Author(s): Jennifer Maiden

Poetry and Folklore | PMLA 2024

This collection looks at the various functions of the concept and reality of the golden bridge, representing strategic victory, amnesty, mercy, problem-solving and the complexity of memory. In this vibrant new work, a bridge in its essence connects the present with the future, oneself with how one could be: perhaps that is a reason the image of a golden bridge reoccurs in history - a link between the self and time/space surrounding it, a way of commenting on and possibly changing that history itself. In the world, ideas of a 'bridge in gold' seem to occur often. General Kutuzov described his exit strategy for the invading French army as a 'golden bridge'. 'Kutuzov would have hands like that: gnarled and bleached by age and earth, to hold his bridge in a grip both loose, reverential and solid.' In Vietnam, there is a bridge named Cau Vang (golden bridge), supported by vast stone hands, just as a bridge in gold colour connects islands in Bali. Perhaps the bridge often has golden hues to represent auspiciousness, wealth, or a wealth of mercy. These poems reflect a golden bridge and this image ripples and mirrors through the poems' changing fathoms. Here a bridge in gold is that of a Chinese garden with light cast upon it, just as it is Kutuzov's strategy, the curve of a moon in eclipse, the artist's pen outlining a new moral compass for someone, the arched moon being witness as someone plans intricately but delays rescue, Bali's expansive bridge watched by Albanese and Tom Uren as Uren fears for Assange, the crescent of a sleeping cat, the shape of an entity carrying another in its arms, the truck-bombed Kerch Bridge at dawn, the arc of a twisting golden Chinese dragon, or ultimately: 'a golden bridge from Time to Time, with health being a temporal velocity, as Time increases its strength by disconnecting from itself, like a disappearing dragon returning from cloud paradise with cloudy incarnation.'