Ellen van Neerven’s collection Comfort Food (2016) is preoccupied with sustenance, survivance, and the conditions of poetic possibility. How is the locus of the poetic here and now maintained? [1] This review reflects on this question through a close reading of “Finger Limes,” the fourth poem of van Neerven’s collection.

I propose that there are two ways of understanding poetic sustenance. On the one hand, it is assured through an unfolding and reflexive poetic form. On the other hand, poetry is a mode of expression that rests in the here and now. In her essay on Yeats’ lyricism, Helen Vendler emphasizes formal priority when she writes that a “poem is an experience in time activated by its forms, from the phonic to the structural.” Vendler’s framing of the poem illuminates how poetry is sustained both within the internal temporality of poetic form and within the external temporality of discourse. I use the term poetic sustenance to refer to both ways of understanding poetry. What follows is a reflection on how van Neerven’s poem “Finger Limes” is sustained as a literary structure and a mode of poetic utterance.

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In the final chapter of The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (1999), Giorgio Agamben writes that “poetry lives only in the tension and difference … between sound and sense.” In other words, poetic form hinges on the possibility of enjambment. This definition of poetry attends to the connection between internal structure and generic form; the possibility of a disjunction between semiotic and semantic fields produces the conditions of poetry. However, Agamben also notes that this conflict between the semiotic and semantic sphere

is complicated by the fact that in the poem there are not, strictly speaking, two series or lines in parallel flight. Rather, there is but one line that is simultaneously traversed by the semantic current and the semiotic current. And between the flowing of these two currents lies the sharp interval obstinately maintained by the poetic mechanē.

Further, Agamben’s figuration of mechanē offers a dialectical way of reading poetry. On the one hand, the poem is caught in the constant forward motion of language insofar as it is a syntactic arrangement on the page or a spoken utterance. Birds don’t fly backwards and rivers don’t flow uphill. On the other hand, the forward motion of language meets the counter-current, or suspension, of enjambment. The possibility that the metrical line can end abruptly while meaning overflows distinguishes poetic form as the dissolution of prosaic form. Poetry emerges in the dialectical tension between linguistic signs and the blankness of the page.

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Agamben’s definition may be a useful way of looking at “Finger Limes”. The terrain of the poem is recognisably poetic: the lines are short, meaning moves across line breaks, the lines are grouped in stanzas and there is very little prosaic punctuation. In fact, only one comma and a single question mark gesture to grammatical intervention.

Observing the poem from a distance the landscape of a “forest” filled with “frog calls” and the ripples of a “coloured creek” surfaces. Van Neerven begins:

Fingers find finger limes
in my country

We travel to the forest
the morning after rain
my fingers have been cold
in the mornings

We cross the coloured creek
along a patient log
we walk towards frog calls
we walk away from winter

The speaker emphasises the intermingling of sight, sound and touch. The soft alliterative assonance of the first line bridges sound and sense. The euphony of the verse mimetically evokes the act of gathering, bringing together harmonious sounds to cradle the finger limes that form the central motif of the poem.

Other devices internal to the lines of verse similarly foreground rhythm and movement. The repetition of collective actions (eg “we travel”, “we cross”, “we walk”) catches the reader in its forward momentum. In other words, the movement of the speaker and their companion through the landscape maps onto the rhythmical topography of the text itself.

Yet despite the forward pull of the verse the counter-current of enjambment can be felt as an undertow that forces the poem to turn inwards. Time and place blur, overlap and rewind, like in the last two lines of the third stanza that begin with the echo “we walk” before unfurling in different directions — firstly “towards frog calls” and secondly “away from winter”. These enjambed lines illustrate how van Neerven’s poetry contains the riddling currents Agamben argues define the essence of poetry. Where the frog calls evoke the sounds of a terrestrial landscape, the poem shifts into a temporal register as the speaker “walk[s] away from winter”.

These variations are not arbitrary. The tensions that materialise the poetic mechanē are felt in the text’s representational field. In the line “[w]e travel to the forest / the morning after rain” the verse moves forwards in tandem with the action of the poem. Just as the speaker and their companion travel onwards to arrive in the natural world of the forest, van Neerven’s verse unfolds in a series of images that evoke linear forms (eg “the patient log”) and a sense of time passing (eg “the morning after rain”). Yet, despite the poem’s resemblance to a chronological description of a trip to the forest the verse destabilises linear time in favour of temporal indeterminacy. The interstice of enjambment, that is paradoxically both a part of the poem and outside the manifest form of written language, allows the poem to reconfigure its temporal logic while presenting a clear series of images. The crossing over from “the forest / [to] the morning after rain” enacts a turn away from the poetic present to a morning unmoored from the chronology of history. The “morning after rain” privileges van Neerven’s prosodic time in the sustenance of the poetic mechanē that dissolves the rigidity of linear time.

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In subtle contrast to the imagery of the forest, the poem’s second movement shifts to the internal realm of the speaker’s “thought”, “memory” and desire. Van Neerven writes:

I want to stop on the way back
get some finger limes
I’ve been homesick for them

But when we return
they are gone
my fingers
numb

We go home anyway
and you make dinner
I’m sorry if I’m crying
I haven’t had anyone cook me a meal
it’s been a while, you know?

We talk about what we would
and what we wouldn’t eat
to stay who we are
for love

Here, van Neerven emphasises desire, yearning and disorientation and binds these thematic concerns formally. Taking van Neerven’s capitalisation as a grammatical cue, the first two lines read as a single sentence wherein the speaker’s desire to “stop on the way back” flows into their desire to “get some finger limes”. However, the transference of desire between the lines of verse, its continuity or suspension, hinges peculiarly on the fissure of enjambment.

The absence of the finger limes unsettles the text’s imagistic unity to expose a chilling emptiness, the finger limes “gone” and the speaker’s fingers “numb”. In the diminuendo of each line, the emptiness of enjambment ironically sustains the poem’s movement even as it ironizes and conditions the speaker’s desires. Just as the speaker wonders about “what we would / and what we wouldn’t eat / to stay who we are / for love” the poem foregrounds an opaque ambivalence towards the sustenance of its own voice. This ambivalence once again hints that poetry is not simply a formal structure nor an unassuming mode of expression. The tension between sensation and paralysis deftly incorporates the logic of enjambment into the poem’s design to suggest that the precarity of poetic expression (i.e. the tension between the written and the unwritten) mirrors the position of the speaker whose desire finds expression only as it becomes undone. Accordingly, the double figure of the finger limes — a symbol of presence and absence — nests the general ambivalence of poetic form within a more personal prosodic landscape and context. In this way, “Finger Limes” offers a view of poetic sustenance that is irreducible to form, dependent on the shifting, intimate desires of the speaker to invoke its poetic space.

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In her review of Throat Leane argues that van Neerven’s “works appear unannounced, defining themselves only by words suspended on the page, transcending convention and transforming space.” As I have tried to illustrate above, van Neerven’s precise use of enjambment in “Finger Limes” exemplifies how the currents of enjambment do not simply function as general precondition of poetry but are incorporated into their prosodic landscape. From the formal arrangement of the short lines of free verse to the vivid imagery and affective undertow of the poem, “Finger Limes” supports Leane’s reading of van Neerven’s work. Elsewhere Leane writes that Indigenous poetry creates both bodies of work and centres the body’s work. Reading through Leane’s insights, “Finger Limes” synthesises these approaches to poetic practice. While van Neerven presents poetic sustenance as tenuous and inextricably bound to both poetic form and the sustenance of the speaker, the poem also gestures to the sustenance of community and discourse outside the poem itself.

The solace that the speaker finds in the comfort of their companion, articulated in the questioning confession “it’s been a while, you know?” emphasises a knowingness and connection outside the text / reader binary. The intimacy between the speaker and their companion situates the reader on the outside, left in the open interstice of enjambment, or the ambivalent space of the unuttered. The reader cannot “know” the speaker’s homesickness, or access the exchange between the two poetic subjects. The reader can only know what the speaker has left within the poem. In other words, the reader can only know what is left within the archive. However, as Leane illuminates, a body of work is also bound to embodiment. In the final part of my reading, I propose to step outside the poetic mechanē to examine more fully the connection between poetic expression and the systems of knowledge represented by the archive and the repertoire.

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In Archive Fever (1995), Derrida writes that the “archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of memory.” In other words, the archive transforms traces existing outside of living memory into what we might term history. The final stanza of “Finger Limes” reflects a similar preoccupation with the erosion of memory and the collapse of embodied, sensory expression into the lifeless space of the archive. The vastness of “thought” and experience cannot “fit” within the field of poetic representation. Yet, the poem nonetheless gestures towards something “more,” that defies the paralysis of “cold fingers” and the chilling stillness this image evokes. In reading the final stanza, the reader is brought back to the assonant tactility of the opening lines where “[f]ingers find finger limes” alive with frog calls and vivid colour. On the one hand, van Neerven’s poem exists in the archive of Australian poetry with its synecdochic relationship to the concept of the archive as figured by Derrida. On the other hand, van Neerven’s work resists the archive in the embodied posture it maintains towards poetry as a vital, not lifeless, form [see Leane’s article “Gathering” that similarly works with Derrida].

In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) Diana Taylor demarcates these concepts. She argues that “the strain between … the archive and the repertoire has often been constructed as existing between written and spoken language.” Taylor emphasises that the task of the critic is not to collapse the distinction between these two “acts of transfer,” but to clarify the effect of its tension, as the status of poetry as a written form is haunted by the orality of poetry. Leane’s concept of the “living archive” foregrounds the importance of embodiment in First Nations poetics and articulates one way that poetry might work, to borrow Taylor’s term again, as a vital “act of transfer.” In poetry criticism more generally, frequent references to the speaker similarly register the affinity between poetic form and embodiment, as critical attention to the sound, rhythm and tone of poetic verse frames written language as a vital mode of expression. Taylor writes that “the dominance of language and writing has come to stand in for meaning itself,” erasing other ways of knowing in an epistemic shift contiguous with many colonial projects. Taylor’s insights resonate with Leane’s analysis of van Neerven’s work that calls for analysis that resists Western poetic conventions and expectations. Perhaps by placing the emphasis on how “Finger Limes” engages with embodiment and utterance, gathering and memory, nourishment and poetic sustenance, we can form new readings that are not limited by the distinction between form and expression, the archive and the repertoire.

As a poem attuned to form, embodiment, sensory experience and memory, van Neerven’s “Finger Limes” presents an intricate meditation on poetic sustenance and survival. Its riddling currents exemplify how poetry is not sustained along a linear axis but unfolds in eddies and counter currents. Likewise, van Neerven’s poetic voice resists the authority of the archive to exist in a more dynamic space wherein expression cannot expel embodiment.

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The collective voice that finds articulation throughout “Finger Limes” (eg we travel / we cross / we talk) offers another way to reflect on poetic sustenance; that is, its reliance on polyphony and the connections beyond those within and around the poem. To return to Leane’s review of Throat once more, Leane writes:

I chose to read this work [Throat] through the poet’s chosen vessel, the throat. Finishing it left me with my heart right there — beating at the back of my throat; in awe of what I had just read, and in suspenseful anticipation of what is to come.

Leane’s critical response to van Neerven’s second poetry collection exemplifies how the sustenance of the poem nests somewhere between the words on the page and the reception of those words by the reader / critic. By reading the collection “through the poet’s chosen vessel” Leane’s review highlights how the vitality of the poem resides in the nexus between poetic form, expression and a reader who might find their heart “beating at the back of [their] throat.” Leane’s analysis recalls a line from Throat that asks: “how do we [poet, speaker, reader] co-exist on the page?” This question is one that lingers in the periphery of “Finger Limes” as it moves through and constructs its poetic field. Likewise, an earlier poem from Throat, titled “Footnotes on a timeline,” situates the reader and poet within the same space. “My time and your time are on this timeline” the speaker reminds the reader.

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If critical reception contributes to poetic sustenance by folding poetry into its own design, van Neerven’s more recent works suggest that the gathering together of voices strengthens poetic sustenance as it extends beyond a single poem, poetry collection and body of work. Van Neerven’s introduction to Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now (2021), speaks to the polyphony that surrounds poetry and writing more generally when they write:

[T]he title perfectly fits the collection. … We [the contributors] all have our own pair of beautiful wings, but we fly stronger together in formation. Together we are stronger. We flock together.

Here, van Neerven opens up another mode of poetic sustenance that identifies the flocking together of different words as a site of strength. The multivalent, morphic quality of the “formation” resonates with the concept of poetic form even as it soars beyond fixity and stasis. Moreover, van Neerven’s conceptualisation of the collection as a flocking together of stories from then and now echoes the language of the here and now written onto the cover of Comfort Food. In both cases, the emphasis falls on the present, gently inviting the reader to reflect the conditions that sustain these works.

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Reading van Neerven’s most recent solo-authored piece Personal Score (2023) further illustrates how the concept of poetic sustenance dovetails with many different ways of thinking about poetic form, expression, collection and reception.[2] Personal Score reads as a piece of “creative nonfiction,” a term that van Neerven and Leane put forward in their edited collection Shapeshifting: First Nations Lyric Nonfiction (2024). For van Neerven and Leane, “creative nonfiction” and the “lyric essay” represent “a new genre of writing that is taking shape and being shaped by First Nations Australian writers.” In light of these remarks, Personal Score collapses the poetry/prose divide and merges memoir, history, critical commentary and lyric in its examination of its chosen topic — sport. As van Neerven writes in their author’s note, “I am not to scalpel you with details but sing to you in poetry, and that is where these memories will rest.” It is from this position that van Neerven shares their research and reflections on sport in Australia. Thus, whilst Comfort Food and Personal Score are at first glance distant from each other, these works profess an affinity to poetry and choose lyrical expression to explore their various themes.

Criss-crossing between poetry, creative nonfiction and editorial introductions, this short reflection on some pieces from van Neerven’s oeuvre hopefully illustrates the elasticity of poetic form, expression, collection and reception as these things find articulation in van Neerven’s work. Just as the poem “Finger Limes” invites inquisitiveness about poetic sustenance and demonstrates the complex irreducibility of this theme, van Neerven’s other writings similarly involve the question of how poetry rest in the here and now of contemporary Australian poetics.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. “The End of the Poem.” The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1999.

Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics, 1995, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 9-63.

Leane, Jeanine. “On the Power to Be Still.” Sydney Review of Books, 2020, accessed 02.10.2023.

Leane, Jeanine. “Gathering: The Politics of Memory and Contemporary Aboriginal Women’s Writing.” Antipodes, 2017, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 242-251.

Leane, Jeanine. “Response to Natalie Harkin: A Labour of Love.” New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry, eds. Dan Disney & Matthew Hall, Palgrave McMillan, 2021, pp. 45-53.

Leane, Jeanine & van Neerven, Ellen, editors. “Introduction.” Shapeshifting. University of Queensland Press, 2024, pp. 1-12.

Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 1-53.

Van Neerven, Ellen. “Finger Limes.” Comfort Food, University of Queensland Press, 2016, pp. 7-8.

Van Neerven, Ellen. “Introduction.” Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now. University of Queensland Press, 2021, pp. ix-xii.

Van Neerven, Ellen. Personal Score. University of Queensland Press, 2023.

Van Neerven, Ellen. Throat. University of Queensland Press, 2020.

Vendler, Helen. “Lyric Form in Yeats’s Poetry: Prophesy, Love and Revolution.” Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, Belknap Press, 2007, pp. 1-26.

[1] A note on the front cover of Comfort Food states that the collection is “nourishing soulful tucker for the here and now.”

[2] Here, the epithet “poetic” intends to qualify lyric or creative writing that frees itself from “the poem” and in this sense is more open that it was understood at the beginning of this piece.

This is the first in a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.