Kimberly K. Williams began writing her third book, Still Lives, before leaving her home in the USA and moving to Canberra. Created over a three-year period, the collection of poems explores themes of space, place, and is speckled with influences of Australian birdlife.
Williams and her family left the States so she could complete a PhD in poetry, supervised by Professor Paul Hetherington at the University of Canberra. She says working with him has enabled her to progress her writing to another level, and to think more about poetic forms and how they are presented.
“The closer in time to now the poems are, I am playing more and more. Travelling across the world really got me thinking about space. I’m really thinking about space on the page and how it can be used to serve a poem and to make a poem playful and to make it engaging,” Williams says.
The idea of place features in a section titled Here and There, given that Williams started some of the poems when she still lived in the US, while most have been written during her time in Australia.
Several poems written here feature native birds, the poet finding herself drawn to their intelligence and the way they can interact with humans. One poem features the ibis, after Williams first saw one on a trip to Sydney and was struck by how prehistoric it looked in comparison to other birds.
“I find in Australia the birds are so gorgeous and beautiful. I love the magpie; at this point, I have a group of magpies that come and visit. I also love the cockatoo,” she says.
Even her poems about animals explore space, the page layout pushing the boundaries of how poems typically appear in print. Making the most of the space means some poems use the gutters, which are typically avoided. One format uses a broad width of the page to mimic sounds made by frogs. Williams says she wanted to have fun with language in this book.
“The poems up front are more traditional, you know, lineated line by line. If you look at it, you will be like ‘yeah, that’s a poem’. The idea is to try and pull the reader in and then play,” she says.
Williams collaborated with artist Phil Day, who helped with the curating and editing, and painted the front cover image. Day has what Williams describes as a somewhat American personality in the way he is always on the clock.
“The people who arranged the acquaintance said he is the kind of person who will call you at 9 o’clock at night and not realise. It turned out to be a very exciting working relationship.”
Still Lives isWilliams’ third poetry book and the second to be published here in Australia. The author’s second book Sometimes a Woman differs was recently award the WILLA literary award for poetry in the US. In a vastly different approach, Williams spent three years researching the women who helped settle America’s wild west. Her research showed her that is was the women running brothels who were often in positions of power, the poems are written in the voices of these women and their workers.
“A lot of times the madam in town was economically the most powerful person when people needed money they would go to her and she would decide to give a loan or not,”
Williams’ has continued to write in the voices of time-forgotten women in her manuscript for her phD. This time the research has been focused on women in the US going west along different trails. She says she found when writing these poems they wanted space, growing on the page. The manuscript has been written as a continuous piece of work even though poems finish, and new ones begin. She plays with the idea of space on the page here, then it bleeds into her new work.
“Still Lives are the poems that aren’t in here, the things that are on my mind daily, things that I encountered as a new resident here that didn’t fit in the other work.”
Still Lives by Kimberly K. Williams is due to be released next month.
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