Capsule Review: Salt Quilt, by Airini Beautrais
A capsule review plus poem extract of experienced poet Airini Beautrais's new collection SALT QUILT.
Veteran poet Airini Beautrais’ fifth collection, Salt Quilt (Te Herenga Waka University Press) hums with a burning, questioning energy. With 49 poems over three sections, it’s a substantial volume, and covers a large amount of ground; the author looks backward at her younger self, picking apart expectations, exploring innards:
No-one will notice your vintage hair
When you are seated in the back row
(‘Doll girl’)
and forward to a future self, peering into possible stereotypes:
Don’t let me be the fanny-packed, febrile grouch
carrying all the pains of the world in her hips
tailing a bony-arsed man who’s embargoed physical touch
around and around the decks of bloated cruise ships
(‘How I want to get old’)
In the centre of the collection, a twenty-plus page poem (‘Cancer Moon: Poet Life’) covers Beautrais’ life in poetry, from the lines read to her as a baby, right through to a consideration of what poetry is in essence, and what it is to the author now: ‘To say poetry is oxygen would be a dick move’, ending with ‘I have slept beside it. / I still don’t really know what it is.’
It’s possible a poem of this length could become indulgent, but Beautrais doesn’t allow that, bringing a sharp, clear-sighted lyrical narrative together that holds both drive and contradiction, equally musing and moving on.
The poet also considers the world’s growth, living things all around us, but not alone: mixed up with humanity, with wishes and desires and destruction. ‘An analysis of power’ digs to the heart of the climate problem: ‘there’s no seeing forests for trees / without an analysis of power’.
Salt Quilt offers a fresh, reflective and full-bodied analysis of living and breathing, of considering what life can mean and how to live it, without dictating or being didactic, using established poetry form to peer at disappointments and joys with intelligence and care.
Poem extract:
Spiders
I have turned the light on
And left the curtains pulled back
On the cobwebbed window
Open to the night
I am helping the spiders
To catch a whole lot of moths
