Reviews:

Wire Dancing by Patricia Sykes

Sykes’ is a talented new voice in Australian poetry. These are direct emotionally contoured poems, verbally very fertile. Often they come straight from the heartland of strongly symbolised states of mind and feeling which takes the work in surprising, disturbingly specific directions.

To quote from her is difficult without distorting the way her poems ‘add up', so to speak, over many lines. But a short fragment from Bread and honey about remembering and early childhood bedroom with its uncanny light bulb image gives something of the work:

wake up arenas
our gums breaking
into teeth
on the cot rails
the paint flaking lead

into our bloods
-how we sucked
on our poisons-
while the wind
swung on the lights
like an antidote

Fast, precise poetry, Sykes works in the in between area of named and nameless feelings. Many of her poems-‘legend as a tourist attraction’, ‘changing the medication’, ‘paddock bull’, ‘killing the galah’, ‘blood and kittens’, ‘improvisation no. 2’, ‘legend,’ ‘ancestries’- achieve powerful impacts in this way. They leap over boundaries, using language as a balletic or gestural medium. Wire Dancing is indeed an appropriate title.

A problem, however is that ultimately the wire dancing and circus references throughout the book create too much of an over arching narrative context for the work. The effect is that the poems, many of which have nothing to do with circus life. Are forced into supporting some larger theme to do with circus as a ‘symbolic’ order, with circus as ‘life.’ Fastened into this book length project, the poems wire dance better than they stand on their own feet. Sykes’ working in circus background gets in the way: so the difficulty may be no more than her gaining enough distance from the immediate materials which any poet uses. As it is. Wire Dancing reads uneasily somewhere between a book length poem and too monotonously organised livre compose. That said, Patricia Sykes is a much more original and experimentally intelligent poet that this overly constructed format allows.

– Martin Harrison, Australian Book Review Nov 1999

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