Jal Nicholl: Surreal Poetry, Stones, Gardens, Architecture, and Comic Scale

Jal Nicholl is an Australian poet and writer whose work uses precise objects, natural history, architecture, humor, and surreal transformation to make the ordinary newly unstable. His poems have appeared in publications including The Age and Overland, and his work was selected for Best Australian Poems 2011. He has also written reviews and short fiction, including work in the horror genre, and has taught high school English in rural Victoria.

Nicholl’s poem “However” is a compact demonstration of his ability to move from exact observation into impossible comparison without changing tone. Stones, ivy, an urn, an eggshell, a seed, an oak, Latin, and a homeless man drawing houses on pavement all enter the poem with the same grammatical calm. The strangeness accumulates quietly.

“However”

“However” develops through a sequence of images that are concrete enough to visualize immediately and strange enough to resist ordinary logic. A stack of stones becomes vulnerable to imagined oedema; an urn carries the weight of a cloud; an eggshell supports a Bible; a seed acquires legs and Oedipal rage; an oak appears capable of reading Latin.

The poem’s title is important because “however” is a word of correction or qualification. It changes direction. Nicholl builds an entire poem out of that verbal energy: each image seems to establish a world, then the next one quietly revises what kind of world the reader thought it was.

Stones and the problem of weight

Stones imply permanence, gravity, geology, and physical fact. They are useful poetic objects because they seem resistant to interpretation. Nicholl unsettles that resistance by imagining them as vulnerable, almost bodily. Once a stone can suffer oedema, mineral matter enters the language of flesh.

This transformation is comic, yet the joke also changes the reader’s scale of attention. An object previously treated as inert becomes capable of condition and vulnerability. The poem repeatedly performs this kind of category crossing. George Kalamaras’s surreal transformations offer a neighboring practice in which bodily, animal, and material categories also shift through associative image.

Urn, cloud, and container

An urn is a container associated with ritual, memory, death, and preservation. A cloud is diffuse, changing, difficult to hold. Bringing them together creates a paradox of containment: the solid vessel is asked to carry what has no stable shape.

Nicholl’s surrealism often works through such mismatches. The comparison seems impossible in physical terms while remaining intuitively legible as an emotional image. Memory itself behaves this way: people attempt to contain experiences that keep changing shape.

Eggshell, Bible, and fragility

An eggshell supporting a Bible reverses an expected hierarchy of weight and authority. The shell is thin, breakable, temporary; the book carries cultural and religious gravity. The image turns that gravity into a physical absurdity.

This is characteristic of Nicholl’s comic scale. Large symbolic systems can be balanced on tiny objects. The poem places seriousness in a position where its weight becomes visible.

Seed, growth, and Oedipal comedy

A seed naturally carries the idea of future growth. Nicholl gives it legs and Oedipal rage, translating biological potential into psychological drama. The joke depends on excessive attribution: a seed is suddenly burdened with family conflict, desire, and mythic violence.

The image also exposes the anthropomorphic habits of poetry. Writers routinely give plants emotions or intentions. Nicholl pushes that habit far enough to make the device itself visible.

Garden and architecture

Natural objects repeatedly meet built forms. Ivy decorates stone, a seed confronts a wall, an oak seems literate, and a homeless man draws porticoes, turrets, spires, and moats inside the grid of pavement. Nature and architecture become competing systems for arranging matter.

This spatial attention connects Nicholl with Chuck Stebelton’s place-centered poetry, where landscape, species, field observation, and built literary environments also shape the work. A garden is already partly architectural: paths, borders, beds, walls, and choices about cultivation impose human order on growth.

The homeless draftsman

The figure drawing isometric houses on pavement changes the poem’s social scale. Architecture becomes imagination rather than property. Porticoes, turrets, spires, and moats are rendered by someone whose relation to housing is precarious.

The scene can be read as comic, poignant, or both. It exposes the difference between drawing a structure and possessing shelter. The pavement itself becomes a temporary page.

Isometric drawing and poetic space

Isometric drawing represents three-dimensional structures on a two-dimensional surface without conventional perspective convergence. That detail matters formally. Nicholl’s poem also creates impossible spatial relations on a flat page: stones swell, clouds become weight, seeds move, trees read, and buildings appear inside pavement lines.

The poem therefore resembles the draftsman’s method. It projects a strange dimensional world from a set of marks. John Mercuri Dooley’s visual and typographic poetry offers another route into language treated as spatial material capable of creating impossible worlds on the page.

Comic surrealism

Nicholl’s humor comes from grammatical composure. The poem rarely signals that an image is bizarre. Impossible propositions are delivered in the same tone as ordinary descriptions. This deadpan quality allows each surreal turn to arrive without theatrical announcement.

The technique has affinities with experimental poetry that treats juxtaposition as a primary engine. The reader creates continuity across images that do not obey ordinary narrative causality.

Short stanzas and sequence

“However” uses short units that give each image room to establish itself before the poem changes direction. This spacing produces a rhythm of proposition and revision. The reader sees the object, accepts its temporary rules, then encounters the next transformation.

That structure belongs within poetic forms based on sequence and juxtaposition. The poem’s coherence comes from repeated acts of category crossing rather than meter or rhyme.

The surreal ordinary

Nicholl’s strongest images begin with things that are easy to overlook: stones, ivy, seeds, pavement, an eggshell. Surrealism emerges from attention. The ordinary object is examined until another possibility becomes visible inside it.

This gives the poem a particular generosity. Nothing is too small to carry imaginative pressure. A seed can become a dramatic character; a pavement square can become a city plan; a cloud can become a burden.

Poetry, fiction, and the strange

Nicholl’s later work in short fiction, including horror, fits naturally with a poetic imagination already interested in the uncanny. Horror and surreal poetry share an ability to make ordinary environments unstable through small changes in expectation.

The difference is often one of emotional temperature. “However” keeps its transformations comic and curious, while the same sensitivity to the strange potential of ordinary things can move easily toward darker fiction.