The Summer King was in 2008 the initial winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award. Since publication it has gone on to win the 2010 Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize.
I was fortunate enough to be present at the premier or early exposure of a good number of these poems. This was as part of a small gathering of poetic obsessive-compulsives (The Lost Friday Salon) who gathered once a month in an upstairs room of the now demolished Christchurch restaurant Mainstreet. How long ago this was speaks to the long genesis and honing of this collection, and to how difficult it is to get such fine collection into print.
Much of Joanna's collection explores the undercurrents of archetype and myth that rise up in and around us. Her language is economical and speaks always with an ear for the sounds as well as the rhetoric that will advance the poem.
A measure of that economy is the poem "The Hill Paddock". I hear in it echoes of that Yiddish theatre song, carried over into English as 'Donna Donna.' That song, which begins and ends as follows, presents in fable form a wryly elegiac world-view.
On a wagon bound for market
There's a calf with a mournful eye.
High above him there's a swallow
Winging swiftly through the sky.
Calves are easily bound and slaughtered
Never knowing the reason why.
But whoever treasures freedom,
Like the swallow has learned to fly
Preston's account gives the elegiac view another turn of the screw. She suggests an innocence/freedom that is now only something 'longed for'.
Searching for the missing calf
in the brittle light of winter afternoon
we found instead
a tuft of bloodied feathers
fluttering in the ryegrass
as though they could remember flight,
and longed for it.
The Yiddish plea to Adonai is supplanted with a condition which, while still clinging to the fabulous, is darkly godless.
She takes those mythic currents and their associated faiths, then knots and cuts the umbilical. Prayers go unanswered.'
The final and darkest poem in the collection is Parable of the Drought. It presents a rural Australian retelling of Abraham's obedience to God in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Only in this poem the injunction the father takes his son into the wilderness. Whether he is provoked by despair, delusion or both, there comes no angel to countermand that sacrifice.
He slid his fingers into the boy's hair
- just like a wether, he thought, just like a ewe -
He watched until the boy's eyes
lost their brilliance - the same brittle blue
as the sky that even now
refuses to cloud
In the opening title poem and at the close The Summer King sees the knife at work. What runs between is as sharply formed. There is much affection for home ground, places and people are recalled with brittle tenderness. In the poem Gloves:
Great Grandmother's gloves were kept for funerals,
in tissue paper, limp as something stillborn.
She drew them on slowly, the grey silk
of the other self she wore.
From there to another expression of bloody mortality may be no more than turning a leaf. In The Bull Sale:
in the centre of it all - a god
in bull's form, his forehead a thick plate
of bone, hard as a butcher's block.
Despite these blows both present and impending she also could . . .'wish you Angels, whistling.'
