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- Custom Article Title: Rose Lucas reviews 'Palace of Culture' by Ania Walwicz
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Reading the poetry of Ania Walwicz is a little like being drawn into a trance: the density of the prose-like lines; the disorientation of the lack of punctuation; the repetition of certain words, phrases, alliterations. It is not a poetry that can be read in short bursts. Each poem is a commitment to a vision, to a mind-space explicitly shaped by the intensity and demand of Walwicz’s language. Having burst into Australian poetry with her ‘Polish accented’ voice more than thirty years ago, troubling the dominant Anglocentric view of Australian culture, Walwicz’s poetic still works to startle a reader from her comfort zone and to disrupt her expectations about what poetry is and can be.
- Book 1 Title: Palace of Culture
- Book 1 Biblio: Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 110 pp
In this collection, the poems cluster loosely around the interiority of the deep mind, in particular around the often disturbing and hypnotic logic of dreams: ‘i am told in a dream that a fast train that a fast rain is going to come on my way and on my way i am told that every day every day…’, or ‘what you see now i dream about what I dream I have a dream now what i see’.
Sometimes this world is threatening and claustrophobic, as in ‘rainbow’: ‘why can’t i wake up and the dreams come true really come true why can’t i and wake up why can’t i wake up why can’t i’. At other times, reminiscent of her earlier work with fairy tales, the dark waters of dream give birth to devouring and violent attackers (‘he cut off my legs and arms to put on him’), or the identification with Snow White, ‘who slept for days where i am now sleepy’.
On one hand, Walwicz’s poetry recreates these visceral experiences of smothering and paralysis, yet on the other it enacts the insistent, life-engendering possibilities of unstoppable language.
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