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Falling and Flying: Poems on Ageing Edited by Judith Beveridge and Susan Ogle, illustrated by Richard Wu Brandl & Schlesinger, 300pp, $29.95
One of Australia's most admired poets, Judith Beveridge, and a geriatrician who is also a poet, Susan Ogle, have edited this collection of Australian poems. Falling and Flying: Poems on Ageing looks squarely at some of the scary aspects of ageing -- not just death but dementia, incontinence, bereavement, dependence. Beveridge and Ogle do not quite offer poetry as a panacea, but express the hope that the poems they have collected will in some way act as a resource for readers living through or contemplating such losses.
A pair of poems by Dorothy Hewett offer a neat example of our mixed feelings about ageing. The first, Old Women in the Mountains, is a poem of observation, describing "old women coming trembling out of the buses / clinging to each other / in their support hose". It is vivid and comical, and the poet's attitude towards the women is affectionate.
This being Hewett, the poem contains ambiguity, the prospect of disappearing into "the blue haze of forest or cliff edge", a disappearance that might be doom, or escape. By contrast, her poem What Will Happen ... is a first-person account of the fear of physical deterioration. Old age here is not amusing; it's rich with fear of an imagined moment "when I lie in my bed / unable to move at daybreak / longing for the great strong pull / of the boughs / the shaking sound / of the wind". Old age is made...