AustLit

'Australia spent 2021 trying to limit the spread of Covid-19, before finally admitting defeat in the face of the Delta variant and letting it run through the community. Most Australians were in lockdown for many weeks; Melbourne, the most affected city, was subject to 262 days of restricted movement over 2020 and 2021. The headlines, meanwhile, were dominated by a slow roll-out of Covid vaccines. One anthology was a direct response to the Covid experience, Lockdown Poetry: The Covid Long Haul, edited by Rose Lucas. “In these poems,” writes reviewer Belinda Calderone, “I was struck by the beautiful detail, the naming of specific flora and fauna, as though our shrunken worlds encouraged us to look at things more closely”. Calderone observes that “the pandemic threw everything we knew into flux, forcing us to look at our lives anew, and sometimes to shed parts of ourselves we had long held on to…”, adding that “[i]n times of collective suffering throughout human history, poets are the ones who are able to name what seems unnameable” (Rochford Street Review, 8 April, see Anthologies). As a coda to the release of How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998 (the third volume of her diaries — see below), Helen Garner separately published her “Lockdown Diaries” in The Monthly:

As the world closes in on itself, the simplest acts grow mythic. A woman reports shifting a tree in her garden that was not thriving: “I used a mattock. I lifted it above my head. The dirt fell all over me.” A nurse in ICU sets up a laptop for a woman to hear her grandchildren singing to her while she dies. An Olympic diver on the high platform turns her back on the abyss, places her palms beside her feet, and unfolds with terrifying slowness into a perfect, motionless handstand. (The Monthly October, see Non-Fiction)' (Introduction)