Contemporary Poetry

environment and space 143

The poem ends with the hope that ‘next year they may fl ower with
rockroses / or stiff honeycomb corals’.^24 This attraction to meta-
morphosis is what draws the poet to reconsider The Mabinogion
in her erotic treatment of Pryderi in ‘Hanner Hwch Hanner Hob

• The Flitch’.^25 There is a comedy in the protagonist’s wooing of
  the pig through Pryderi’s tale, and also something disconcertingly
  atavistic at its close: ‘he takes out his sharp pig little knife / and
  sticks her one / she’s gone in a minute / with one happy sigh’.^26
  Szumigalski judges this eroticism and suggestion of violation well,
  allowing us to reconsider the narrative of the trickster as a method
  of dangerous seduction.
  Szumigalski’s poems read as a desire to decipher marks in the
  world and translate them into signifi cant meanings or linguistic
  signs. The most obvious clue to this impulse is given in the title of
  her third volume The Doctrine of Signatures ( 1983 ). Dating from
  the Renaissance, the concept of ‘signature’ proposes that a herbal-
  ist’s use of various plants was dictated by their form. For example,
  lungwort, with its speckled leaves resembling the lungs, was used
  for bronchial illness. This impulse towards investing the world
  with decipherable meanings surfaces in ‘The Musicologist’. In this
  poem a man, ‘d’, obsessively records and archives the sounds of
  daily life in an attempt to fi nd some underlying structure or univer-
  sal code to be unscrambled:

d shows

her the place in the notebook where he’s written down

the melody all the sounds that ever were are stored in

the void around us he claims the basis of some sort of

symphony she asks he snorts with laughter at her simplistic

approach.^27

Szumigalski exhibits scepticism towards a doctrine of universality.
It is not until ‘I^2 = - 1 ’ from the volume, Rapture of the Deep ( 1991 ),
that the poet addresses this ambition for a transcendent meaning
directly. One cannot but read this poem as an investigation of logos,
the divine order of language. Like Hass’s ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’,
the poem reveals a loss or mourning for the transcendent language
where words are linked to the objects that they signifi ed: