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‘Peter Singer believes we are all equally valuable and I believe him,’ Anna Livesey writes in the titular poem of her new collection, Ordinary Time. The poem is wonderfully casual, like a structured train of thought. ‘This means I should do more,’ Livesey continues. She then muses onwards and, wondering about the future, thinks, ‘One day there’ll be no book of mine left on the earth’.
These musings on the passage of time are what form the backdrop of Livesey’s collection. She specifically focuses on the time that passes with pregnancy, birth, and childhood. In doing so, she explores the world of parenthood. In the poem Speech and Comprehension, Livesey perfectly describes the innocence of new life that her baby has, the simple ‘infinitesimal knowledge of less than two weeks’. At this stage, parent and child speak in their own silent language.
However, the wonderful innocence of children also needs protection. In the poem Artificial Intelligence, Livesey portrays the worries that come with being a parent. She describes the earthquake drill procedure at Playcentre, which includes instructions to ‘fold over your child like a turtle and hold on’. When Livesey describes how the parents ‘give ourselves up, bend-bridge-wise / over small hearts that judder and fear’, Livesey highlights a vivid image. Each parent acts as both a physical and metaphorical buffer to the world’s dangers. In this way, Livesey perfectly describes both the care and worry that comes with parenthood. She softly ends the poem with a sentence that is simple, yet carries mountains of emotion: ‘One month post-partum, I find, you’ll cry at anything’.
Livesey’s wonder at the growth of her children also carries its own innocence. In the poem Your Mind Like a Pearl, Livesey ponders how she and her child were once together, telling her child that ‘before you were born, you, coalescent, bathed inside me’. Now the two are separate entities, parent and child both carrying their own thoughts within their own bodies. As her child thinks and moves, Livesey addresses her child and states how she can see ‘the physical presence of your mind, working’. Through her observations, Livesey herself seems struck with awe as well.
The bond between parent and child is also a relationship that plays out through Livesey and her own mother. Her mother suffers from time; Livesey brings out the image of her mother’s hands as she last saw her, in ‘the claw-twists of dementia’. She also describes her mother’s hands as they used to be when she was younger, the hands that taught her how to sew as well as the hands that held her close.
It seems that ordinary time has a firm grasp on those both in youth and in older age. Livesey’s own awe as her child grows reveals how inspiring this passage of time can be, even if it is not quite so comforting on the other side of the spectrum. And even if time rolls onwards and all the books we write are to disappear, as Livesey states at the end of her first poem, ‘Having started as a poet I suppose any contribution is a positive mark on the ledger’.
Reviewed by Emma Shi
Ordinary Time
by Anna Livesey
Published by Victoria University Press
ISBN 9781776561605
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