabs, his body does not already contain aspects of the cosmos within it. Instead, its every atom suffers change (lines 15–16). Despite their seemingly consumable, ill-fated individual lives, as aspects of the whole presented in this poem, the crabs are eternal. The final lines of the poem, "my long skull falls / balding through centuries. And the ox-bone / shines, singing of space, the pale sun wintering in Cancer. / A new star explodes out of the net" (lines 13–36), imply a certain degree of success in the poet's experience of transcendence. This, however, is undermined by the contrasting characterisation of the sea life here and in other, intertextually related, poems.

One such poem, "**The Catch**" (TM 80), shows that the creatures with which the poet comes into contact "live in the mind as much as in the sea" (Smith 2009, 178). The description of these creatures as "ghosts" (line 3) in "The Catch" implies that any fate shared with the ghostly crabs in "At Deception Bay" is likewise a thing of the imagination. This is in itself not necessarily a limiting factor. Of all Malouf 's sea poems, it is "At Deception Bay" which demonstrates the most positive poetic enactment of transcendence. Nevertheless, the title of the poem stands: "At *Deception* Bay" (my emphasis). When read in the context of the other bay poems, the implication is that the poet's sense of communion and place within a greater cosmic order created imaginatively in the work is an illusion. In the end, both ocean and word deceive the poet. It is typical of Malouf 's style that each poem is reticulate and multifarious, and in many instances can function as a microcosm of his entire oeuvre.

In Malouf 's childhood poems, water enters as a disturbing and threatening force of nature, and it continues to symbolise death in the poems which take place during the poet's adult life. In simple terms, water represents a connection, a threatening permeability. Its very nature is contradictory, in that it simultaneously demarcates and permeates, connects, creates, and erases. It is the geographical realities of mountains and coastlines which have given form to Australia's (sub)urban centres and its identity as an island continent. Water, however, also threatens to dissolve these structures, threatens the life of the individual, and forces a connection between that which is wild and that which is tame. It is a transformative and transcendental force which perfectly encapsulates the dynamic of attraction and revolution of the sublime. This dynamic is a constant presence in Malouf 's treatment of water in this poetry. The following poems explore the dynamic between water and land, and between water and the man-made interiors of Australian suburban life in this context.

The poem "**This Day Under My Hand**" (RD 57–58) negotiates structures of belonging and possession between man-made spaces and the coast. Each site of belonging is questioned and transformed through the poem's movement from the domestic interior of the speaker's childhood to the moment at which he instead chooses to be defined by a relationship with the ocean. Far from being a smooth progression, the poem develops out of a series of tensions, ending finally with a return to the interior of the beach house around which the piece initially revolves. Interiors in Malouf 's poems may be divided into two groups: those which are re-explored sites of childhood memory, and those which occur doing adulthood. In this case, the beach house belongs to the first set. As a site of memory, it is expected that the poet's exploration of this space is a process of self-creation, of exploring his sense of belonging in relation to his roots. However, from the very beginning of the poem, this space is characterised by the poet's non-possession of it, opening with the statement, "Well it was never mine, / not really" (lines 1–2). Instead, the focus quickly turns to the island the house stands on.

> Well it was never mine, not really. My father bought it in my name to save the tax in '45: streaked weatherboard, no view to speak of, only the sand -hills of Moreton Island humpbacked and white like whales

[…]

Sandcrabs will throw their claws In a copper pot, hiss red, their agonies sealed off under a lid. At nine the Scrabble board

[…]

The cold Pacific – banging an open gate. Australia hitched like a water tank to the back verandah, all night tugging at our sleep. (lines 1–8, 17–21, 28–32)

This movement from interior, to island, and to the intrusion of the sea into this interior space (in the form of sea creatures) constitutes the first set in a chain: First Moreton Island, and then Australia as an island continent surrounded by the ocean which intrudes into "the cracks in iron" in this place (line 39). The image of the island, and in this case the interiors of the house, as fragmented into different "exotic islands", is recalled in "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton" (line 15, RD 27). There is constant tension caused by the threat of intrusion from the ocean which transforms the spaces it seeps into, and the attempt to facilitate this merger between land, body, and ocean through creative acts of the imagination. These acts of the imagination occur in the second and final stanza of "This Day Under My Hand".

In the second stanza, the children combine sky, water, and the imagination to make the ocean available to them through shadow play, where "small arms spread to conjure / again from moonlight shallows / the old rock-cod they hooked / at dawn out on the reef " (lines 13–16). It is worth noting here that they only *hooked* the cod. The children's attempts to possess the creatures of the ocean are not clearly fulfilled. Rather, the description of the sandcrabs dying a horrible culinary death "sealed off under a lid" (line 20) in the following stanza pre-empts the barriers between the wildness of the natural world, the domestic sphere, and by extension, that which defines the poet.

The Scrabble board indicates another attempt to take semiotic possession of the space. The "small words interlocking / down and across that fill / an evening square by square" (lines 22–24) are set against the attempts of nature into intrude into this space in stanza four. The criss-cross of the Scrabble board itself reflects the net-like structure of Malouf 's own work, in which many poems function as miniatures of his entire oeuvre, offering a subtle comment on his own inability to fulfil his own imperative to "come into full possession of a place […] in the imagination" (Malouf 1998, 39). The fourth stanza contains not only the familiar motif of the water as a wild force of nature threatening to intrude, knocking like "the Tigermoths / at the wirescreen door" (lines 25–26). It is after this stanza that Australia as a nation is no longer the umbrella definer for the poet's sense of identity, but is made subordinate to the domestic sphere, "hitched like a watertank / to the back verandah" (lines 29–31).

Two things occur at this point in the piece. Australia as a nation is first made unreal by being attached to the verandah, which is itself a liminal non-space. Malouf experienced this first-hand when, as a child, his sleeping place was on the verandah. As an adult he spoke of this place as a threshold, "a verandah is not part of the house. Even a child knows this […] Each morning I step across the threshold and there it is, a world recovered, restored" (Malouf 1999, 20). Then Australia becomes a secondary, unreal point of identification which attempts to draw the poet back into the realm of the mundane and finite, when he could be experiencing a connection with the wild in the form of the ocean in his sleep (as in other ocean poems), or in a process of letting go, as in the first lines of the final stanza in "Sheer Edge": "Now let it go, my foothold / on a continent!" (lines 41–42). As was prefigured by the Scrabble game in stanza three, the poet fails to take literary and imaginary possession of Australia. Instead, the continent fades away into insignificance, and the act of writing as possession is addressed in relation to the raw powers of nature itself, in the form of the ocean.

The poet's break with the continent is directly followed by the act of signing his name, a name that then "blooms elsewhere / as salt, gull's cry, bruised flesh / of the reef that gasps and thrashes / its life out in our hands" (lines 43–44). The "gull's cry" (line 44) looks back to "Sheer Edge" and the gulls' precarious hold on the continent:

Now let it go, my foothold on a continent! – I sign my name, it blooms elsewhere as salt, grey gull's cry, bruised flesh of the reef that gasps and thrashes its life out in our hands (lines 41–46)

The poet can sign his name, but his hold on the country will only ever be provisional. Space is imbued with human meaning through social practice, including writing. It is transformed into place through the sign, and if the sign itself is only ever arbitrary, then so too is the human meaning which transforms space into place. The very language (poetry) which Malouf views as part of the process of the enculturation of Australia into a place of belonging for its European settlers (cf. Malouf 1998) is that which defines our foothold on this continent as never more than provisional. Where the writing of a name could mark an act of taking possession, the signing of it implies agreement. It is also worth noting that "to sign" (line 42) draws attention to the name as a sign and only a sign, thus exposing the emptiness of the semiotic system. The name is able to break free from the semiotic system entirely and become embodied in nature. Yet, it is not long before the attempt to unify the poet's self with nature, to commune with nature, is revealed to be caught up in the destructive relationship of possessor and possessed, hunter and prey.

Finally, it is the reef, the interior of the bay, which is embodied as "bruised flesh" that "gasps and thrashes / its life out in our hands" (lines 44–46), and even the bay hisses like the sandcrabs of the third stanza, as "their claws / in a copper pot, hiss / red, their agonies / sealed off under a lid" (lines 17–20). This tension between a desire for belonging (which the signing of the poet's name in the salt of the seas expresses), and the destructive nature of possession, is also an important element here in "This Day Under My Hand"; it is also present in "The Crab Feast", and in "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton", where "the Pacific/breaks at our table" (lines 8–9). This relationship is symptomatic of the (post)colonial relationship with the land which Malouf is not able to resolve; or rather, is only able to momentarily resolve in experiences of transcendence which are not grounded in the land, but in the ocean.

Malouf 's water poems paint the nation as a slippery subject. Even as the poet seeks transcendence through the act of place-making it eludes him, allowing only a loose foothold at the edge between land and deceptive waters. Yet the water offers other possibilities. In the following pieces, the subject attempts to transcend the self and reach for unmediated unity with the animal Other through an act of communion. In keeping with the quotidian sacred, this communion is manifest in what might be Australia's most beloved past time: eating.

## **Communing with the Animal Other "In the Sea's Giving"; "The Crab Feast"; "Pentecostal"**

The three pieces read in detail here continue to address the possibility of possessing place through language and the imagination, with the additional possibility of the body offering a way to overcome the separation caused by language. Malouf characterises the ocean as simultaneously Other and familiar. It is the absolute, existent beyond speech, which the subject desires. Corporeality, like language, offers both the possibility of communion with the animal Other (most notably the crab in the water poems) and limits the subject's ability to experience unity with the animal Other this side of the grave. Importantly, the destructive nature of this hunger for (colonial) possession is never far from sight in these poems.

"**In the Sea's Giving**" (P 148–149) combines the different elements which come together in the ocean as a site of Malouf 's attempts to achieve an experience of transcendence.

> A world so close that was not Ours. Though we could swim, My sister and I, before we could walk (lines 1–4)

From the outset, the first stanza expresses the Otherness of the water simultaneously with the subject's affinity with it. Although ocean is described a "world so close that was not / ours" (lines 1–2), the subjects of the poem were able to enter this world and swim in it before they could walk. This implies an affinity with the water that runs deeper than that with the earth. The children's affinity with the ocean recalls the universal pre-linguistic state of the baby in utero. From a less Freudian angle, the ocean is also a symbol of connection, as it both defines the outlines of the continent and connects it with the rest of the world. This being the case, the children are situated between their desire to return to this world, and their realisation that "it was not our element" (line 5).

Malouf heightens this feeling of Otherness by expressing it in terms of nonpossession. In a dry side-reference to Mathew 5:5,1 the ocean is characterised as the "two thirds of a planet / we'd not inherited" (lines 8–9). The two-thirds to one-third division also places the "we" in the wider context of humanity, rather than the specifically Australian subject. By placing a central value on Australia as an island, Malouf explores how water offers the gift of a new way of inhabiting Australia in the imagination, whilst at the same time denying the subject the possession of the continent, this being that part of the planet that man did not inherit.

The third stanza continues the pattern of connecting the ocean with dream states, with the animal Other and with something deeper and darker "than daylight could fathom" (lines 10–11). Stanzas three to five are of particular interest because they consider the difficulty of connecting with the other world and its animal inhabitants imaginatively. If we view dreams as being symbolic of the poet's genius (e.g. the imagination rather than fancy, in the sense of Coleridge), then the failure of the children to "make friends / with its creatures" even "in dream" (lines 11–13), is also a failure to successfully create a unified whole through a process of the imagination. The ocean is often associated with dream states and the unconscious, perhaps due to the poet's bodily rather than linguistic experience of it. In "The Crab Feast" examined next, for instance, the poet characterises the ocean as a dream which he is open to receiving: "The back of my head / was open to dream / dark your [the crab's] body moves in" (RD 112, lines 78–80). The attempts of the two subjects in "In the Sea's Giving" to actively form an integrative image of the oceanic dream world with their daily lives is shown to be futile:

> Cuttlefish could not be reconciled to their birdcage bones, seahorses were fabulous strangers,

more fabulous because, unlike the beasts of air and earth, all our wishing could not make pets of them […] (lines 13–21)

They cannot reconcile their corporeality with the medium of the ocean; but the poem shows more than a thematic interest in unifying these areas. The lines, the "Cuttlefish / could not be reconciled / to their birdcage bones" (lines 13–15) make it clear that the protagonists actively attempt to reconcile these two aspects, here represented by the cuttlefish of the ocean, and the empty cuttlefish shells common on the beaches of Australia, which are used as "birdcage bones" for their domesticated aerial cousins.

The failure of the imagination to unify the swimmers with the animal Others in "In the Sea's Giving" is highlighted further in the seventh stanza, which mentions "These others / melted in our heads" (lines 25–26), whose image cannot be maintained in the imagination once "Hauled out into the sun" (line 27) and the humdrum world of the poet. The wildness of these animals is contrasted with the tamed suburban versions of these oceanic representatives of wildness, and wildness lost: "tabbycats / in butter boxes" and "Willywagtails / tempted with rainbow cakecrumbs" (lines 21–24). Through their description as "beasts of air / and earth" (lines 18–19), the domesticated animals are differentiated from the wild, not only in kind, but also in environment. This allows the sea creatures to continue to function as a symbol of pure wildness even when repositioned in an urban or suburban setting, as in "The Carp" (P 33) and "The Crab Feast" (RD 109–118).

Just as Malouf writes animals in a suburban and domestic context, the animals here serve as a reminder of what humanity once had and has now lost. This loss is not an assertion, but rather a question which leaves the reader to search for the answer: "How then did we manage / to live with it? What / had we traded to be safe?" ("In the Sea's Giving", lines 32–34).

> What had we traded to be safe? Past midnight, sealed off In the bronze bell of the moon, We plunged over the sea ledge seeking Answers, climbed back At dawn wearing our magic Skin – only later

Found what we had lost (lines 33–41)

That which has been lost takes on a dual temporal and spatial character in lines such as "past midnight" (line 35) and "on the shores of an ice-blue earlier / kingdom" (lines 46–47). The two questions look in both directions: to the loss, but also to the result of this loss. The first question, hanging between stanzas eight and nine, places the search for the transcendent at the centre of the human condition, rather than characterising it as an optional extra. The question is not What else is out there? but "How then did we manage / to live with it?" (line 32), the "it" being the loss of the absolute and wild. When the subjects of the poem do find it "only later" (line 40), it is not in a fleeting experience of the ocean, but in the dissolution of the self as ocean. The "ghosts, fishlike, transparent" which float out of the subjects in a "flush of warm salt", "light" the flesh from the inside, while the ocean creates a "magic skin" (lines 39–44). The skin of the body remains a transitionary space. It is only in the renewed loss (the sloughing off of the water as they return to the shore) in the face of the "sunshine and death" (line 48) of daily life that reflection is made possible, through the linguistic system. It is only in this moment of reflection that the subjects of the poem realise what it is that they have lost. And there is the bind: this knowledge requires reflection, and can thus only be attained in the negative, as an understanding of what is absent.

Whilst "At Deception Bay" reflects the limits of the imagination, the other crab poems – namely "The Crab Feast" (RD 109–118), "Into the Blue" (78–81), and "Pentecostal" (RD 10) – explore the subject's desire for communion with the animal Other. To put this in more Romantic terms, these are the attempts of the subject to transcend *I* and gain experience of the *Thou*. This necessarily involves the transformation, even dissolution, of the self. Malouf 's gestures to Ariel's song from Shakespeare's *The Tempest* in "At Deception Bay" (RD 103–104), and again in "The Crab Feast" (RD 109–118), tie in with the thematic focus of a merger between the subject and its oceanic Other:

> Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange – Ariel's song, *The Tempest* Act I, Scene ii (Shakespeare and Dyce 1868, 17)

Mark Byron also notes this allusion to Ariel's Song in *Remembering Babylon*, in which the "correspondence between human child and marine creature is counter-balanced by gestures toward the spirit world: the crabs and Gemmy's 'ghostly' visage" (Byron 2005, 80). Malouf elevates the humble crab to the most common symbol of the animal Other, namely the Other as crustacean. In these poems, the poet attempts to overcome the binary human/animal paradigm in his search for communion with the animal Other. He remains, however, bound by the hunter–hunted relationship. This relationship "would seem to work against any notion of a surrender of control by a dominant human species" (Smith 2009, 167). The ambivalence of the hunter–prey relationship in the context of the poet's attempts at a communion with the animal Other echoes the title of "At Deception Bay". Yvonne Smith has also noted that "this ambivalence, often troubled by an awareness of the writer's capacity for both creativity and deception is figured and re-figured in several of [Malouf 's] works" (ibid.).

One of the few Malouf poems to have been honoured with repeated academic attention, "**The Crab Feast**" is at once a multi-part epic and intimately personal. "The Crab Feast" utilises the power of the personal pronoun to affect the reader's perspective in a way which imitates the speaker's own attempts to cross the line between the human and the animal. The direct address of the opening section opens up the possibility of a dual perspective, whereby the reader can identify with the lyric I and, at the same time, assume the position of the addressee. The sensuality of the opening section adds the aura of a love poem. Looking back to the connection with *The Book of Beasts*, Yvonne Smith notes that "The crab in the bestiary is a cunning hunter who, the reader learns, enjoys a feast and uses stealth to keep the oyster's shell open by inserting a pebble as it relaxes in the sun 'pleasuring its internal organs in the free air' " (ibid., 175).

He is very fond of oysters and likes to get himself a banquet of their flesh. But, although eager for dinner, he understands the danger, some the pursuit is as difficult as it is hazardous. It is difficult because the inner flesh of the oyster is contained within very strong shells, as if Nature [sic] its maker has by her imperial command fortified the soft part of the body with walls. (*The Book of Beasts:* Cambridge University Library 1984, 210)

This further blurs the line between the crab and the speaker in Malouf 's poem, as here it is the speaker rather than the crab who feasts, and whose words imply a "pleasuring" of the crab's "internal organs".

In addition to the similarity between the poet and crab, the personal pronouns in the piece form an I/you/we constellation which blurs the line further between poet, crab, and reader. The use of the collective first-person catapults what has been a confusion between "you" (as both the crab and perhaps the reader) into a further confusion between "we" (as the crab/hunter relationship) and the relationship of the collective human "we" to the animal Other. At the beginning of section two, the focus is still largely on the "we" of the speaker and the crab, as one of the "variant selves" expressed as "Doulton claws" (lines 26, 31). By section three, however, the "we" can no longer refer to the crab, as the crab has no need for the "the breaths / we draw between cries" (lines 62–63). The collective pronoun puts the hunt into a universal perspective of the human relationship to the animal. Rather, the speaker places himself and his hunt within the universal human relationship with the animal Other as a *fixed* framework; "fixed terms in what is celebrated, / the spaces in the net" (lines 64–65). The use of the passive mode is telling here: he lets go of all agency. In its use of the plural first-person address, the poem hovers between the personal and the general throughout.

Despite the rich descriptive language, the extensive use of the present tense lends the piece a personal immediacy. It is this plain speech to which the speaker returns for the final sentences of the piece, and in exaggerated form through the shortness of the final lines "I am ready. / Begin" (lines 255–256). The poem oscillates between the present and past tenses, anticipating the temporal confusion of the final lines. The effect is two-fold. It makes the experience of the speaker universal and timeless, inviting a metaphoric reading; but it also shows that poetry is limited to transmitting this experience always and only after the fact. The immediacy of experience conjured up through his use of the present tense and direct address is shown to be a mirage. Thus, the piece reflects on its own fallibility.

In section II, stanza four, there is the first evidence of zeugma, when the speaker's desire, "I wanted" (line 37) refers to multiple parts of the sentence. In this stanza, the crab is defined corporally: "raw poundage" (lines 37–38); spatially: "on my palm, on my tongue" (line 41); and in manner: "in defiance of breathlessness / and verbal charms" (lines 39–40). Each of these aspects reflects on the role of language in creating the crab imaginatively. The "raw poundage" on the speaker's "tongue" echoes the "raw words" of those new to speech in "Wolf Boy" (P 27, line 9). It also deconstructs the body of the crab into mere matter, without form until located on the tongue of the speaker; thus it becomes a double metaphor for the act of consumption and the speech act of the imagination.

When the poet speaks of the crab as "raw poundage" (line 37), the line length exceeds the confines of the structure established in the poem until that point. This enacts the speaker's desire to move beyond language itself, an interpretation supported by the call to possess the crab's "defiance" of "the power of verbal charms" (lines 39–40). In section IV, stanza one, the act of feeding ties the act of eating to the speaker's attempts to unify with the crab, while the use of the death trope and the plural "small mouths" (line 75) after "everything" (line 74) provide a less personal context for this desire for unity. Section VI, stanza four draws attention to the uncertainty of who dies through this process: "I crossed the limits / into alien territory. One of us / will die of this, I told myself; and one of us / did. The other / swam off to lick warm stones and sulk with clouds along a shoreline" (lines 139–144). This uncertainty is echoed in the irregular line lengths, which cause a pause in rhythm before the affirmative "and one of us did" (line 142), and after "the other" (line 142); before the following lines explain what happened to the survivor.

Section IIX, stanza eight repeats and extends the line "because you are so open" (line 76) to "Because you are so open. Because you are" (line 198). The repetition here highlights the importance of the openness of the crab, in which that which is inside is laid bare in readiness to be shared, in readiness for a connection. The same standalone line which functions as the eighth stanza of section XII prefigures the final lines of the entire piece: "you lie open before me/Begin" (line 256). The lines in section X, "But words made you / a fact in my head. You were / myself in another species, brute / blue, a bolt of lightning, maybe God" (lines 244–247), show the power of the poetic imagination to create the crab

#### 98 Water

in speech. The "but" which introduces line 244 negates the drawn-out description up to that point, which describes the speaker as a part of a pure landscape of "water / poised above water" that is "never to be weighted" (lines 234–241). The potential to poetise their relationship and communicate through language is shown to be, at the same time, that which limits the speaker in his attempts to become a part of that nature. The poet attempts the Romantic philosophical act of a killing of the self,2 by escaping the bounds of the reflexive self.

"The Crab Feast" opens with a series of assertions of unity between the poet and the crab, from the triumphant opening statement "There is no getting closer / than this" and "I know / now all your secrets" through to "when the shell / cracked there was nothing / between us" (1–8). All this has been made possible (or so it would initially appear) through the moment when the poet's "tongue slips into / the furthest, sweetest corner" of the crab (lines 1–4). Initially, the tongue (which holds the dual function of speech and taste) is what allows the poet to enter into a state of unity with the larger system of nature already laid out in "At Deception Bay": moonlight, ocean, galactic gas bubbles. The crab is the embodiment of nature itself. It is "moonlight / transformed into flesh" ("The Crab Feast", lines 8–9). Thus, the consumption of the crab places the poet in direct communication with nature. In the final line of the first section, however, this communication breaks down into mere mimicry.

The poet mimics the ocean with his own body, making a "new habitat under the coral / reef of [his] ribs" (lines 22–24). The clear boundaries of internal and external (the crab contained within the body), self and Other, are not truly dissolved. Upon re-examination, the triumphant unity with which the poem opens, in which man and animal are open to each other in a sensual union, is undercut by its relation to the wider context of human nature. The magic of moonlight, a highly Romantic symbol of transcendent wildness, is paired with the refuse of mankind. The human/animal divide, which the speaker seeks to overcome through the act of consumption, is already shown to be nonsensical in these initial stanzas. The flesh which the speaker desires is already made of moonlight and sewage. The piece shows the paradoxical situation of a speaker who is incapable of achieving transcendence through union with the animal Other except through the text; while in the background, that which the speaker desires to consume is shown to already be the product of various acts of consumption and processing through the human body. In the consumption of the animal, the human consumes his own refuse. The "moon's ashes" captures the destructive nature of this relationship in one apocalyptic image (lines 12–13).

The second section reiterates the connection between the crab and languageless knowledge. This time, however, it is expressed as desire rather than success: "I wanted the whole of you, raw / poundage / in defiance of breathlessness / or the power of verbal charms, / on my palm, on my tongue" (lines 37–41). The desire expressed in the second section stems from the poet's experience of the self as multiple, and importantly, situated in nature and made visible to the poet through nature as mirror: "Noon that blinding glass did not reveal us / as we were. It cast up variant selves / more real than / reflections" (lines 25–28). These revelations of the self provide the poet with another quality of view, one that looks beyond the literal. The "glass" of the ocean was "blinding" (line 25). In going against its original function and obscuring sight, the mirror does not "reveal us as we were" (lines 25–26) but opens up the poet's eyes to a higher truth, the familial relationship between the wild and the self.

It is this changed quality with which the poet views the world that occupies the third section, through the use of further reflection imagery: "waterbirds whose / one thin leg props up clouds" (lines 45–46). This section also draws attention to the way that a poem is not simply a reflection of what is seen, but constructs viewpoints:".. then the perspectives: / matchwood pier, a brackish estuary / that flows on into / the sun, a tip of light over the dunes. / I enter" (lines 50–54). It is with this changed quality of view that the poet is willing to give himself over to nature, equally as hunter and one who will die. The hunter now hunts for knowledge of the connection between the self and the animal Other, as expressed through the use of the first-person plural: "I hunted you / like a favourite colour, / indigo, to learn / how changeable we are, what rainbows / we harbour within us / and how I should die" (lines 80–85, my emphasis). As the hunt continues in section V, it becomes a universal hunt through Malouf 's use of telescoping his poem out of the near present to "a distance of centuries" (lines 93–94).

The poet describes the crab as "myself in another species" (line 246). This familiarity, however, is not comforting, but leads to the sublime shock of understanding the Other as the self. This shock is expressed as a realisation of transcendence in the final section through the characterisation of the crab as the self "in another species, brute / blue, a bolt of lightning, maybe God" (lines 246–247). There are several moments of the sublime leading up to this final realisation. The confrontation with the openness of the dissected crab is described as a "sort of power / that kills us, for whom moonlight, the concept blue, is intolerably complex as / our cells are, each an open universe / expanding beyond us, the tug / of immortality. / We shall reach it and still die" (lines 180–187). The image of the body's cells expanding towards immorality and death (blue is associated with death both here and in "Ode One", RD 181–183) is reminiscent of the feeling of the self dissolving in the awesome face of nature, in the classic Kantian sense of the sublime. Ultimately, though, this experience does not last. Instead, the moments of the sublime in this piece are later shown to simply mimic the backwards/forwards dance of the hunt, swinging between affirmation and limitation, and increasingly so towards the end of the piece.

In the final stanzas of section IX, for instance, there is a sublime moment in which the crab dislodges the poet's consciousness to the point where the poet's self is lost: "you blaze in my thoughts. Displacing more / than your own weight, making less / disturbance than the unusual disturbance you plunge and take me with you. I go out / in silence" (lines 217–222). The gravity of this moment, when the self finally transcends itself in unity with the ocean, is undermined by the absurdity of the situation. It is at exactly this transcendent moment that Malouf inserts the image of the poet sitting in a restaurant: "I go out / in silence, in full view / of waiters, having learned / this much at least; to die true / to my kind – upright, smiling – / and like you, beyond speech" (lines 221–226). This is the only use of an urban space in the entire poem; and the contrast it contains between the language of honour (lines 224–225), the hovering waiters, and the poet straight-backed in his chair in the throes of ecstasy normally reserved for food critics, is a classic case of Malouf 's use of bathos.

The use of the (sub)urban setting here is ironic in the Romantic sense. It distances the reader from that which, until that point, had been an experience of the closeness and magic of the hunt. It is from this point onwards that the poem reflects on its own role in the characterisation of the crab. In the final section, the simple statement "But words made you a fact in my head" (lines 244–245) reveals the entire narrative until that point to have been exactly that – an act of the imagination only expressible from within the linguistic system, a translation of the transcendent.

Yvonne Smith holds a surprisingly positive view of the final state of the poet's relationship to the crab:

The simple statements that conclude the poem contrast with the subtle and complex images that have gone before as the crab is placed in a wide frame of reference that touches on the mythical, astronomical, scientific and autobiographical. However, the 'gift' of this rich array of associations casts a deep shadow over the actual creature. The speaker must accept that the crab lives in its own order of knowledge, co-existent with his life, and it is this recognition, sustained as belief, that redresses the imbalance so that 'the weights are equal' (Part X). Now that speaker, intent of imagining this improbable match of power, is "open" and "ready" to be broken and eaten in a 'love feast'. (Smith 2009, 176–177)

This, however, ignores the structure of the poem, which reflects on its own erroneous assertions of success. The final stanzas break down into ever smaller sentences that move in jolts towards their own contradiction.

#### Communing with the Animal Other 101

Now all has been made plain between us, the weights are equal, though the sky tilts, and the sun

with a splash I do not hear breaks into the dark. We are one at last. Assembled here out of earth, water, air

to a love feast. You lie open before me. I am ready. Begin. (lines 248–256)

The passage from "we are one at last" (line 252) and "You lie open / before me" (lines 254–255), until the final line, "I am ready to begin", reveals the entire narrative to have been constructed, rather than remembered or directly experienced. The state of being "open" for the "love feast" of (un)equals is shown to be provisional and deferred. To say "begin" implies that which has not yet begun. Water as a source of food is not incidental. The act of eating denotes an attempt to become one with nature in a very physical way. In nearly every poem in which eating (as opposed to drinking) occurs, the food is highly symbolic, being either forbidden fruit or, as seen above, seafood in the majority of cases. In this aspect, water occupies a liminal position between being lifesustaining (at times eroticised) and a site of death – be it for crab or poet.

In the larger context of Malouf 's work, the desire to bridge the animal/human divide has its background in his desire to transcend the self. One of his strategies is communion with the animal Other. My use of the term "communion" in this context is not only a nod to the Romantics,3 but also flows from the poems themselves. It establishes a Christian blueprint for the process Malouf is emulating in his crab poems, specifically that of the spiritual connection with Christ established through the symbolic consumption (assuming a Protestant rather than a Catholic practice) of his flesh and blood during Communion. This Christian symbolism is recalled in the title of "**Pentecostal**" (RD 10), and at once invoked and satirised.

> Lit scales in the grass, in a dented pail soft guts that spill their lost light thin as the Pleiades. Mullet, whiting, bream – the terror of Fridays Their names, their boneless ghosts, lodged in my throat. […] Gelatinous thick Tongues in a shell too far from the sea, they thunder Te Deums to table-salt, writhe in the anguished Hiss of deliquescence. I make myself small, then smaller; approach the vanishing point; surrender

breath then blood to hear from the wet sizzle of flesh made dung, scoured shell, sucked bone, the clear death-aria in my throat, the voice of the word -less creature in us that rages against hook, Against withering salt, against frying pan and fire (lines 1–4, 9–18)

By initially defining the sea creatures as "the terror of Fridays" (line 3), the poem recalls the Christian tradition of eating fish on Friday from the perspective of those children unfortunate enough to have had to consume this fish. The reference to Friday's fish forms a point of contrast to the rest of the piece. Firstly, it is a satirical element which contrasts with the poet's earnest attempts to achieve unity with the sea creatures through the dissolution of the self, in lines such as "I make myself small, / then smaller; approach the vanishing point" (lines 12–13) and in physical surrender in lines such as "surrender / breath then blood" (lines 13–14). Secondly, fish is traditionally eaten on Fridays because it is a fasting food. This stands in contrast to the exorbitantly detailed and luscious description of eating and food in lines 9–12 and 12–16.

The sea creatures in the bucket are a visceral and imminent take on the tongues of flame in Acts 2:3,4 as "Gelatinous thick / tongues" (lines 9–10), as well as Jesus as the Word made flesh in "the wet sizzle / of flesh made dung" (lines 14–15). On the one hand, these instances may be read as sardonic references to the Romantic concept of communion. Yet within this, there is also a more positive association with Romanticism. This is a rejection of the two-world approach to transcendence, in which the transcendent merely connects with the imminent on a vertical axis. Instead, Malouf explores the possibilities of Novalis's single world model in which the transcendent is already in the imminent, the difference between them being qualitative rather than spatial.

The use of this single world model of the transcendent within the imminent in an Australian context is not limited to Malouf 's work. Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass, and Lyn McCredden have posited the development of the sacred in Australia as an earthed, embodied, and often mundane presence-experience of the sacred. Bill Ashcroft argues that the Australian sacred has developed out of a specifically Australian understanding of the sublime which developed in the nineteenth century (Ashcroft et al. 2009, 5).5 Ashcroft views the Australian sublime to be related, but in some ways opposite, to that of the European Romantic tradition. For him, the Romantic sublime is "vertical and temporal", based as it is on Kant's images of mountains and gorges, whereas the Australian sublime is "horizontal and spatial" (Ashcroft et al. 4). When stripping back the preferred illustrative images of each, however, both the so-called Australian sublime and the sublime of European Romanticism reveal the same core concept in each case: an excess at the limits of representation.6

With the post-war generation of poets, including White and Webb, this idea of the sublime, which "astonishes by tracing the edge of all form where *no-thing* appears" moves away from the expanse of the horizon and into "the proximate details of everyday life – objects and relations observed beyond the possible entrapment of language, […] objects whose luminosity defies explanation" (Ashcroft et al. 2009, 10, 12, emphasis in original). In this way, the Australian sublime develops into a concept of the sacred in the "intimate and proximate presence of material things, which in their own way intimate the unpresentable – the sacred possibilities – in their very presence" (ibid., 12). The materiality of this sacred in the works of Australian poets since the second half of the twentieth century has created "moments of aesthetic presence in which the sacred is glimpsed outside structures of interpretation" (ibid., 18). The concept of *presence*7 sees this material and proximate sacred as a rejection of a hermeneutic, rather than the embodied relationship with the world that the Enlightenment brought (ibid.). Bill Ashcroft states that in Malouf 's work, "it is this presence, a presence that exists beyond language, and indeed beyond interpretation, perhaps even beyond memory, that poetry seeks" (Ashcroft 2014, 5).

Both this rejection of a purely hermeneutic relationship to the world, and the desire to find the sacred in the material everyday world, play key roles in early Romanticism's rejection of Cartesian mind/body dualism. The Romantic view involved in the Australian experience of a proximate sacred shines through implicitly in the way academics such as David Tacey have approached it in the twentieth century. Tacey, for instance, writes of poetry as a carrier of a "mythopoetic mode of perception in secular times", noting how in landscape poetry, authors "do not merely describe or represent the land, they *participate* in it" in an attempt to undermine the self/Other divide (Tacey 1995, 162). Tacey's comments, however, lack the reflection on the difficulties involved in bridging this divide which are so central to Romantic irony, as well as to Watson's and Malouf 's work. As Ashcroft writes, "in Malouf 's writing, we get the sense that while poetry provides supreme access to presence, it is available to all of us in our everyday lives, one of the dimensions of consciousness that poetry in its 'love for what is out of reach' makes more accessible" (Ashcroft 2014, 5). *More*, is of course relative, and it is this aspect in which irony finds potential (ibid.)

Natalie Seger picks up on this structure of the immanent sacred in her essay "Imagining Transcendence: The Poetry of David Malouf ":

Malouf 's exploration of the distance between the self and the other is complicated by a sense of paradox that plays throughout his work: a negotiation of wholeness, which is figured positively, and the more negative idea of fusion, the celebrated status of the creative individual, as opposed to one which is displaced from the community. This contradiction is a problem addressed by Levinas, who, as Blanchot explains, was the first to look closely at the 'strange structure' of 'transcendence within immanence'. (Seger 2005, 147)

Nevertheless, there is very little evidence to support the idea that fusion is a negative concept per se in Malouf 's poetic work. Rather, poems such as "The Crab Feast" demonstrate how this ideal can highlight uneven power-relations. The issue of transcendence in immanence was already a central concern of Novalis, and Malouf 's poetry reflects the poet's attempt to find transcendence in the immanence of the crab (and in general, in the artefacts of daily life) through an act of the imagination. The paradox of the self–Other relationship is exposed through ironic reflection.

The tension between communion and fusion in "Pentecostal" is expressed in the act of eating. James Tulip clearly explains the difference between the two concepts in the following:

It tells of what eating means, what flesh means, what the crab is in relation to man and man in relation to the crab, and how these two states of nature are bound together but only known to be so by a sacrament or sacrifice that lets us penetrate physically and sensuously and imaginatively into the otherness of the animal and into us. There is a discovery – or should we say rediscovery – of the meal as a sacramental moment in this poem. (Tulip 1981, 396)

It is this understanding of communion with which Malouf engages when the speaker eats sea food in his crab poems. Although the focus is often on eating, particularly in "The Crab Feast", Malouf 's writing fuses elements in a way that creates the illusion of a connection with the animal Other. In "Stars" (TM 79) from the set "Into the Blue", the sea creatures' habitat is characterised as "further out than thought could reach" (line 5), a description which is in keeping with the ocean itself as the stuff of dreams, or "galaxies" in "At Deception Bay" (line 3, RD 103). In "Rockpools" (from "Into the Blue"), however, their habitat is made of materials and forms from the poet's familiar urban and domestic spaces: "glass", "skirts", "tango", "distant rooms", and finally, "red velvet mouths" (lines 1–5). By blending these materials in the description of the animal Other, Malouf is able to bring the two worlds – the transcendent world of the ocean and the galaxy, and that of (sub)urban Australia – together. To a certain extent, this mitigates the "shock" felt at the realisation of a "family likeness" between the poet and the animal Other (lines 7–8). This "shock" may be understood as a moment of sublime shock, as the self sees itself in the Other.

The dual lens of otherness and likeness is common to Malouf 's animal poems. The Otherness of the animal is highlighted by the use of the hunter/hunted food/ consumer relationship. The familial likeness occurs through the identification of an animal-self within the human. In the case of man-made objects taking on animal form, such as in "Typewriter Music" (TM 12) or "Bicycle" (RD 67), both possibilities coexist. This dynamic between the familiar and the Other, in which they exist simultaneously or follow each other within the same poem, makes it difficult to view them as two poles. Instead they take on a qualitative aspect which is neatly summarised in the section "Stars" from the same collection "Into the Blue" (TM 79): "it / took us / out and further out than thought could reach. / First apprehension / of distance: the far, the near" (lines 3–7). The characterisation of distances as objects transforms description, the mimetic functions of language, into a creative function of language which creates concepts rather than represents them.

Voice and language are key in understanding the familial relationship between the animal Other and the self in "Pentecostal". Through his consumption of the seafood, the poet internalises not only their flesh, but also the voice of the animal Other, as their "death-aria" sings in the throat of the poet (line 16). It is in the line following, that "the voice of the word / -less creature" is situated "in us" (lines 16–17). The use of the plural form here suggests that the voice of the animal Other is the same as that of humanity's animal self which likewise "rages against hook, / against withering salt, against frying-pan and fire" (lines 17–18). The animal Other in the crab poems forms an interesting intersection between language, otherness, and body. In order to connect to them, the poet is obliged to fall back on bodily experience rather than linguistics. The connection between body and language is shown in the way the sea creatures themselves become "Gelatinous thick / tongue" (lines 9–10), symbolically becoming language. This is a language shared by nature in general (see for instance "Cuisine"), and it is the language of taste.

#### **Water: Closing Remarks**

The ocean connects and delineates, bearing a Schlegelian fluidity that makes it the perfect vehicle for exploring the tensions between two ways of being in Australia. This is the double lens throughout Malouf 's work: namely, the metaphysical and the specifically Australian issues he addresses in his critical work (the language/landscape divide, making place in Australia). These two are connected here, as they were in Romanticism. The metaphysical in these poems is an integral part of sense-making in the world, in an earnest attempt to deal with the issues of the day; then as now. Whether writing the continent or the ocean, in each case, language is posited as both a method of approaching unity, and as its limiting factor. Schlegelian irony turns this backwards and forwards into a productive force. Malouf 's ocean poems elicit a re-thinking of categories such as time, space, the human, the animal, and the nature of the sacred (something which he expands on in his body poems).

By pointing to the fundamentally deceptive nature of such categories, the poet calls into question the hierarchies implicit in the desire to possess the land and the animal Other, thus revealing the deceptive nature of place-making processes both under colonialism and today. Malouf uses water rather than land as a new approach to nation-making processes. Whereas land and nature (usually landplants and river systems) have been important in the nation-making processes of the US, Malouf offers water as an alternative: his nation, like his subject, is hybrid, fluid, in a flux state between isolation and global connections. Water gave Australia the form that the English gave it and its unique settler identity, but it also shows us the extent of our own limitations.

The ocean is like the Romantic subject in that it defines what is (i.e. the continent as Australia, or the "continent" of our own consciousness) and indicates that which is not (absolute unity, a truly indigenous relationship to the land), thus proffering a connection of which the human cannot take full advantage. This is why the edges of the land are so important: they represent the edges of the mind. The sea's pervasiveness is as pervasive as the infinite that can enter the land and seep under the floorboards of that more finite place, the Australian suburb. The ocean's intrusion into the domestic sphere serves the dual purpose of undermining a colonial way of being in Australia – the parcelling out of small patches of land to be owned, and mowed; a suburban dream of English gardens and civilised society – and of showing the reader another way of belonging, which is a communion with the Other: always sought, never reached, but ever in becoming.

# **Interiors**

Malouf 's interior poems approach the writing of the subject into place through its deconstruction, creating room for new ways of being in place. This occurs directly or via the intrusion of the fantastic into the domestic sphere. Here, the interiors are rendered uncanny as they merge with the ocean, the body, or the wildness of the animal Other. The deconstruction and reconstruction of place in these poems raises the possibility of rewriting colonial patterns of living into one which is defined by an endless creative process. The final poems addressed in this section describe interior spaces quite differently to the other pieces examined here. Rather than deconstructing interiors spaces, the poems "Bicycle" and "Typewriter Music" evoke the godhead in mechanical form. They form a continuation of the play between the mundane and the transcendent explored in Malouf 's suburban settings.

### **Fragments of the Social Self**

#### **"This Day Under My Hand"; "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton"**

I now return briefly to two poems already mentioned: "This Day Under My Hand" and "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton". In these pieces, the house walls dissolve as the outside creeps in. However, I argue against Leer's assessment that the self/ Other divide is overcome through the imagination in Malouf 's writing. Rather, the interior loses its ability to create a cohesive, at times colonially influenced, social order. This life and place made inside is endlessly fragmented rather than dissolved in a way that might allow a transcendence of the self.

True to its nature, water refuses to remain in its own designated site, but seeps into many of Malouf 's other sites as well. These include the interior spaces in Malouf 's poems. The relationship between the interiors of Malouf 's childhood haunts, and their ability to serve as integrative sources of identity, was touched on in "This Day Under My Hand" (RD 57–58). The themes and motifs of that poem are also present in **"An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton"** (RD 27), which shows the house's inability to create a coherent familial (and by extension, social) order. Martin Leer proposes that Malouf writes the psyche as house (Leer 1985, 4). As such, the fate of the house in "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton" may be read as being analogous to the self.

> The garden shifts indoors, the house lets fall its lamplight, opens

windows in the earth and the small stars of the grass, the night insects, needlepoint a jungle more dense than any tapestry, where Saturn burns, a snow owl's nest, and melons feed their crystal with hot sugars of the moon. (lines 1–7)

The boundary between the interior and the outside world of the garden (and later the Pacific Ocean) becomes blurred in the very first line, as "The garden shifts indoors". The relationship between suburbia and gardens is a relatively unthreatening one. It is not the wilderness or the forest which encroaches into the interior, but something already akin to it: the garden. It is not surprising that the movement is a reciprocal one. Not only does the garden enter the house, but the house enters the earth. It "lets fall / its lamp light, open / windows in the earth" (lines 1–3).

In his analysis of this poem, Martin Leer expresses the critical consensus that Malouf 's work achieves a positive resolution to the self/other divide through the power of the imagination:

Malouf 's poem (where again one notes the proximity of ocean and desert1 ) is purely about the way the outside world enters the perceiving consciousness through the windows of the imagination […]. Malouf displays a decentralization of the mind, a freeing of the imagination from a superimposed, supposedly rational, conscious self: a rebellion in fact, not so much against Stevens, as against Descartes and Freud, against the separation of mind and body, 'ego' and 'id', corresponding on the political level to the demise of the British Empire. (Leer 1985, 16)

Leer's comments are founded on a psychoanalytical approach. However, his basic thesis of the function of imagination in Malouf 's work credits art with the ability to dissolve the self and partake in a presence-experience of connection:

The movement of the self out of itself takes place on many levels and in many situations in Malouf 's work. It is the movement back to the pristine house and at the same time the movement onto the ultimate beach or plain stretching to the pole in Ovid's case—of individuality and facing up to death. Death in Malouf turns the creatures inside out. They break out of constrictions, into their true selves, into a space where all time is eternally present, or continually present. This is paradise, but also nature in its ceaseless flux—if we offer no resistance to it by trying to mark ourselves off from it—and it is the work of art. (ibid., 19)

There is, however, a significant change which occurs in the third stanza, the exact middle of the poem, when the "Pacific breaks at our table" (lines 8–9); this undermines the idea that anything is finally resolved in the poem, whether at the centre or periphery. The Pacific likewise intrudes into the domestic sphere in "This Day Under My Hand", "banging -/ an open gate" while sea water salt works "its slow way into / the cracks in iron, laying / its white crust on the skin (lines 28-29, 38-40).

The interior in **"An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton"** is fragmented, then the house itself becomes corporeal before being deconstructed.

> The Pacific Breaks at our table each grain of salt a splinter of its light at midday, deserts flare on the lizard's tongue. Familiar rooms glow, rise through the dark – exotic islands; this house a strange anatomy of parts, so many neighbours in a thicket: hair, eye, tooth, thumb. (lines 7–15)

Through this process of dissolution and *Verfremdung*, the house loses its ability to create a coherent familial and social order. Its interiors are no longer the interiors of memory as a space of self-determination. Rather, the house/self is multiple, and in its fragmentation of parts, it has the ability to connect with the other "neighbours in a thicket" (line 15) – a line which reflects the title of Malouf 's 1974 collection in which "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton" first appeared. The deconstruction of the self, the loss of its coherent socially and linguistically defined form, should lend the self an ability to connect with the Other in the Schlegelian sense. Malouf 's own comments on the piece echo the concept of the Romantic symbol unmistakably:

The movement of that poem is from something observed, described – objects, events – straight through into the mind, and the experience it enacts – the *belief* – is that there is no disjunction between thought and object, between mind and body – that the old subject/object dichotomy is resolved in experience, in being itself. […] The whole movement of the poem is from the house and garden outside to a point where the house has become the house of the body itself and the anatomy that one is talking about is the body as the point from which the thing is experienced *in itself*, but not as something *separate*. (Malouf 1990, 274, emphasis in original)

And yet, at the end of the piece, the self does not connect with the Other, but remains deconstructed, fragmented into a meaningless ensemble of body parts: "hair, eyetooth, thumb" (line 15).

The moment when the ocean enters the suburban interior of the house at Hamilton recalls "The Crab Feast" in the way the possibility of merging two worlds is encapsulated in the act of eating, while the "salt a splinter of light at midday" reminds the reader of the crabs in "At Deception Bay" rising "to meet their image in the sun" (P 77, line 6). Given that "At Deception Bay" was also originally published in *Neighbours in a Thicket*, the intertextual relationship between the two is not unexpected. The repetition of the collection's title in the poem "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton", however, implies a greater degree of connection to the other poems than simply their proximity in the edition. The "neighbours" and the "thicket" in line 15 are never defined. The mixture of closeness (as to be neighbours implies both a social bond and a physical ease of passage between two locations) and the barrier implied by the word "thicket" may be viewed as symbolic of the interrelatedness of Malouf's poems, of language in general, and of the self with the Other. On the other hand, it also shows these relationships to exist in the context of the insurmountable barrier of language. This is not necessarily to disagree with the author: indeed, the emphasis on the belief that "there is no disjunction between thought and object" in the quotation above stems from Malouf himself. The experience of wholeness may be enacted with success in the poem, but ultimately its enactment is still a matter for the mind rather than the body. The image of Malouf projected by critics such as Marin Leer is that of a dreamer. This may be the case, but the final image of this poem contains more than a little nightmare.

### **Recollections of Childhood: Deconstructing the Indoor Self**

#### **"Interiors from a Childhood"; "Indoor Garden"**

The coalescence of house and body in "An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton" exemplifies a connection between interiors and childhood which occurs in a substantial body of poems. Interior spaces become important as sites of memory in the development of the self through its enculturation into the linguistic order. The body, mind, and interior are brought together in the set "Interiors from a childhood" (P 3–5), which consists of "At My Grandmother's", "Family Photographs", "Maiden Aunts", and "Childhood Illness". The domestic sphere of the childhood poems here is one which is dominated by women and a culture strange to the poet. Malouf inverts the Australian Gothic trope of the uncanny Australian landscape. Instead, it is the domestic interiors of his childhood which take on the role of the Gothic, void of the sublime.

In "At My Grandmother's", the interior of the grandmother's home is portrayed as a threatening underwater world. The similarity of this poem's underwater scene with the underwater world the speaker longs for in other poems serves contrarily to highlight the differences between the two, while maintaining the characterisation of water as a threatening element. The sea in the grandmother's house is not a part of the Australian landscape. Nature is neither welcomed nor desired in this room that is "shuttered against the bright envenomed leaves" (line 2). The description of the leaves outside as "envenomed" conveys the grandmother's relationship with the Australian landscape outside. Whilst many Australian plants are poisonous, the term '*en*venomed' implies that it is the grandmother's own attitude which has made them so. What nature there is in the room is dead: "the parrot screeching soundless / in its dome of glass, the faded butterflies / like jewels pinned against a sable cloak" (lines 9–10).