Davina Allison's Remarks on Time
My academic friend Davina Allison is a published poet, which has appeared in a number of outlets both here and internationally. These include our Australian Book Review, The London Magazine and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as Editor’s Choice.
The last is especially significant because the body of work that came to be published through that outlet concerned her engagement with the Canadian trancscendental Thomist Bernard Lonergan, in particular his Insight: A Study of Human Understanding.
While space does not allow a full overview of Lonergan’s works, Insight’s main contribution concerns the way that our understanding of the process of knowing - the latter being a participation in transcendental categories such as being, truth, goodness and value - provides the template that in turn makes all knowing possible. This thereby bridges the seeming metaphysical gap between the subjective and objective, since one’s own desire to know is what pushes us beyond finite reality into infinite reality.
While not being overly steeped in Lonerganian literature, I nonetheless found striking resemblances to Giussani’s mode of knowing, in particular his point that all knowledge constitutes an invitation by reality to engage the self with the uncreated mystery behind all created reality.
More to the point, I found myself interfacing both Giussani and Lonergan as I read through Davina’s recently published volume of poems Remarks on Time (published by Resource Publications), which has received hearty endorsement by none less than Catherine Pickstock and Caitlin Smith Gilson.
When reading her poems, I was struck by her focus on botanical imagery, and the juxtaposition between the concreteness of those depictions of plantlife on the one hand, and the sparseness of Davina’s prose on the other. One really gets a sense of, not so much being pushed, but wanting to push beyond the seeming simplicity of her prose, and experiencing the gap between the finite and infinite. This is evident from her very first poem “Remarks on Time”
You can buy silk
every night
Travel by river.
Whatever flowers I find, sometimes violets,
almost blue
in the sun
Lonergan’s theme of “knowing your knowing” or Giussani’s “engagement of the I” also comes out in a number of poems where these very concrete specimens of creation are not simply left as mere objects, but become moments of the subject’s reflection, and otherwise insignificant things very quickly catapult her to what I can only describe as vastness. To wit, one of her shorter poems, Early Rain
a marigold
so I remember
the desert,
ripe mulberries
Where her poems become most moving is at a point that both Lonergan and Giussani observe, the point of realisation that at the threshold of infinite, one comes across not just an abstract “transcendence” or “horizon”, but an other that not only gives value in the abstract, but value to the self in particular. One sees glimmers of this in poems like her Moths at the Oleander, wherein the titular moth evokes a response in the subject
be my love
we’ll go to the low hills
where a channel
cut through rock brings water.
This is but a small sample of what to expect in Davina’s deceptively slim volume of poems, in which specimens, expressed in sparse language, vibrate with the infinite and beyond that, the beauty of an other.
