Review by Stacey O’Carroll
Author: Madeleine Dale
Publisher: UQP
RRP: $24.99
Release Date: 3 September 2024
“Imagine Mary, waiting ten days by the yellow house
as if waiting for inspiration —
for the same raw-breeze must who turns oak leaves
over and breaks windfall fruit from its branch.” The Poet in Water
Poetry has been having a little popularity resurgence over the last few years, and who could resist a swirling wave-inspired cover? In Portraits of Drowning, Queensland academic and poet Madeleine Dale has created her debut collection of lyric poems.
At the centre of Dale’s poems is the theme of water, which weaves its way through our landscapes, lives, loves, history, and myths. For Dale, drowning can represent grief or our inability to let trauma wash away. One of the most interesting aspects of poetry is its ability to shift in meaning depending on the reader, like swimmers in an ocean pool. Each reading can bring a new metaphor to the surface and almost create a different poem.
“How many times
Can we save this girl?
Sixteen when she went
Into the Seine, fate
Lining up the sibilance
Like that. Too soon…” Resuscitation Annie
Dale’s poems drag the reader into their current with unusual and ambiguous titles such as Cephalophore,
Occlude and Came Back Wrong. It is worth noting the titles themselves have a lyrical quality to them as well as the poems. Something that takes just as much work as the actual poems. While some of the poems linger and swirl around your mind long after you have read the text, unfortunately for me, others wash away in a forgettable blur.
Portraits of Drowning is a moving and thought-provoking collection in which Dale demonstrates her skill with word choice and structure. Dale’s collection of poems won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize in 2023. She is clearly a poet to follow. Portraits of Drowning will submerge the reader in the rhythm and empathy of Dale’s beautifully crafted poetry; they may not drown, but her words will continue to wash over them.