inside | walls crawl with mould | curtains sulk
            in corners | a woman crouches in front of lazy flames | wan | not
            so much warm as
                                                uncold
            (“Raising the fire”)

I first read Jac Jenkins’ poetry when we both did an MA in Creative Writing in 2017. The course combined poets and non-fiction writers. I was writing a grief memoir, and had not studied poetry formally. This was a class that included now-critically acclaimed young poets who took this nonfiction writer’s workshop critiques in good heart, though my feedback mostly comprised feelings, and recollections of the 70s poets of my youth – a drawling Sam Hunt, and David Mitchell introducing me to the lower case ‘i’.

There were some emerging poets in my class closer to my age, and they included Jenkins. We non-young ones often found ourselves doing the washing up after workshop afternoon tea on Wednesdays. There, in the cramped kitchen in Bill Manhire House, up to our elbows in soap suds or wielding teatowels, talk turned from writing to our domestic lives; children, husbands, houses; the cosy murmur of women doing household tasks together.

How ironic that years later I encounter Jenkins again in another domestic setting, this time one evoked in her debut collection, Moon too Heavy. Jenkins’ focus is on patriarchal expectations shaping what it is to be a woman. Think oppression, child-rearing, cleaning, obedience, social constructs. Jenkins highlights the misogyny behind these expectations with the book’s epigraph, from Pythagoras: there is a good principle that created order, light, and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness, and woman.

The opening poem, “Raising the fire”, takes us to hearth, home, and an unhappy woman in a corner. There’s no man in this dullness; presumably he is out in the light expecting to come home to a tidy house. The woman is unnamed; she could be everywoman. The scene is domestic, but not cosy; there are mouldy walls, sulking curtains, the fire is ‘lazy’ – as if inviting masculine critique of slovenly housekeeping. The time factor is slippery, with a reference to settler terms such as ‘slate frame’ and
‘hearth’, yet the use of ‘we’ – ‘we swirl over the pale flames’ – invites in a contemporary reader. Indeed, we ‘rouse’ the flames. Jenkins implies these are flames of rebellion.

Jenkins, who has a Bachelor of Veterinary Science and an MA in Creative Writing, dismantles Pythagoras’ claim of the chaotic, dark, female mind with poetry that moves back and forth between that, and a female mind that is rational, scientific, and a creator of order and light. At times Jenkins’ register is formal and dives into the intellectual – ‘What, sir, is the difference between infinity plus / and infinity minus on a scale of nothingness’ ( “Arguing with Milosz”) – and at other times it is earthy, unexpected, sinuous and sexual – ‘One of the walkers wears a placard and nothing / else. JESUS LOVES SLUTS. Sometimes her left nipple flicks out from behind.’ (“Slang”)

Jenkins’ work arises from her own life experience, coming of age in the later years of the feminist movement. “Slang” also maintains the rage of those years:

            I glance to my right where my husband, who is not my daughter’s
            father, keeps pace with us. He is here because The Penguin Thesaurus
            of Slang lists many more derogatory words for woman than man.

There’s a hopeful aspect, in that the next generation is marching for a cause, and that the speaker’s male partner is on board.

However, for me, the strongest poems are “Émilie” and “Tres”, drawing on the real-life Émilie du Châtelet, born in 1706, who defied the expectations of the times to become a mathematician and physicist. Jenkins brings to life the essence of Émile, a French woman, the author of a famous essay on the nature of fire, which Jenkins uses as a motif. Du Châtelet also wrote about Newton’s theories and established that the moon was 70 times denser than he had believed. Cue: Jenkins’ title, Moon too Heavy.

The moon and its pull on tides have often been written about in terms of a feminine persona. Jenkins unites the scientific with the reality of womanhood:

            Three men keep
            a flicker of inclining light
            on a woman forming

            and reforming Newton
            in French, who ignores
            her clenching womb

            until a daughter is born and placed
            on a geometry book.
            (“Émilie”)

Jenkins drives home the tragedy of this duality in “Tres”, describing how Émilie functions within the expectations of society at the time – ‘knows how to flirt’ – yet can ‘divide / a nine-figure number / in her head”. The ultimate tragedy, outside the realm of the men around her, is that she knows ‘… howto die / post-partum’.

In addition to Jenkins’ book in 2025, another that same year is Dame Fiona Kidman’s career retrospective, The Midnight Plane. It also explores domestic settings:

            I’m encased between the kitchen walls,                                            While all the house is sleeping still.
            Trim and neat, my house is full of other people’s
            Dreaming. Piles of ironing, flat and folded
            Are testimony to my day’s endeavours.
            Black pits outside hold only silence,
            Or wait – murmur in the void.
            (“The baked bean flutters”)

This 1975 poem, as with Jenkins’ 2025 opening poem, shares the domestic setting of the house and a critique of the female role in that sphere. But here, the subject has subsumed herself to the housekeeping role, and to ‘other people’s dreaming’. There is no fire smouldering amid the discontent, but something undefined, a ‘murmuring’. Jenkins and Kidman provide a continuum: the latter, raised in a more restrictive era; the former, finding her way in a very different society to then, but with those restrictions still chafing.

It’s interesting, too, to compare Moon too Heavy with another recent collection, Alison Glenny’s /slanted (Compound Press, 2024). Glenny, like Jenkins, has a muse who was a real-life historical figure – Australian mountaineer Freda Du Faur. Born in the 1880s, Du Faur was a feminist and queer at a time when lesbianism was seen as a psychological disorder. Glenny’s approach is experimental, and the presence of Du Faur forms a narrative. However, these final lines of Jenkins’ “Raising the fire” remind me of something the two collections share:

            … we swirl over the pale flames | rouse
            them to blaze | not so much conflagration |       as cautery

Both poets use language to deal with emotional pain, cauterising the wounds, with the poetic process itself scarring the experience into a new shape. Glenny, for example, echoes the misery of Jenkins’ room ‘crawling with mould’, and transforms it:

            a mountain in the scullery
            and dampness in all rooms
            ~
            covered in fur, a hill is purring.
            (“Appendix: Séance Notes”)

While Moon too Heavy sits outside much of current liberal dialogue, it needs to be read on its own terms. This is poetry exploring the bounds of a speaker’s particular experience of the burden of societal expectations. Just as the moon has a waxing and waning, Jenkins’ book plays with dark and light through an astute balance of logic, research, and the imaginative chaos that creativity involves. It celebrates that women aren’t sulking in corners now. But a cold, hard fact remains: someone’s still got to do the dishes.