‘Star Trails’ Alexandra Fraser
Steele Roberts
ISBN 978-0-947493-93-6,
$25.00
‘Star Trails’ is a fusion of science and poetry, skilfully done so readers don’t need a glossary or footnotes to understand each poem. Alexandra Fraser seems to share her father’s fascination with the sciences of light and astrophysics. The book is divided into three parts, ‘Backscatter’, ‘The Backdrop’ and ‘Viewpoint’. The first section is a series of poems about the poet’s late father. ‘Backscatter’ where an x-ray detects the radiation that reflects from the object and forms an image, an appropriate metaphor for the reflection and images of a late father.
He also seems to have been a keen photographer, in ‘Definition: snapshot snap∫ɒt’,
‘An isolated observation
just before you turned from the camera
just before the mask came up
the shutter click echoed
loud in the silent room
An informal photograph taken quickly with a small handheld camera
always we wait for the tide
and that instant when the heron
is halfway to flight vanes to the wind
primaries stretched for lift
and long toes still touching the mud’
The poem contains two other definitions too. The first quoted observation seems to come from a child who knows this process of taking a photograph, the father’s careful use of camera, means the child has to stay quiet and indulge her parent. The second quoted observation is of a man patient and observant, waiting for the precise moment to capture the heron taking flight. A man of precision and practice.
The title poem stays with the subject of photography. It considers a photograph,
‘it seems only a thing
a piece of shiny black paper
with white curved streaks
circling around a still point
a vortex that draws you in
and then you start the step by step
deconstruction the tearing apart
translating the image
into a vocabulary of memories
and musings
these are star trails
traces of burning hydrogen suns
they are traces of intention
the camera aimed to celestial south’
It ends with a quote from Derrida,
‘ Derrida said all photographs
are about mourning
the loss of the subject the object
the times’
Photographs are about the need to capture a moment before it’s lost in irretrievable archives of memory. The poem is focused more on the physical process of creating a photograph than the picture captured. A little girl grows up sharing her father’s fascination. The poems that show the poet as physics teacher are no surprise. There is one more surprise from her late father, though. In ‘Fifty-year embargo’, the poet is watching a documentary created from the release of embargoed government records and discovers there are photographs of her father,
‘you with tripod and camera
behind a wall of sandbags
that sillage of faded prints
now falls into place
top-secret research to develop
a tsunami generator
to aim at Tokyo’s heart
if only you had been here
your words could have breached
that long-held barrier’
Her father took this secret research to his grave. The poet does not blame him for remaining silent but expresses regret that her father didn’t survive long enough to talk about his secret research and how difficult it must have been to keep such a secret from his loved ones without the relief of sharing it.
The second section, ‘The Backdrop’, is a brief tour of science history. ‘Weaving rainbows’ looks at Isaac Newton’s research into rainbows, by poking his eye with a bodkin,
‘Newton partitioned light into slices
the passionate red of the lover
and the yellow of alchemist’s gold
green the apocryphal
apple of gravity
fallen Eve-like into his hand
purple buboes of the plague
the Great Fire’s orange flame
and a heavenly calm lapis blue
Newton last of the magicians
encoded his alchemical notes
but they were thought
not fit to be printed
(though a million hidden
words are now online)’
Later, the poet John Keats,
‘ was negative
about Newton claiming
he stole the poetry from the rainbow
by weaving it
via a small chunk of glass
into a beam of ordinary light
but those of us who watch
prismatic splinters glint
from the rim of a wine glass
or a bevelled edge rejoice
in the mathematical beauty
of the world’
The poem packs in a lot of understated passion. Newton’s desire to observe, record and experiment to learn more. Keats’ striving to prove his aphorism that beauty is truth. And ordinary scientists who use calmer methods of experiment and observation to build on the knowledge founded by earlier generations.
The final section, ‘View Point’ is a return to the theme of personal observation. ‘Waikato tritina’ starts,
‘going back to there is harder than leaving
you can’t step no not the same river
and are you still there a silhouette in fog
following the white lines through the fog
driving home after midnight leaving
the farewell party the pavilion by the river’
An adult returning to a childhood home is complex: there’s a temptation to step into familiar roles that are no longer true as the child is now an adult which must be recognised by the parents. When one parent has passed away, the mix of the absent of one parent and the altered relationship with the surviving parent has to be negotiated. The second line plays with Heraclitus’ notion that you never step into the same river twice.
‘The inside dark’ muses on ‘Where does the light come from when we dream?’,
‘These images are postcard-bright
existing in perfect bone-covered blackness
Do synapses produce sunshine
or neurotransmitters make candlelight
to reveal a death-bed
a dying chrysanthemum
a locked door where we fumble for the key?
Within the bone we light our visions
and ignite all that we desire and fear’
Once a scientist, always a scientist, even when asleep.
‘Star Trails’ is a collection of measured, considered poems that explore the poet’s late father, their shared love of science and the poet’s own life in science. Although the poems use scientific theories and terminology, they do so in a way that non-scientific readers can understand without needing footnotes or a glossary. Alexandra Frasers’ poetry comes from a desire to communicate with a reader and share her knowledge and delight.