Salt Quilt

Prospective readers will no doubt find Salt Quilt an intriguing title for a poetry collection. The book’s cover illustrates that such a bedspread actually exists! For writer Airini Beautrais, ‘salt’ and ‘quilt’ provide a useful analogy for life: past and present, harshness and softness are juxtaposed throughout these provocative poems, demonstrating the necessity for considering and accepting both.

Nostalgia works well in poetry as is illustrated in several of Beautrais’ verses. In Swingball, she celebrates typical activities and delights of the 70s: holiday homes for the kids, clean jokes, Monopoly, and the game of swingball, concluding with the philosophical observation about cooperation: “No one can play a thing like this single-handed”.

By far the most powerful poem is, if you’ll excuse the pun, An analysis of power. Our writer references some of the appalling hallmarks of today’s world: climate change, the care taken to manufacture and preserve expensive cars, “all the messages sent / from satellite and cellphone tower” – and exposes them with cliches such as “but there’s no seeing forests for trees / without an analysis of power”. The repetition of the eponymous “analysis of power” is salutary in impact.

Beautrais is still young enough to be able to voice a plea about old age in How I want to get old. The horrors of old age – its physical and mental decline, its backward looks, its seemingly careless lack of awareness – are all graphically outpoured. The poem nevertheless concludes with a plea for toughness, even tempestuousness.    

Cancer Moon: Poet Life consists of a 20-page musing on things astrological, mythical, poetical, and political. And more besides. We learn of our poet’s beginnings as a writer, and that she attributes them in part to her star sign. Sceptical as I am about such matters, I note that I am studying Beautrais’ work during the month of Cancer. Was that meant?

“‘Did you really write that poem?’ a boy asks me”, she writes. “Wow, cool”. Beautrais’ work is better than cool: it’s self-searching, reflective, salutary, and brave.