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PoetryThe Meaning of Wood
Shortlisted for the Ann Elder Award, The Meaning of Wood is a book of personal or relationship poetry. There are poems about the author's family and those she has loved. It is a book inevitably about the loss of loved ones, but it is also a celebration of love and the joy as well as pain that love brings. Ultimately, the poems are about hope and finding the renewal that makes life worthwhile. Susan Kruss's poems confidently and intelligently capture the look and feeling of people and places. Her narratives and lyrics, frequently enlivened by strong images, are grounded in rich experience, and convey her concern for what is poetic as well as for the people and animals of which she writes. Personalities come alive in her poetry, and when she writes of human afflictions, she does so in a way that is serious but far from depressing. There are many memorable poems in this collection - a collection characterised by deliberate clarity of speech and for the cadences that bring the everyday into surprising fresh perspective.(Michael Sharkey) This long-awaited first book from Susan Kruss is impelled by the skimming patterns of feathers and light, the screeches of birds, the yawning music from a woman's belly. Again and again, Kruss successfully lures the domestic into the universal with words that split the silence, leaving emotional, even spiritual imprints long after they have been read.(Jordie Albiston) Kruss's poems are narratives or lyrics, or a combination of the two ... This duality is like a dialectic - the two parts pull against each other in their essence, for the lyrical is condensing into emotional concentration on the moment, and is static, but the narrative is wanting to move forward in time, to take us out of the moment, create movement in the story. Lyrical elements serve to interrupt the narrative. But the combination works. After reading the book I had an overall impression of a contentment for the soul. Not a sense of rebellion against the injustices of life, but a moving forward beyond them, a positive affirmation of the beauty of living despite suffering its difficulties. A spiritual planting. That is what stayed with me. (John Sheppard) What is the meaning of wood? It is natural, it is beautiful, it is practical ... While Kruss writes most often of hardship ... there is at the same time a celebration of endurance, of recovery, of resilience - a certain sturdiness of spirit symbolised, for example, in the description of the old woman picking through the ruins of her burnt house ... there is a sense of sorrow overcome, a calm which has been reached by the very act of documenting ... The writing in this fine collection combines an uncompromising intellect with intensity of emotion. (Marietta Elliott) The Meaning of Wood Unsplit wood lined the walls of the shed. Outside, the old splitting log grooved and ridged by years of axe-cuts, so dry that even its colour was gone. Each morning, my aunt pinned up her grey hair chopped a log or two into kindling for the stove shaving off slices around the edge keeping the middle to place on top to hold the fire. Wood smoke stained the walls a dark rim near the kitchen ceiling. After tea, my uncle would sit on the splitting log, take the tin of papers and pack of Drum tobacco from his top pocket, roll a cigarette, slow, and smoke it, slow, pointing out constellations with its red tip in the frost-bright sky. I learned to use the axe well enough standing, feet apart, letting the blade arc down. The rhythm of raising the axe swinging it to split each piece clean along a crack parallel to the grain. The satisfaction of pieces falling neat as halved potatoes. * * * It took two days to cut down the planny. One of the men started with the axe chipping one side then the other so the trees would fall where they wanted. The chainsaw screamed as it bit into branches that dropped like dead birds. We pulled them into leafy heaps as the saw howled through the trunks. When the air was full of eucalyptus and trees lay everywhere like pick-up sticks they hacked off the last branches chainsawed each trunk into five-foot logs stacked them onto the one-ton truck and we drove back into the yard. The men would have thrown the logs off the truck just any old way, but my uncle told them to heave them over the side all the same way so they stacked in a tidy pile. They brought the tractor into the yard chained it up to the circular saw. The saw screeched as they pushed the wood against its teeth, lengthways in half, then four cuts to make five logs. They stacked the walls inside the shed and began around the edges of the yard. Sawdust gleamed in the sun. My uncle's legs buckled. He sat down suddenly. Everyone stopped. 'Don't tell her' he said. 'It's heart. Nothing they can do. She thinks it's just bronchitis.' After that, the others did most of the work. He directed us kids in stacking the wood, quick and neat through the hot afternoons, sap sticky on our hands, splinters clinging to our clothes. * * * Before a year passed, he was gone. We found him lying on the floor in the wash house one evening, sat for hours waiting for the doctor to drive out after he finished setting a broken leg. By then he was cooling despite hot water bottles, blankets and my aunt kneeling on the floor hugging his chest. They carried him out, yellow and still as new-felled wood, sap pooled in stagnant veins. My aunt continued through the next winter splitting the silence each morning, lighting the stove, warming her hands with the wood he had stored. When the weather started to warm up we played in the planny, jumping from stump to stump already shooting again, red leaves unfurling on thin stems. The Meaning of Wood is available at the following outlets: Readings Bookstore, Lygon St, Carlton, Vic Collected Works Level 1, Nicholas Building 37 Swanston St, Melbourne (03) 9654 8873 |