POETRY
The Jaguar
Sarah Holland-Batt
University of Queensland Press $24.99

Sarah Holland-Batt, at the age of 40, is emerging as a key figure in contemporary Australian poetry. Her three books, Aria (2008), The Hazards (2015) and now The Jaguar, have appeared at judicious seven-year intervals and collected a number of substantial awards. Her recent book of short essays on poetry, Fishing for Lightning, has consolidated her position.

Holland-Batt’s highly metaphorical style has been influential on numerous younger Australian poets – although few seem to equal her almost conversational ease in the medium. In The Jaguar, the poet’s approach is slightly more relaxed – though, paradoxically, more intense. This may be because she has here, in the person of her recently deceased father, more extended and deeply felt material to work with.

Clearly, the death of Dr Anthony Holland-Batt (1937-2020) was something the poet was seriously disturbed by. Some readers may have heard the eloquent media pleas the poet made on the issue of aged care during, and since, the time her father was maltreated in one such institution.

Noting the book’s title, some readers may also think of Rilke’s famous poem The Panther and suspect a connection. Holland-Batt’s poem, however, is in a very different mode. Early in the poem she recalls the acquisition: “A folly he bought without test-driving, / vintage 1980 XJ, a rebellion against his tremor”.

Her father proceeds to drive it dangerously on the edge of legality and modifies it in destructive ways. “Finally his modifications / killed it, the car he had always wanted and waited / so long to buy, and it sat like a carcass / in the garage, like a headstone, like a coffin – / but it’s no symbol or metaphor. I can’t make anything of it.”

Of course, given the information provided in the poems before and after, we can plainly see that the vehicle is highly metaphoric. It’s a mark of Holland-Batt’s self-confidence that she can employ such a sardonic manner alongside other poems that are more orthodoxly poignant. Importantly, her father’s humanity is not simplified – or sentimentalised in retrospect.

After so many poems of grief and suffering, The Jaguar’s readers will experience in Part III a perhaps-necessary surprise when they’re offered 15 poems which are, broadly speaking, about love and sex. Most of them appear somewhat autobiographical, but others may well be set-pieces satirising prevailing attitudes. One of the most beguiling is Epithalamium, supposedly written to “celebrate” the marriage of a narcissistic ex-lover. Holland-Batt’s characteristic tone in this third section can be sensed in her lines: “To love a narcissist /you have to believe, and reader, I did – /for a time I loved him, I believed in his cruelty and beauty …”