The Abbotsford Mysteries

Reviews

A collection of extraordinary depth and focus. Powerfully conceived and executed, these poems give complex voice to the multi-stranded miseries and ecstasies of the ghosts of the old Abbotsford convent: the bewildered orphans, left always with a childhood ‘that cannot unbandage itself’, the wild girls swimming the Yarra to freedom in the shadow of the Skipping Girl; and the nuns, whose sometimes punitive practice co-exists with a creed of love that offers moments of ambiguous radiance ‘as if an archangel tapped on your soul’.

—Jennifer Strauss

Spirited and fugitive, lively and resistant, the girls in these poems speak through a powerful blend of the lyrical and the verbatim in a bare, intense, even visionary form of ‘writing back—against and into history. Patricia Sykes merges fluently into dramatic voices so busy at grief, fear and abandonment. She knows their restless sorrows but she also celebrates their ache to live and to find freedom outside their bind of protection and guilt. These are moving, compassionate poems full of the motif of river: life, undercurrent, debris - and the deeply aspiring self. 

—Philip Salom

…The work is, ultimately, an act of retrieval that is, by turn, luminous, wry, defiant and empathic. Patricia Sykes is a poet who knows not to be constricted by boundaries, who brings into play all the resources of history and reverie, remembrance and vision, in this supple interweaving of lyric intimacy, documentary, liturgy and plain-speaking.

—Jill Jones

The  narrative force of Patricia Sykes new collection is astonishing. Each poem is both moving and disturbing, as humble as it is sad. The Abbotsford Mysteries manages to be very much sui  generis, while remaining intensely accessible. I can’t think of  another recent book in which History and Art get on so well. Definitely a must-read.

Rob Riel

The poems work over ‘unfinished things’, making a space where ‘the best/the worst [and] the unspeakable’ cohabit. Particularly charged are the absences Sykes courts: girls who died, girls who ran away, poems that deal with sin’s structuring around power, silence and routines like prayer and chores.

Sam Moginie, Cordite Poetry Review

These lines are masterful, not simply drawing together images of Christ and Mary with lived female experience but arguing back, demanding recognition... The poems ask for time and careful reading, for ‘sitting with’ and listening. The life of the girls and the women they became deserve such accomplished recognition.

Robyn Cadwallader, Verity LA

Occasionally one comes across a collection of poetry which seems to come out of left field. Such was the case with Patricia Sykes’ third major collection The Abbotsford Mysteries. After reading the first few poems I had to take a deep breath and put the collection down for a few minutes. I realised that I was embarking on something special – how come I had missed her first two books? ...Already an established poet and librettist, The Abbotsford Mysteries has firmly cemented Sykes reputation as a major poet.

—Mark Roberts, Rochford Street Review

We hear a polyphony of reminiscent voices stung with pain. More that that, we hear discord tuned to symphony by a poet using the melodics of love.  Love not only for the girls who have survived to become confidantes but also for language itself, with its power to undo the curses a cold world can deliver.

—Ross Gibson

In this complex work, Patricia Sykes has chosen a kaleidoscopic technique which has allowed the reader/listener access to the experiential — the personal and specific — while engaging the oblique and suggestive qualities of poetry. She has allowed an entry point to the knotted themes which arise from religious incarceration, positive and negative:  bonding, womanhood and spirituality; occultation, exploitation and loneliness. This is an important poetic rendering of a barely known history.

—Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

'How we add up is not how we add up', as Sykes so knowingly and affectingly puts it. This is a volume to both honour and challenge what it is to be abandoned, displaced, institutionalised. True the preconceptions, the cliches and shared common ground are here too, but most strikingly it is the individual and the individual nature of experience that is at once so plainly and poetically expressed. As one who knows intimately the difficulties and complicated pleasures of this particular 'childhood', I can say without reservation - the nail and the hammer, right on the head Patricia!

Terry Jaensch

It is impossible to read these words—this record—and remain indifferent.

—Kevin Brophy

The Abbotsford Mysteries follows a narrative of sorts, from the arrival at the orphanage of Sykes and her sisters in the ‘Rosarium’ section, through their adolescent yearnings, to the aftermath, when the Convent’s surrounds are left behind. But the narrative is never stable, flickering between past suffering and adult justification, and following multiple voices, of orphaned girls, ‘the wayward ones’ housed separately in the Sacred House class, and the Sisters. The effect is mesmerising...

—Ainslee Meredith, Australian Poetry

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Rosarium

Death’s dream kingdom

Mutter song

Onus

There will be a girl who

This viper her tongue

Providence

Panic bell

How will you know who you are

Gamble

Creed

Gloria

The Luminous

Rose, roses, rosary

Miasmata

Coils

The door

Iambic pentameter

Each phantom ache an amputee

The man in the moon and the axe of God

Bloodline

Institutional

Architecture

Gloria 

The Sorrowfuls

Aspect

Lent

Deadly endings

Persecuting colour

PUC SUX

Mortal, venial

Bad girls do the best sheets

Mellifer

Honorary

Hell, memory

Gloria 

The Joyfuls

Incarnae

Conceived

Bound

Immanent

Abiding

Feast

Fount

Edified

Discipled

Clots

Gloria

The Glorious

Crux

God’s star

Crocodile file

Visitation of sweetness

The perfect deception of night

Winged ascent

Glass story

Beloved

Having lost all fear

Trusting the donkey

Gloria