Whisper Songs

Tony Birch

Whisper Songs
Format
Paperback
Publisher
University of Queensland Press
Country
Australia
Published
1 June 2021
Pages
96
ISBN
9780702263279

Whisper Songs

Tony Birch

In this stunning collection Tony Birch invites the reader into a tender conversation with those he loves - and has loved - the most. He also challenges the past to speak up by interrogating the archive, including documents from his own family history, highlighting forcefully the ways in which the personal is also intensely political.

Divided into three sections - Blood, Skin and Water - the poems in Whisper Songs address themes of loss (of people and place), the legacies of colonial history and violence, and the relationships between Country and memory.

Whisper Songs reveals Birch at his lyrical and intimate best.

Review

2021 is the year of Tony Birch, with two new books: one short story collection (Dark as Night, August) and one poetry collection. Birch has always been a beautiful writer, and it feels particularly fortunate that we as readers are able to reap the rewards of such a productive period of his writing career.

In the poem that introduces the collection, Anne-Marie Te Whiu declares that Birch’s ‘words are constellations of memories / his heart beats across hemispheres and time’. This feels particularly true of Whisper Songs as it is dedicated to Birch’s brother, Wayne, who died in 2018. Much of the first section (‘Blood’) recalls childhood and the bonds of family, as well as moments of tragedy. As a reader, I felt warmly invited into Birch’s personal life with his precise imagery: ‘red bicycles ring tandem / slalom empty streets’; ‘catches the wind in infant hands’.

I particularly enjoyed the way Birch interweaves historical documents and archives into the poems. By using the structure of historical records to construct ‘The Eight Truths of Bhouta Khan’, Birch depicts the absurdities of racist bureaucracy in early 1900s Australian immigration acts. Perhaps even more compelling are the poems that use documents from Birch’s own life and family history. I think it is particularly important as cultural history, and as a practice of poetics, to use poetry to convey the realities of First Nations people and the personal effects of invasion and colonisation. It is poetry as witness statement and testimony, and readers who enjoy the works of Natalie Harkin, Alison Whittaker and Evelyn Araluen will be similarly interested in Birch’s poetry, though Whisper Songs is perhaps less dense on the page.

This collection offers up Birch’s life ‘for your inspection’, and I recommend readers accept such a generous invitation.


Clare Millar is from Readings online.

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