POETRY
EATING MY GRANDMOTHER: A GRIEF CYCLE
By Krissy Kneen. University of Queensland Press. $24.95
Although Krissy Kneen already has a substantial track record in fiction, memoir and television, Eating My Grandmother: A Grief Cycle is her first book of poems. It's a "livre compose" written with great intensity and confessional sincerity (even risk).
The grandmother who Kneen is both grieving and celebrating (Lotty Kneen aka Dragitsa Marusic) appears to have been a very strong, even dominating, woman who remained at the centre of her familial life over at least two generations. As the author says in her Acknowledgements, it was "the best kind of family, unique, a little crazy but full of love".
Strangely, however, we readers end up knowing more of Lotty's impact on others (her daughters and granddaughter) than we do about the woman herself. Part ix of the book's "Requiem" section tells us that Lotty, in death, "…walks free / of the Jewish name that might have spelled her end. // She sails free / from the burning of her birth certificates, /two dates of birth / two documents, neither one / authentic. / Lie upon lie upon a missing truth. / Migrant papers, lost. / Slovenia, fled. / Egypt, fled. / All the burning buildings piled with / smoulder / coals of hidden history / taken to the grave."
The main focus of the book, however, is on the ferocity of the author's own grieving, as symbolised in her swallowing a few grains of her grandmother's ashes, after the rest have been more traditionally disposed of.
As Kneen says in a kind of prologue, "I pick a grain of her, stolen from the urn / place it on my tongue. / Her body. / My blood. // She lodges in me." Undoubtedly, this act was profoundly significant for the author but whether it will bear the symbolic load she places on it throughout 80 pages of verse is less clear.
The idea of gaining strength through ingesting, literally or metaphorically, parts of a suitably strong person is common to many cultures but when taken too literally the chemistry, as it were, can be confusing. With all due respect to undertakers, it's not always certain exactly what's in the urn.
Another small worry with Eating My Grandmother is that the author has served her apprenticeship in other fields (albeit related). Experienced poetry readers may already have sensed from the excerpts quoted above that Kneen's grip on free verse lineation is not always secure.
Sometimes there's a really good reason why a particular line should be very long (in the manner of Walt Whitman or AllenGinsberg) or very short (in the manner of William Carlos Williams) but quite often in Eating My Grandmother there isn't one.
Prose writers, suddenly liberated from "right justification", can often find free verse lineation liberating but its expert use is not something learned over a few months, regardless of the intensity of the emotions the form is being used to express.
Eating My Grandmother certainly allows the reader to understand and share its author's grief. It does, as Keen says in her Acknowledgements, "present the many complications of a life (both good and not so good)" and it undoubtedly is, as she intends, a "tribute".
There is also a sense, however, that a powerful, more extensive story of Lotty Kneen remains to be told — most probably in prose.
Geoff Page is a Canberra poet and reviewer.
