Sprightly Testaments

Where She Lives
by Jean Frances
Ginninderra Press, 2012, 76 pages, $20

The poems of Jean Frances are sprightly and youthful, sparely punctuated in short lines of modernism-influenced free verse. Some are written from the perspective of the models who posed for paintings by Klimt, Manet and Rubens, while others are concerned with artists like Van Gogh, Bruegel and Suzanne Valadon, and others again are inspired by musicians such as Bach and Satie, but when the speaker of a Jean Frances poem might be taken as the poet herself, the subject is often found engaged in hearty outdoor activity, such as surfing or playing tennis.

Thus it came as a surprise for me, as it must for readers of this magazine, where many Jean Frances poems made their first appearance in recent years, to learn that their energetic author died earlier this year at the age of eighty. Could a poet of such antiquity produce an observation as mischievous as that to be found in “Getting the Most Out of Sex”?

I’ve had a poem

growing in my head for days

and as it goes down on paper

it starts to feel really great

and suddenly an orgasm

seems like nothing special

Perhaps the question betrays an unthinking prejudice about the elderly; but at a first reading it would be hard not to suppose that the speaker in “On the Bus with Les Murray” is a hopeful young writer:

You pay your fare

and lurch along the aisle

to find a place

One row ahead

a familiar figure spills

over the seat edge

jaunty cap snug

upon his head

The great man himself

Are you Les Murray

He turns with a shy smile

You introduce yourself

tell him you write poetry

and later    rising to get off

he says    Send me your poems

Poet at Bunyah

You glow

The bus becomes a golden coach

and you are Cinderella

going to the ball

The literary techniques used in this memorable vignette—one which captures Les Murray’s habitual kindness as well as his familiar appearance—are those of today’s younger poets: the line breaks used to express spoken pauses, and the economy with words. Who would have suspected that the writer was older than Murray himself?

Where She Lives is full of well-observed poems that often come to a conclusion with a twist of wit. With my preference for poems that have been constrained by the use of fixed forms, I was perversely attracted to the villanelle “Fancy Dress Exigency”, but it is apparent that the author was more at home in the looser structure of a poem such as the impressive “Shadow”:

On sunlit days

she becomes intolerable

clinging to your heels    your toes

leaps with you    reaching

for a ball at tennis

tries to push you into traffic

as you cross a busy street

and just before you dive

she lies waiting in the pool

The female pronoun for the shadow is a neat touch, here, while the spaces at the centre of the lines encourage the corner of the eye to half-notice the shadowy presence.

The poems in what is only the third collection published by Jean Frances are of a quality that might have led readers to see it as a precursor for more in the same vein; instead, the book must stand as a memorial for the belated emergence of a talented writer.