Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Dorothy Porter, Wild Surmise (2002)

I can’t find an image of the cover of this novel written in verse by one of Australia’s most well-known female poets but it’s available on Amazon.com.

Alex is a proclaimed glamour girl of astronomy because of her research on the satellite Europa (satellite to Jupiter). She’s married to a failed academic who spends his time complaining about all the shitty undergraduate poetry he has to mark (and oh sweet jesus I can only imagine how bad undergraduate poetry must be. Mine barely passes for real poetry now and I’m almost in my thirties…shudder!).

So Alex is obsessed with Europa, and also with another woman she’s had an affair with - also in her field, called Phoebe. Wow, how saucy - a lesbian affair, big deal.

This novel tries far too hard to do things that have been done before. I know I’m not exactly a published poet so it’s all well and good for me to criticise this but reading this was too easy and I had very few ‘connecting’ moments with the words - which I do expect from any poetry I read. Otherwise I’ll just stick to reading the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar. I have read some of Porter’s other verse novels - What a piece of work and The Monkey’s Mask, the latter of which I thought was brilliant. What a piece of work is flawed but still engaging.

Wild Surmise has some really poor examples of pieces that apparently pass for poetry. If that weren’t the case, I’m sure I wouldn’t have rush-read through it in a matter of a few hours. Anything that makes me think “duh, I could’ve written that” can’t be that remarkable.