Album review
If Movement Was A Language, Svetlana Sterlin’s debut collection of poetry out through Vagabond Press in Australia, is a work that centres water materially and figuratively. In the so-called Australian tradition, and particularly within settler colonial histories here, pools (public and private) have become part of our literary and cultural consciousness, an activity in how we build, constitute and now challenge the nation state. As such, the symbol of the pool – and more broadly our relationships with water, as both porous and resistant – can act as a powerful metonym for Australia’s endless mythologies of unbounded opportunities. A mythology submerged in, perhaps ironically, the duality of white Australia where we are both weary of yet simultaneously buoyed by migrant workers like Sterlin’s parents, who immigrated to Australia via New Zealand from Russia.
This is what underpins this collection, this duality – this rubbing-up against – never more so encapsulated in Sterlin’s own relationship with water. At times, it’s tedium and demand, as the pressures of competitive swimming ramp up; at others, a profound sense of what the pool can and should be: the departure, the return, the liminal, the traceable, the self-writing self through repetitive movement (arguably in parallel to the poet).
The collection, more formally, is split into 5 parts: ‘I: FOREIGN’, ‘II: ODD, III: ALIEN’, ‘IV: REDUNDANT’, ‘V: STAGNANT’. Each section contains questions both intimate and geo-politically, conversing forms such as list and concrete poems, ghazals, recipes, unrhyming couplets, triptychs and elegies to name a few. One poem, found in the first section ‘II: ODD’, is a particularly striking concrete poem titled ‘Murmuration, with punctures’ (pp. 33). The poem’s physicality takes on the form of an arrow – or perhaps more aptly, a skein of birds – as the writing itself explores how the pool and the act of swimming become forces of forward propulsion but also of situating, of grounding. We get a glimpse into the life of the poet’s family: her dad the swimming coach, her afternoons populated by swimming training, the pool a place in which the poet ‘struts’ into the pool grounds in the same way as a suited stranger. And yet, despite its familiarity, and the confidence bred from a sense of homely permeance, it’s also a space quickly infiltrated, invaded and undermined by the bureaucratic and patriarchal interests of the nation state.
The word choice in this poem is particularly heightened, leaning towards words and terms like ‘flock’ and ‘diaspora’ to denote how Sterlin’s father felt both at home and yet perpetually at odds with the space. Here, that duality between safety and unease is fully on show, a duality that inevitably comes to its peek later on in the collection in section ‘IV: REDUNDANT’ where we find out the poet’s father receives a redundancy package from his job at the pool, in many ways intractably changing his families, and the poet’s, relationship with water.
If Movement Was A Language is of course, in following on from this so-called Australian literary tradition, not the only recent work that has dealt with water aesthetically, materially and poetically, sharing such considerations with Izzy Roberts-Orr’s 2024 collection Raw Salt and Ella Skilbeck-Porter’s 2023 collection These Are Different Waters. Whereas Raw Salt focuses predominantly on oceanic bodies, Sterlin’s collection situates the reader poolside or in the deep-end for much of it, in much the same way that Ella Skilbeck-Porter’s collection does. But beyond explorations of memory – and how they might resurface in the steady tedium of swimming – this is the limit of similarities between Skilbeck-Porter’s and Sterlin’s work. Skilbeck-Porter’s while observational and attentive, is not in the more traditional sense, narrative; whereas, in the 50 poems which make up If Movement Was A Language almost all of them might be characterised as such.
This is not to the collection’s detriment, but instead its asset. The work is by no means language or word poetry – even if it’s title might imply something of that ilk – but instead a work that encourages a return, time and again, to those moments that have shaped and reshaped the poet’s life, particularly as it pertains to national and familial identity making. These are, as such, not poems of obfuscation or trickery. They are not poems in which the language subsumes the message, in which word-play is chosen over meaning. If Movement Was A Language is a broadly accessible collection, and Sterlin works hard to make it so. Within it’s very blueprint (pun intended) there seems to be a sense of wanting to reach beyond the insularity and often unfortunately self-performativity that makes up much of the academy’s poetry. The collection has, in this way, a rather broad material, aesthetical and narrative appeal, particularly for those reading outside the so-called Australian tradition as well as those first coming in contact with poetry as a permeable (pun intended) and approachable form.
In remaining with this narrative thread, it’s unsurprising then that our legacy of pool writing – perhaps most acutely embodied in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip – is not even remotely limited to poetry, but as Gareth Morgan very aptly notes in his essay for Sydney Review of Books ‘Water Splendour’ embedded in our settler-colonial imagination, one in which in effect ‘The pool as a symbol of nationhood is more powerful than any more direct representation.’ This point, of which the symbol is more powerful than the reality, comes into full focus in Sterlin’s collection in the poem ‘Map of my childhood, refracted’ (pp. 52), a list poem in which Sterlin reflects intimately not on the materiality of each pool that foot-pathed her childhood, but rather what that pool has come to represent. She writes:
5. Knox Leisureworks, VIC
Dad’s early embarrassments:
snaking lane ropes
slither onto the reel
to create double lanes.
I weave across dividing
lines, oblivious to flags
and crash
into unsuspecting adults
pp. 53
The lineation in the break of ‘dividing’ and ‘lines’ is telling here. The poet, it seems, is denoting that central tension of the book, being stuck between – but also the tether between – different objects/ideas of relation: home & abroad, country & nation, selfhood & self-perception, the pool & the surface. Now & then.
This tethering of relations is, evidently, a theme throughout the book and my favourite poems are those that trouble the liminality of the pool, that tether it’s meditative focus to the materiality of our bodies, the fleetingness of each rhythmic gesture and how life and death are inevitably embodied in each stroke. This comes salient in the extended elegy of ‘When the stars explode’ (pp. 88) which marks the poet’s relationship to a young friend presumably lost to cancer. The poem is made up of 14 stanzas with 4 lines per stanza, in which each stanza is read on, as if in ways marking how swimming, lost in its tedium, obfuscates the difference between each stroke as well as each session spent at the pool.
In reading these lines, I’m reminded of my own writing: ‘blue wedge of sunlight & the sensation of drowning’ as I too cavort across the pool, especially now coming into a fully realised Naarm summer. Memories flash before and after me, but memories incomplete, only a murmur, a rupturing, the body in a constant state of both fight and freedom, the story of my life summarised in the blue rush behind me, the air bubbles that escape and pock the surface.
If Movement Was A Language is a triumph of a book, one that feels both immersive and expansive, immediate and approachable, timely and timeless. No doubt it’s lines will hover behind and ahead of me as I struggle and collapse into each lap.
Citation:
Morgan, G., (2024) ‘Water Splendour’. Sydney Review of Books [Online]. Link: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essays/water-splendour
