Poetry Monday: Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Inside My Mother

I know it’s not Monday where I am, but my blog, being on US time, still says it’s monday, so I’m going to take the opportunity to showcase a poetry book that is being published tomorrow.  Some weeks ago I blogged about a poetry session My Mother’s Heart that I attended at the Sydney Writers Festival.  Ali Cobby Eckermann’s new poetry book, from which she read, has now arrived, and at first glance, I’m very excited by it.  The work is rooted in the earth, and rich with legend, many stories, love, fear, loss, lost vernacular, a beautiful, and at times terrible history, healing, and as the title suggests, the nature of the maternal, in all its metaphoric implications.  I’ve only skimmed the surface so far, but I’m looking forward to reading through it slowly and deeply and finding new meaning, and new ways of looking at the world through this work:

“there’s a whole ocean filled with sand
between what was and what will be”

More about Ali Cobby Eckermann and her work can be found in this recent interview at Mascara Review: http://mascarareview.com/ali-cobby-eckermann-in-conversation-with-jaydeep-sarangi/

The book is available, from tomorrow, directly from Giramondo.

Poetry Monday: A Mother’s Heart

This Saturday, at the Sydney Writers Festival, I had the pleasure of listening to some ten poets (11 if you count the English “heckler” who was invited to join in) reading to the theme of Give Me Back my Mother’s Heart at Wharf Theatre 2. The performers were from across the Aboriginal nations, with the exception of the ring-in, whose British/Caribbean work was in sync with the theme but infused with the pain of diaspora, rather than displacement.  It was so polished and powerful, I knew he wasn’t really a ring-in.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Director of Aboriginal Writers Retreat, led up the group, whose work was confronting, intense, angry, funny, powerful, and often delivered with the memorable punch of Slam.  Ali’s own opening poem, “I Tell Ya True”, which you can read in it’s entirety on Poetry International Web, presented a moving reminder not to judge others:

you never know
what sorrows we are nursing

Eckermann’s co-collaborator at Aboriginal Writers Retreat was Lionel Fogarty, who, along with Maggie Walsh, Ken Canning, Lorna Munro, Elizabeth Wymarra, and a group of poets from the Redfern Writers Group, presented a varied selection of work, full of stories of loss, love, pain, about losing mothers -- sometimes through having been stolen away during the disastrous Child Removal Policy in 1969, and about finding mother’s heart beating in ones own chest:  “all here without our mothers...”.  I found myself laughing, crying, feeling ashamed and feeling proud throughout this session in various parts, and sometimes all of those things at once.   

What I liked best about the session was how tightly linked the poets were and how the poetry managed to bridge the gap between a deep timelessness and a very modern streetwise sensibility.  Though the work was inherently different: the voices, the ages, the level of experience, and even the backgrounds varied, there was such a powerful camaraderie and connection between the writers and their sense of being part of a single voice gaining collective strength through mutual support.  The audience felt it too: participating with whoops, applause, shout-outs, gasps, tears, and laughter.  It was a great session that left me feeling very excited by what I heard.  I’ll be hunting down Eckermann’s forthcoming book Inside My Mother (it’s Giramondo, who else), and books by other members of the group, as I was left wanting more. I just wish I could find the name of that British fake-heckler “ring-in”, as he was really good.