Bird and Other Writings on Epilepsy.(Review)

Bird and Other Writings on Epilepsy, by Susan Hawthorne; Spinifex, 1999, $19.95.

BIRD is essentially a livre compose on the mystery of, and medical knowledge about, epilepsy. It seems to be aimed at two overlapping audiences: those who read Australian poetry generally, and those who have experienced epilepsy at close range, either as a sufferer or through their relationship with a sufferer.

The first group will probably find Bird a little uneven in poetic quality, ranging from powerful, fully-achieved poems such as "The Language of My Tongue" to rather brief and prosy notes such as "ECT" which reads in its entirety: "How would you feel if your body / gave you a spontaneous ECT?"

The second group, those who know the subject at close range, will find this book a useful addition to the works they already have on their shelf. Bird is a collection about what it feels like to be an epileptic, what it feels like to wake up with no memory of the seizure, what it feels like to be "rescued" by people you've never met, what it feels like to wake up with a lacerated tongue and realise you've been "fitting" in your sleep.

The long title poem is, in effect, a short story in verse. It tells of an epileptic girl who has a talent for the trapeze but whom everyone (or almost everyone) is deterring from it for obvious reasons. Hawthorne's situation is closely observed and her narrative well-paced but the poetic texture most of the time seems thin. A typical line reads "My best friend's name is Gabriella. We talk a lot." The demand for density of imagery in dramatic or narrative poetry is clearly lower than for lyrical verse but quite a few readers will feel that Hawthorne's narrative here, despite the obvious interest of her material, has nevertheless fallen short of this mark.

MAL MORGAN'S last book, Beautiful Veins, also deals with an illness--lung cancer--but it is a very different sort of book. Unlike Susan Hawthorne, Morgan was an experienced poet with six books behind him when he started these poems. Since the late 1960s he had been a feature of the Melbourne poetry scene and a respected promoter of other poets' work rather than just his own.

Although he was born in 1935, it was the era of the late 1960s and early 1970s that set down the parameters of Morgan's work. His poetry is emotional and, like that of many "confessional" poets, somehow public and private at the same time. As the CD (included free) indicates, Morgan was a proficient reader of his own work, and seems to have liked living at the crossover between "page" poetry and "stage" poetry. The poems in Beautiful Veins happily scatter the names of other poets ...