The Accidental Cage, Michelle Cahill.  Interactive Press.  Brisbane, Australia, 2006.  63 pp.  ISBN 9781876819392.  Price: A$24.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

Michelle Cahill is a medical practitioner in Sydney.  Her poems and reviews have appeared in many journals and she was the recipient of a scholarship from the Poetry Australia Foundation for its 2006 Poetry Workshop.

Beautifully published by Interactive Press, The Accidental Cage has poems arranged in two sections with space around the poems giving them power and prismatic beauty.  Jacket design is by David Reiter, cover image by Ian Cameron and author photos are by Steve Sharpe (back); Mike Spitz (inside).

In a personal letter Cahill says, “The book explores the themes of freedom and entrapment, political and personal, and the resistance to this through language, the natural world and the imagination.”

Cahill’s poems are utterly present in the world, in the sense that relationships direct the pulse of many poems in the collection whether they directly engage with other people or not.  However, there is little traditional in Cahill’s work except its fidelity to language and music, which is simultaneously a fidelity to critical thinking, to bodily thinking, and, more problematically and always paradoxically, to spirituality.

If a poem conveys its message as much in the unspoken as in the spoken, syntax and form are the poet’s means of composing in and with the silence.  Cahill’s characteristically, though not exclusively, long line is merely an overt sign of her kinship with such sensibilities.  Such poems as the title poem, “The Accidental Cage,” with its sinuous lines, exemplifies the power of plain vocabulary in active relationship with the blank space surrounding any vocabulary.  It’s as if the silences point to the inherent inadequacy of language and at the same time to its potential for vitality and precision.  Such potential becomes realised to the degree that the poet is willing to use her eyes, her ears and her perceptions in the act – if it is to be active, actual – of any utterance.  For example, the final movement of the 37-line poem begins:

The beauty was not death but its living promise.
It was the beauty of panic; its correspondence and design.
The pointillist shadows of gum leaves,
light falling on the wrinkled sarking, which was foil
for the birds in their sporadic brush with air.
Crepe myrtle swimming darkly in the prophetic glass,
the sound-proof sun illuminating the barn.
The birds hovering in a void were winged silhouettes,
resisting the hours with each arrested flight.

The manner of her invitation to see beauty as a living promise, the balanced lines, permits of its acceptance.  It charms (in the magical sense) with its quality of archaic stylisation.  The imagery too is of the decorative order of beauty and though the last lines touch us with their poignancy, in this case it is a poignancy of assurance.

I indicated that Cahill’s poems have an essence of spirituality, and for a poet of social vision, one whose art is a form of activism – that is, active in the world as an agent of transformation – there may be an even more fruitful ambivalence towards spirituality.  The tension, which attends Cahill’s imaginative, intellectual and compositional processes, itself creates urgency and refuses complacency in the work and its consequences are readily visible.  Cahill’s poems are all the more vigorous for such tension.

The perspective informing “Ice” is the silence of the Hongu Nup glacier, which a note explains approaches the Ama Dablam summit in Nepal.  We are reminded that the poem belongs to us, the readers, as we empathise with the poet’s difficulties and discomfort.  When the poet says, “And it was a death, a passing into the spirit world, / for now the only song we heard was spectral,” the reader becomes part of the circumstances.  The poem begins:

At last we entered the Hongu Nup glacier,
our boots soaked, there were calluses on my feet.
But what was most disturbing was the silence.
Gone, the sweet dialect of the village, monkeys, waterfall.
Gone, the warble of birds, crickets or wood chopping.
There was only the wind and the falling ice,
and as the sound became less human our dialogue lapsed.

Amid this desolation, the “strangely familiar” terrain reminds the poet of dreams she has had of “stranded livestock, / avalanche, the bodies of children and soldiers”.

In fact, the finest poems in The Accidental Cage seek and create a relationship between poet and reader that reveals a kind of symbiosis that enables a dialogue to be opened up.  In doing so, the poems make something new: a dialogue and a togetherness.  Cahill’s poem, “Chimera,” a fabular, perfect poem, begins:

Last night I dreamt I was captured on screen
by covert forces armed in the sprawling city.
Driftwood limbs were floating signatures,
blood the currency in the tenement, corridors

stale with rumour.

By juxtaposing the fairytale image of being in a film with allusions to armed forces, Cuba, Fallujah, Generals of Libration, Cahill places herself amongst unbelievable things.  Unbelievable not merely in their horror but more significantly, that such horrible things can happen and be part of one’s nightmares.

In some ways counterpoint to this is the poem “Stepping through Glass,” which confesses to the restrictions of domesticity, a desire for the world to be excluded. Yet, as part of the dialogue, the speaker wants to live in the world, to be present with her beliefs, to know what she can do, what challenges she can overcome.  The poem ends with the mother’s response to her crying child:

The afternoon slips into dusk.
Her hot cries tugging at my heart,
bright and bold as new grass.

The poems in The Accidental Cage are of a high standard and the collection is to be praised for the innovation and intelligence of Cahill’s poetry, and for the substantial pleasure the book as a whole offers.  And I trust the ways in which Cahill’s categories of gender and sexual identity are understood to be crucial to her poetry’s vibrancy and dynamism and living intelligence.  Included in The Accidental Cage is the fine poem “Our Cardboard House” which is a provocative, self-probing work:

A raft of rocks where willow-necked
cormorants perfect their asanas.
How sear the headland we walk, the near
psychotic sea exhausting the dunes.

Here, although the action takes place in a seemingly idyllic scene, the words “raft,” “sear”, “psychotic” and “exhausting” point to another side of life.  The poem concludes with the author’s voice in all its perfect pitch for both the colloquial and the radiant: “Wind screaming outside the empty kiosk, / like a woman giving birth in a paddock”.

Section 2 is insistently sensual and unabashedly poetic.  Cahill is a thinking poet as the first poem in this section “Bamboo” indicates.  The poem ends with these lines:

My wet boots return
to the chorten, accepting
the counsel of prayer flags,
ice and rubble.

Although the scene is an exotic one, the poet draws the reader into it with her speaker’s insistence on describing simple things: the mountain, deer, a waterfall, prayer flags, ice and rubble.  These images give the scene a recognisable immediacy.

The long poem “Platinum After Shining” is a paean for a pet dog “lost in the waves”:

She will wade in the surf where once she loved to flirt
long, awkward legs like an adolescent girl.
The cancer will be her anchor.
I remember on wintry days how she’d canter beside me
along the shore, head held high, discerning the air.
Or the way that school-boys would admire her sheer size.

This has become one of my favourites of Cahill’s works.  Perhaps because it is a poem about pain and loss and the poet is always, whatever the force of her wit, able to take into account various kinds of personal and public pain, or at least their possibility.

The exactness of Cahill’s observations is delightful.  As a rule she doesn’t just mention birds, for instance, but states which species she means: sea gulls, mynahs, crows, bush turkey, blue jays, pigeons.  Her various skills are practised and honed                and presented in fascinating detail; it’s easy to interpret these, too, as metaphors for the poet’s craft as we see in the following poem “Accident” with the technical aspect, the poet’s position as a doctor at the scene of an accident, stressed.  And we see, too, that she is able to turn an emergency into something poetic:

Pass the tow-trucks
we accelerate,
zooming by straw-yellow
melaleuca
their branches naked,
black as liquorice.
Only the sun’s fingers try
peeling the sky.
Cutting the dressings.

And in the poem  “Songkhan,” about a visit to Thailand where the water festival is in full swing, we see the way Cahill confronts the outside world and makes it part of herself:

We are running wet.  No pedestrian
or songhaew escapes children
with their bucketfuls of water.

There are also poems about Laos, London and Andalusia.  One about Laos, “The War Never Ends, Muang Noi Village, Laos,” begins with the poet’s recollection of childhood and her departure from the village and ends with her return to find that the war is still going on:

As if in all this time, nothing
from my childhood ever changed.
Or the war never ended.

Cahill’s love of words is obvious everywhere, not least in those poems about other cultures, where she used words such as songthaew, songkhan, khaoniaw, dukkha, falang, and the London tube expression, “Mind the gap, would you please mind the gap”.

All the poems, no matter their subject, exhibit the fine control, which characterizes Cahill’s writing.  This is writing with a purpose.  Weighty in subject but never weighed down by it.  The brilliance of this collection lies in its view that life, though never wholly comprehensible, is spellbinding.