Judith Beveridge: a note on Tintinnabulum
The renowned Australian poet Judith Beveridge reflects on her much-anticipated new collection of poems Tintinnabulum (1 July 2024), the first since her prize-winning Sun Music in 2018. Read an extract from the book here.
Tintinnabulum explores what poetry can uncover through musicality and analogy, how these elements can open up sacred spaces. I have chosen Tintinnabulum as the title (which means the ringing of little bells) to suggest celebration and to indicate that many poems in the collection engage in an almost ritualised observance of precise aspects of the physical world. I look specifically at animals, landscapes, and at people in certain environments.
Sacred spaces, I believe, come into being when we perceive relationships and apprehend interconnections. I have always been interested in the ways in which similes and metaphors can create relations that formerly might have been unnoticed. My poetry has centred around this core aspect of poetic language and Tintinnabulum continues this with perhaps more urgency and power, but also with humour and surprise.
I also love to use language that is distinctly focussed on sound as a way of enhancing meaning and providing pleasure for the reader. My animal poems, which make up the book’s first section, delve into how we often interact with cruelty and insensitivity to non-human animals, but I also look at ways in which encounters with animals throw their ‘otherness’ into stark relief such as the distinctly alien lives of cicadas, leeches, bluebottles.
The second section focusses on the human world and brings to bear a sense of compassion for the difficulties that people encounter: surfers on a high sea, a waitress unhappy in her job, two brothers suffering racist cruelty, as well as elegiac poems about friends and family members.
The third section consists of imaginative/hallucinogenic scenarios, and is my most poetry at its most weirdly inventive. This section culminates in a joyous romp through sonic repetitions and is a homage to the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
The poet Edward Hirsch has said that ‘Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.’ I believe the final section of the book attempts this level of worshipful attention evoking the beauty and awe to be found in landscapes. It is my aim that readers, after reading Tintinnabulum, will find the world less fragmented and more interconnected, that language can be felt as an activating mechanism for wonder, joy and revelation.
— Judith Beveridge, May 2024
