The Heart of the Advocate by Angela Costi, Liquid Amber Press 2025.
Justice must not be confused with law.
………………………………………….. – ‘The Heart of the Advocate’
Angela Costi’s latest poetry collection, The Heart of the Advocate, with its eye-catching, symbol-strewn cover and clean internal design, demands our attention. Poetically speaking, it’s substantial; at 90-odd pages it includes an Opening Address as well as explanatory File Notes. Its poems make an eloquent case for the need for empathy, and further, philoxenia (‘befriend the stranger’) in the practice of the law and beyond—the ‘heart’ of the title, and its ‘advocate’.
As a former lawyer turned poet, Costi is well poised to write such a work. With both passion and precision, her poems explore the rift between justice and the law within the often-veiled domestic environment as well as in the courtroom and other more public spaces, in the past and also, urgently, in the present.
The job of poetry, however, is not to tell us something so much as to deliver the experience of it. Deftly and courageously, Costi unpeels the nature of injustice in its various guises, enabling us to inhabit, through poetic reenactment of specific situations, the felt experiences embedded in people’s many stories. As the part titles show, her field of focus widens dramatically from the personal to the societal; we become aware that there are few aspects of the way we live that this poet is unafraid to tackle.
Some poems read like narrative capsules, by turns heartbreaking and inspiring, including of members of Costi’s own family who emigrated from Cyprus and whose ill-treatment on the voyage to Australia taught them “how to plead like well-behaved dogs” and of the poet herself, scolded as a law clerk for wearing a blue crochet top “showing collar bone”, as well as many in the wider community. A particularly striking example is that of the poet’s colleague Vincent Shin who, as a young boy, witnessed his father’s brutal attacks on his mother yet went on to become an advocate for others:
The second your father threw your mother
into a bush of thorns.… & you held her.… gashed and bloody
you were an advocate.… how many punches to the face does it take
to compel the study of Acts that don’t blame your mum
or you .… for being too small .… scared .… childlike………………………………………… – ‘Survivor’..
Other poems are more oblique, marked by restraint and letting the facts speak for themselves. This is beautifully evidenced in ‘Dancing on Shards: An Affidavit’, about the poet’s uncle and aunt among the 170,000 Cypriots who fled for their lives to Australia in 1974. The poem contains spellbinding lyricism and a devastating final couplet:
Tákis was the boat moving in the flow
……………………………….and current of his wife’s hips
—the dignity of their desire
……………………………….filled our heart with tearsForty years later
…………..there is no Tákis next to Chrystálla at the café…
she said he returned to save
what was left of him
Many poems shine the spotlight on women who had to fight for equal rights and indeed even to be heard, from Rosalie Bogner and Merle Thornton who were ‘chained to the Liquor Act’ to Erica McGilchrist, art therapist for incarcerated women and an ‘Activist as much as an Artist’, to Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, judged and ‘mocked’ for her dress sense.
Tragically, recent examples also abound, as with Gillian Meagher, raped and murdered in 2012, whose case is particularly shocking as she was denied any voice at all:
There were 700 metres to get her home
equal to 920 steps in heels …as she nears the corner at 400 metres…
with the streetlights of Hope Street …
…………………..except tonight
at the Duchess Boutique with its rows
of white gowns, she is stopped—……………………………………. – ‘Countless’
Costi teases out the entrenched nature of attitudes behind many modern ‘stories’, tracing a precedent in ancient mythology, as with Zelda D’Aprano who chained herself to the ‘mountainous’ Commonwealth Building in Melbourne in 1969 to protest the lack of equal pay, and who is likened to Prometheus. And in what is arguably one of the most powerful poems in the collection, an unnamed woman in the witness box is hovered over by the ghosts of Persephone, Cassandra, Leda and others as she is traumatised all over again by her cross-questioning:
She was nineteen when it happened and prefers
to be called………girl .. daughter ……..sister……………….not
Madam……………but this gowned man is steeped
…………..…………..………….in ancient Greek myth
…………..Madam, I suggest to you, you will say whatever
…………..you think helps your story, whether it’s true………or untrue…………………………………………………………. – ‘Crossing Over into Myth’
As these poetic snippets show, the fluidly structured enjambed free verse, largely uninterrupted by end stopped lines which characterises the early poems gives way to a staccato effect of irregularly spaced lines and uneven line breaks, conjuring up the disturbing and fragmentary nature of unjust or abusive experiences themselves. Nowhere is this truer than in the found poem based on a Criminal Law exam paper, where perpetrators’ and victims’ names are changed to biblical characters:
Consider …..Hagar…..…..…..…..…..believes Sara
..Hagar …..…..…..…..…..…..…..….….sells Sarah the gun
…………Sarah
..is capable of firing bullets. …..…..She kills Abraham…………………………………………………………. – ‘THIS PAPER IS’
Through all the various subjects under scrutiny and their stylistic approaches, however, there is one constant: we are exhorted away from any hasty response to be attentive to what’s being said (and what isn’t), to listen without judgment—perhaps the ultimate act of respect one human can pay another. If we accept the poet’s premise that the function of advocacy of one person for another exists in many roles across society and not just in legal cross-examination, these poems speak to all of us.
Just as Ritsos’ renowned poem, ‘Epitaphios’, which gave voice to a grieving mother in a 1936 photograph and prompted a mass anti-fascist protest, so too can Costi’s poems, which give voice to the many silenced survivors and victims of injustice who flit largely unnoticed through contemporary society, prompt a crucial change of heart:
The mother had her mouth wide open but no scream or wail or weep was recorded. The mother was not interviewed to know her grief…
…………………………………………. – ‘In the Quiet Space for the Living and the Dead’………
In this context, the exquisitely poignant poem evoking a meeting between the poet’s son and her father, positioned at the close of the first part, takes on a shimmering significance:
There will be no thumping of fists on the table
no pulling of a grandson’s ear, the house
will be quiet, ready to listen to their new story…………………………………………. – ‘Writs of Passage II’
In conclusion, The Heart of the Advocate is a timely and profoundly moving work for readers everywhere, and the culmination of years of experience and research by a wise and compassionate poet and person. If justice starts with empathy, and if we are prepared to heed the plea inherent in the poems to embrace a more supportive, less adversarial form of advocacy, this stirring collection will help make us more empathetic advocates in daily life and enrich the discussion around the humanising of the legal system. That its launch took place in the Old Magistrates’ Court, traditional seat of the conservative, often patriarchal, values under scrutiny, is deeply heartening.
– Denise O’Hagan
