This week’s poetry spotlight returns to Ali Whitelock’s charming and much-loved work, highlighting the poem ‘the cumquats of christmas past’ from her second collection, The Lactic Acid in the Calves of Your Despair.
Post written by Polly Grant Butler
Earlier this week, Ali Whitelock announced on Facebook her forthcoming poetry collection with Wakefield Press, plus the news – floods, fires and pandemics permitting – it can be expected on the shelf early next year. Reading this post, I realised it was about time I finally delved into the poems by everyone’s favourite Scottish-Australian. And I was certainly not disappointed.
Like T.S. Eliot’s coffee spoons in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Ali Whitelock masterfully evokes big universal truths in small everyday objects. A meal from the Indian takeaway wrestles with loss, the complications of family in a stale cigarette. Sometimes Ali uses familiar items as similes to express that which is ineffable, at other times it’s in the monotonous interaction with the day that our most powerful ideas come alive. Notably, Ali employs casual speech and colloquialism in a way that feels fresh and exciting.
Despite steady brushstrokes of humour throughout, this is a devastating collection, one that will resonate with anyone who has experienced grief; the way it leaps from a mundane task, often without notice, and weighs the body down like an anchor. As Ali writes in the introduction, ‘Grief is grief and it sneaks up on you … like today at the cafe when the waitress told me the cake of the day was Black Forest gateau and I thought he’d have ordered that and wept into my decaf soy latte.’
Grief in the poem I have chosen to highlight, ‘the cumquats of christmas past’, is ‘compressed’ and ‘orange’, touching everything with its sticky hands. Minimal punctuation and enjambment are used to mimic the franticness of breath, while the spaces between each stanza allow for moments of respite. Listen to Ali reading the poem below.
I know, I know, the holiday season should be happy! But don’t let the sadness in this collection dissuade you. Good literature makes you feel things, and there is plenty of joy throughout this book, and so much love.
Support Wakefield Press by buying our beautiful books! Visit our website or contact us on 08 8352 4455 for more information, or to purchase a book (or three!). We can post your purchase to your doorstep!