Lamentations is a new poetry collection from SUBHASH JAIRETH, capturing his reverence of water and landscape in a beautiful hymn to the natural world.

Read on for an extract, where a kayak travels along a river of memories.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In Lamentations, Subhash Jaireth composes a river of voices – philosophical, tender, and reverent – flowing through landscapes of memory, loss, and renewal. Part meditation, part love story, and part elegy for the natural world, these prose poems move between rivers and deserts, Bashō and Hafez, Australia and Persia, tracing how water remembers, how language listens, and how grief transforms into grace.

Through the dialogue of two consciousnesses – intimate, questioning, and profoundly attuned – Jaireth explores the porous boundaries between the human and the elemental. Rivers become voices, rocks become listeners, and words themselves turn liquid, carrying echoes of the world’s oldest stories.

A work of rare beauty and wisdom, Lamentations is a quiet reckoning with what it means to belong – to a place, to another, and to the earth itself.

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EXTRACT

Goolay’yari, he says, the D’harawal call a pelican, looking at the sign which reads Pelican Point. Goolay’yari is also the name of the river which used to run past here, thousands of years ago, and join Kai’eemah. She looks following his finger tracing its flow under the waters of the bay. The early morning sun is soft, the air misty with salty spray, and the sand pliant and crunchy under the feet. They walk tracking the drowned valleys, the sand and gravel of which might still remember the watery touch as might the twigs, leaves, and pollen and the fossil shells and bones, and … the fishhooks, she hears herself speak. Of course, he says, and the footprints of people who would have walked, run and danced. Look, she says, as a pair of eastern curlew land in the muddy sand. The pink on the long black bill glimmers. The male wavers and wobbles behind, hesitant, uninterested. Its mournful karr-er drowned by the bubbling high-pitched kerlee-kerlee of the female. A nice pair, you two, she thinks as she watches him walk past them eager to reach the sand spit

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She is surprised by the ease with which they find the right rhythm to paddle the kayak, because when they walk, they are always out of step; she swift and hasty, and he sombre and ponderous. He would, no doubt, credit the underground river flowing beneath, but for her the joy of the moment is innate and therefore would remain unreasoned, unexplained. Meanwhile the kayak glides on the shallow water, handling the waves with skill but without flourish or arrogance. The sea is calm, the light soothes, and the motion mesmerises asking the body to acquiesce. And acquiesce she does, enchanted by the shimmer of mica, quartz, and rusty oxides in the sand on the spit. Behind her back she hears him breathe and wishes she had a rear-view mirror to look at his unwary face, blessing and blessed. He must be searching for Gymea Lily, she thinks, well aware that to find it here in the mangroves, saltmarshes and the dune woodland it would be a miracle. Yes, a miracle, she hears him speak not surprised that he has ensnared the whispered thought. And at that very moment, as if to celebrate the event, a young ruddy turnstone lands on the kayak, eager to balance itself on its short orange legs. The reddish-brown band on its breast sparks in the light as it looks at her bemused. The exchange between them is brief for the bird soon issues a quick rattle and takes off carried away by the playful wind

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Like sand grains in the drowned river valleys, he says, which preserve the impressions of water, words retain the memory of lost languages. To walk on the ground underneath which flow the ancient rivers, for him, is to mourn the loss of rivers and languages. Each D’harawal word he utters, he explains, is a pebble of hope he feels carrying in his mouth; hope that one day D’harawal songs and stories would begin to flow again like daragun, the water creeks. For D’harawal, Gadu is the sea lapping the shoreline, and garrigarrang, the one that spreads beyond the breaking waves where gawura, the humpback whales come to frolic in the season of wirtijirbin, the superb lyrebird. Dugongs used to visit as well but the D’harawal word for them has been lost. The water in the present-day bay is cold for dugongs, but eight thousand years ago when the warm sea began to rise and turned the fresh water daragun into estuaries, they came looking for sea grasses in the brackish water. One of them lost its way, beached and perished. The people saw it breathe its last; an old woman raised her arms and wailed; the rest joined her to step-dance around her, chanting words of grief and gratitude, wishing its spirit a safe passage to the other world, guarded by bilima, the long-necked turtle. It left its bones, found fossilised in the river sediments next to the remains of pollen and plants, of roots, stumps, and peat. We walked past the site last year, he says; the site not far from which now stands the florist shop where we bought for your Grandma, a bouquet of banksias, and boronia roses of two different colours

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Punjab, India, Subhash Jaireth spent nine years studying geology and literature in Russia before migrating to Australia in 1986. He has published poetry in Hindi, English and Russian. His published works include four books of poems and five books of prose fiction and non-fiction. Jaireth’s most recent books include a collection of essays, Spinoza’s Overcoat: Travels with Writers and Poets (Transit Lounge, 2020), which won the 2021 ACT Book of the Year, a book of translation from Hindi, Rain Clouds: Love Songs of Meerabai (Recent Work Press, 2020), and Aflame (Gazebo Books, 2021). His most recent poetry collection is Lamentations.

Read more about Subhash Jaireth here.

Read more about Lamentations on the publisher’s website here.