Poetry Review – Thérèse Corfiatis’ ‘Breath’

Coronavirus has pulled the rug from under many things large and small. If it was big enough to sink Dark Mofo and other iconic events, it certainly had an impact right down the arts events scale.

One of the perhaps unnoticed casualties was a planned launch of Ulverstone poet Thérèse Corfiatis’ new collection of poetry, Breath & other poems.

With physical gatherings unable to be held, the book received an online launch recently through its publisher Gininderra Press.

Speaking as a newsmagazine that has only ever existed in the digital space, we don’t think online is the end of the world (!), so we are are pleased to provide a modest spotlight on this worthwhile publication.

Landscape is not a bad place to start for any Tasmanian poet, and so it is with this latest collection. It’s almost as our land itself, heaving with mystery and history, provide the very breath that infuses our beings.

With published work now in double figures, Corfiatis confidence and deftness is clearly apparent. Many phrases, lovingly constructed, move from the visuals towards a meditative state as in Out Into Moonlight:

Out into moonlight

honeyed notes of birds

fill up silences

heaven’s stars abloom

like wreathed flowers

a million petals set on fire

Skilfully she’s able to transfer her talent for observation from the physical environment to the people who move through it. She has not shied away from very personal matters either as she sifts through her own emotions and those of her dearest, such as:

my mother moves in ways caught up in pain

her tender core enmeshed within its tangled skein

her life unravelling, fraying at the end

a swathe of glorious cloth needing gentleness to mend

Those lines are from The Five Garments. The life of Beverley Amelia Ravanelli is further elaborated in the tender My Mother Died In Spring. If you read nothing else in this book then read this poem, a dazzling revelation of how wonderful it can be to celebrate the life of someone you never knew.

Corfiatis can also be careful and sparse, often turning over simple events to discover what might lie underneath. In Lady of Letters and Feathers, in memory of mentor and friend Rose Stephens, she writes:

she sent me feathers

folded in the page

some for my hair, some for my pillow

to give me wings at night

The observations are not all from Tasmania, with a fair smattering of the Middle East and other far away places like Christmas Island. The sheer desperation of a place most of us have never experienced is rendered simply but movingly through the people, as in News Report from Diwaniya, South of Baghdad (our ellipsis):

His tiny daughter, premature

came too early

into a broken city.

Doctors are exhausted –

nothing works

…

He walks away with her, alone.

The breath of the title comes across as a kind of alter ego of the poet herself, as she draws in the world in ample draughts and with all her senses and energises her being with it, before sharing. She lives and breathes the past and present, riding their waves and interplays of stillness and motion (Sleep Would Not Come):

Rising

restless from my bed

I wandered out into the night –

my eyes drank in a heady potion made of stars.

Flat sea shone like sun-shot glass

mirror for a pumpkin moon

As such the collection does have a very defined, human poise to it, like yoga for the mind. For lovers of beautiful things and quiet moments, for lovers of the love and the sorrow in the everyday in all their subtle and riotous hues, this book is a companion. Spend some time with it soon.

Breath & other poems, Gininderra Press 2020, 76pp, ISBN 978-1-760421-912-7, paperback w colour cover, no illustrations. It is also available at The Hobart Bookshop in Salamanca Place, Hobart.

About the poet

Therese Corfiatis was born in and grew up in Hobart. After she married, she moved to  Adelaide where her 2 sons were born, but eventually moved back to Tasmania and settled in the coastal town of Ulverstone.

She has worked as a disability support worker, a vocation close to her heart, as her oldest son was diagnosed at a very young age with autism. The knowledge and skills learnt as a carer shifted easily into the disability sector.

Her passion for writing, put on hold whilst child rearing, came to the fore once she returned to her beloved island.

In 2000, her first collection of poetry co-written with Anne Landers, Seasons  of the Soul was published by Ginninderra Press in Canberra, ACT.,  since relocated to Port Adelaide, SA. Since then, she has gone on to have 9 more collections published.

Therese and Anne ran a writer’s group, ‘Sunday Scribblers’ in the West Ulverstone Community House for 18 years. This group went on to publish a collection called ‘Journey into Words’, made possible with the financial assistance of The Women Tasmania grant in 2006. Many of the women in the group went on to see their work published, either in collections, anthologies or radio broadcast – quite an accomplishment.