Review of Australian poet Damen O’Brien’s poem ‘Self portrait of an unreliable narrator’ published in ‘The London Magazine’

I request the readers to read the poem from this link first and then only my review. Thanks. https://thelondonmagazine.org/poetry-self-portrait-as-an-unreliable-narrator-by-damen-obrien/ A poem is often the closest version of a visualization a poet had suddenly or had been weaving within which found a shape one fine morning. In some poems the visualization is too subtle or overshadowed by the craft. But this poem is woven around how a witness can help the police to develop an identikit of a victim. What? Victim to be identified first? Then, what about the perpetrator? When he/she would be charged? Is not all these too vague? How many accused go Scot-free for lack of evidence or on the grounds that the evidence is not accurate/ strong enough to implicate an accused? When the poem clearly highlights this lacuna or grey side of the legal system, it comes out strongly about the incident which had more than one witness or rather, a dozen or more witnesses. A young woman left a place reflecting all her resistance and condemnation of the way she was illtreated. Her eyes reflected the questions she wanted raise but couldn’t for whatever reason. The backdrop of that injustice to her and insult to her is nowhere in the preliminary inquiry itself. The type of inquiry or its scope is not fully depicted in the poem but the reader certainly gets that only commotion or disturbance in a public place is addressed and not the underlying patriarchy or racist tendencies that happen repetitively somewhere or other all over the world. The ending lines gives the account from the perspective of the victim (so striking and revealing the poet’s comfort with the genre): I know why I went, but is that the whole of the fear that I was? I’m not so sure now. I am full of doubts. Was I a woman who was driven away, or the man who was hunched at the wheel? So, the fear that was instilled and the monstrous tendencies that perpetuated the whole episode, are not focussed at all, by the system and an institution that represents it. Legal institutions talk of the codes for public conduct and the religious institutions on the moral codes. But only literature uphold human values which are the unwritten codes of ethics.