Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge’s much-anticipated new collection of poems, and her first since the prize-winning Sun Music in 2018. The poems in Tintinnabulum focus on animals, people, and places, with multiplicity everywhere, and an overall feeling of the joy and richness of language.

Sun Music brings together poems published over a thirty-year period, from Judith Beveridge’s collections The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace, Wolf Notes and Storm and Honey. It begins with an introduction by the poet, outlining the contours of her writing, and ends with a gathering of thirty-three new poems, including the exquisite elegy which gives this collection its title.

Devadatta’s Poems complements the sequence ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, published in Beveridge’s earlier collection Wolf Notes, which followed the travels of Siddhattha Gotama before he became the Buddha, and portrayed the world from his disciplined and ascetic point of view. These new poems are written from the viewpoint of Devadatta, Siddhattha’s jealous and ambitious cousin, who attempted to murder him three times. They are marked by an extraordinary richness of language and detail, and a dedication to sensation, which is in contrast to Siddhattha’s purity, and caused at least in part by Devadatta’s desire for Yasodhara, his cousin’s wife.

The major part of Storm and Honey portrays the working life of a trawler’s crew, fishing in estuarine and coastal waters. It opens with the discovery of a child’s corpse inside the belly of a shark – an intensity which is held throughout as the poems respond to the visceral shock of the fishing, the characters of the men, and the power of light and wind and water.

These energies are so fully enacted in the language of the poems, in their visual and aural effects, that you feel there is a claim being made for poetry itself as an elemental power. Elsewhere there is delight and comedy too, in poetry’s ability to distil the storm.

Beveridge’s poetry is remarkable for its attentiveness to the humble rituals of life. It discovers richness and grace in the smallest, the poorest, the most awkward or most transient of beings.

There is a Buddhist underpinning to this awareness of latent power, recognised in the collection’s central sequence of poems, which depicts Siddhattha Gotama’s wandering through the forests and towns of Northern India before he became the Buddha.