I Don't Know How That Happened
Oliver Driscoll
I Don’t Know How That Happened
Oliver Driscoll
On a podcast I’m listening to, a man says there were only eight shots fired but another man says, no, there had to be more. A third man says he thinks someone might have gotten to the first man.
In turns unsettling and funny, Oliver Driscoll’s debut collection is a testament to the mundane resonances of contemporary life and language. Driscoll’s wry eye captures the subtle whimsy of the everyday, while exploring the capacity of its language to disturb the field of human meaning.
Driscoll rubs language against the things of the world to make poems that are restless, sidelong, roundabout, fluky and overall, pretty wonderful. - Carrie Tiffany
Driscoll’s work captures the beauty and the repetitions of the everyday: the fragments, exchanges, and observations that define the extraordinary and quotidian. The poems here are familiar and unsettling, images that echo and evoke both the ordinary and a profound suggestion of something other, a haunting liminality. There is a quality to these weaving, interconnected narratives; strikingly spare, lingering, surreal yet anchored in the material, the concrete details of the real. - Alyson Miller
Review
Freya Howarth
The pared-back prose poems in this collection examine the seemingly small details of domestic life. They tell the stories of encounters – moments of contact and subtle conflict – that happen between people when they live close to each other. In one poem, the narrator takes advantage of an auction in the building where he lives to visit the other apartment and observe the behaviour of bidders, owners and tenant; neighbours, friends and family pop in and out of each other’s lives – with a text message or a phone call, or the drip of a shower upstairs – each time signifying some shift in their own life, whether small or major. Other poems take the form of lists cataloguing items or ideas: household objects, lines for poems, lines for films.
Beneath the banal façade of suburban life, there is the suggestion of violence, which sometimes rises to the surface. There’s the sense, too, that living alongside each other fosters a vulturous way of looking at our neighbours. When an elderly neighbour leaves behind a home full of valuable mid-century furniture, the narrator wonders how he might claim some pieces for himself, observing that the old man ‘wouldn’t have known how good it was’. If chairs, tables and lamps can be reclaimed and repurposed, does the same go for the words and histories of others? What happens when we ‘claim other people’s suffering’?
Beyond opportunism, there’s the possibility of finding beauty in the everyday and value in someone else’s discards: in lights brought back from Japan, or an abandoned chair. It’s the poet’s task to collect these details from life, to polish what has been neglected, to rearrange words till they mean something new. This is how this quietly moving collection can help us know what we had, and what we may have lost.
Freya Howarth works as a bookseller at Readings St Kilda.
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