Halfborn Woman
by Colleen Higgs
(Hands-On Books)
Life is a white-knuckle ride and we are always in the perplexing and demanding dead centre of it, or as Colleen Higgs — following on from American poet Adrienne Rich — would have it, we are always only “halfborn”, and this is by no means intended negatively.
Higgs writes from within her life towards that life constructed outside. And it is as impersonal and terrifying as that: “The door is locked from the inside that is the clue.”
To acknowledge the impersonal is by no means to devalue life or to slide into a hopelessly depressive state. Quite the opposite. The impersonal lies at the heart of life, the contingent power of life as it rages and surges through us. Life is an event we must always be equal to — a beautiful fulcrum: “Absence is a hunger, an ache, a sadness, a nameless growing dread, a powerful erosive secret. It’s a constant companion, a guardian angle, an imaginary friend, a promise, a voice in my head, a wish. It’s the possibility of flight or rescue.”
This is writing as if writing really mattered, as if there were genuine stakes in it: “We keep going, as though, motion itself will save us.”
Some of these poems are snapshots of affective states as if they were images on film, where desperate characters are fermenting with thoughts such as: “she’s counting on something / more / than this”.
Others are almost proverbial with their wisdom: “Sorry that he’d killed the lovely wild bird / his long time friend / more friend than the caged birds / it came of its own free will”.
There is no respite: “tenderness draws in like nightfall / like acid up a litmus paper”. And happiness, too, is never a proliferating given: “Being happy is not a thread or a quilt or a road / it’s like bees buzzing on a hot afternoon / separately, then disappearing”.
We come to rest at the end of this book, but not even for a rest. The poet has gone done made another biological life — so different and so much more demanding than her art. And yet, this new life is nothing less than art itself — a ceaseless attempt at creating a beautiful fulcrum, the capacity to acknowledge the vicissitudes of life through open engagement and the capacity to construct an outside: already she is playing “with her voice, like an instrument she is learning”.