For the Seasons

Beverley Farmer is one of our finest prose writers, but her new book, For the Seasons: Haikus, is likely to make her reputation as a poet too. The manuscript of For the Seasons, composed over twenty-five years ago, was rediscovered by the critic and scholar Lyn Jacobs after Farmer’s death in 2018. The collection has never been published in full before. It joins the three prose works by Farmer Giramondo has now brought back into print: the novels Alone and The Seal Woman and the journal A Body of Water.

The haikus collected in For the Seasons are arranged in sections, beginning with Spring then progressing to Summer and Autumn and ending with Winter. One is immediately struck by the delicacy of Farmer’s observations, drawn from her immersion in the coastal landscape around Point Lonsdale on the Bellarine Peninsula in southern Victoria. The constraints imposed by the haiku form encourage attention to the finest details and textures – of light and colour, of air and sand and sea – and foster an awareness of the transient life they hold, its beauty, vitality and decay. The emotion is all in the detail, the ‘I’ barely features, yet the mood of the seasons, and their progression is keenly registered. Farmer’s poetry is remarkable in this respect, modest, self-effacing, and yet revelatory in its intensity.