Review: BITER

Claudia Jardine’s first poetry collection, BITER, is as ferocious and sexual as the title suggests.

Love permeates the volume, whether frank or fleshy, familial or tender. The collection mixes creative translations of the epigrams of the Palatine Anthology, a volume believed compiled in the 10th century by Constantinus Cephalas, with laugh-out-loud modern poetry prodding at feminist problems and contradictions around sexuality. A tightly-structured pantoum illustrates this, relaying a cervical smear experience, ending with ‘she stopped, and said, ‘Your cervix is iron!’ / All the more for my sexual prime!’

Jardine doesn’t hesitate to play with form; pantoums and sonnets rub shoulders with free verse. There’s a poem contained mostly in its title:

                Passing Comment from a Man Dressed in White

                Wearing Sunglasses Impatiently Pacing the Queue of

                Cars Waiting to Board the Interislander Ferry on a

                Hot Day in Picton, Delivered Through the Window

                on the Passenger’s Side with All the Grace of an

                Unravelling Ham Sandwich

and a limerick on encryption, privacy and titillation. But the poetry exploring tiny understandable moments, such as Thoughts Thought After Surveying the Contents of / the Fridge,  or My Sister (A Cancer) Generously Gives Her Dog to / Our Parents ring with truth and the sort of love that forgives. The collection is a celebration of many facets of love through many eyes.

My Sister (A Cancer) Generously Gives Her Dog to

Our Parents

for my family

my sister has a nice name

doesn’t mean I like it when my mum looks me in the eyes

and uses it on me

years later my boss tells me the best way

to get a dog’s attention

is to call the other dog’s name

provided you have two dogs

the trick always works

and so on with sisters

I am jealous of her

star sign

she is the crab and I am the tampon

but I am understanding

understanding and graceful

the young Libra sun and moon that I am

I work hard to make sure they get our names right

at school where hers is in gold on the good walls

and my brother, a Capricorn

plays timpani in the orchestra to make a statement

when I was little

I ransacked my sister’s sticker collection

and made a collage of her blue-chip playground stocks

on the legs of her full-sized single bed

which I was so envious of

she didn’t hold it against me

when I was bigger

I read her journal

Itemised all the things she his

under her enormous double bed

ratted her out for having Smirnoff Double Blacks

in her t-shirt drawer

she didn’t hold that against me either

but

the thing

that makes my sister purse her lips

is that I have never adopted a pet

and then left the country

and now Frank has made a serious error

(but good luck explaining that to him)

he has stolen my mother’s best breast

and run off down the garden

Reviewed by Erica Stretton