Poetry review – SHE GOES TO TOWN: Kimberly K. Williams admires the multiple perspectives on this collection by Sandra Renew
She Goes to Town
Sandra Renew
Gazebo Books 2024
ISBN 9780645920987
$24.99
She Goes to Town is the seventh full-length collection by Australian poet Sandra Renew (not counting full-length books co-authored with other poets and writers). It is a book that examines the contemporary world from several perspectives on both the macro and micro levels. In fact, the book is an unpredictable blending of the two, both in content and in construction.
The book immediately alerts the readers to the type of journey they are embarking on. The first poem, “Part 1: I Am Writing from the Body of Who I Am Now…”, warns readers: ‘There will be reversals. Finding again broken and unreliable / links, going back. Travelling old roads as if she only knew them / in dreams.’ It is a promise of the poems to come, and here Renew delivers.
Despite the kept promise, the above excerpt also indicates that the reliability of what follows needs to be consistently questioned. Even the speaker questions herself: ‘Two voices, more than that. Speaking her uncertain, new / urban body, new words … a separation…She is writing a memoir, a fiction / of herself, reminiscing remembrances, maybe an obituary…’ (“Part 1: I Am Writing…”). In this moment of separation, the journey, at once both individual and collective, commences, but does so with uncertainty.
In the second poem, “Street,” the eleventh line plays with the word “lies”:’she never lies with so much quiet.’ And from this point onward, the reader may understandably question almost everything to come. But Renew is aware of this, and the third poem, “Once We Had a Revolution,” offers one full stanza of explanation:
how the words become the lie
how the lie becomes the story
how the story becomes the history
how the history becomes the narrative
how the narrative becomes the discourse
how the discourse becomes her body.
In a gentle way, this is all so unsettling. The rug is being pulled out from under us poem after poem, yet, somehow, Renew gets away with it. This is astute writing. Tension abounds; we read on to see if it resolves.
One way that Renew pulls off this subtle trickery (besides announcing through the poems what is happening even as it occurs) is that the book’s course is never predictable. Poems use both the first and third person points of view, such as the penultimate poem in the book’s first part, “Getting ‘the Electric’” and the first poem in Part two, “This is Where I Come From, What I Came Through to Get Here”. However, many of the poems are in the third person – examining “She”, as the book’s title poem indicates. Indeed, in this book “She” is busy: “She goes to town”; “She Goes to War”; “She Enjoys Being Older” are examples. The alternating points of view afford readers the widest of angles. In addition, the varying forms do, too. The book contains many prose poems as narratives, but there are also free verse lineated poems, some poems that alternate between prose and lineated stanzas, a few tankas, and even a “Sestina for Afghanistan,” where the third and fourth lines solemnly declare, ‘we all know our invasion history is usually / overlaid with sorry silence. Consistently…’ This is the big picture that the poems in this book depict time and again, the overarching narrative of contemporary times since the mid-twentieth century, at least.
But life at the micro level is addressed as well. The poems question an individual’s place in a world that values conformity. The second poem in Part 2, “Tribe,” a first-person prose poem, illustrates this point. The middle of the first paragraphs admits, ‘I don’t think I am being / romantic when I look around me and cannot find my tribe, / either in the past or any present.’ Indeed, the separation that began with the first poem of the book continues.
Sometimes the stories in this book meta-textually acknowledge themselves:
This is the story of a tree, old beyond the recall of generations, and an ugly
little dry gully, on the sandy edge of town. In black and white, it’s an edgy
story, but it’s also a story where we somehow know the ending before we
begin.
This is yet another example of how Renew’s writing works – we know the endings, and they generally aren’t satisfying. However, Renew’s way through the stories casts a different kind of light on what is predictable, and so we read onward, listening as the poems speak.
Ultimately, the poems in this book reveal a type of wisdom. Renew was a teenager in the ‘60s and identified as a lesbian long before an understanding of queer was common. There is an inherent political edge to her work as the poems demand that we look again and again at how humans have ended up in so many concurrent crises. As the poems tell their stories, both personal and global, they are investigating the status of almost all aspects of life: “gender climate” and climate change (“Tribe”) and the historical climate that has led us to these multiple crises, including the invidiousness of “doom-scrolling.” The first poem of Part three is entitled, “This is What I Worry About”, and it reads like a prose list poem, including, ‘Persecution and murder under the name of homophobia, / misogyny, trans-hatred …’ Readers might lose hope at such a daunting list, but the very next poem, “Peak Alone” takes a different tack, offering brief moments from the natural world that sustain through the use of imagery alone: ‘Peak Alone stands cobalt blue against massing grey-lit storm / clouds, rain promise tempered by morning sun, expanding / light …’ Before readers grow too comfortable, however, the trickster fox enters the poem towards the end until it is dismissed two poems later in “Warning to a Fox”: ‘So, my fox, you should leave now. Move inland…’ Here is another example of how Renew’s poems never let readers get comfortable.
Every poem in this collection is an individual journey of sorts – a wide-scope political journey on the way to a protest, a quiet time in nature, a moment on the streets of a small Australian town in the twentieth century. In She Goes to Town, there are stories within stories, which Part four of the book addresses. This final section’s first poem, “How Does it End?” brings the readers’ attentions to possible conclusion(s), and the question becomes: how to wrap up such a wide-sweeping book? As the speaker herself admits, ‘I’m just kicking the / story on. Not giving a free pass to hate speech, not letting a religious protection ooze beyond its borders into an anti-gay weapon…’ The readers are propelled, poem and after poem, with confronting questions right to the book’s end: ‘When our species dies, how does it end?’ (“It’s a Journey”). Perhaps what counts most is that, in spite of the difficult questions that the poems pose and the lack of ready answers, the journey continues nevertheless. Despite the threat of tricksters and the omnipresent reminders of deception (the antepenultimate poem, “Hello Trojan,” ushers in the Trojan horse itself), readers move forward in a sense of company – with our reticent yet self-assigned speaker – and something of value is uncovered, poem after poem, until the final two lines: ‘whatever dream becomes the ocean / the woman is the ocean and it becomes her’ (“It Becomes Her”).
Sep 6 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Sandra Renew
Poetry review – SHE GOES TO TOWN: Kimberly K. Williams admires the multiple perspectives on this collection by Sandra Renew
She Goes to Town is the seventh full-length collection by Australian poet Sandra Renew (not counting full-length books co-authored with other poets and writers). It is a book that examines the contemporary world from several perspectives on both the macro and micro levels. In fact, the book is an unpredictable blending of the two, both in content and in construction.
The book immediately alerts the readers to the type of journey they are embarking on. The first poem, “Part 1: I Am Writing from the Body of Who I Am Now…”, warns readers: ‘There will be reversals. Finding again broken and unreliable / links, going back. Travelling old roads as if she only knew them / in dreams.’ It is a promise of the poems to come, and here Renew delivers.
Despite the kept promise, the above excerpt also indicates that the reliability of what follows needs to be consistently questioned. Even the speaker questions herself: ‘Two voices, more than that. Speaking her uncertain, new / urban body, new words … a separation…She is writing a memoir, a fiction / of herself, reminiscing remembrances, maybe an obituary…’ (“Part 1: I Am Writing…”). In this moment of separation, the journey, at once both individual and collective, commences, but does so with uncertainty.
In the second poem, “Street,” the eleventh line plays with the word “lies”:’she never lies with so much quiet.’ And from this point onward, the reader may understandably question almost everything to come. But Renew is aware of this, and the third poem, “Once We Had a Revolution,” offers one full stanza of explanation:
In a gentle way, this is all so unsettling. The rug is being pulled out from under us poem after poem, yet, somehow, Renew gets away with it. This is astute writing. Tension abounds; we read on to see if it resolves.
One way that Renew pulls off this subtle trickery (besides announcing through the poems what is happening even as it occurs) is that the book’s course is never predictable. Poems use both the first and third person points of view, such as the penultimate poem in the book’s first part, “Getting ‘the Electric’” and the first poem in Part two, “This is Where I Come From, What I Came Through to Get Here”. However, many of the poems are in the third person – examining “She”, as the book’s title poem indicates. Indeed, in this book “She” is busy: “She goes to town”; “She Goes to War”; “She Enjoys Being Older” are examples. The alternating points of view afford readers the widest of angles. In addition, the varying forms do, too. The book contains many prose poems as narratives, but there are also free verse lineated poems, some poems that alternate between prose and lineated stanzas, a few tankas, and even a “Sestina for Afghanistan,” where the third and fourth lines solemnly declare, ‘we all know our invasion history is usually / overlaid with sorry silence. Consistently…’ This is the big picture that the poems in this book depict time and again, the overarching narrative of contemporary times since the mid-twentieth century, at least.
But life at the micro level is addressed as well. The poems question an individual’s place in a world that values conformity. The second poem in Part 2, “Tribe,” a first-person prose poem, illustrates this point. The middle of the first paragraphs admits, ‘I don’t think I am being / romantic when I look around me and cannot find my tribe, / either in the past or any present.’ Indeed, the separation that began with the first poem of the book continues.
Sometimes the stories in this book meta-textually acknowledge themselves:
This is yet another example of how Renew’s writing works – we know the endings, and they generally aren’t satisfying. However, Renew’s way through the stories casts a different kind of light on what is predictable, and so we read onward, listening as the poems speak.
Ultimately, the poems in this book reveal a type of wisdom. Renew was a teenager in the ‘60s and identified as a lesbian long before an understanding of queer was common. There is an inherent political edge to her work as the poems demand that we look again and again at how humans have ended up in so many concurrent crises. As the poems tell their stories, both personal and global, they are investigating the status of almost all aspects of life: “gender climate” and climate change (“Tribe”) and the historical climate that has led us to these multiple crises, including the invidiousness of “doom-scrolling.” The first poem of Part three is entitled, “This is What I Worry About”, and it reads like a prose list poem, including, ‘Persecution and murder under the name of homophobia, / misogyny, trans-hatred …’ Readers might lose hope at such a daunting list, but the very next poem, “Peak Alone” takes a different tack, offering brief moments from the natural world that sustain through the use of imagery alone: ‘Peak Alone stands cobalt blue against massing grey-lit storm / clouds, rain promise tempered by morning sun, expanding / light …’ Before readers grow too comfortable, however, the trickster fox enters the poem towards the end until it is dismissed two poems later in “Warning to a Fox”: ‘So, my fox, you should leave now. Move inland…’ Here is another example of how Renew’s poems never let readers get comfortable.
Every poem in this collection is an individual journey of sorts – a wide-scope political journey on the way to a protest, a quiet time in nature, a moment on the streets of a small Australian town in the twentieth century. In She Goes to Town, there are stories within stories, which Part four of the book addresses. This final section’s first poem, “How Does it End?” brings the readers’ attentions to possible conclusion(s), and the question becomes: how to wrap up such a wide-sweeping book? As the speaker herself admits, ‘I’m just kicking the / story on. Not giving a free pass to hate speech, not letting a religious protection ooze beyond its borders into an anti-gay weapon…’ The readers are propelled, poem and after poem, with confronting questions right to the book’s end: ‘When our species dies, how does it end?’ (“It’s a Journey”). Perhaps what counts most is that, in spite of the difficult questions that the poems pose and the lack of ready answers, the journey continues nevertheless. Despite the threat of tricksters and the omnipresent reminders of deception (the antepenultimate poem, “Hello Trojan,” ushers in the Trojan horse itself), readers move forward in a sense of company – with our reticent yet self-assigned speaker – and something of value is uncovered, poem after poem, until the final two lines: ‘whatever dream becomes the ocean / the woman is the ocean and it becomes her’ (“It Becomes Her”).