How to Express The Ineffable: a Review of Samuel Wagan Watson’s Smoke Encrypted Whispers

Narrative voice in Samuel Wagan Watson’s stunning suite of poems Smoke Encrypted Whispers is truly an exercise in multidimensionality, with Watson’s own tone moving effortlessly between autobiographical recollections across his life, more immediate “author’s notes” on his own writing process, and other more elusive forms of exploration. These intimate unspoolings are sublimated in another quieter register — that of the Spirit moving in the energy behind all that is formed. This is a cycle of twenty-four vignettes, all of varied distances but all richly coded with the language of consciousness; the symbol, timeless and arising through the presence of experience.

Beginning with an evocative scientific warning about smoke, it is clear one has entered a rarefied space and is partaking in the expression of how and why smoke as a symbol has meaning. The warning creates a continuum with which to bless the collection; it names the typical negative association to smoke whilst introducing a subversion — that of spirit and ritual. Watson is a Brisbane-based poet of Bundjalung heritage and the smoking ritual of his people — which features the burning of symbolic natural resources — can be used to welcome people to a particular area, to cleanse an area or a person, or in the respectful transition in the passing over of elders which honours people past and present, ensuring future. Watson’s is a pervasive smoke in its breadth and wholeness; ephemeral, toxic, sacred and a most resonant interdimensional symbol that classes his poems as Greek epics with the “Warning” acting as a prologue.

The first formal poem in the collection, “smoke signals” not only introduces another iteration of smoke linking it to a cultural identity, but furthers Greek roots by introducing prose captions or phonotext interlaced with italicised, tiered stanzas of poetry which serve as distillations of the autobiography — a mode that beautifully realises the voice of spirit which exists not only with life but behind it. As the poet writes: “mysteriously

moving the world around us

an unknown power”

This shows a remarkable depth of field spanning 1976 to 2003, moving seamlessly within suburban and coastal landscapes from south-side Brisbane, Cribb Island, Capalaba, with a return as an adult to the eminently and poetically useful Boundary Street at West End in Brisbane, the

Berlin Wall and a recitation at a New Zealand pub. Initially, these are contemporary Australian landscapes of rugby league, second-hand stores and shorelines where the pulsating wrench of childhood is always accompanied by the ghosts and strips of smoke from vehicles, industrial sites and the fire riddles passed on by his uncle visiting from Arnhem Land. There is an eloquence and subtlety revealed only on second and third readings that shows how sublime the sense of internal integrity is; structural choices that transcend simple thematic connections: Watson’s home streets inspire his first ghosts, rising “from the bitumen like rings of smoke.” These poems are a worship of the notion of realm: how public events — be they New Year’s celebrations, street festivals featuring Indigenous culture, or football matches — take place while people are fishing, saying their prayers, raising their children and mending the domestic upheavals of dissolved marriages. Ideals and romantic experience can be shaped by Muses and the agitated spirits of ancestors. Watson revels in the true Ancient Greek definition of Apocalypse being an unveiling of dimensions through the deciphering of speech hidden in the vehicle of smoke; that with the knowledge of Spirit and essence in the everyday that writes our lives, comes an holy conflagration; the ritual burning of all that no longer serves us. Imperatives of self-definition and identity rely on continual transposition — harmony between archetypes and lived experience. As an Indigenous man, monsters have many guises: “ Dracula, witches and Bigfoot and Bjelke-Petersen-police at my parents’ back door.”

Poetry buffs will notice borrowings — such as the use of phonotext — from H.D’s mid-century symbolist masterwork, Helen in Egypt, but structurally Watson achieves something new in the realisation, closing the gap between white intrusion and expansion of self by expressing the potential and totality of the seemingly ineffable. This is work of tremendous nuance and precision with an intimate understanding of growth and boundaries, in all their forms.

There is a repetition of “unsealed roads” and rivers shaped like snakes filled with singing Muses that form graceful deconstructions of the nature of space, dealing with the most profound binary eliciting fear; that of being alive or dead. In “rip”, Watson unlocks this fear in his adulthood and does away with full-stops altogether to signify a space to let the truth in. His “author’s notes” are spatial interludes that explicitly deal with the extension of being and acting as a writer, writing being. Trees are a significant presence, be they ghosts brushing the roof in childhood, or roots cleansing the murks of Queensland mangroves and the psyche of the human. It is important to Watson that awareness of these different bodies heralds a new language that tears “through the glutinous skin of Dreamtime and Earth, scattering the wings of those haze-angels with a high-octane Beowulf growl.” This is the brink of potential and there is music in everything.

As testament to the elusive nature of smoke, not all the phonotext is contextualised. A mysterious nursing home houses an unnamed relative stained with the smoke of chronic emphysema. Even this slow, hideous death is rhythmic and cadential.

It is the “author’s notes — conclusion” where Greek classics and Indigenous practices are woven together in a pronounced way: “we’re not evicting them from this plain, but in smoke, we’re ensuring their whispers continue the journey beyond... beyond this secular world.”

Smoke Encrypted Whispers in tackling the fecund literary scope of billowing smoke plumes, achieves so much more through a phenomenally intelligent play of structure; here is experienced the primacy of breathing, the powerful magnetism of being as the smoke continues to rise.