Two books of poetry by Melinda Smith

Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call
by Melinda Smith
Pitt Street Poetry, 2013, 70 pages, $25

First … Then … : Poems from Planet Autism
by Melinda Smith
Ginninderra Press, 2012, 45 pages, $17.50

Despite its central position in the lives of all of us, motherhood has never been a popular subject among serious poets. Or perhaps it has simply not been popular among those people, usually men, who have traditionally chosen the poems that are to be published.

Judith Wright’s better-known works include poems such as “Woman to Child”. Yet, certainly when compared with Melinda Smith’s poems, Wright’s seem distant, as if she is observing her experience rather than living it, and determined to make it universal rather than personal.

Melinda Smith’s poems about motherhood, in contrast, are vital and vivid and clearly the product of the agonies and joys of a woman’s life lived and felt to the full. For those readers accustomed only to the euphemised or sentimentalised views of motherhood which still dominate mainstream culture, some of these poems may come as a shock.

The title of the sonnet “A woman at 40 weeks’ gestation contemplates her undergarments” (in the collection Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call) gives us fair warning. The poem ends:

                                    Who’d face that pain

without the huge inducement of a chance

to lay the burden down? Who’d find a way

to heave her insides out with might and main

if not for hope of clean, white underpants?

She does not use humour to ingratiate herself with her readers; she uses it to show that the experiences she describes are so difficult that they can be endured only if one can laugh at oneself. Indeed, “Song of the anti-depressant” (which, like a number of these poems, first appeared in Quadrant) suggests, with rueful humour, that in some cases humour may not be enough.

While her humour is mostly directed at her own fallibility, it sometimes extends sardonically to others. In “BabyHowl”, for instance, about a new mother’s battle with fatigue, she shows up Allen Ginsberg’s preoccupations in his celebrated poem “Howl” (opening line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”) as self-indulgent blather:

I saw my mind denied re-generation

frayed by madness

sleep-starving, hysterical, stonkered …

I saw my self-control crumpled to a sodden

kleenex in the wastepaper-bin of night …

The poems in this collection cover a multitude of topics in a remarkable variety of poetic forms. Melinda Smith is particularly adept at those poems in which lines are repeated in regular patterns: “Discretion”, a short poem about a failed affair, is a fine example. “Laura to Petrarch”, a powerful rebuke of Petrarch’s unrequited love, uses Petrarch’s own form, the sonnet.

The short poem “Safe”, about an affair that did not go further than the pounding of chests pressed together beneath shirt buttons, shows a mastery of the shaping possibilities of free verse. Like most of her poems, it lends itself to reading aloud. I can imagine an audience at a poetry reading reacting to several of these poems with stunned silence rather than the customary polite applause.

First … Then … : Poems from Planet Autism consists of poems derived from Melinda Smith’s experience of being the mother of an autistic child. While the joys of motherhood are comparable, the difficulties are multiplied.

The title poem, “First … Then …”, is another that would have a striking effect on an audience. It consists of instructions to a child:

First stop biting Mummy

Then play with sliding door …

First swallow medicine

Then build washing machine from cardboard boxes …

alternating with the mother’s learning the hard way:

First joking about “our little Rain Man”

Then realising the joke was on me …

First talking to happy well-adjusted mums of older kids on the spectrum

Then terrified our family would disintegrate before our kids ever got to that age …

By the end of the poem’s four pages the stunned audience would feel they knew more about being the parent of an autistic child than if they had read a manual.

The sonnet “On holding the baby of a friend” provides a poignant insight into the frustrated love of the mother of the autistic child:

I had so much of this to give: I planned

to shower it all on mine. He wanted none.

I wonder whether mothers get a store

of child-affection, swelling in the chest

like milk come in, demanding to be used.

Does having to suppress it make you sore?

In fact this whole book adds up to a pretty comprehensive manual on autism. If in the three or four poems based on the experiences of others the standard falls away a little, it is still a moving and powerfully poetic introduction to a subject most of us know little about. It won the poetry category of the 2013 ACT Writing and Publishing Awards. I shall be surprised if Melinda Smith’s poetry does not win more prizes.