Queensland poet unleashes power and precision in The Jaguar

Sarah Holland-Batt saw the ravages of Parkinson’s disease first as a daughter, then as caregiver and advocate for change in the aged care sector.

After her beloved father Tony’s death in March 2020, the grieving writer harnessed her formidable gifts as a poet to capture tender and harrowing moments of his 2-decade struggle with the neurodegenerative disease.

Her piercing observations gave rise to The Jaguar, announced as the winner of the 2023 Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance at the Queensland Literary Awards. The $25,000 prize is awarded for an outstanding work by an Australian writer highlighting a uniquely Queensland story.

The Jaguar, part of which the Gold Coast-born author started in lockdown as the global pandemic took hold, won the 2023 Stella Prize. Sarah dedicated the award to her father, a metallurgist and academic who instilled in her his great love of books:

‘At the end of his life, when we had to move Dad into a nursing home, he insisted on bringing his library with him. Although his cognition and eyesight were failing, the walls of his small room were stacked with hundreds of books he could no longer read.’

‘Literature was his final companion; he knew many of those books so well he didn’t even need to pick them off the shelf to relive them. The care we writers take with language is not disconnected from our care for other human beings. Both are a recognition that we exist in relation to others, an act of communion.

‘Whenever I am tempted to feel complacent about the work of writing, I think of my father’s library, and the gift those books offered to him. It was a gift he passed on to me, magnified and multiplied, in return. I hope to always pay forward what literature has given me, as my father did.’

We asked Sarah, Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology and a 2019 Queensland Writers Fellow, about the book that has set Australia’s literary world alight, what makes a great poet, her tips for writers, where she finds inspiration, and what’s next.

The jaguar and the natural order

The eponymous Jaguar was a bottle-green 1980 XJ classic that Sarah’s father bought and drove against his doctor’s and family’s wishes after the onset of the Parkinson’s tremor. It was only when choosing the book’s title that Sarah saw the jaguar’s trajectory across the bundle of poems she had selected.

‘I'm fascinated by apex predators in general, and I've written some poems about the animal world and predation in previous books,’ she says.

‘I had this conversation with a filmmaker when I was on a writer's residency in the United States. She was Mexican and she'd grown up in Sinaloa, which is drug cartel country in Mexico. Her dad owned the local motel. It was the meeting spot for cartel kingpins, and the cops would drink with them on the weekend.

‘She had this wild childhood, and her dad, within this maelstrom of drugs and guns and so forth, gave her a pet jaguar. So as a young girl, she had this pet that could not only kill her but drag her up a tree.

‘Jaguars are the only big cat that can bite through the human skull, such is the strength of their jaw. When she was telling me all of this, it stayed with me and it made it into a poem towards the end of the book.

‘In my mind, the jaguar became symbolic of damage to the skull, damage to the brain, and a metaphor for the predations of illness – the way in which illness can, over time, pursue you, as it did Dad. But the jaguar also became a symbol of resilience, in that its territory is ever shrinking and yet it is at the top of the food chain.

‘I wanted the poems to treat human death as part of the natural order of things, so the poems that are set in hospitals and those sterile human environments have a lot of animal imagery in them, including images of the jaguar.’

It echoes a theme Sarah has confronted in her activism on aged care: an unwillingness to concede that we are animals on this planet, ‘this denial of our vulnerability or frailty, both in the fact that we'll die and in the fact that we’ll age and we may need help and assistance’.

Home and the next project

Amid the Stella Prize whirlwind, Sarah moved back to Brisbane in June 2023 after a year as the Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre. The University of Sydney fellowship embeds a literary writer in a medical research institute to explore health and chronic disease.

‘I’m working on a book of nonfiction in the realm of memoir about an aspect of my dad's Parkinson's,’ Sarah says. ‘I've had the benefit of speaking to researchers who are working on various elements of research related to the symptoms my dad was experiencing, and his treatment.’

Poetry finds its space

Sarah read The Gift, one of the poems about her father, at the Federal Government announcement in February 2023 that Australia would have a poet laureate. The Jaguar was the second consecutive anthology of poetry to win the Stella Prize, after Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear was awarded the prize in 2022.

While poetry’s back-to-back Stella wins may signal a shift to the centre of the literary canon from the margins, Sarah is wary of talk of a renaissance: ‘There certainly are some amazing poetry books being published at present, but there always have been. I think the challenge has been that we haven't always given poets the recognition they’ve deserved in their lifetime – and that there haven’t always been readers for the wonderful books of poetry published. So, it's lovely to see some of that happening, but I still think there’s scope for contemporary poetry to find more readers.’

'A little bit like a piece of music’

‘Poets share a love of the minutiae of language,’ Sarah says. ‘Poetry is a form that's all about being concise and shaping language in every sense. You shape it visually … poets pay attention to the number of lines in a stanza, the shape of a stanza, the length of the line, where the human breath falls as you read the poem out loud.

‘There are also aural qualities in that a poem should work a little bit like a piece of music. It's got patterns of emphasis and rhythm and silence. It's also about memorability in a way longer forms of writing are not, in that you can remember lines or sometimes an entire poem. A really good poem stays with you.

‘All of those sorts of elements make poetry dynamic and fun to write. Every poem is a new shape on the page. Every poem sets its own rules. It's the sense of exploration and discovery in form that I feel with a poem.’

Inspiration from being in the world

What inspires an award-winning poet? ‘Great books. It's that simple. I might be in a bit of a funk and then I read an amazing poem, I discover a poet I haven't read before or I encounter a new use of language or a word I didn't know. My imagination is refreshed by works that excite me.’

‘Beyond that, the other thing that inspires me is getting out beyond the echo chamber of the literary realm and out into the world. I feel pleased and lucky to have many friends who are visual artists and composers and musicians and singers. I get a lot of energy from other art forms and from engaging with the medical realm, which I've done over the past few years through my advocacy.

‘As a writer, you can't just stay at home and write all day … that would be a death sentence for my writing. If I ever had the freedom to just sit and write all the time for the rest of my life, I think I'd have nothing to write about. I get a lot of energy from being in the world.’

Professor’s top advice for writers

‘It's very hard to write something new without knowing what's come before. The act of reading – reading closely and reading well – is the core critical skill that makes a good writer. You can't write a great book without having read any.’

‘The other critical thing is for a writer to have an open mindset and a willingness to engage with a range of ideas and perspectives and vantage points. That's something that I work very closely with my students on as well.

‘For many years now, I've taught a course called Dangerous Ideas: Contemporary Debates in Writing, where we look at a range of sometimes contentious issues that that animate contemporary literary culture.

‘It's very important to me that students, irrespective of how passionately held their views may be, are exposed to a range of opinions, and integrate counter arguments in their response, rather than thinking, ‘I know everything about this already, and there's nothing anyone can tell me that might change my mind.’ That's important in an internet age.’

The new generation

Asked to name books or writers she admires, Sarah turns to the future of her craft, giving a nod to emerging authors with whom she has worked as a teacher.

‘Jarad Bruinstroop, who has just done his PhD with me, won the Thomas Shapcott Prize for his book of poetry, Reliefs. It’s a beautiful and exciting piece of work.’

‘Ella Jeffery, who now is an academic at Griffith University, has a wonderful book of poetry called Dead Bolt. I had the great fortune of having some mentorship of Ella through her PhD. I was really lucky to supervise Emily O'Grady with The Yellow House, and there are so many others.

‘It's been wonderful to see a new generation of writers. I'm always very careful not to impose my voice on them. I see my role as one of helping them find the kernel of what they want to do and their strengths as poets.

‘Working with exciting young writers for me is just as exciting as revisiting Yeats or Dickinson or any of the writers I’ve loved.’

 

The Jaguar is published by University of Queensland Press.

The Queensland Literary Awards, managed by State Library of Queensland, celebrate emerging and established authors from across Australia. Check out the 2023 winners, and discover more opportunities and inspiration for readers and writers.