Melbourne-based poet Robbie Coburn’s latest poetry collection gallops and canters across the page; but it also soars Pegasus-like above a physical and emotional landscape where herds of fantasies, dreams and memories intermingle in a Western Gothic carnival: nightmares indeed.
Coburn has cited Edgar Allan Poe as an early influence, and certainly there are elements of Poe’s gothic imagination and sepulchral melancholy at play here:
In the dream I am screaming.
I am holding your bones in my arms,
taking them to my family’s farm
to bury them.
(from Burial)
But Coburn’s deep familiarity with, and love of, horses also inspires both literal and metaphorical images singing the comforts of an embodied existence accepting of transience and joy:
as I followed you
your gumboots making a space
for our feet in the wet grass
like two newborn foals
teaching one another
how to walk
(from Foals)
In one poem, as striking as it is short, Coburn seems to echo – as he does elsewhere – Eliot’s Whispers of Immortality (“And saw the skull beneath the skin” etc.) while hinting at a child’s first intimations of mortality:
Geography of a Horse
One morning you notice the heaving curve of their flanks
as they halt suddenly, exhausted
before the oversized ribcage is revealed
and you count the protruding bones
with your tiny hand.
Throughout the three sections of this tough-love collection, Coburn makes no bones about his experiences with extreme forms of physical and mental anguish. Any salvation (redemption?) – if required at all – is in language, the poetics, by turns lapidary, paratactic, elliptical, contrapuntal and, like a Shaker cabinet, bloody well-built.