The quivering luminosity of Islander is the rippling movement of the sea in sunlight, reflecting at once here, at once there, and then dissolving the distinctions. From Scotland to the Antipodes and back again, Davidson maps the prosaic alongside the sacred, inviting us into a gentle dissolution of place- based story, towards a more non-dual perspective of being in the world. This is the work of a cartographer of ‘ancient light’. —Em Strang
The title poem of Islander is an essential definition: not rooted in landlocked blood and soil but connected by sea and distance, and the returning tides of Scotland, the archipelagos of New Zealand and the islands of Oceania. Here is a poet never given to the common gestures of banal defiance but simply slipping away from the traps of rigidity and subscription, attuned to the ancient laws of movement and sensitive to the uncertainties, the vulnerable truths. ‘Interislander’ takes a specific urgency, a man suffering a heart attack on the ferry between New Zealand’s north and south islands: practicalities and actions demanded of the moment are deftly depicted but the human place in our unfinished history is there between the sea beneath and the enveloping sky above. ‘The Desert Road’ crosses the country, mapped by co-ordinate points, listening as the darkness falls and languages come out in constellations, leading through the wilderness to strange, ‘familiar places’. ‘The inbreath’ takes us to Ardbeg and another waterside with slipstreams and shipping lanes, snow in the mouth and Scotland as no more nor less than another harbour of perception. Lynn Davidson is a poet opening such perceptions and sensitivities, singular, sometimes wittily anecdotal, poised upon latent gravity, eluding both flippancy and weight in a collection that slows time and repays patience with tempered inductions to particular, opening perspectives. —Alan Riach
From reviews of Islander
by Michael Stevens from Landfall
‘Davidson is the real deal: her gifts are legion. There is no dilute surrealism, no toneless and banal confessionalism, no tub-thumping of identity politics and its theoretical matrices to be found in these poems. She writes with the deep sensitivity of a psychogeographer. Her attunement to the forms and sounds of the environments in which she finds herself are a study, as the following poem, ‘Return’, reproduced here in its entirety, testifies:
I walked the thin road back,
one slow movement in dusk’s animation,
when the sky washed out
exposing the bens splashed with gold light
then washed in again, stained sea-
anemone-red, and this red sky
flickered drawing me in
releasing me beyond Laphroaig Distillery
to Port Ellen where all the white-washed houses
are birds
standing on one leg
at the Bay’s gleaming edge.
Here is the quietude of Edward Thomas, the pre-Socratic earthiness of Seamus Heaney, and the painterly marks of a Joan Eardley landscape. Davidson operates outside the climates of what is fashionable, favouring the business of what is before her senses. In these dark times, there is much to be found in this book that rails against despair and despondency. I will conclude with this reminder, lifted from the collection’s concluding poem: ‘Even though it’s not the beginning of the world anymore, / neither is it the end.’
by Lydia Harris from Northwards Now‘The poems in this collection are spare and meditative with surges of tenderness. Fathers, mothers, sons and daughters are present as part of the fabric of deep time, deep connection. Islands to mainland, north to south. Lynn Davidson makes deft use of white space. Her poems grow out of silence and return there, resonating like solemn bells. Her images are poised and arresting.
by Paula Green on Poetry Shelf
Time goes slower in the sea
and faster in the mountains.
Physics has taken over
where poetry left off.
from ‘Pearls’
Lynn Davidson’s terrific new poetry collection, Islander, travels between Scotland and New Zealand, between the place she grew up (Kapiti, Wellington) and the place she now lives (Edinburgh). Divided into five parts the poems move amidst light, fire and earth. Like Dinah Hawken, Lynn pays close attention to the world about her, the physical world, the inhabited world, a world buffeted by weather, seasons, time. Her poems are layered and fluent and measured.
The opening poem, ‘My stair’, sees the speaker (the poet?) looking out, in an eerie night light, from her second-floor window onto the bus depot. She evokes a scene through pitch perfect detail and a surprising simile (‘buses lightly lumber / into the yellow depot / like bubbles back / into solution’). But the surprise for me, the point of ruffle and ripple, is the mention of the father:
My father’s heart is failing, he fills up
with fluid (like an empty bus fills up with light?)
I look for flights.
One of the pleasures of this collection is the eclectic movement. There is movement born from departure, from the sway between presence and absence, birds in flight, the ripple of water, the movement of a musing and contemplative mind. A number of poems struck me. ‘A hillside of houses leave’ is mysterious, magical and rich in movement. Like many of the poems, there is a link to birds that might be symbolic but that is always physical.
Steeped in old weather the wooden houses
remember their bird-selves and unfold
barely-jointed wings.
The poem holds the conundrum of life – its impermanence, its fragility and the little anchors, the necessary bones.
People curl inside
the bones that keep them
that will not keep them long.
The presence of birds is fitting in a collection that navigates islands – the birds might signal the ocean’s presence, the multiple flights, the multiple nests, the bird on the poet’s sight line, the bird carried by heart, the bird house and the bird lungs.
I began to see the collection as a poetry chain; where this poem rubs against that poem and that poem rubs against this. Here the light of this day touches the light of that day which touches the light of the day before all the way back to ancient times. Dinah has a poem dedicated to her and I am reminded of Dinah’s ability to evoke the spare and the luminous within a cluster of lines that then open out with absorbing richness. Lynn is similarly dexterous. This from Lynn’s ‘Bonfire’:
The mainland is rendered down
silvers and is gone.
My heart is green and raw – a pea not a heart –
front to the fire back to the wind.
The groan of stone on stone unsettles
me as I unsettle them.
Islands is also inhabited with daily lives, with anecdote and incident, thus rendering landscape humane as well as wild and beautiful. At times it made me laugh out loud as in ‘Lineage’:
I was nine months pregnant, and waiting, when the man in the
Taranaki airport shop snapped this isn’t a library you know,
and when I turned my great belly full of fingernails and teeth-in-bud
towards him he asked (hotly) if I was actually going to buy anything.
The baby made exclamation marks with its soft bones,
glared with its wide open eyes – two Os. No I said I won’t buy
my news from you.
Lynn traces family, the children who leave, the children who make home solid, the unnamed boy who names home hame, the children half a hemisphere away. This from ‘Leaving Wellington’:
Hours go by and elements still gather.
Each day my waking children, just by naming
assembled all the solid things of world:
the bath, stove, chair, the bed, the window,
the shoe, the dinosaur, the door, the wall.
Then in a kind of via negativa
they composed two empty rooms by leaving home.
I said it was an anchor but it’s not.
It’s a shadow roughly like a kiss.
This is a book to slow down with – just as you slow down when you walk the perimeter of an island – gazing into a shifting sky vista and towards the unreachable but alluring horizon line –letting your own thoughts cascade and catch. It is a book where the view of a poem never settles but keeps revealing new lights, new joys, new surprises. I love this considered pace, this sharp revelation, this anchored heart. I love this book.