AustLit

'“I peeled apples and sliced them finger-nail deep, waking you with their scent” (1): Jen Webb’s Sentences from the Archive (Recent Work Press, 2016) begins with the pastel erotic vignette ‘Outside the Orchard’. It’s like a favourite private memory that gets indulgently recycled from time to time. “The astringent bite. Fluid in the mouth. Green skin, spiralling a green S across the lawn.” (1) But by the third poem ‘The heart of the sea’, the green is muddied, the tone becomes urgent, and the murmur of inner experience is abandoned for a collective voice: “The navy arrived in fast boats, urging us to board, guaranteeing our lives….” (3) The tense shifts midpoint to a present which seems to express a kind of futility, like the futility of prediction: “Tonight we wait, hand in hand, standing on the deck. In the distance we see it draw nearer. I think that it’s a rainstorm, but someone says no, it’s angels. Someone else says it is the herald of our end.” (3)' (Introduction)