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‘the eagle, canopic on tar,
atop kangaroo smear,
thrown furred corsets of white bone,
confetti of road crows chroming a black storm’
– this is inventive, musical and harsh, accurate and rich, with a vein of visionary dream, which I like.” The landscape of feral goats, idiosyncratic human markers, failed fences, becomes the distorted and detail-selective realm of memory. It was written in 2009, when the poet’s father began to lose his memory; it is an exploration of oral tradition, the stuff of generational infamy, the coming, by ship in 1855, to Australia . ‘That sick green sea/carrying/the little stone/to the orange square…
REVIEWS
“While this book is an archaeological dig into the past and the woes of the present, I felt rewarded after my reading for its contemporary relevance of family baggage (something we all own), as well as its experimental array of images and metaphors.” HELEN HAGEMANN, Plumwood Mountain Journal
“The blurb to Meredith Wattison’s terra bravura states that the collection differs from her previous work in that it is “fully autobiographical”. This position is announced boldly from the very first line, and resonates throughout the volume, with a complex weave of visual and narrative threads stitching this collection – and its subject – across time, memory, and history. From European beginnings to the vast dry centre of Australia, to domestic details past and present, terra bravura explores the complicated web of identity back through the poet’s father, now living with dementia, to her paternal great-grandmother.” WILLO DRUMMOND, Mascara Literary Review
“Meredith Wattison’s terra bravura, however, is a personal-historical genealogy that covers and recovers the intersecting scapes forging modern Australia, from cultural and individual inheritance and exile to colonialism, filial duty, and motherhood. Each trope takes part in, as it takes apart, the construction of the self—that recognition of the unknowable kindred amid the clashing horrors and passions of the past…The bravura is in the telling.” EDRIC MESMER, Rochford Street Review
“Wattison has orchestrated for the reader a squall of detail, personae, incidents. As we spectrally soar across vast geographical and temporal distances, we are simultaneously plunged, without smart device, into a pure past – conical, fathomless, grainy. It is that vertigo and loss of perspective that accompanies entry to an antiquarian’s lair.” ANTONIA PONT, Cordite Poetry Review
“Terra Bravura…will more than satisfy those who relish key episodes from a family’s ramifying history in language that evokes their original intensity.” GEOFF PAGE, The Australian (paywalled)
