Doctor Poetry

Christopher Race, 2015, Still Life With Grandmother
Pomonal Publishing, Stawell, Victoria.


Sometimes we see a book and we leave it on the shelf. Then we might see the same book again, pick it up, open it to a page, read, and put it back. But the words we read can follow us as we walk down the street. They stir our thoughts and our feelings and beseech us to return. 
That is how I came to sit one day with this book of poetry and read it through from cover to cover and feel restored at the end of it and in better spirits that I had been for a while. It was like sitting down to a delightful and nourishing dinner, which I had been in great need of, in fact, famished for.
In his poetry Christopher Race writes nakedly, adopting no obscuring devices and affectations. He doesn't try to be deep, he doesn't dig for meaning. He just tells it like it is, how he meets it.
         
          'It's as if no one understands anything.
           And what they do makes them despair
           perhaps I am a budding fool

           for something that will run me down'
from A Marked Man

           'Am I anxious because I am never home?
           But someplace temporary from which I could be evicted 
                                                                             at any moment.'
from Never At Home

          Afternoon Shopping
          
           'What is this?
           The faces staring out at me from the magazine covers.
           The avocadoes lying in the tray.
           What is this? An old man placing each step
           so carefully in the carpark, followed so
           carefully by a white car looking to park.
           And this? The grey sky, what is this?
           A grey sky low, and rain drops falling
           once or twice.
           Coming out of the supermarket
           I have my plastic bags. What is this?
           Any of this?' 

While the poems appear to be quite autobiographical and are full of details plucked from everyday life, we do not come to know anything much for sure about the man. This is a poet's work - to transform the personal into the universal; to write in a language that is understood by everyone and reaches to the depths of us all, beneath the superficial disguises we don for our various reasons.

          'Desperate to show themselves,
           the impossible selves
           they wish someone else to show them.'
from Who Will There Be

This poet has understood that this cannot be achieved through abstractions or recording thoughts, but by placing our body within the scene and speaking as we would in normal life, if we could.  

Christopher Race through this ability he has as a poet finds the words for the unsayable, and in so doing, proffers the medicine of consolation. It's okay he says, none of us really knows what we are doing here, so why don't we give up pretending and just be kind to each other.