from the editor's desk
Review of ‘How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up’ by Lisa Collyer
Collyer, Lisa. Sydney: Sydney: Life Before Man, 2023. RRP: $24.99, 168pp, ISBN: 9780645633764.
Jackson
Although this book’s speaker wishes ‘to rewrite the working class into history’ (‘Class Consciousness’, 1331) and its seventy-five poems are primarily concerned with experiences in female bodies, it is not the kind of book that can easily be fitted into half-hour commutes, let alone the blessed breaks afforded by Play School to the hard-working mothers the speaker is unable to join because, as the title (and opening) poem states, ‘each month an egg cooks defective’. Often, turning the page presents a puzzle—‘a dare’, as the Dorothy Hewett Award judges, who shortlisted a manuscript version, aptly commented (Hughes-d’Aeth et al.). Although the poems’ titles straightforwardly state feminist and other political agendas (‘The Beauty Police’, ‘Property Rights’), Collyer’s diction is anything but straightforward. To reap these poems’ reward—their empathy with experiences ranging from hiking up sand dunes and travelling in Asia to miscarriage, slut-shaming and body hair removal—the reader must tackle language that varies from mildly odd—‘The lubed prod / of a sonographer’s pitch in a freedom trash can’ (‘The Pencil Test’, 49)—to inventively lyrical: ‘a cabinet of skin’ (‘Visiting Window’, 117); ‘chaise longue inflection’ (‘Need Not Apply’, 127); ‘a dupe / with his pants down / looking for a misplaced doll’ (‘The Waiting Room’, 115).
The overall tone is uncompromising. Almost every poem ends with a full stop, often rather suddenly. That’s all you’re getting, it says. Collyer’s brutalist vibe may leave some readers cold, especially if the poem is also particularly inscrutable, like ‘1 in 4’:
If I were to uncoil
lower tongue
and exhale
my unmarked teeth
could serve a family epitaph—
a tabloid typeface
smudged Franklin Gothic
no gun buyback
would redress. (13)
That’s the poem. No matter how closely I read it, I can’t make it fit the title, which alludes to the statistics on either miscarriage or—more likely, given the gun—childhood sexual abuse and family violence. Teeth, perhaps grimacing, are the central image, but are they somehow to be exhaled? Is that a deliberate enjambment or just a lost comma? And in what sense can teeth—or anything—serve an epitaph? If it read ‘serve as’ or ‘serve up’, that would make sense, but it doesn’t, and I can’t believe an author mentored by Lucy Dougan (‘Epilogue’, 164; imprint page) would leave out a preposition merely by mistake. The meaning remains obscure.
This kind of tripwire punctuation and curious diction recurs throughout the book, making me wonder whether some of the text is intended as LANGUAGE poetry, in which trying to find a coherent overall meaning is pointless and spoils the experience of reading. Some poems seem influenced by J. H. Prynne and the Cambridge School, perhaps via John Kinsella (who gets an ‘after’). For example, ‘The Ladette’ begins:
Into the punch, her rebellion is rum.
A nutmeg pinch over a boundary
feud. An earring lost is tiddly peach
blossom, the flood levels the fence
line, a moveable feast of insect swarm.
She wangles personal stakes, ottomans
the ringtone of tin pannikins, a slutty
citrus cleft to a punchbowl attired to
stir-up [sic] broken tea. […] (37)
Like Prynne at his best, this sounds wonderfully deranged. Fittingly, the woman in the poem is being punched or drunk on punch or both. Yet the title, together with an epigraph saying this poem is ‘after’ (more odd diction) a nutmeg grater that belonged to Western Australia’s first surveyor-general, suggests we are expected to imagine a specific situation. The woman is doing something. Ottomaning a ringtone that is a slutty citrus cleft? What? Oh, wait a minute, she’s wangling the ottomans (that’s another invisible comma, not an enjambment), and ‘cleft’ has been made to serve, dictionary definition notwithstanding, as the past tense of ‘cleave’. The citrus is an orange half decorating the rim of a punchbowl, which is… attired to stir up tea? No, there’s another invisible comma; it’s the woman who is attired—maybe. Damn, I liked it much better before I tried the close reading.
As this book is aimed at highly literate readers, it’s a shame that they will be distracted more than occasionally by spelling mistakes and wrongly punctuated compounds. This is the publisher’s problem, not the author’s. The author should be forgiven for misspelling Bibbulmun (‘Suffragette Bluebells’, 136) and ‘led’ (‘The Rules of Asylum’, 157) and for hyphenating phrasal verbs, but the prevalence of such flaws suggests that the publisher neglected to ensure the book was competently edited. This does the author, poetry and the English language a significant disservice.
Despite—or because of—its difficulty and density, this book has attracted some unreservedly positive reviews. ‘Bound to become an Australian classic’, breathes Elizabeth Walton. More soberly, Miriam Wei Wei Lo rightly praises Collyer’s ‘clever’ approach to vital themes but cautions that some of the poems are ‘a little too oblique’, tipping from ‘allusiveness’ into ‘elusiveness’.
That’s an understatement. Nevertheless, for readers privileged with the time and knowledge to unpick these tightly stitched and sometimes rather knotted poems, they will, as Magdalena Ball remarks, reward repeated reading.
1 My page citations are approximate. Although this is a print-only book and cannot be searched electronically, it has no page numbers or table of contents. To locate and cite memorable poems, I had to number the pages myself, probably incorrectly, and make a table of contents on a piece of paper.
Works Cited
Ball, Magdalena. ‘A review of Lisa Collyer’s How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up’, Compulsive Reader, 21 January (2024). Sourced at: https://compulsivereader.com/2024/01/21/a-review-of-how-to-order-eggs-sunny-side-up-by-lisa-collyer/.
Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony, Leni Shilton, Astrid Edwards, Eleanor Hurt. ‘The Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript 2022—shortlist’. UWA Publishing, 2022. Sourced at: https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/pages/copy-of-the-dorothy-hewett-award-for-an-unpublished-manuscript-2022-shortlist.
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. ‘A review of Lisa Collyer’s How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up’, Miriam Wei Wei Lo: Mostly Poetry, 3 November (2023). Sourced at: https://miriamweiweilo.com/reviews/review-of-lisa-collyers-how-to-order-eggs-sunny-side-up/.
Walton, Elizabeth. ‘Book review: How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up, Lisa Collyer’, ArtsHub, 5 December (2023). Sourced at: https://www.artshub.com.au/news/reviews/book-review-how-to-order-eggs-sunny-side-up-lisa-collyer-2686189/.
Writer, poet and editor Jackson was born in Cumbria, England, and now lives in Aotearoa New Zealand after many years in Western Australia. Jackson has published four full-length poetry collections, including A coat of ashes (Recent Work Press 2019) and The emptied bridge (Mulla Mulla Press 2019), plus work in many journals and anthologies, notably the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. Jackson’s awards include the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize. In 2018, they completed a PhD in Writing at Edith Cowan University, winning the University Research Medal and two other awards. Jackson taught English in China in 2018/2019. writerjackson.com
