First Taste
by Tiggy Johnson
ISBN 978-0-9808136-0-9
‘First taste’ will be launched by Emilie Zoey Baker, this Sunday, 28th November, from 3pm at Caffe Sospeso, 428 Burwood Road, Hawthorn. All welcome.
Tiggy Johnson writes in straight, honest language. The poems collected in First Taste are not for academics, they are for readers, as all poems should be. Johnson draws a narrative bow and fires us through the trials of life, from love to loss, from birth to death, and laughter to sorrow.
The title poem is a journey through vast desserts, tracing a shared life through cakes – from a first taste of butterscotch pudding to an older person’s appetite for anzac biscuits and blueberry muffins. The poem draws a parallel between tastes and life, as we get older the rich sweetness of life is replaced by the safe and bland.
Coburg High continues the exploration of reminiscence as the narrator passes a set of buildings that once meant so much. A flood of memories rushes the page familiar appropriate to any reader who attended high school.
The introductory set of poems concludes with I remember as the narrator recounts childhood memories such as bowling her eldest brother middle stump and then never being allowed to play again. The sequence of memories concludes with a harsh reality ‘I don’t remember / ever missing it’.
The second “set” of poems is themed around pregnancy. Week sixteen removes the gloss painted over pregnancy as Johnson describes with brutal honesty the fatigue entering the second trimester.
Baby’s health is everything is a song of frustration. In spite of the best initial intentions the speed of the world and the ever presence of commercials push a mother into the fast food aisle of life. The poem closes with a sad resignation.
It’s like… should be essential reading for all males in order to gain an understanding of the horrors of morning sickness. This piece reminded me of Dr. Robert Winston who, in ‘The Body Human’, while sitting in a rubber dinghy in rough sea swell explains the feeling of morning sickness as “at first you think you’re going to die. Then you’re afraid you’re not.”
The facts injects a twist of humour into the pregnancy themed section. Through the agony of labour the narrator can “laugh” –
Like
whispering to your husband
you were sure the baby
was going to come out of your arse
only to discover later
there is no such thing
as a woman in labour
whispering.
daddy’s girl takes the up till now light hearted collection into the darkness of loss. The piece imagines the thoughts of a father on what would have been his daughter’s fifth birthday. Johnson describes the images of a child at play, but the dark tone creates a soft focus dream like picture, the poem concludes with a resounding stanza,
he tries to avoid wondering
how different his memories might be
if you’d been born
just two days before
Solitaire continues the dark path by recounting the final days of a loved one lived out in a nursing home. The poem explores the regrets of missed Mothers’ Day lunches and draws a vivid image of ambulances that arrive without any sense of urgency.
Shopping for girls is a return to the earlier theme of an individual trying to stand against multi-national commercial pressure, similar to the exploration is Baby’s health is everything the poem traces the ever increasing pace of growing up experienced by today’s children.
The collection draws to a close with Concluding and Dear Dad. Johnson brings the collection full circle as she explores the end of life. Concluding takes us into a hospital ward as a father endures one last visit from his daughter and grandchildren. The pain is expressed with sorrowful lucidity in the stanza –
We don’t stay long
you’re too tired to say more than thanks
to the kids
for their homemade birthday cards
and the cupcakes
you won’t touch.
Dear Dad is almost a tanka in its brevity. Straight to the point, it expresses the only regret of a surviving child as being that the end had to come.
The collection reads as a whole with a natural progression and delivers clearly and without any airs of pretension that we are the sum of our experiences, there is pain in birth and relief in death. But, regardless of whatever life can throw at us, butterscotch sauce is a cure-all.
