Cirrus@Austlit

'We have been living with Judith Beveridge’s marvellous poetry since the publication of The Domesticity of Giraffes in 1987. With that length of exposure, I feel I should be more confident about the shape of her work but I always feel that I don’t have enough of a grasp of her “poetic-self” to generalise with any degree of certainty about what these poems actually do. At one level they are very similar – the tone, for example, seldom changes and neither does the pace: the poems tend to be expansive. But at another level they are immensely varied: she seems just as much at home in lyrical personal expression as she does in dramatic monologues, where she enters the personalities of very different characters: the Buddha, Marco Polo’s concubine and Hannibal, to name a few. Looking at the poems from this point of view – the stance of the poet vis a vis the human consciousness that the poem is dealing with – raises another difficult issue, or at least an issue I used to find difficult before I learned how to relax and not worry about it. That is that often we aren’t sure whether a particular poem is “personal” or “imagined”. “Making Perfume”, the fourth poem of The Domesticity of Giraffes, is written in the first person and luxuriates (a feature that runs throughout Beveridge’s poetry) in names, and, in this poem, the way in which they match the scents being created. It’s always worried me whether this is “personal” or not – ie is it a poem about the author’s adolescent hobbies? The answer is “probably not”, but the evidence for that would only be a matter of probabilities and one wouldn’. Was her father a birdwatcher with a special pair of binoculars (“Sun Music”) did she have a dog which died in 2016 (“Bandit”) and so on? It’s a complicated issue in reader’s responses to poems and Beveridge isn’t the only poet where it turns up, but it isn’t resolved by treating this as a voyeuristic desire to know intimate details about someone’s life. Somehow it relates to authenticity. There’s a big difference, for most of us, between seeing a host of golden daffodils and imagining that you have done so. Or of actually having a gorgeous girlfriend who is as beautiful as a red, red rose and imagining that you do. Somehow we want lyric poets to recognise the significance of special experiences they have had and to make them the basis of exploratory poems. In contrast, of course, imaginative, dramatic enterings into unfamiliar personalities – Marco Polo’s concubine, for example – must, by definition, not arise from personal experience but from imaginative reconstructions.' (Introduction)