The problem with most poems of personal anecdote is that they too rarely compel us, as the best poetry does with its talismanic power, to reread, to return again and again to an uncanny rightness of saying. They are too rarely memorable. In the right hands, such material can resonate beautifully. Think of the distances leapt by a poet like Seamus Heaney from such ordinary material, though his was also combined with the public and moral emergency of a society in conflict. In America, where Holland-Batt has lived and studied, a new collection by Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets, also described as a verse memoir, has just won the Pulitzer Prize. While they are very different writers, Seuss and Holland-Batt handle the personal with unusual skill. Their best poems feel intended, shaped by urgent thought and diction.

Holland-Batt has said she feels both American and Australian in her poetic identity. Her father, an engineer who emigrated from England, took the family to America as well as Australia. His long descent into Parkinson’s disease has also been the subject of Holland-Batt’s journalism and advocacy concerning the conditions in Australian aged care facilities. Her poems honour this subject matter with unflinching observation and skilful metaphor, as in ‘My Father as a Giant Koi’:

He cannot trust the scratched headlamps
of his eyes so he navigates by feel,
angling his huge whiskered head
mouth-first toward the fork, weaving
like an adder charmed by smoke,
then he bites down to find the world
suddenly there again, solid as metal and bait.

When her language escapes rationality, as she does in ‘Empires of the Mind,’ driven by the relentless absurdity of illness, Holland-Batt conveys a richer, sadder ambiguity, her father repeatedly ‘crying about Winston Churchill’.

And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus
croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark –
unsettled, loud, insatiable – the unutterable fear
rippling through them like a herd of horses
apprehending the tremor of thunder
on a horizon they cannot see but feel.

The jaguar of the book’s title, an animal as exotic and uncontrollable as her father’s disease, makes several appearances, from the car he buys in his strangely masculine denial of death, to a friend’s pet in a prose poem, ‘Brazil’, about a journey never taken. There she sees her father ‘lifting a cup filled with jaguar’s blood up to the light, how it gleams like wine, I see the raw jaguar’s heart filleted in the finest slivers, carmine red, laid out like a stinking meat flower in front of him’. It’s a weird carnality, this effort to devour a vanishing life. The jaguar appears again in ‘Ode to Cartier’, where something wild prowls in the language: ‘Hunter, huntress – / there’s life in me yet.’ And again in ‘Meditation on Risk in New Hampshire’, asking ‘why the body courts / proximity to what can kill it …’ The same poem gives us the image of a grizzly in Alaska, rearing ‘to full height to see what we were’. Though bears do not actually charge in that posture, Holland-Batt seems fascinated by the possibility of danger. She uses animal imagery less for its beauty than its otherness, irrational as the human passions.

One can hear the poet’s antecedents in her rhythms, figures like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, though without the former’s public position or the latter’s extremity. Holland-Batt has already, before the age of forty, been showered with awards and honours, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for her second book, The Hazards (2015). She has edited two volumes of Best Australian Poetry and made herself an indispensable presence on the literary scene, publishing Fishing for Lightning (2021), a remarkable collection of mini-essays on poetry and poets, all of which first appeared as columns in The Weekend Australian. She knows how to make the experience of poetry accessible to a wide public. If she hasn’t yet written poems I want to have by heart, that doesn’t mean she never will.

A few poems in this book lack the emotional energy of her best work. ‘Monopoli’, for example, reads like a postcard from her travels, leaving a whiff of privilege. Better poems, such as a series about her love life, will make many readers nod with recognition at their observations about narcissistic men and the poet’s own ambivalence: ‘and above all, take note of all the things I say – / pull me closer, push me away’. Often the poet is guarded and solitary, consoled by language more than anything else. I most enjoy her moments flirting with rhyme, as she does in ‘Driving Through Drystone Country’:

Slovenly roofs pitch

over hay store and cow stall –
industry of the particular –
and everywhere the regular metre

of drystone walls,
arrowheads of shale
fitted with flagstone precision.

Monuments to nothing
but labour and time.
Plein-air altars for rain and wind.

These are lines in which memoir crosses over into poetry.

The writing about her father is powerful because of such poetry, the way the words are worked at, rubbed and turned and used for digging into the truth with unsentimental feeling. ‘Late, late, late, late, late. / You are late in your dying.’ This comes from a strong final sequence, ‘In My Father’s Country’:

At night the lights spot on
like lanterns in rolling spray,

quaint font rocks and swings
on the gastropub. My whisky sears

and cracks its ice – the sting, the saw
of true north. Then I think of you

sleeping on your frozen front lawn.
And I cannot get warm.

There’s no denying this poet’s vocation, nor is there any doubt about what she could yet accomplish. Reader, take note.