“I wrote this book during an intensely challenging period, as my father was dying, and just after,” Sarah Holland-Batt noted about The Jaguar, a powerful exploration of grief upon losing her father to Parkinson’s disease.
“I’m interested in contemplating the things that are difficult to look at: decline, death, violence, grief, sadness, ageing,” she said in her acceptance speech for the Stella Prize. “Holding the gaze when the gaze is hard seems to me to be the essential task of the poet.”
Structured in four parts, Holland-Batt begins closest to the present, describing her reactions to her father’s mental (and later physical) decline. As her father moves in and out of cognizance and consciousness, the poet likewise navigates in and out of memories of her father before and during his illness.
For anyone who has suffered seeing the degeneration of a parent through aging, mental or physical illness, Holland-Batt’s portrayal of the desire to stay true to the knowledge of who her father is deeply resonant yet emotionally unnerving.
The title — The Jaguar — honours her father as a formidable figure, elegant even in death, and foregrounds her striking metaphors of animals. (She opens the collection with the line, “My father is a giant coy….”)
In Part III (and some of IV), she veers into her personal life separate from recollections of her father. In Part III, she explores her love life and the tragedy of betrayal. These poems are sensual, revealing the intoxicating nature of attraction and the horror of knowing, in her case, that the relationship has to end.
The last poem, an eleven-part elegy titled “In My Father’s Country,” returns to the core theme — travelling through life without the one you love. I highly recommend reading Parts I, II and IV of the collection.
Overall, The Jaguar is a stunning collection. Like a jaguar’s muscles rippling through the savanna, Holland-Batt’s poetic skill subtly but surely makes its presence felt. For example, her mastery of form is evident in her range of poetic styles, from the modern sonnet to cantata, prose poem and free verse.
The Jaguar is the 2023 winner of the Stella Prize, annually “awarded to the most excellent, original and outstanding book written by an Australian woman” (stella.org). It has received many other accolades:
- Winner, Queensland Premier’s Award for State Significance 2023
- Winner, The Australian Book of the Year 2022
- Winner, FALS Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award 2023
- Winner, AJA/Wiley Book Award 2023
- Longlisted, Griffin Poetry Prize 2023
- Shortlisted, Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2023
- Shortlisted, Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2023
- Longlisted, ALS Gold Medal 2023