Nandi Chinna

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Five Islands Press

Nandi Chinna – a South Australian whom the Perth poetry scene has gladly adopted as one of their own – writes verse which is fragile, honest and succinct in its sincerity. Her debut collection Our Only Guide Is Our Homesickness creates a rich, beautifully detailed landscape of the human heart, as burnt and brave as the Australian Outback and as equally vast and fearsome. Her mudmap of the homesick soul is ripe with grand, romantic gestures and visceral, bloody realities.

This balance of breath and bone is skillfully orchestrated and executed throughout Chinna’s first book of poetry. Her writing is a vast middle ground of delicate imagery. She creates a geography of the psyche where science and nature fall in love, consummate, conflict, consort then contort each other. This erotic stand off occurs time and again, like in Maps where Words fall gently off the steep end of voice; soft, / soft they enter me through the ribcage

The dreaming of botany battles the butchery of benevolence many times in this collection. Chinna ponders with dexterity whether a flower could dream the colour of its petals, / the minute pixels of pollenbefore contemplating the reality of being an organ donor whom they’d cut open to assemble inside of me / a stainless steel orchestra .  This clash is courtly in nature, with love and abandonment acting as its allies. The result is a language of loss and dignity, one which engages a poise and elegance of rhythm and meter.

With this book Chinna has set in motion, with clarity and courage, a career which adheres to the integrity of poetic form and expression. Made possible through Five Islands Press’ New Poets publishing program, this collection yet again proves that Western Australia leads the way with its majestic troupe of poets. Yes, even those gladly adopted from across the border. After all, their homesickness seems to be a perfect guide of how graceful the human heart can truly be.