The depth in a day.(In Your Absence by Stephen McInerney)(Book Review)

In Your Absence, by Stephen McInerney; Indigo/Ginninderra Press, 2002, $18.

IT HAS OFTEN struck me as odd, even perverse, that so many people seem to feel the need to impose upon the world of everyday experience, this world, adscititious dimensions of strangeness--alien abductions, let's say, or predetermination by astrology--when the everyday is so very strange and mysterious in and of itself. What could be more extraordinary than this--sitting on the patio, for example, with the weight of a cup of coffee in one's palms, watching the shadows of the sheets on the line as they convulse across the grass in obsessive circuits--when there might have been nothing? As you can see, it doesn't take long to get from the back yard to the limits of the universe. I felt in the company of a like mind when reading "This", the opening poem of Stephen McInerney's impressive, and enjoyable (the two attributes don't invariably coincide), debut collection, In Your Absence:

 
   It begins with little more than the turning 
   Of a page, noticing the fridge humming, 
   A flower in a glass, a ball of loose string 
   On the sill, the drip of a tap left running. 
 
   This sudden awareness of empty space, 
   Deeper than the sky in the back window ... 

We have a houseful of the ordinary, and we see, hear,, feel these disparate objects and processes emerge into the strange thisness of their presence under the spotlight of the poet's attention, much as that yellow cab in Hecht's "Apprehensions" becomes the "absolute parental yellow" in the light of an electrical storm. And suddenly we are in a space deeper than the sky. As I said, it doesn't take long if you look at the ordinary closely and concentratedly enough. And those opening lines are very clever: even before we know what we are going to be reading about we realise that there will be larger implications because this is only how it begins. From this midpoint the poet draws back from that space deeper than the sky into the elusive present of "[a] single day" ("Where can we live but days?" as a famous poem asks),

 
   ... Hour by hour 
   Falling through our hands, sifted through the clock. 
   This waiting. This need to turn the kettle off 
   And on. To butter bread. To flick a switch. To talk. 

The poem ends not with the inactive "noticing" and "awareness" of its beginning but with engagement, the observing mind becoming, needing to be, an actor and participant among all this, which is so provisionally and temporarily ours, as it falls through our hands, sifted through the clock.

An impressive beginning then, quietly observant, understated, not straining after great effects yet managing to be large in scope while small in scale and Close in attention.