The Strange Matter

What is the strange matter? It is the plastic milk containers upside-down on someone's fence, the cockroaches making their nightly commute across the bookshelves, the Rusa deer that boards the 53 bus at Wollongong and has thoughts about Wyatt and Gascoigne. It is the morning hour after everyone is fed and dressed and out of the house; the moment of sitting down, the dregs of tea tipped onto earth, the face in the laundry window. In Ali Jane Smith's debut collection, the extraordinary is found not through departure from the ordinary but by staying with it, turning it over with patient, curious hands.

These poems were written on and about Wodi Wodi, Dharawhal, and Yuin Country - the Illawarra coast south of Sydney - and this place seeps through every poem: its bus routes and escarpments, its possums and bluetongue lizards, its suburban shopping centres and sea eagle-watched beaches. Yet the collection is also restlessly intertextual, drawing on Schoenberg and John Cage, Myra Hess and Lauren Jackson, Gascoigne and George Orwell, Tippi Hedren and Janet Leigh, as though attention - to a bus window, a cockroach's gait, a bee tree threatened by chainsaws - requires the company of the whole culture.

Smith's voice is warm, wry, and formally adventurous. She works in sequences, lyrics, semi-dramatic monologues, and permutational repetitions - a poem that reshuffles its own stanzas three times to show thought working over itself. Her tonal range is wide: from elegy to pratfall, from close ecological observation to the sudden entrance of Lauren Jackson into a poem about World War II. What holds everything together is an irrepressible sociability of mind, and a deep conviction that attention to the world as it is - strange, ordinary, pressured, alive - is both an ethical and aesthetic practice.