OPEN BY POET SARAH ST VINCENT WELCH

Sarah St Vincent Welch talks about her new book OPEN

Had the great pleasure of launching OPEN by Sarah St Vincent Welch at That Poetry Thing! that's on at Smith's every Monday Night, this week. 

Sarah and I met properly in 1991. I’d noticed this interesting writer and was keen for her to submit to a book I had on the go, and she had already picked up the leaflet and wanted to know more about it. Thanks to this and an opportune moment, we had a wonderful getting-to-know-you conversation — on a Canberra kerb’s edge, as speeches came to an end, other Gulf War protesters swirled and parted, and some lay abreast the length of the road holding large placards for a photoshoot. Sounds like a metaphor ...

Sarah is a writer on the edge, observing, witnessing and — just as often in the midst of it — experiencing. She is one of the most poetic prose writers I know, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of her short stories in print along with her award-winning unpublished novel. Meanwhile it’s exciting to see a volume of poetry from her, and I have no doubt it is the first of many.

Open is not a large volume, yet it holds so much of a life. We meet significant people including the poet’s son Lawrence and the poet’s husband Dylan — both loved as much as Sarah — and the poet’s mother Molly too. In Archaeology of Gardens Sarah still observing, digs and cuts back while her mother watches: ‘from the high window/as I watered our garden in summer/you let me be lost in my dreams, this better place/the best place I could be, and I think you knew …

There are poems that are dreamlike and poems as surreal as dreams.  There are poems that take the everyday world and make it other-worldly. In 821.3 in old Civic Library she builds a world for the reader from what goes on inside and out — I’ll read an excerpt from the beginning:

Look through the darkness

of light-sensitive glass

at the interchange

the missed connections,

takeaways and deals

Hold your sweat wet

call slip, and watch

while the infirm wait

for a kneeling bus …

It’s an unsettling poem —the sense that one move out of step and everything will come tumbling down. You feel a butterfly somewhere move its wing.

I heard it explained on TV that the reason tenors are so popular is because we can actually feel the voice in our bodies. I thought that’s a bit fascinating. Then one night in the heat of a Sydney summer I was standing in a circle of people at an exhibition opening, holding an open bottle of water against me. When the MC began the formalities in his beautiful tenor speaking voice it vibrated through the bottle into my hand and through my body.

Sarah as you may have noticed is not a tenor … but the tenor of her writing voice is such that it enters you, it holds you, it holds on to you.

Melinda Smith MC Extraordinaire

Anna Couani reads from her new collection Thinking Process also launched on the night