By Jasmine Gallagher (Compound Press, 2022)
Jasmine Gallagher’s debut collection is like a series of fractal prisms. She takes moments, spaces and stories, then breaks and turns them so we see them from all sides.
As implied by the oxymoronic title, there’s a lot here. Dirge Bucolic delves into and through Jasmine’s personal experience of her own chronic illness and the death of her father, as well as the way the Canterbury landscapes she grew up surrounded by have been written, and re-written, by the colonial experience.
There’s Erewhon Station, named for Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon, set in a place where “the ill are punished as criminals”; there’s the man alone in James K Baxter’s’ ‘High Country Weather’, letting go of his anger in a way Jasmine cannot; there’s her fear of turning into a moor-wandering Emily Brontë “whenever I visit my mother” .
The structures are often experimental, but not in a way that makes the work hard to digest or understand. In ‘FAIRY STUFF’, an older male relative calls her doctoral research into contemporary poetry “fairy stuff”, then suggests she really needs to “get a proper job and buy a house in Ashburton”. Yep, been there. And she uses footnotes throughout in ways that are both delightful and profound, as asides, accessories, explanatory extras. One reads: “bats see the world in this antipodean way, head down, feet up⸺hanging upside down …. hence their association with evil”.
This is the kind of collection you could spend hours, then days, then years, pouring over. I know I will.
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LAURA WILLIAMSON
