Blood Universe
Esther Ottaway's 32-page poetry collection exploring pregnancy and parenthood.
These poems have been reprinted widely in anthologies, published in The Australian,
featured on Radio National's Poetica program, listed in further reading in 60 Classic Australian Poems,
and set to music for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.
I like these poems because they are rich and full-hearted. Esther Ottaway writes with unsentimental clarity. She is sharp, smart and tender and she has a dexterity with language that marks her as a poet.
– Judith Beveridge
Authoritative command of form and tone, arresting and inventive use of language.
– Stephen Edgar
Delicate and tough, precisely observed and thoughtful.
– Brook Emery
Evening Prayer
She is bent over her knees like a devotee,
palms and cheek pressed to the linen.
It is dark. Her back is to me, the soles of her feet visible
not quite side by side, like two leaves
that drifted down into divine asymmetry,
here, there. Above them, the rise of her spine,
sacrum, a valley of vertebrae, the gentle peaks
of her scapulae and shoulder-tips - my handspan their measure,
her still too-big head, sprinkling of hair,
slumbering face written like a revelation.
In the cot's centre, her soles - two butterfly wings,
two graces, halves of an answer.
Dimension and Light
Look twice. She and I are crafty edges
butted together in Escher's lithography. Descend these stairs
with caution - two dimensions pop to three,
you're outside the square, tipped out
of your own careful drawing, as two cells
burst into that four-chambered, quicksilver heart.
Our heads are opposing poles,
two points of a compass
aiming, priming, one to earth, one to sky.
Her walls and ceiling are my viscera -
we share the vibrations of an eardrum,
music, traffic, loved voices, but only she
hears that interior percussion, my pumps and bellows,
acoustics of my secret engineering.
Since I will never hear them, perhaps these sounds
were never mine, built for her, osmotic rhythms
of blood and water, memories older than mind.
We are spoonerisms: the elements she thieves
from my bones and blood and breath
become her kidneys, fingers, tongue. We are tricks
of dimension and light. Look now, she distends
my vertical, rendering me convex
through a looking-glass of water. Witness this -
it is never the eye that is tricked,
always the brain. Her weight is magnetism.
Her elbow's point wheels across my belly's sky -
an inverse sun, a telic compass needle.
In Single File
The afternoon shines. We take ourselves blackly
to Cornelian Bay for coffee and formula.
In the doorway the pram jams, I wrangle,
resentfully thank the man
who whisks us across the threshold:
I would have managed. I take a basket-chair,
secure the pram at forty-five degrees. Light
blares, refracting, chiming through floor-to-ceiling glass
displaying the plainest of Tasmanian views:
a low blue line of suburb-spattered hills
behind a wedge of silver-black water; in the foreground
cut grass, a sign bearing a black pointer
crossed out, a juvenile eucalypt standing absurdly
on its own. The ice water, coffee, hazelnut tart arrive
in single file, with pleasantries, reminding me
why I love restaurants: that civility, the elegant waiting.
But my world has turned since then. I guzzle my coffee,
hammer the tart into hasty shards:
not dining out, merely a small point won
and conceded again, the formula trickling away
as surely as an egg-timer's sand.
