Green Dance
Jena Woodhouse
“Woodhouse finds a place among such poets as Judith Wright and Mary Oliver, renowned for immortalising earth, nature and species in their poems.”
– Angela Costi, Rochford Street Review
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My arrival coincides with that of butterflies,
detecting subtle signals in the ether
that denote their vine. Pliant loops
and tropes and tendrils interlacing trellises
lure them back to these life-giving colonies.
This is the nursery and the lullaby, gently undulating
beneath massive trees. The caterpillars hatch and feed,
outgrow their skins, wax plump and sleek, entering
their dormant phase within a lime-green time-capsule,
the chrysalis where they transmogrify.
Emerging with damp, crumpled wings whose veins
are pumped with haemolymph, they wait
until the jewel colours dry, when they will
assay the sky that arcs towards infinity,
glimpsed through eyelike apertures in canopies.
Inspired by a Landcare initiative, Tamborine Mountain.
-
Male catbirds don’t build bowers,
but they do bring offerings
of flowers, to romance a female
they desire as spouse. They like to dance.
Catbirds pair for life. Hens build
a spacious nest with twigs and vines,
cushioned with soft, rotted wood
overlaid with moss or leaves.
Nests are camouflaged aloft
in giant stinging trees, or in the crowns
of tree ferns, like the nests
of regent birds, their friends.
Male catbirds, constant in their ways,
feed the chosen hen year round.
She waits for his arrival
bearing juicy gifts of fruit—
a native fig for preference
or sometimes an exotic treat:
a garnet grape she’ll savour
for its nectar-scented flesh.
They’ll dive and dip on days of heat
mirage, a double emerald flash,
bathing in the limpid water
cupped in joints of giant trees.
They take turns tending nestlings
when they hatch, and he does not neglect
assiduous patrols of territory
to safeguard boundaries.
Catbird, you are in my world:
it gladdens me to realise that—
but is there room for me
in your diminished habitat?
-
Air, thinned by the mountain,
autumn, night, insinuates itself
through cold-lipped partings in
the louvre-glass. The fridge purrs
like an animal, its belly full,
while outside in the stippled forest,
dense beyond the dappled yard,
an owl’s cry fills the hollows
that a waxing moon left dark.
Jena Woodhouse
Image:
Anna Jacobson
About Jena
Jena Woodhouse spent her childhood on a farm in the Keppel Bay (Ganumi Bara) hinterland, on Queensland’s Capricorn Coast, before moving to Brisbane, where she attended the University of Queensland, graduating with first class Honours in Russian Language and Literature, a triple major in English, Australian, and Women’s literature, and a postgraduate Dip. Ed. She later completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at QUT. She also has a qualification in Librarianship.
Her occupations have included teaching Russian, and English as a Second Language (to immigrants and refugees), and working for ten years as a fiction and poetry editor for a university publishing house, before relocating to Greece. In Athens, she was recruited by the British Council as an examiner (for Cambridge University Certificates in English) and the Hellenic-American Union (for examinations in international certificates in English from the University of Michigan, US). She also worked for some years as a sub-editor and arts journalist with her own by-line for the Athens-based subsidiary of the International Herald Tribune.
She is currently employed by a Canadian university-based publisher. She is also the poetry editor for Hecate.
Her personal writing and publishing span several decades, and she is the author/ translator/ co-compiler of eleven book and chapbook publications, including six poetry titles. Two of her books were reissued: Metis, the Octopus and the Olive Tree (1st ed. Jam Roll Press; 2nd ed. UQP) and the short fiction collection Dreams of Flight (Ginninderra).
Full details of individual publications and reviews are available on the AustLit database.
She has received awards for poetry, long and short fiction and writing for children, and her work has appeared in publications in Canada, the US, Ireland and Greece, as well as Australia. Her poems have been shortlisted three times for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, and five times for the ACU Poetry Prize (among numerous other honours and awards), and she has read her work, by invitation, in Germany, France and Greece, in addition to Australia.
Some of her poems have been set to music and recorded by internationally-renowned, Queensland-born composer Betty Beath.
In recent years, she has been awarded creative residencies in Scotland (a Hawthornden Fellowship); France (a Tenot Foundation Bursary at CAMAC Centre d’Art, Marnay-sur-Seine); Ireland (on three occasions, at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig); Greece (an AAIA – Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens – Creative Residency; and embedded author status, on three occasions, at the British School at Knossos, Crete); besides residencies within Australia.
Abiding interests and influences include the natural world; the arts; mythology, especially that of Greece; Classical and Bronze-Age archaeology; travel, literature from various cultures, and modern European languages. She speaks Modern Greek and Russian, some French, and is currently attending Italian language classes.
A pivotal and auspicious period in her development as a poet was the decade she spent, from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, as a frequent weekend guest at Abydos, Val Vallis’s retreat at The Knoll on Tamborine Mountain. Thanks to Val’s generosity in lending the key to Abydos, she was able to find peace and inspiration in what was then the sylvan haven of the Mountain. Her poems inspired by that experience, published as Green Dance: Tamborine Mountain Poems, became the inaugural poetry publication of Calanthe Press in 2018.
Tamborine Mountain, a unique world within a world, has, she senses, been a place revered by poets and song-makers for thousands of years. It continues to nourish and replenish the springs of wonder and creativity. She would like to acknowledge those unknown singers who preceded her, and also Raymond Curtis, one of the Mountain’s own true poets, and all those whose love for the Mountain has moved them to celebrate it in poetry and song.
Book and chapbook publications:
- His Battalion (a translation from the Russian of a novella of military fiction commissioned by UQP, 1981)
- Eros in Landscape (poetry, Jacaranda Press 1989)
- Passenger on a Ferry (poetry, UQP 1994)
- Metis, the Octopus and the Olive Tree (children’s novella, Jam Roll Press 2003, UQP 2004)
- Hidden Desires: Australian Women Writing (anthology, with Christina Houen) (Ginninderra 2006)
- Farming Ghosts (a novel, Ginninderra 2009)
- Dreams of Flight (short fiction, Ginninderra 2014)
- Green Dance: Tamborine Mountain Poems (Calanthe Press, 2018)
- The Book of Lost Addresses: a retrospective (poetry chapbook, Picaro Poets 2020)
- On the Windswept Bridge (poetry chapbook, Pocket Poets 2020)
- News from the Village: Travels in Rural Greece (poetry chapbook, Picaro Poets 2021).
Quotes from reviews:
“Woodhouse has that rare ability to discern elements of the epic in the ordinary.”
Simon Patton, Australian Book Review
“Woodhouse values learning, the past, other cultures, but is also acutely aware of simplicities and their multiple potentialities, of life as a thread which, although tenuous, is continuously being spun.”
Gillian Bouras, The Southeastern Review (Athens)
“Jena Woodhouse is best known to Australian readers as a poet and her fiction is written in a poet’s prose, dense with imagery and unexpected turns of language and thought.”
Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald
“Woodhouse’s approach to nature poetry is complex, at once unapologetically anthropomorphic and firmly ecological. …Woodhouse is an accomplished poet with many publications and awards to her name. She is also a lyricist and an author of prose, including children’s fiction. These layers of her identity are evident in this vital and vivacious poetry, which is as alive with promise as the soil after rain.”
Alison Clifton, StylusLit
“Sober and sure of foot at its best, this poetry goes to the heart of its matter in my native landscapes of place and mind to tap roots there that I should love to have tapped myself.”
Dimitris Tsaloumas, poet (on back cover of poetry collection, Passenger on a Ferry)