This week’s spotlight shines once again on Jelena Dinić’s stunning collection In the Room with the She Wolf, highlighting the poem ‘Devil’s Elbow’. 

Post written by Polly Grant Butler

Although I have lived in Adelaide for eight months now, I still have one foot in my Melbourne-hometown, which keeps me going back every month or so. Sometimes I go by sky (an experience I will never not find terrifying), and sometimes by overnight bus (equally terrifying, but for different reasons). The best trips are when I get to avoid the city altogether (has it always been this big?!), instead spending the weekend in the Dandenong Ranges with my partner and my cats and my books.

The Dandenong Ranges is the Melbourne equivalent of the Adelaide Hills, except nobody I know ever wants to visit because they are incapable of going further than a couple of tram stops up Sydney Road. Full of steep inclines and windy roads, both areas appear to have a hairpin turn horrifyingly dubbed ‘Devil’s Elbow’, and though I suspect Jelena’s poem refers to one near her home in the Adelaide Hills, the setting of this poem feels very familiar to me. 

‘Devil’s Elbow’ the poem consists of six numbered sections. In the first, we see the ‘curves like a ribbon round the neck of the hill’, a beautifully apt description for this type of landscape. In the second, a close relationship is evoked (‘we turn to each other knowingly’) and contrasted with the poem’s repeating references to wildness, an imagined freedom. The later sections are more abstract, but still sensitively anchored to the familiar. There is something prose-like about this poem, a matter-of-fact tone that allows its images to slice through like magic, lines such as ‘a bling of promise in the sun’ and ‘words sound like staged collisions’.

The last three lines of the final stanza are so simple yet so moving, with the use of full stops forcing you to stop and observe each idea individually while also collectively, like when you’re waiting to enter Devil’s Elbow, watching each car speed by, and the rushing is felt from all directions. I really love this poem.

In the Room with the She Wolf is a brilliant collection that is full of depth, yet it also has an accessibility that would appeal to even those who confess to finding poetry intimidating. I am very excited to see what Jelena follows it with. 

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!