Review

Landing stages

Review written by Dave Clark.

Where do we feel most at home? What do we do when people and places no longer comfort or enrich us? Is it wiser to stay, or to leave and start anew?

These themes are intricately observed and knitted throughout Landing Stages, a new collection of poetry from writer, musician and designer Wendy Taleo. The peeling bark of a tree on the front cover alludes to the shedding, the stripping away of what chokes and withholds, in search of new spaces and breath. The first line of the book – I am the storm that brings splendid colours (p7) – hints at how the writer is stepping into the grief, the mending and the healing to come. The poems are urging the writer and reader to strive on, to escape the unsafe, to step into the unknown in the hope of crafting better days:

Weave new threads,

never old. (p13)

Unfolding in four sections, the book explores family, travel, education and living in the desert. Nature, lodgings and artisanship are employed to take us into the shattering of expectations and ending of relationships. There is the sense of life changing shape before us and a poet hungry and expectant of finding new footing, new landing stages to be at home in. Grief and loss move into travel adventures local and international, the mood lifting, though the cry for nurturing community is braided through. A brief questioning of the impact of education and what are our best teachers drives the poet toward remote life in Alice Springs (Mparntwe), where she writes of magpies gasping in the heat (p70). Many poems, including elegy for coral, speak of how something can shrivel or thrive, depending on the environment it is in. We are eager to discover as we read through each piece – where will be the place that the poet comes most alive?

In this collection of seventy-three poems, there is delicate use of form, rhyme and metaphor, and just when you sense you know where the pieces are going, there are surprising and enjoyable turns of phrase and imagery, such as this description of two people:

we are mismatched crockery (p24)

and the stunning line about rain –

first sprinkle creates a dot painting on bitumen (p86).

The writing is most vivid when pushing into topics of grief, longing and the reshaping of things of come. The cracking open of the heart exposes us to a richness of language in the poetry. There are several moments of experimentation in style and wording, combining several poems with photos and sheet music. This opens possibilities of what poetry can do and how multidisciplinary approaches can speak to the mind, heart and spirit in differing ways. In a life that has forever changed for the poet, we join in the search for reconnection - to ourselves, with nature and who matters to us. This collection encourages us to find where we feel most at home.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Clark is a reliable human with unreliable health. He’s a writer-poet with chronic fatigue syndrome, living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs).
Dave writes about grief, disability and the many ways we can hold an experience. He works as a counsellor, creating space for stories of significance.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daveclarkwriter/