AustLit

'The poetry of Andy Jackson not only inhabits and is rooted in the liminal space of the body, but is used as a site to consider selfhood, subjectivity, language, form, and bodily difference. Using poetry as a generative practice, Jackson expresses the unsettledness of being in his own body. Jackson has the hereditary genetic disorder, Marfan Syndrome, where the body is unable to correctly produce the protein fibrillin-1, which in turn affects the connective tissue, the heart, the spine, and the joints. On his blog, Among the Regulars, Jackson describes his body of work as ‘poetry, from a body shaped like a question mark’.1 A pronounced spinal curvature means that Jackson inhabits his body in a particular way, and in turn marks his use of language in a particular way. He is explicit about this: ‘I would argue that to begin to unravel how the body is implicated in poetry will illuminate and liberate both’.2 In rewriting the language of the body, Jackson engages in a poetics of the threshold — the threshold being the nexus between selfhood, subjectivity, and the body, both the individual body and the collective body. He does this by renovating form (language) and by interrogating (his own) disability.' (Introduction)

'Pearl remembers Nell’s feet stretched towards the campfires on the beach, her fourth toe curled in and nestled against the middle toe like a small prawn. They all have a curled fourth toe – Diana, Lucy, Pearl.

'When Pearl’s grandmother Nell dies unexpectedly, Pearl and her family – mother Diana, sister Lucy – return to Kangaroo Island to mourn and farewell her. Each of them knew Nell intimately but differently, and each woman must reckon with Nell’s passing in her own way. But Nell had secrets, too, and as Pearl, Diana and Lucy interrogate their feelings about the island, Pearl starts to pull together the scraps Nell left behind – her stories, poems, paintings – and unearths a connection to the island’s early history, of the early European sealers and their first contact with the Ngarrindjeri people.

'As the three women are in grief pulled apart from each other, Pearl’s deepening connection to their history, the island’s history, grounds her, and will ultimately bring the women back to each other.

'Heart of the Grass Tree is an exquisite, searing and hope-filled debut about mothers and daughters and family stories, about country and its living history.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative).' (Publication abstract)

Dedication: Dedicated to Jane and Jaime,and to the friends and colleagues around the world who worked with Syd Harrex to establish the CRNLE