I’ve been blogging for more than a decade (oops, forgot the blog’s tenth birthday) and up until this year, I have not reviewed any poetry. Because I don’t read poetry. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s more that I’m not in the habit of seeking it out. However, inclusion of poetry in the Stella Prize meant reading Big Beautiful Female Theory earlier in the year, and more recently, The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt (which incidentally, won the 2023 Stella Prize).

The titular poem comes midway in the collection and, despite what you might expect (and what the image on the cover suggests), the poem is about her father’s car  –

A folly he bought without test-driving,
vintage 1980 XJ, a rebellion against his tremor…

It’s important because at the time of the acquisition, her father was not supposed to be driving. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and was going blind in one eye – the Jaguar becomes an act of rebellion.

The collection opens with a number of poems describing the time immediately before and after her father’s death.

I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again.
I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade.
I hate myself for noticing his poetry – the triplet
that should not be beautiful to my ear
but is. Day, year, decade – scale of awful economy.

Two poems stand out in the first section – Time Remaining, which describes the minutes before her father died; and The Outing, in which Holland-Batt chooses the clothes her father will be buried in –

in the end you’ll be dressed
as a man again – someone
with somewhere, finally, to go.

The tenderness of The Outing brought me to tears.

There’s a change of pace in the middle section of the collection, with a focus on love and relationships. My favourite was Affidavit which is Lifestyles-of-the-Rich-and-Famous with an existential edge –

My days are wide open and stacked
like Baccarat chips and there’s nothing
on my slate, so until the charges
against me are finally laid,
register your complaint in writing
and address it care of Grand Cayman,
and goddamn it, I’m so sick
of these surplus supermoons –
if another one doesn’t come round
this century it won’t be too soon.

There’s beautiful and arresting imagery in Holland-Batt’s words – ‘Dreadlocked sheep/ marked for slaughter/ with punk spray-paint’ and ‘The mud crabs shadowboxed…’. In a scene from the hospital – ‘A bag of Hartmann’s Solution/ hangs in the air like a sling/ of trapped rain.’ And someone in a crowd at an airport is described as a ‘…rock in a fast-moving river‘ as ‘…families trundling luggage and shrugging on coats…’ move around him. You can see all of this, right?

Holland-Batt closes the loop by finishing the collection with a poem that references how the body persists while Parkinson’s and dementia erode the memory and traits of people  –

We’ve said our goodbyes –
you’re elsewhere now.
Here, but nowhere really.
We only talk in poetry.
I’m not sure when
I last saw the you I knew –
whenever it was
I didn’t make a note of the date.

I heard someone refer to dementia as the ‘longest goodbye’ – at the time I was struck by the poignancy of that but I think Holland-Batt has shifted it up a gear with this collection.

4/5 Superb.

Bring me lemons and mint, a pitcher’s fishbowl
loaded with ice and slices of cucumber,

a Tom Collins in a tumbler, the fizz of it.
Give me sulphur summer heat, tarry sidewalks,

a tired hydrant geysering over the street…