Megan Ross in conversation with Sibongile Fisher, at Love Books
Once again, I was surprised, and more than pleasantly, by the launch of a book of poems by a poet whose work I had not yet encountered. As is my habit, I flipped open Milk Fever and chose a short poem at random and found this.
Language
Our bodies
talk
all the time
It’s okay
I love you
Please don’t
Megan Ross exudes energy and self-confidence and it emerges in this, her debut volume, along with empathy and enthusiasm for the kind of playfulness of poetry that Harry Owen has talked about.
It isn’t easy to pin down what the poems are about – this is poetry after all – though their topics are identifiable, and as you can guess from the book’s title, a central concern is the aftermath of childbirth. Intensely personal, honest, the memories, dreams and insights are embedded in imaginative and exuberant skeins of words, some easier to penetrate than others.
D. How do I mourn myself?
In a bathroom I wash without the light
Cannot bear the hanging jacket of flesh /
This unborn death hollows me like a gem squash:
Dark’s green shell, sunlight’s yellow seeds
Somewhere else / now
The imagery is often vivid, with a spontaneity that stretches out towards finding meaning in the mundane.
There’s a lot of adventure in Milk Fever. If you are going to depart from the conventions of metre and rhyme, why not make your verse truly free? Experiment with emphasising pauses and absences, caesuras; use white space; use the page in landscape. Some of the experiments will work, some will fail. What’s important is that they are backed by a love of what words can achieve and a knowledge of their limits.
At the launch, at Love Books in Melville, one of the members of the largely women audience asked Megan if men could appreciate this book. She answered along the lines that common humanity should enable them to. She might well have answered that poetry that doesn’t transcend boundaries isn’t poetry.
Reg Rumney 