Review: The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt

This poetry collection begins with My Father as a Giant Koi, a portrait of the poet’s father in advanced stages of a neurological disease (Parkinson’s, it is identified later). Like the fish, “ancient god of the dark”, he spends his hours “perfecting the art of the circle”: “what he knows is shrinking into round facts”. It is a powerful image, rendered as delicately as an ink drawing. This first section of four documents her father’s decline and death.

In the second the theme becomes more expansive: the poet’s childhood and upbringing, her mother’s cancer and knee surgery. The third addresses a marriage’s dissolution, perhaps finding another love, through a sequence of cocktails in various luxurious hotels and bars across Europe and the US. The final section returns to Australia and to some of the earlier concerns of lineage and place, including visits to her father’s birthplace in Worthing, her grandfather’s place of wartime service in Gibraltar. These are elegant poems, sometimes rather austere. There is some fine nature writing, often reflecting the poet’s mood, such as the misty mountains following her father’s death in Springbrook, or the grief-laden imagery of the Australian coast in The Midpoint, in which sandpipers form “a single-file funeral procession”. The metaphors are often interesting, but every now and then quantity triumphs over a singularly precise image (in the first poem, the father is not only like a fish but also an ice skater and a monorail).

The titular jaguar slinks through the collection in various guises, at first as a kind of blood sacrifice to her father’s health and dreams of traveling to Brazil; then the car he buys and does up when told he can no longer drive (“he drove it as though he was punishing [the poet’s mother]”); at last the story she hears of the big cat given to a daughter. “It tore apart her brother’s beagle and ate it,” the poem describes bluntly. There are other Amazonian creatures, such as the hummingbirds, butterflies and caimans that flicker on the TV at night like Plato’s cave while her mother receives chemo, or the doctor in which she sees the likeness of a glittering boa or a vivid orchid mantis who advises her to withhold antibiotics and so bring about the end of her father’s life. The exotic is sublime in these poems, wild and beautiful, but also dangerous and unknowable.

Luxury and decadence suggest a similar sense of glamour and decay in the third section, such as in Cipriani, which finds the poet dining with a millionaire:

antipasti of octopus and bread,

that beautiful heavy Italian bread

in perfect ovals on the side plates.

The clearest artistic vision statement comes in a poem with a title that gives Lana Del Rey a run for her money, Upon Viewing a Still Life by Chardin and Thinking of the Marathon Bombing in Boston, which does what it says and explains:

it [death] does that,

masked, enters unannounced — and often in the canvas

we mistake it for beauty, completion masquerading

as perfection

and concludes that “death is an embellishment, that what/is important is the ceremony, the arrangement”. It is a clear elocution of death as stilled life, and what is a poem but life captured, arranged and stilled on the page?

These ideas reach their apotheosis in Time Remaining, a breathtaking meditation on time and experience. The poem starts by painting in the colours of her father’s hospital room: silver bubbles of mineral water, a “chartreuse” indicator on a screen, the “mulberry velvet” of morphine. Her father “remains” but the poet wants to say “is remaining—/present continuous”. “He is at the verge/of something he is only starting to comprehend”:

he’s standing at the delta

of a huge muddy rivermouth

where the mackerel-backed sky and water

mirror each other’s enormities

and the eye cannot find the horizon

Wonder, she suggests he is feeling, and the poem induces the same, capturing the way that such events dilate time and space, becoming infinite.

Gay rating: not gay.