To celebrate Ali Whitelock’s soon-to-be-launched third collection A Brief Letter to the Sea About a Couple of Things, this week’s spotlight shines on her poem ‘vodka & coke’.
Post written by Polly Grant Butler
Winter slid under my door this morning, on its official day of commencement. It taunted me as I attempted to peel myself out of bed, then followed me to the office, where it swum through the cracks and carefully arranged its shades of grey. Actually, I don’t really hate Winter, but I do find ways to complain about all of the seasons, as my fellow Wakefielders have unkindly observed. Scottish-born Ali Whitelock lives in the sunshine of NSW, yet her work pairs perfectly with these cold days, perhaps because she still yearns for her homeland: ‘the Scottish wilds, the icy north wind, the horizontal rain, the Cairngorms, the Old Man of Storr, the best Indian food you will ever taste in your life, and supermarkets that reduce packs of twelve croissants to 5p at the end of the day’. It is fitting, then, that her third collection will be released to the world and the wind in just a couple of weeks.
Like her previous collections of poetry, And My Heart Crumples Like a Coke Can and The Lactic Acid in the Calves of Your Despair, the poems in A Brief Letter to the Sea About a Couple of Things are very funny and deeply moving. They are full of language that teeters on melodrama, with words like ‘sorrow’ and ‘anguish’, but when paired with such uniquely evocative similes, the emotions feel entirely authentic.
The poem I have chosen to highlight is ‘vodka & coke’. Like many of Ali’s poems, it is written in second-person, allowing you to fully inhabit the perspective. Instead of using punctuation and varying line length, Ali opts for block poetry, forcing you to feel the weight and impact of the images. In ‘vodka & coke’, the block eventually slips into new alignment, with the text now in the centre of the page, the sudden white space like a breath after a torrent of anxiety. Then the poem slips again, with the last four words mirroring stairs, a metaphor, perhaps, for the speaker stepping away from the weight.
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