By Maria Millers, Woorilla Poetry
This week Sarah Holland Batt added yet another award to her already impressive swathe of prizes.
A professor of Creative Writing she is also an ardent advocate for Aged Care and Patron for Aged Care Reform
Her memoir, The Jaguar, told in a collection of standalone poems about her father’s life and decline with Parkinson’s, has just won the Queensland Premiers Award.
The title of her book, The Jaguar, refers to an irrationally defiant purchase of a car her father made after diagnosis. She traces his decline but also delves back into memories of happier times. Grief is at its core but also anger at the indignities often experienced in Aged Care. But this is also a daughter writing about a father she misses and remembers with love, respect and humour.
The poem I’m featuring this week is also about a poet’s memories of her father. Kim Walters looks back at her seven year old self and remembers time spent with her father as he builds a house.
There is no subcontracting here, the man does it all with skill and precision: bricklaying, carpentry, painting. He’s a bricky, a chippy and painter. Is there tradie slang for a painter?
The BEX in the pocket of his overall suggests this man is tired and needs a pep up, and leaves us wondering how long can he keep going with this physically demanding work , yet he still lifts the child on to his ‘rafted shoulders.’
He is still ‘sure footed ‘but ‘walking the line of his tight roped years’. While for the daughter life is still all ahead of her.
So, there we have two poets writing about illness, ageing and a loving relationship between two daughters and their fathers.
The Builder – Kim Waters
Sometimes I hear the scaffolding strain,
his whistle through the plasterless rooms,
and I’m there again, seven-years-old,
watching his hands cradle a brick,
set it square, remove a spill
with the point of a diamond-shaped knife.
I remember his hair flecked with paint,
a nail purse belted around his waist,
a flat pencil, fold-up ruler
and a packet of Bex in his overall bib.
The way he’d hammer a nail, his gaze
a spirit level of concentration
as he zithered a wedge of wood with his saw.
How he’d jam one knee up against a horse,
shaved timber falling in curls
around his hobnailed boots.And the times
he’d lift me onto his rafted shoulders
and we’d move through the whalebone rooms of a house,
him sure-footed, walking the line
of his tight-roped years and me reaching
into the open-roofed sky.
Do you have memoir poem ?
Woorilla Poetry Prize 2023 closing date is September 30th – visit www.woorilla.org.au
