A reflective glance: So glad I have finished the thesis!

 

Back when I was re-re-revising the second last nearly but not quite final revision of chapters …

 

 

 

 

 

 

Theorising ‘value’ makes me frustrate in the head

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Moths, by anthropologist Michael Jackson

 

 

I often carry a thin poetry volume around with me, tucked in between draft chapters I am currently editing. I’ve been carrying Michael Jackson’s, Duty Free: Selected Poems 1965-1988, around for a while now. He is quite a beautiful poet and I enjoy re-reading his poems, looking for the anthropology or ethnographer. The latter is not far away in the following.

 

THE MOTHS

 

Our house had filled with moths,

a slow silting of lintel and architrave

a cupboard dust,

until I looked much closer

and found the wood-grain one,

the white quill paperbark, the blotched

shadow of a patch of bush,

an elbowing riverbank that had gone deep blue.

 

The soft perimeter of forests

had entered our house

fluttering around the moon.

 

Then for five days they drowned

in sinks and pools or seemed to wane

into sanded wood or ash on windowsills

until they became

what they were when I first noticed them:

fragments of a dull interior.

 

 

 

from – Michael Jackson 1989, Duty Free: Selected Poems 1965-1988, John McIndoe, Dunedin NZ,  p. 43.

 

 

 

The second and eighth lines – ‘a slow silting of lintel and architrave’ and ‘an elbowing riverbank that had gone deep blue’ – are exceptional and beautifully crafted. But I think the poem, as a whole, is a little too clever. I would have resisted ‘fragments of a dull interior’ at least, I think. (She says sitting on a pedestal in front of her computer . . .)