The bonsai keeper's daughter [TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses]

Suburban gardens are designed as sites of domestic leisure; private arenas in which the homeliness of indoor domestic space extends into the natural world, where plants, animals and landscapes are tamed or restructured to produce a space for human pleasure. This poem transforms the garden into a contested, antagonistic site in which concerns about possession, inheritance and control are negotiated by the poem’s speaker.This practice-led poetic work is part of a broader suite of poems that examine how the lyric poem can exaggerate the unheimlich qualities of domestic space in contemporary Australia. The persona poem is a form that allows a distinct character to emerge in the poem, and in ‘The bonsai keeper’s daughter’ the nameless speaker, defined only by her relationship to her father, rejects her father’s controlling approach to the garden but remains trapped by it. Her highly theatrical language of violence and submission serves to heighten the artificiality of the garden, which is largely used to stage familial antagonism rather than as the location of leisure, pleasure or engagement with the natural world.This poem is part of a work-in-progress titled Year of Two Winters, a poetry collection examining housing insecurity and unhomeliness in contemporary Australia, which has been awarded the prestigious Mick Dark Flagship Fellowship for Environmental Writing and was the recipient of a place in Bundanon Trust’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 2021. Other poems from the manuscript have been published in high quality national literary journals.