Day 3: A book you love.

After the Park, a poem from Vanishing Point by Felicity Plunkett.

Things fade and fail, but not the dream – Gwen Harwood

Noon emptied the park like a death.
Vanished skies swung crying.
The last woman, lingering,
I pushed the beads of a plastic abacus:
counted my losses. At night
my dreams rolled back to taste your trace
and I sailed their upswing
woke to the jolt of their stop:
salt mornings; hope’s flaking away.
But what if it were not
too late? What if, as you turned
and left our accidental meeting –
our unrehearsed universe
pressed between pages of unwritten notes –
I called your name?

Felicity Plunkett’s first book, Vanishing Point, seizes the temporality of dreams and feelings, and molds it in a compelling way that extends its transience.

Vanishing Point is split into three sections, each exploring themes of life, death and the body that revolves around the idea of ‘flakes’. With this idea of flakes, Plunkett emphasizes the fragility of her poems and immerses the reader with the different connotations behind the word. Flakes are often thought of as trivial; one might think of flaking paint, the sloughing of skin or bits of a whole. But the word also evokes strong actions: to break into flakes, to fall into flakes and to form into flakes. Vanishing Point builds up a steady progression into womanhood, detailing the experiences of a woman in love, in pregnancy and in marriage. Plunkett weaves a darkness within these commonly celebrated feminine moments by exploring themes of violence, life, death and the body.

Our dreams come in waves, moving us to aspire for greater things and yet, they are short-lived and vanish quickly from our memories. The first section “Flakes of a Dream”, gestures towards the mourning of the dream. Plunkett’s poems echo a sense of violence and an inner struggle with the limited capabilities of the self as one may observe in “After the Park”, where the speaker chases after traces of a dream in order to relive it one last time.

Plunkett has stated that she is always inspired by the ways in which life begins and ends, focusing on the perceived strength and fragility of the human body. Her habit of note-taking details, or “little flakes” as she calls them, of things that she finds interesting, is the driving force behind her writing process in Vanishing Point. She says, “Odd things influence me – an offhand comment, a row of surgical instruments laid out, and music”.  Indeed, a sense of bizarreness and mystery pervades Plunkett’s poetry and she portrays this oddness beautifully using an array of subjects and themes in Vanishing Point.

Note: I cheated and ripped this off a book review I had to do for Poetry last semester but hey, I honestly loved this book - it is extremely beautiful and gave me immense inspiration for my own poetry.