The Striped World

'The bars were the lashes of the stripes
The stripes were the lashes of the bars' (Tiger in the Menagerie)
Emma Jones' The Striped World is a hugely impressive debut. It is described as an investigation into the meetings of different worlds - sea and land, humanity and nature. But as much as meeting, The Striped World could be said to explore separation, from the reference to stripes in the title to repeated references to double or split selves in poems such as Conversation, Daphne and Creator:
'I felt, with a pang, a second self
rear its glossy spreading head
…
and I'm reminded then
of the natural mirror
that can assert itself, at certain times:
unruffled sky
unruffled lake
their same slung clouds.'
There is an ongoing correspondence in The Striped World between the separation in the self and the elements alongside larger social or geographical separations, such as Zoos for the Dead that explores the historical practice of the Australian government's separation of part-aboriginal children from their mothers or Waiting, where the 'cracked' Atlantic shapes the experience of the settler in a foreign land.

However, in many ways, what Jones seems to be thinking about is the illusion of separation: both 'created' - tigers and birds in cages, children in institutions, settlers and indigenous peoples, and 'natural' - sea and sky. Instead, her intensely beautiful, sensual and image-rich verse seems to suggest a holism that lies under our perception of difference, such as in Painting:
'..The inside out, and the outside in -
And still the light comes, and into the eye,
And with it a world, and a borderland.
…..
..Then the canvas said 'there's no division,
Just a vision forced of earth and sky,'
Jones' birds and skies, waters and double selves suggest a constant movement and flux that the modern world unsuccessfully attempts to classify and separate; instead, like 'those statues that lean above themselves in water', Jones, (like Narcissus, made into a bird in Zoos for the Dead) experiences the original and the reflection as one.
The Striped World is an absorbing, elegantly written and thoughtful work. Its originality and richness ensure many re-readings, peeling the layers of pearls.