In quest of understanding

Press, 28 March 1981, Page 17

In quest of understanding

Flowers From Happyever: A Prose Lyric. By Jean Watson. Voice Press, 1980. 59 pp. $7.95. (Reviewed by Diane Prout) Jean Watson's fourth book appears to draw together in a distilled form many of the transcendental themes explored' in ‘"The Balloon Watchers” and ‘'The World is an Orange and the Sun.” The author describes her work as a prose lyric which should alert readers to the fact that they can expect to find many . of the techniques of poetry in it — the .compression of ideas, repetition and extensive use of image and symbol — and will need to focus accordingly. The book, falls into three'parts, each consisting of up to nine antithetical sections which reveal some aspect of the narrator’s mood and stance, as they shift from one direction to another. The author or narrator is seeking fulfilment of a promise experienced long ago on a sheep station in Western Queensland. That this .promise is related to the joy of spiritual understanding is made perfectly clear, although the images of material beauty

(’the sun setting on a dining table laid with highly polished silver), and the quest for its posssession (Lasseters search for gold, are used as objective correlatives to this end. The whole concept of the book is similar to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, although in view of the fact (as the note at the end of the book tells us) that Jean Watson is currently studying religion at university and has a strong interest in vedantic philosophy, and meditation, her literary models are more likely to be Eastern than Western. To what extent the author is writing in her own “voice” and merely cogitating on the causes of her own lack of direction and purpose in life, is hard to say. The flowers from Happyever are a chimera like Lasseter’s gold.’The book ends with a return of the original image and the narrator no more certain of its meaning than in the beginning. Because of its many ambiguities and ambivalences, there can be no definitive interpretation. However, “Flowers From Happyever” would repay more than one reading. , ’