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Martin Edmond Reviews Vicki Viidikas’ “New and Rediscovered”

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New and Rediscovered

by Vicki Viidikas

Transit Lounge

May 2010

ISBN: 9780980571769

REVIEWED BY MARTIN EDMOND

 

That Incorrigible Weapon: Vicki Viidikas, New and Rediscovered

 

A few years ago a friend who lives in Queensland asked me if I would mind having a look around the second hand bookshops in Sydney for the only one of Vicki Viidikas’ four books he didn’t own a copy of: Knabel, her third, published by Wild & Woolley in 1978. One very hot January day I stopped in at Gould’s in King Street, Newtown and spent an irritable half hour or so looking through the poetry section for a book I felt sure was there but could not find; I remember the black dust from the street that coats all the books on the lower shelves sticking to my sweating hands like a contagion. Some weeks later, on a whim, I called in again and this time found a copy in a matter of minutes.

When I took it to the desk to pay Bob Gould, sitting up on his high seat, began to reminisce. Such a fine writer, he said. So sad. Do you know, she came in here just a few weeks before she died, to sell some books? She was getting rid of her library in stages in order to finance her drug addiction … as he spoke, incongruously, he began taking rolls of banknotes from his pockets, presumably the day’s takings, and handing them up to a young acolyte standing at his shoulder. It seemed an apt illustration of the relationship between writers, books and money.

            At this point I had not read any of Viidikas’ work and didn’t really look at Knabel either; just parcelled it up and sent it off to Rockhampton. I was however aware of a flavour, indeed an aura, around her memory—several older writers I knew, my Queensland friend among them, sometimes spoke of her, always with an oddly wistful tone in their voice. It wasn’t like they were recalling a companion or lover of their youth; rather it was if something unique and irreplaceable had gone out of the world when Viidikas died, aged fifty, in 1998. Now, a dozen or so years later, we have a selection of her work edited by Barry Scott and published in a handsome edition by Transit Lounge. And so it is possible to approach the question of what kind of writer she was.

            The selection is substantial and includes material from all her books as well as about twenty previously uncollected pieces. It consists of poetry and prose and is ordered roughly chronologically (some pieces are clearly out of sequence), without making any particular distinction between her two main modes of writing: that is, free form poems and prose pieces which are usually short, even compressed, and at times resemble prose poems. There are also eight colour plates of naïve drawings and excerpts from two longer works: an unpublished novel called Kali and the Dung Beetle and a sequence entitled Prisoner Poems. The selection works well and the book can be read, as I read it, straight through from start to finish as if it were a kind of autobiography.

            A peculiar sort of autobiography, however. Viidikas is not primarily interested in  herself as much as in things seen and done; she is neither analytical or theoretical and nor is she disposed towards the drawing of conclusions—or, god forbid, morals. She instead sends despatches from the frontiers of experience, with the emphasis always upon the nature of the experience rather than the nature of the self who experiences. That is to say, she is an instinctive writer who is driven to write down things that happened to her, or that she made happen, as they happened. Many of the short prose pieces, for instance, are really character sketches of people she has known and some among them are unforgettable: individuals you will not meet anywhere else in Australian writing though you might still come across them in the street.

The poems, which seem rather more extempore, like the prose usually bear a strong trace of their occasion and those occasions are frequently, though not always, traumatic. The focus upon experience rather than self makes of these apparently confessional pieces something more like reportage; yet it is reportage that does not deny the full participation of the self: an analogy might perhaps be found in the work of Herbert Huncke, who also put himself in the way of extreme situations and then wrote up the results. Like Huncke, Viidikas casts a cold eye on life, on death and the complications that ensue in the passage from one to the other; and if the lack of self pity, even of self regard, is both bracing and disconcerting, it has also the paradoxical effect of making us feel we know what it was like to be her without a concomitant sense of knowing what it would have been like to know her.

This entails, I think, another paradox: the self that negotiates these experiences, this brave, reckless, honest, insouciant, hyper-aware voyager, discloses herself primarily as wound or, less surely, scar. Self as wound is not the intent of the writer but a consequence of her writing; and because she is not analytical, the effect is of a vulnerability that is pure, intense and unannealed. Therefore it is not a surprise to find her, in the latter stages of the book, describing the country of addiction from the point of view of an insider, a long-term resident, and ultimately someone who will find it impossible to leave. There are many kinds of addict and many reasons why people become addicted; one, certainly, is that heroin is a great salve of mental pain.

Viidikas seems gradually have fallen silent; her last book, India Ink, came out in 1984, fourteen years before her death, and she did not publish much in magazines in those later years either. However, it would be a mistake to let that encroaching silence shadow the earlier work: she is one of those rare writers whose every utterance is worthy of attention; or, to put it another way, she did not write unless she had something to say. Her major themes—they way or ways in which men and women relate, especially sexually; the nature of religious or other kinds of rhapsodic experience; the exotic as it appears to the committed traveller—do not date and hence her dispatches from the frontiers she explored or transgressed remain vivid and contemporary.

Her longish story of an affair with a young Cretan man, for instance, told with unflinching honesty, could stand as a paradigm of all such encounters and includes, at its climax, a haunting insight into the effect the violence of men has upon the affections of women. Similarly, her hair-raising account of a night out in the environs of Bangkok, trying to buy marijuana, is a narrative which could easily have ended in a murder—her own—and thus gives insight into encounters that may not have finished so well. Her Indian experiences, which were extensive, have a dynamic that oscillates between revelation and disenchantment and I wondered if the unpublished Kali and the Dung Beetle, which must on the evidence of the extract given here shed more light on this aspect of her consciousness, will ever come out in full.

Of course certain kinds of religious experience do also bring the pilgrim to a place of silence, a nirvana that might bear some superficial resemblance to the muted trance of the addict; in both states the fealty to experience that leaves such a strong trace through Viidikas’ writing is replaced by something that may not require a witness or indeed witnessing. Even as skilled and committed writer as Viidikas might long for a cessation of the effort of composition as well as an end to the necessity of wrenching from the world material that may then be composed. The last poem in the book, Lust, written just two months before her death, is a kind of renunciation of the sexual adventuring anatomised in the rest of the book; when she writes Who will bring back the beauty / the ecstasy, the mystery / of creation? you know that she (the last spinster) no longer considers that a task she can fulfil.

I did wonder what the books were that Vicki Viidikas sold to Gould’s around the time of the composition of Lust; but, having told me the bare bones of the anecdote, the bookseller would not say any more. He took my dollars, handed them up to the young fellow at his elbow and turned his mind to other things. Kerry Lewes, in the introduction to this selection, does list some favourite writers, mostly European: Akhmatova, Djuna Barnes, Baudelaire, Beckett, Cavafy, Cendrars, Éluard, Grass, Herbert, Holub, Popa, Prévert . . . but not Rilke and not Rimbaud either. Nevertheless Viidikas’ densely compacted, highly allusive, linguistically inventive prose poems do sometimes recall Illuminations; as her courage, her despair and her silence echo the doomed Rimbaldian trajectory.

Letter to an Unknown Prisoner, a late piece (1990), begins: Today was almost impossible to begin, with no sleep, all night tossing like bunkers on a great ship, far out on the Arabian Ocean . . . ; and ends: Freedom, to unlock denial; freedom, that incorrigible weapon. A weapon that she seems to have used, both in writing and in life, in every possible manner she could devise; and then with great generosity reported openly, skilfully, truthfully and beautifully upon the results.

 

Nicholas YB Wong

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Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walk With Words

“I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine, only given to me for safekeeping.”                                                                                                                          Wislawa Szymborska

 

Life at 3 A.M. is an elephant

urging me to make choices –

 

The night chill challenges my social life.

It asks why I commit myself to words

and turn away from humans,

who often talk too much.

 

Temperature has no speech – it never knows

the setbacks of language.

 

I have married words. Every night,

I bang on them, wearing my blood red matador’s cape,

working towards perfect orgasms.

 

Tonight, I am not writing. I walk

in the bituminous street, feeling bitter

after seeing my friends whose life

is made of unpronounceable stock codes.

 

My feet go numb; my existence, a walnut wafer,

brittle, belittled.

 

I search in the sky for the mercurial moon –

Not there.

I look back and ask the street how far I will walk

 

alone

 

 

 

 

Mark Twain as an Anti-Anti Smoker

 

 

Effective January 1, 2007, the vast majority of indoor areas of workplaces and public places, such as restaurants, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, karaokes and bars which are frequented by people of different ages are required to ban smoking.

Hong Kong Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance, cap. 371.

 

Mark Twain, a heavy smoker

(and literary

            figure) himself,

is going to rule our city. And he,

            with his humor and flare,

has decided to set free all

underground smokers.

In his inaugural ceremony, he strides

            onto the stage,

his forefinger curling

his moustache

when he speaks:

                                    “I won’t bow my head and

confess like a child. I give you all freedom

            in an adult style.

To cease smoking is

the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know

because I’ve done it

a thousand times.”

 

You, who exterminated

            that thing

in the city,

must be dismayed

to know the law

is dead.

That law, an infant, which cries no more,

                        barely knows how to toddle.

 

That thing –

            as you insist calling it –

has a white sinewy-lean body,

             a mini-chimney,

paper-smooth, smell of ancient culture. That thing isn’t wood, but it sometimes crackles when lit

 

 

                                                            in absolute silence.

 

 

I’m warning you! That thing is returning

            at full speed. And this time,

            you’ll say no euphemism. You’ll speak

of its real name

as you do when you name

Jesus, Kwan Yin and the one

rolling over you naked.

 

During those bleak days, we felt like

fugitives

in the name of the hoary

            addictive.

                                                                                                                                     We hid in the darkest corner

in universities, diners,

at rooftops, anywhere so long as

            they were invisible on maps,

puff

ing

and breath

ing

at the same time, degraded like dogs which ransacked for food in trash.

 

Soon we will hang a Mark Twain

            flag outside our windows.

                                    His face

soars in proud smoky air,

when we fondle with

that thing

            legitimately inside. Soon we will smoke in buses, in churches, in malls, in the             City Hall, in museums, in the Coliseum.

You then will die gradually

                        of second- and third-hand

smoke, and we,

devoted chain smokers,

will die faster. Don’t worry.

            Don’t dissuade –

 

we are all prepared. Everything dies

                        on a predetermined date,

            including the law

you once                                                                                              embraced.

 

 

 

Ali Jane Smith

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Ali Jane Smith’s first poetry collection, Gala was published in 2006 as part of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program. Her work has appeared in journals such as Southerly, Cordite, and Famous Reporter. She has recorded readings for audio Cd and performed in schools, universities, pubs, cafes, shopping malls and festivals.  She is the Director of the South Coast Writers Centre.

 

 

 

 

Poems as Dolly Parton: A real live Dolly

 

Up close you can see

the texture of my skin.

The smile that was always mine

the eyes full of thoughts

of you and the other people

I care for. Of the world

and what can be done.

 

If you take my hand it will be

the hand that you know.

The touch that you have grown

used to and never grown used to.

 

The voice most of all

shows the things that change

and never change

like a long, long love affair.

 

It’s easy to hear what’s been lost:

the range, the clarity, but

in my voice now you’ll hear

all the joyous moments

inspired thoughts, desolate

hours, true griefs, and loving gestures

you have known.

 

 

 

Poems as Dolly Parton: Only Dolly Parton album you’ll ever need

 

I know you love

the dirt-poor dreaming girl

who lets you forget

the hours and pains in

writing, singing, playing, looking pretty.

The show that lets you forget the business.

 

I know you like the stories.

You like my heartbroken women.

My happy singing women. My ruined

but still hopeful

lost and longing never despairing

picked up and dusted off

women who know the cold truth and carry it

alongside warm hopefulness.

 

You look at me as I

smile out at you from your tv

a photograph or the stage

when I sing and laugh and let you see

a glistening tear that doesn’t spill.

 

You want me to mend

your hurts and forgive.

To see the good in you, but

the pain and cruelty as well.

To know

and still love you.

 

 

 

Marlene Marburg

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Marlene Marburg is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne College of Divinity.  Her research is focussed on the relationship of poetry and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Marlene is a poet, spiritual director and formator.  She is married with adult children, and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moving Images

Wurrunjeri earth,
skin and muscle bulldozed
to raw and slippery flesh.
Deep rivers turned shallow
slush upside down

Water like wind
finds the empty places
It wants to whirl
 
The earth-shapers are stopping erosion;
moving piles of dirt from here to majestic there.
Progress demands intervention, they say.
They erect a good will sign,
Rehabilitation Project,

but many of us are old enough to know
the banks of the local creek
are little changed in thirty years.
 
By October, the stench settles.
Crystals on the banks twitch in the light.
Dust fog begins to rise.

Walkers inhale the disturbance,
coughing debris out and in
Oneness with the earth is closer
than we think

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
Nick Cave sings, and the wind is alive
to his song, and the water
knows to seek its own level

 

Whorls                                          

The ammonite in my hands, gazes
from a mysterious, soul-breathing centre, 
recognising we are kin in the cosmos, Jurassic heritage,
forming and transforming fossil and flesh, hardened

and polished like marble and slate, cool
spiral labyrinth, narrowing path to the holy of holies,
birthplace outgrown, time and again, the dark place
edging forward into the light.  It is as if she struggles;

albino lashes languishing in her burial rock.
Wine stained strands float from her like mermaids’ hair.
Cavities are filled with coral crystals,
pearls from a stowaway rape.
 
The ammonite is clothed in delicate embroidery,
golden imprint of once green clusters flourishing on a sea bed;
We animate them in the theatre of imagining, mirror
the infinite mind giving shape to desire.

Returning the gaze, I bridge the vast gap of time, 
explore her colour and shape as a once-lost sibling. 
Ammonite sister and Abraham’s lost son
see the whorls in my fingers and the mirror of self.

 

Andy Kissane

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Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three collections of poetry. Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009) is shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. Poetry prizes include the Red Earth Poetry Award, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Poetry Olympics, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the inaugural Publisher’s Cup Cricket Poetry Award and the BTG-Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing prize. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities, most recently UNSW, (2007-2009). He is currently the recipient of a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is working on a book of short stories and a fourth collection of poetry.

 

 

Seeing you again

Driving to your place, I remember

how you said you wanted to carry my hands

around inside your bra. You won’t say that today.

You are married and it’s years since that

dinner dance, foxtrotting under the tablecloth,

my cock wet before I’d eaten the entree.

 

You said you adored men in dinner suits

and I was eager to strip, loosening

the onyx studs from my ruffle slowly

and carefully, as if they were amulets

with enough power to peel back

my shirt and open up my skin.

 

You meet me in the driveway, comfortable

in tracksuit and windcheater. Your hair

is not quite the way I remember it.

We don’t have much time alone.

Your husband’s making coffee

in the kitchen as words ripen

 

on the roof of my mouth like blackberries:

fat icicles ready to fall. My cup wobbles

on its saucer as I recall the last camping trip,

our lilos pushed together, your sleeping bag

zipped into mine, the guttural snores

of lion seals floating up from the beach.

 

I think of what might have been, waking

to a thousand, thousand dawns, children,

the closeness where you don’t need to speak.

Instead, there’s this afternoon tea, polite

conversation, the way I look at you and wish

I could live more than one life.

 

 

 

Wood becoming Rock

 

Walking down the steep path to the backyard,

I hold the stump splitter like a baby.

I’m an occasional woodchopper, intent

on clearing the logs left by the previous owners

—an eyesore, abandoned.

One huge tree, an angophora, fell down

of its own accord, unable to get enough purchase

in the rocky hillside, harming neither limb nor property.

I’ve already chopped and moved a mountain

of wood, gradually, like a hot-rodder

restoring a classic car.

But what’s left now is the hard stuff,

wood well on its way to petrification—

green-tinged, adamantine, too heavy

for one man to lift. I swing the axe

up towards the hidden sun and the other bright stars,

then bring it down onto the dumb block.

I make no impression on the weathered wood.

Relentlessly, I search for a fissure in the log,

a crack the width of a hair that I can wedge open.

The longer the search, the greater my enlightenment.

If only I could borrow the Marabunta,

those ferocious army ants from the film,

The Naked Jungle, let them feast on the wood,

then stop right there. But as I remember it,

they don’t stop, eating everything in their path.

I swing and swing until I am a riot of noise, a mob,

a serial woodchopper who won’t cease until he’s felled

the forest. I hack until my shirt sticks to my back.

My shoulders ache, my arms have emigrated,

and I am all axe,

as Gimli is axe to Legolas’s bow.

I can’t work, it seems, without making

some connection to popular culture,

though this is not work, this hefting

is not my bread and butter. Sparks flash

blue and yellow at the moment of impact

and I understand how my ancestors struggled

to make fire. I’m tired, wet, almost done

for the day, but over there,

against the fence lies another

and it will lie there until I come for it—

ageless, slowly rotting, obdurate and silent.

I wield my iron-age tool until the wood wails and shrieks

and when I finally cleave through the stump,

the sound of it splitting fills the cave

of my head with the last rays of sunlight.

 

Michele Leggott

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Michele Leggott is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland and was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2008-09. She has published seven books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005, 2006), Journey to Portugal (2007) and Mirabile Dictu (2009). She edited Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland. Michele was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to poetry. See also www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/leggott/index.asp

 

 

 

te torea / the oystercatcher        

trebling stage left   
and how would you ever
pick them out on the rocks
until they move and orange sticks
poke and shrill at the kids    who want
food and probably flying lessons
same old same    old torea    not in
Native Animals of New Zealand
but certainly one of the cards torn
from the jelly crystal packets each week
always three and often duplicates
what were we learning and why is it stuck
in the active grid this morning
looking at Motukorea    their island    and Motuihe
where a goose jumped out of a boat
on new year’s day and danced
for lettuce from a bucket    oh he’s
too little to leave on the farm    they said
and rowed back out to the yachts
bobbing off Von Luckner’s bay

dogs rode in the bows of kayaks
landing we supposed on other parts of
the island famous for its permeable approach
to security    Pearl chasing down the Moa
out there in the sparkling waters of the gulf
and they got all the way to the Kermadecs
with their charts sextant and radio
and their pantomime imperial flag    another story
outside the cordon of plastic ribbons
on the landward beach and a sign
DO NOT DISTURB THIS BIRD    gazing
absently out to sea just above
the highwater mark    a jelly card swap
an indigene without sound    and this book
that comes into the house today
trebling calling catching itself
on the black terraces above the tide
Maungauika    and the winter stars rising
over my northeastern shoulder

 

 

the answers

it looks impossible    but really
it happened    is happening    the table top
bright red and the little chairs
each with a decal on its creamy enamel    
the continuous tea party
that seems to be taking place whenever
we look    whenever we ask
what was that    where are those baths
that merry go round she rides
with one of us    the plank and sawhorse
seesaw in the driveway    the baby
stomping along in the sunhat
with her mother and the mountain behind
is that her on the path with presents
and why are his fingers bandaged

it is the moving that matters
the two of us and her walking to camera
at Pukeiti    the waterwheel beating
along the cool ravine    or the Rinso box
and one of us running and jumping
under the clothesline    rocking the pram
one taking out the other with the business end
of a hobby horse    silent howling   
swimming and getting stagily into the car
the circus the fire engine a donkey ride
at Ngamotu    Fishers’ bach Dees’ bach
Onaero Urenui Mokau    ordinary things
and behind them the extraordinary grief
of watching the toddler on the lawn
fall into her father’s arms

tonight on the cold Wellington streets
I see them walk by    coats no longer over
their arms but the ring from Stewart Dawson’s
glinting on her hand there    and on mine
and on mine here    extraordinary grief
and the answers we make
from distance which is no distance at all    

 

 

te oru / the stingray

hot blue stars at the edge of the world
some like horses    some like music
and one has a saxophone
we’ve got chalk words and lots of food
we’ve got the saxophone
blowing us out to the edge of the world
where the poems are

orcas arrive in the harbour
hunting stingray    the researchers
who named them have tracked the pod
from the Kaipara and say it is unique
in taking on the rays    maybe    maybe not
the whales frolic all morning
and when an escaping stingray
soars on camera    ray skips lunch
with orca    an old story flaps into view
stingray in the boat    crew jumping about
trying to gaff it    the whacking tail    pain
my father’s bandaged fingers
held up to the whirring camera    his salute
to the fish    to us    and to her

hot blue stars at the edge of the world
cool blue bird under the wharf
a new sun climbs into the sky

on this side of the harbour
the tug Wainui and her barge Moehau
are bringing in sand from Pakiri
for the beach at Torpedo Bay    
a stingray cruises about the shins
of the kaumatua blessing the sand    
the foreshore and the seabed
are not quiet places    who can say
what belongs to this green mountain
rearing out of the morning mist

hot blue stars    flash of wings
under the wharf    kingfisher    bird of omen
tell us how the sun lights the new moon
how kites with sting tails float over Orakei
how an old story encircles the gleaming bay



 

Anis Shivani

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Anis Shivani’s poems appear in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Fiddlehead, Meanjin, Washington Square, Verse, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere.  A debut book of criticism, Against the Workshop:  Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, will appear in July 2011, and a second collection of short fiction, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, will appear later in 2011.

 

 

 

The Death of Li Po

 

Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems.  The emperors,

on whose behalf I wandered, are jealous like wives.

 

To travel a thousand rivers upstream or down, in a

moon’s half cycle, is only to deliver one’s true debts.

 

In Ch’ang-an, the winehouses gave me a special name

I both abhorred and loved at the same time:

 

Banished Immortal, meaning he who imagines life

as a continuation of the mountain’s other side.

 

Long ago, in the gibbons’ shrieks I heard in K’uei-chou,

a passage of sorts was enacted.  I lost my strangeness.

 

Now, on this river that beckons to the civilization

still remnant in the shrunken land, land of half-sight,

 

I embrace the moon, its diffuse wavy pattern, its

silken bodice, its talkative-silent recital – a poem

 

inherited among the thousands I most love,

to live through the tough interrogation ahead.

 

Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems.  If I drown,

in the brown depths the poet’s only disguise flutters. 

 

 

 

To Orhan Pamuk

 

You have the hüzün, the melancholy

of undying empires piled on each other,

the intrigue of the word-defying holy,

the torture-games of brother by brother.

You strand the Bosphorus on feet of clay,

an Istanbullu fifty years on the same street,

seeing the Golden Horn as on the first day,

nodding to the names behind the retreat.

We, loud exiles and immigrants, toss-offs

and runaways, our good parents’ heartbreak,

dig for first and last names in the old troughs,

defend to the death our identifying stake.

Your loneliness is spared the daily death.

We, the free, delineate each new breath.

 

 

 

Dear Paul Muldoon

 

Barricade the America behind the Princeton

oaks, behind the New Yorker’s gates, in a-technical

language of your aged-youth, steeped in the tragedy of

loaves and laughing sciences and lush O’Casey;

barricade it from the striptease of hidden views

familiar from publishing’s megacelebrities touring

the country in birdcages lined with squawk;

barricade America’s broken highways and silenced

cancer wars with ribbons of your faltering

precious dialogue with Heaney and his forefathers

and theirs, buried deep in the potato fields from

whence no man emigrates sans soul in a coffin box;

barricade America whose gift to herself is platitude,

toward blue Eden, soaked with irony,

a flatulent brig staggering onward to foggy coasts

borrowed from other continents, land masses

whose shape resembles fractured skulls.

 

 

 

Alan Gould

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Alan Gould has published twenty books, comprising novels, collections of poetry and a volume of essays. His most recent novel is The Lakewoman which is presently on the shortlist for the Prime Minister’s Fiction Award, and his most recent volume of poetry is Folk Tunes from Salt Publishing. ‘Works And Days’ comes from a picaresque novel entitled The Poets’ Stairwell, and has been recently completed.

 

 

 

 

 

Works And Days

 

Now and then throughout the night, other coaches arrived at this depot, passengers disgorged, bought coffee at the all-night stall, returned to their seats, whereupon with a growl, their vehicles departed, for Athens, Istanbul, Skopje, Sofia.  Henry and I returned to our seats, dozed upright, bought further coffees, waited for what the Turks might do.  Dawn came up, strobe-yellow from behind the angular roofline, the disco closed down, and in the early light, now resembled any old garage. But our two feckless Turkish drivers had vanished along with their plump Greek girls and the hundreds of spectral dancers we had glimpsed under the blue lights. As it became clear some fraud had been practiced on us and we were not going on to Athens, one by one our fellow passengers took their bags from the lockers and dispersed into the industrial town.

            ‘What’s the verb from ‘feckless,’ I tilted to Henry.

            ‘Well and truly fecked,’ he rejoined, hoisting his pack. And we went looking for a roof.

            We found a room in Thessalonika quite quickly, but the city promised to be tedious for an enforced stay. Here were shopwindows displaying lathes, compressors, saw-benches, a workaday town without a historic relic in sight. By late morning we had wandered to the waterfront, where we met Martha.

            There was a wharf, and a Greek woman thrashed a squid against the timbers. Behind her the Aegean resembled hammered tin. To one side were monstrous derricks and several bright container ships. The day was warm and the scene was held by a complete inertia but for the woman’s exertions with her squid. Some loafers sat on bollards, watching her or minding a fishing line. And there was also the American girl who had been on our Istanbul coach, regarding the treatment of the squid with evident dismay. Hup! And thunk!

            ‘Like, I know they gotta eat,’ she said, seeing Henry and I approach.

            ‘It loosens the guts, I suppose,’ I offered.

            ‘That is still one helluva way to treat a squid.’

            ‘You’re probably right.’

            We all three watched. This American girl was solidly built with short blonde hair and small eyes that now showed an expression of affront. Indeed I wondered whether she intended to intervene on behalf of the squid. If she did there would be a scene, and this, I recognized, would disappoint me because I found the Greek woman’s heave and slap rather magnificent. Here was someone putting her whole being into the simple domestic task. Up flew her arm with the long, glistening squid at the end of it. Then with an undulation that ran from squid-tentacle to human ankle, down came the creature with a forward jerk of the woman’s torso, a bounce of her ample bosom and a resounding crack as the squid hit the boards. Hup and smack! Hup and smack!  I thought of Eva, and how she would have relished this turning of task into dance, immemorial.

            ‘One helluva way to treat a squid!’

            Henry had watched the spectacle, then lost interest and gone to the wharf edge where he gazed at the oily sway of the sea. But for our different reasons the American and I remained transfixed.

            ‘I concede I’d prefer gentler treatment for my own insides if I was being prepared for a meal.’

            ‘I’m thinking of that squid,’ she dismissed my attempt at charm.

             ‘Actually, I find this rather a thrilling sight.’

            Hup and smack, hup and smack, and the Greek woman a silhouette against the glary Aegean behind her!

             ‘O sure thing! It’s ethnic as hell.’ 

             ‘And beautiful in its way.’

            ‘It’s still one helluva…’ and she shook her head, leaving the sentence unfinished, distressed by the sight, unable to tear herself away.

            When I made to rejoin Henry, I found she had followed me. ‘May I tag along awhile?’ she asked. ‘I’m kinda lonesome right now.’

 ‘Of course,’ I agreed, and learned that she was Martha from Muncie, Indiana, where

she practiced as a plumber. I saw she had big hands and long fingers.  ‘Boon&Luck,’ I introduced ourselves. ‘Both poets,’ I owned.

           ‘You say that’s your livelihood?’ asked Martha. ‘That’s weird.’

           ‘Not livelihood,’ I allowed. ‘Somewhere between an aspiration and a place in history.’

            ‘History? Speak for yourself,’ Henry interposed.

            ‘I don’t get any of this,’ said Martha. ‘You gotta have a livelihood.’

            ‘Poetry is a kind of money,’ Henry was prompt to supply the Stevens, which left Martha further bewildered.

            ‘And you…um… plumb?’ I asked.

            ‘You getta lotta treeroots and sick smells come out of a job,’ Martha brought our conversation to earth.  ‘But sometimes I get to do a course on plastics or the latest hydraulic theory. I never grew outta liking being in school.’

            ‘What brings you to Greece?’ Henry asked.

            ‘I got kinda itchy for some of the things I learned back in school.’

            ‘Like?’

            ‘Like, well, that war they had with the Trojans. I’ve just come from there. And like, all those Gods and Goddesses having ding dongs with each other.’

            At a waterside café, we took coffee, then some lunch. Martha did most of the talking, about her visit to the Troy diggings at Hissarlik. It was a methodical presentation, but something in this person brought out a kindliness and patience in Henry that I might not have expected. We wandered further down the waterfront, retraced our steps and found ourselves back beside the Greek woman, now resting from her squid-thrashing, her galvanized bucket containing a mash of several squid at her side.

            ‘I kinda think I’ve seen this town enough,’ Martha stated. ‘I don’t like discos and bad ladies and someone smashing hell out of a poor squid. When you travel, you come across places that kinda have no poetry I guess.’

            ‘On the contrary!’

            We both glanced at Henry who held his body poised with conviction, like a heron that has just seized a minnow.   ‘Everywhere you look you can see a town saturated with Hesiod.’

            ‘What’s Hesiod?’ asked Martha.

            ‘A poet,’ I knew enough to explain.

            Henry might have given us dates, a lifestory, but instead he advised us to check out Works and Days. ‘Hesiod’s your boy for tool shops and working women of one sort or another.’

            ‘I don’t know that guy,’ Martha decided, her attention drifting back to the tub of mashed squid and her face clouding as she did so.

            ‘Do you believe in the dignity of honest labour?’ I should say that Henry was positively firing his questions. 

             ‘I guess.’

             ‘Protestant work ethic, etcetera.’

             ‘Of course,’ Martha glanced at her interrogator with sudden suspicion. ‘I belong to our church.’

             ‘Good. Well, the Protestant work ethic is pure Hesiod.’

             ‘Hesiod was a Protestant?’

              ‘Absolutely,’ Henry nodded with that grave deliberation indicating he was having fun.

             ‘I didn’t know that,’ Martha pondered this new information. ‘At school I learned about Socrates and hemlock,’ she decided to risk.

             ‘Hesiod is pre-Socratic.’

             ‘And yet he’s a Protestant?’

             ‘Absolutely.’ 

             ‘I don’t get that.’

             ‘Do you think present times are degenerate in comparison to a past golden age?’

            This caused Martha to take her eyes off the squid bucket and look at Henry’s intent, mischievous face reflectively. ‘I sometimes have a gut feeling that things are coming kinda unstuck these days,’ she conceded at length.

              ‘Mankind has a golden, silver and iron age – in that order?’

             ‘I guess we all think that deep down.’

             ‘Then Hesiod’s your boy for things coming unstuck.’

             ‘So he’s important, right?’

            ‘He’s critical,’ Henry affirmed for her. ‘Final question!’ and my companion poet was not quite able to hide his smirk, ‘Do you like the poetry of Robert Frost?’

             ‘Of course! Frost is a great poet. He is taught at school.’

             ‘Frost’s poetry could not have existed had there been no Hesiod.’

              Martha’s brow furrowed at this connection. ‘I don’t get that either.’

             ‘Poets of a present age learn to speak by taking in the speech of poets from an earlier age.  It is a process identical with how infants learn to speak by absorbing the speech of their parents. Frost is a pastoral poet because Hesiod established the territory of pastoral poetry.’

             ‘That’s kinda neat.’

             ‘It is very neat indeed,’ Henry trumped. 

            ‘I thought Frost was a pastoral poet because he liked writing about his farm,’ I ventured to check the progress of the lesson.

             ‘The farm was incidental,’ Henry could not disguise his smirk. ‘The farm was inert without earlier text to animate its possibilities of meaning.’

             ‘I guess this Hesiod must have been quite some guy,’ declared Martha.

             ‘He was,’ said Henry. ‘For instance he advised people not to urinate where the sun can see you.’

             ‘I can see that makes sense,’ Martha the plumber nodded, willing to be taken along now, for all that the information came at such headlong pace.

             ‘Hesiod discouraged people from telling lies simply for the sake of making talk….’

             ‘Ri-ight,’ Martha was not sure how this one related to being a poet.

              ‘…Which is to say’ Henry continued headlong, ‘we have a poet at the dawn of poetry who understood the pathology of people who get nervous in conversation.’

             ‘I get nervous like that,’ Martha brightened at the recognition. ‘I get kinda muddled and blurt, and then falsehoods come out.’

              ‘Exactly,’ Henry clinched. ‘Hesiod also said that sometimes a day can be your stepmother. And sometimes a day can be your mother.’

            ‘I think that one just gets me confused,’ she decided. Nonetheless I could see she was intrigued by the proposition.

            ‘So you see, Hesiod tackles the gut issues,’ Henry summed up. ‘You must read Hesiod at your earliest opportunity.’

            ‘I guess I’ll do that.’ 

            She had been distracted entirely from the squid-bucket now. So had I.  And once again Henry had performed according to his genius. He had taken the substance of books and brought it to thrilling life. Yes, I would re-read Hesiod at the earliest opportunity, now that print on a page was somehow made vibrant, as the blades of light scintillant on the sea beside us, as the gleam of the squid in their galvanized bucket.

            We strolled the waterfront. Henry moved us from Hesiod to Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics. Thales, with his view that the underlying substance of reality was water, was a plumber’s gift that Henry did not neglect to present to Martha. We took an early dinner of moussaka and retsina at a waterside café, walked some more in order to tackle Pythagoras, then parted, Martha to her tent at a campsite, Henry and I to the small, cement-smelling room. In the morning the three of us met again at the same café and when it came time to catch the Athens train Martha again requested she be allowed to tag along.

            ‘I’m kinda more curious than lonesome now,’ she said.

            ‘There’s ground to cover,’ Henry welcomed her along, and in Martha I recognized, we had a Henry Luck project in view.  From it I would gain an insight into the purity of his altruism.

 

 

 

Rumjhum Biswas

Written by mascara on . Posted in Fiction.

Rumjhum Biswas’s prose and poetry have been published in India and abroad, both in print and online, including Per Contra, South, Words-Myth, Everyday Fiction, Danse Macabre, Muse India, Kritya, Pratilipi, Eclectica, Nth Position, The King’s English,  Arabesques Review, A Little Poetry, The Little Magazine, Etchings and Going Down Swinging. Her poem “Cleavage” was in the long list of the Bridport Poetry Competition 2006. Her story "Ahalya’s Valhalla" was among the notable stories of 2007 in Story South’s Million Writers’ Award.

 

 

 

 

Ducklings

 

 

“Shiuli!” called Nityananda as he peered into the dark. The pre-dawn air was chilly even though winter was months away. Nityananda hunched his shoulders and tried to draw the threadbare shawl tighter around him. Shivering as he rubbed his elbows in an effort to increase the circulation, Nityananda wondered how many more seasons his old bones would take. He prayed God would let him live long enough to see Shiuli married and Laltu and Poltu settled.  “Shiuli! O Shiuli!”  But the girl was nowhere to be seen. She must have gone to the pond. Nityananda had half a mind to go there and drag Shiuli back. It would be heartless, no doubt, but the girl had better learn early how hard their lot was.

Shiuli was eighteen and under happier circumstances would have been married already, with a child or two to show for it. But the double tragedy of losing both parents to Cholera one after the other in a span of just four weeks had turned Shiuli into a surrogate mother for her two younger brothers from the tender age of twelve. The boys, twins, were four years old at that time. Shuili’s three other siblings had also perished in the epidemic that swept their whole district, mowing down village after village. It was a miracle that three of his grandchildren managed to survive. Nityananda knew he was lucky. God had been merciful and spared a portion of his family when he could have taken them all in one fell swoop. Still Nityananda rued his fate. He wished that he had died instead of his son and daughter-in-law. God’s mercy was cruel. Or else why would able-bodied young people like Nityananda’s daughter-in-law and son die instead of an old man like him? Why would they, who were barely able to eke a living from the few animals and the little land that they owned, be assaulted by this sudden new scourge of such epidemic proportions? Why God why?

Shiuli had wanted to study. From the time she could hold a slate and chalk, she had followed her grandfather about repeating the letters of the alphabet and writing them down after Nityananda had scratched them out on the dry soil, frowning and wrinkling up her snub nose to see the letters better. Shiuli never let go until she had fully grasped Nityananda’s lesson for the day. The girl was smart. By the time she was seven Shiuli could add or subtract a whole bunch of numbers in her head and write full sentences. Haripada, Shiuli’s father used to be so proud of his clever daughter. Being the youngest child – the twins had not yet been born then – she was easily his favorite.

“Shiuli will be a teacher,” Haripada would say, picking up Shiuli and swinging her above his broad shoulders. “Every time our Shiuli walks past adjusting her spectacles and brandishing her ruler, everybody in the village will say, ‘Namoshkar Mashtarni Didimoni, namoshkar!”

Shiuli would giggle delightedly. Then, Nityananda would pipe in with a twinkle in his eyes, “But our Mashtarni Didimoni will say namoshkar to me, with folded hands every time she leaves for school, because I was her first teacher!” And Shiuli would promptly swing towards her dadu, her darling grandfather, from her father’s perch and grab his arms.

Yes, they use to have many dreams about Shiuli, dreams that were as sweet as the jasmine that scented their garden in summer. They would lie down under the stars and talk about Shiuli’s future even though Madhobi, Nityananda’s daughter-in-law, grumbled under her breath that the rightful place for girls was in her husband’s house and Shiuli was better off learning to cook and clean instead of getting her head full of frivolous ideas. Shiuli’s mother had her reasons. Neighbors often passed snide remarks about Haripada’s and Nityananda’s dreams. Besides, girl children were normally never allowed to finish school in the village. It was not the custom. At the most they studied up to class five or six. The village elders disapproved of so much attention paid to girls. They frowned upon girls gallivanting around after puberty. The earlier you married off a girl the better it was; there were few troubles and the groom’s family was usually willing to settle for less dowry, because the girls were fresh and tender. Nityananda himself had brought Madhobi home when she was barely fourteen and practically illiterate, but well versed in household duties and an expert cook. Madhobi was only twenty eight when, already weakened by multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, she succumbed to the Cholera epidemic when it hit their village. Haripada did not get a chance to mourn his wife for long. He followed some weeks later, after watching three of his children writhe in pain and die, one after the other.

Nityananda wiped the tears that pricked the corners of his rheumy eyes and trickled down. He went in to wake up the boys. Laltu and Poltu helped him feed their cow and the two goats. Meanwhile Shiuli fed the chickens and ducks. They had their breakfast of tea soaked with puffed rice only after all their animals and birds were fed. This was the first thing they did each morning, and it had been their routine ever since the rest of their family had died. The children had insisted on it; they could never bear to eat until all their four legged and winged family members had had their fill.  The three children’s world revolved around these mute creatures that demanded their love and gave back in full measure with their nuzzling and cooing and clucking, following them about whenever Nityananda and his grandchildren were nearby. Shiuli always chattered with the chickens and ducks as if they were her own babies. She also chattered with the cow and the goats. But ever since the ducklings had hatched, all three children had become unnecessarily attached to them.

Not becoming unnecessarily attached to their livestock was something that Nityananda, being a life hardened and practical man believed in staunchly. His own behavior towards their livestock was gruff, not that it made much of a difference as far as the animals were concerned. They still went up to him and followed him when he was near them. Nityananda scolded them as he stroked the larger animals or threw a handful of puffed rice at the chickens and ducks. Nityananda knew that attachment created problems. Like that time when he had to sell the year old pie-bald male kid to the butcher and Laltu and Poltu had cried for days. Shiuli had consoled them and given him black looks side by side. She would never know how bad Nityananda had felt that day; as if he had sold his own grandson. But he had had to do it. What choice did he have? There was the loan to be repaid and taxes too. Someday, when they were grown up, they would understand.

Nityananda crossed the narrow four poster bed sized bit of courtyard that separated his room from that of the boys. He bent his head to avoid the strands of thatch hanging over the low doorway. He didn’t like to wake the boys up so early. They were so young; if they didn’t play and read and have fun now when would they ever? Time flows like a river and never stops for even a moment, thought Nityananda to himself. Soon the boys would be lost to manhood. The pleasures of running down a field or splashing in the water would be lost to them. The magic of a new world unfolding day by day would be gone forever. But what could he do?

Laltu and Poltu went to the free government primary school. Before they left for school in the morning, they helped Nityananda with the cow and the goats. Together they untied the animals and led them out down the village road. Once they reached a customer’s house, either Laltu or Poltu called out while Nityananda sat down on his haunches to milk the cow. The boys were quite adept at milking the goats, but Nityananda still preferred to do the cow himself. There was time enough for his grandsons. He measured and poured the milk from the pail into the vessel that his customer handed over. Laltu collected the money or wrote the amount and date in a notebook kept especially for those who preferred to pay at the month end. After that they moved on to the next house and then to the next, until all their customers were served. This was a slow and sometimes tedious process. It would have been better for Nityananda’s old bones if the boys’ took the milk to their customers later on in the day. Raw milk didn’t go bad if you kept strips of straw in the cans. It stayed good for atleast an hour or two. But people liked to buy milk that they could watch being milked straight from the cows. So Laltu and Poltu had to be woken up at the crack of dawn, even during holidays. Today however, they seemed to have got up on their own. Nityananda rubbed his eyes and looked again. The grass mats that served as their beds were empty.

“Shiuli! O Shiuli! Laltu! Poltu! Where are you?”

No one answered.

Suddenly feeling alarmed, Nityananda hurried out. He looked to the right and left and then went down to the pond. In the brightening morning light, though still misty, he was able to make out shadowy shapes huddled near the pond steps. He called again. The shapes remained still. A broken sob caught his ears. Nityananda ran towards the sound.

He found them sitting there, hugging the ducklings. This time it was Shiuli who was crying her heart out. Laltu and Poltu were crying too and trying to comfort her at the same time. Shiuli, bent over with grief, sat holding the ducklings to her bosom which would have held babies had their circumstances been different. Shiuli, weeping her heart out as if she was going to lose her own children to sickness. Shiuli, who no longer ran up numbers inside her head or read fluently from the day old newspaper that Nityananda sometimes brought home from the village school master’s house. Shiuli, who had grown day by day into an exact replica of her mother, and turned into a quiet dutiful woman, a good cook and a devoted home-maker.

Nityananda felt his heart cracking up under the weight of sorrow. His eyes stung, but the tears remained inside. He wished he could weep like these children. Hold the half grown ducklings to his bosom; shower them with kisses. But what was the use of getting emotional? This wretched bird flu had hit every village for miles around. The men in white suits would be coming over to claim the little ones, any day now. Any day.