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POETRY
Bobish
Magdalena Ball
Puncher & Wattmann, $25
Dress Rehearsals
Madison Godfrey
Joan, $24.99
When a poet writes biography we are left with a spare, bright document. The arc of the subject’s life lends the poems a narrative momentum that thematic collections don’t often concern themselves with, while poetic form gives the biographer permission to pause, to see a life as a series of wakeful moments floating across the white page.
The primary building block of these biographies is often the “image”, that “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” that Ezra Pound urged poets to prioritise above all else at the beginning of the 20th century. And so, readers of these collections are offered a life glimpsed through a series of charged, epiphanic moments, strung together like a radioactive necklace.
Madison Godfrey’s poems read like half a page of attitude being tried on for size.Credit:
Two recent (and very different) collections of poetry, Bobish by Magdalena Ball, and Dress Rehearsals by Madison Godfrey, each take a life as their scaffolding. Bobish is a biography of the author’s great-great grandmother, while Dress Rehearsals is a “memoir made of poetry”.
The lives that lend these books their arcs are not exceptional in the biopic sense of the term. No Nobel prizes were won by their subjects, no cricket teams captained. But they are exceptional in that they are part of an ordinary that has often been overlooked. Both books document the lives of people living between identities (national and gendered), where language slips and breaks.
Magdalena Ball writes with a similar sparseness to the great modernist biographical poet Lorine Niedecker.
The bodies of both subjects live or lived with chronic illness: in the case of Bobish, untreated diabetes, and in the case of Madison Godfrey, endometriosis, though in neither case is illness the primary focus. It is simply there, like the hum of an air conditioner, the way illness is for many.
Bobish is the story of a girl emigree who travelled, alone, from Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement to New York City in 1907, never to see her family again. The woman who was “Bobish” to author Magdalena Ball was Rebecca Lieberman on paper, but that name was also an invention – Rebecca anglicised from Rivka, Lieberman a name chosen by her own Ashkenazic Jewish grandparents when compelled to do so by authorities. And as Bell writes “even the name of her country changed/ shifted, ceased to exist/ was destroyed/ denied/ but she survived.”
As the collection progresses, we glimpse Bobish as she travels to New York, works in sweatshops, marries a fish smoker who will drink her hard-won savings away, bears four children and reads tea leaves for extra cash by night. And it is this, Bobish’s clairvoyance, that becomes a portal, one that Bobish can use to breach her miserable present, and Ball uses to burrow her way back, via her DNA, to the past.