In welcome/no vacancy, Five Islands—in what I believe is the final series of New Poets—introduces the work of Ella Holcombe in book form. Born in 1982, she is ahead of the curve for getting a first book out in Australia, where there is no shortage of poets vying for the attention of publishers willing to touch poetry. This book, and a short stack of newer poems, attractively arranged in a makeshift chapbook, recently arrived in my letterbox.

Holcombe is a poet of the ordinary—but it is the ordinary transformed. In the newer work she sent me—all prose poems—the perspective of the poems is foremost: two poems entitled “From above the earth”, as well as, among others, “From the porch” and “In the pines.” These titles angle the poems such that the details she chooses from the milieu she portrays take on an almost disembodied quality.

“In a small cabin in the woods a man is nearly finished fucking a woman who may or may not be his wife when he hears a knock at the door.”

Setting the scene from her omniscient position “above the earth,” the objects of the cabin impinge on the narrative, which becomes almost secondary, as the attention shifts to the cabin—

“Between the man and the turning doorknob there is a bundle of newspapers tied with string, one skating shoe, a tine of paint a roll of canvas. As the doorknob turns one final time the man will build a raft from these things.”

The poem—as is the case with many of these poems—has a stop-time effect. The turn of a doorknob, normally a quick action: yet here the narrator and the man survey the scene. It slips into the surrealistic with the mention of the raft. The debris of the everyday is transformed. These newer poems are full of such debris, alongside the patchwork of memory. Between portraits, there are poems that seem a continuation from the work in welcome/no vacancy that introduce a more direct perspective: “I,” “we” are interlaced with the outside view.

In welcome/no vacancy the reader sees the seeds of the concern with the ordinary that, on occasion, blossoms into the surreal. Here most of the poems are lineated, though a few prose poems are slipped in too. Given the more recent abundance of prose poems, I’m interested that this direction is not the primary form of her first book, but is a looming presence in it.

The book has a beautiful design—from the cover image by Bill Emory, which accords perfectly with the title, to the bio which in itself is a willed perspective:

“Ella Holcombe was born in 1982 and spent the first three years of her life in a caravan in the wilds of Kinglake. It snowed and her grandmother worried that Ella would perish.

“She didn’t.

“Ella now lives in Brunswick (VIC) with a bunch of stray boys and a large orange snail.”


This whimsy, on the front inside flap, carries into the poems. (I’ve said it before, but I’m so glad this these books have perfect binding and better design principles than earlier New Poets Series.) Emotion is mediated by the domestic scene, as in “Flying at the wind”:


and I couldn’t believe
you were leaving

back at the house we fed the chooks
collected the eggs, drank black coffee
toast thick with jam


In other poems, Holcombe experiments with form—the narrative poem “Dictionary” includes word collisions (“onehundredandone”) and her own punctuation to indicate dialogue with:


/not gonna be in those books anyway but / she says / they’re not dirty books/

she grins a half grin
/dirty retarded bitch/ she says


Some poems aren’t successful in their entirety, though all offer points of interest, and the promise of future work—the newer poems do start to fulfil that promise. One poem that does strike me is “Seven reasons for leaving you.” This title could indicate an emotional-laden piece—yet Holcombe swerves from that, only allowing a sense of suffocation to slip into her second reason (“My heart stopped beating/ I remembered how to breathe”). In the rest (and why is it that seven is such an attractive number to me? Perhaps its Empson and Kundera that have won me over…) the “you” of the title seems almost incidental, the reasons wilfully light—for instance “A grey-hatted man was talking loudly/ about telecommunications.” The form of couplets seems to suit Holcombes sensibility, and the list form adds to the whimsy of her reasons.

The New Poets series is, besides, something of a testing ground—at a limit of 32 pages, these books hover between chapbooks and full-length collections. A good number of New Poets poets have become integral parts of the Australian poetry scene—MTC Cronin and Peter Minter in particular exemplify the successes of New Poets. Nonetheless, there have been a large number of misses with the series too. It has been a laudable endeavour, though many poets have bypassed the New Poets route with their first collections— Kate Fagan, Luke Beesley, Aidan Coleman, Jaya Savige to name a few. I wonder if, in reality, New Poets has often brought out collections from poets who are, in reality, not quite ready for a complete collection?

That aside, I’m glad they’ve given Ella Holcombe a start, and with her precocity, I’m looking forward to reading more of her work soon. Perhaps that’s the best indication of the success of the collection? I’m intrigued to see what comes next in her development.