Joy for Tatjana
On Tuesday night I read poetry with Andrew Lansdowne at The Gods Cafe in Canberra. Among the welcoming poetry community, fostered over the years by Geoff Page, was Isobel Hannan, a close friend of Tatjana Lukic’s. The date of the reading happened to coincide with the second anniversary of Tatjana’s death. A Croatian born writer, Tatjana’s life journeys pitted her against the traumas of war, migration, family disruptions and cancer, to which she eventually succumbed. I read the poem “Joy,” in memory of Tatjana.
When we last met, on 20 June 2008, I was touched by her humility, her humour and her passion for living. We shared a meal of home-cooked soup, we drank Turkish coffee and smoked one or two Camel cigarettes in her garden. Eastern spinebills were feeding on nectar, and blue wrens darted about the fernery at the front of Tatjana’s house. The poplars were late in their golden-leaf, before winter’s dramatic fall. We spoke of her hospital admissions, her family, her writing, the tiredness and forgetfulness from which she was suffering as a result of her treatment, the side-effects of her bloated moon face and hair loss. Despite the seizures and falls she was experiencing, the lapses in consciousness, despite living alone in her home in Yarralumla with only rudimentary emergency support, she was busy sewing curtains, trying out scarves and wigs, painting in pastels, matching the days of the week to colours:
“so, see how i see them ( no idea why), and tell me how you see them
(days and their colours). it’s interesting to know:
monday blue
tuesday brown
wednesday green
thursday red
friday purple
saturday orange
sunday yellow”
(from an email to the poet, joanne burns : 30/7/08)
She loved most to cook for her friends. And what seemed most vital to her then was to continue to edit and complete her manuscript. Tatjana’s spirit bore witness to the Noble Rider that Wallace Stevens wrote of, her poetry affirming “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” Yet her language was not one of the aesthete or the conspicuously private, responding ironically and empathetically to cultural and historical realities. The poems were to be published soon after her death in the superb collection La La La, which won the Canberra Critics Award in 2009.
Tatjana could not speak English when she and her family arrived in Australia as refugees from the Balkans war. She described writing poetry in English as “one of the hardest and most challenging things” she had accomplished. She had won several national awards for her poetry collections published in the former Yugoslavia.
photograph by David Cahill 2.9.07: Reading at Poetry Without Borders
TATJANA LUKIC
25 August 1959 – 10 August 2008
