Review: Flat Exit by Broede Carmody

This is a collection of moments. Like memories, they are often stark and bright, rendered with certainty and specificity. But also like memories they are unstable. Whether they are discrete or part of a grand story, whether the “you” who is addressed throughout is one person or many, lover or friend — the edges of these poems blur into dreams.

The poems sketch a loose narrative. The first sequence, Falling Into The River, charts a return to the city from the country where the poet grew up, from where “the river anchors everything,/the way it scissors” to a place where “my accent/has bent out of its shape” and there’s a boyfriend waiting. In the second sequence, Pine Cones Warn Of Forest Fire, that boyfriend is overseas in Europe (“my bed still suggests/your shape”), and the poet is anxious at home with housemates and friends. The final sequence, Learning To Breathe Again, is a superlative examination of loss: of a friend, of a relationship. Four Days On finds the poet “a stranger wandering a house” after the loss of someone who:

taught me to slip under waves like fish

and emerge safe on the side

Immediately following is I Placed A Sprig Of Rosemary At Your Feet. The poet finds Tim Tam crumbs in the bed, and “there’s a loud volume/of water on the road”:

We move through each other,

on to the place we’re going.

“Soil is easier to move while grieving” Carmody writes in the outstanding Gardening:

This succulent hole is an orange

tongue; the same colour that crept

into your room. We didn’t lie horizontal in Princes

Park enough. The living complain about weather,

but, like mint, you knew how to wait for rain.

Through precise observation Carmody renders these moments like finely crafted jewellery. Motifs thread the narrative like beads — moths, gin (and other delicacies, reminding me of the delight in snacks in Andrew Brooks’s Inferno), herbs and botanicals, the rain and sea. Offsetting this precision is a dreamy sensuality, lychees that “we’ll pick//out the stony heart, our fingers stained/by their juice” in Waiting For Rain, or, in 4 am, when the boyfriend comes home and “a hand whips across my mouth — ours”. In Salt, another highlight, the poet dreams “you fill your pockets with shellfish … a seagull/pulsates in your jacket” and recalls a first meeting:

I wanted to jump in feet-first that night.

I stood at your shoes, the ocean worried

at our shore

Beginnings and endings, past and future, friends and lovers co-exist in the present in these poems. Through them, Carmody fixes them into something enduring.

Gay rating: 4/5 for queer figures, sex and relationships.