Author: mascara

Dog Boy

by Eva Hornung

Text Publishing, 2009

ISBN 9781921520099

Reviewed by KATHARINE GILLETT

What is it that makes us human? In Dog Boy, Eva Hornung examines the instinct to nurture and protect, not as an inherently human trait, but as one belonging to the invisibly marked territory of a pack of stray dogs.

Four-year-old Romochka is abandoned by his mother at the onset of a Russian winter. As the chill begins to creep under his blankets and the sky loses its light for the season, he is driven by hunger to take to the streets.  When he follows a dog to her home under an old church on the outskirts of Moscow, it is the beginning of a new life for Romochka and suckling alongside the dog’s pups he feels the safety and warmth denied him by his human mother. Almost immediately, the themes of loyalty and love take hold and as the next few winters unfold, we see Romochka’s education extend beyond the primal need for survival.  

Perhaps in order to understand what it is like to begin again, Hornung—who previously wrote as Eva Sallis and is the author of journey-themed Hiam and The City of Sealions among other works—travelled to Russia to research the book, which is based on the true story of a boy living with dogs in Moscow. Her cultural immersion extends in the novel to a linguistic one, resonating Romochka’s loss of his human language, which is, of course, useless in his new surrounds:

There was so much in the new world to be learned that he quickly forgot anything that didn’t touch him. This new world had immutable laws. It was divided into realms of danger and safety; it had clear enemies and its own demons. (p. 38)

In a book largely without dialogue, Romochka must learn to rely on his senses: ‘Day was a brief visitation of many greys. Romochka could see the dogs’ eyes and shapes inside the lair only at midday. Otherwise he could see nothing, but could hear and feel where each of them was’ (p. 67). Exiled at the edge of the city, straining to see in the dark or attempting to smell the threat of a stranger, Romochka’s intuitivism takes over, as if he has been reborn.

While the story of the wild boy is not new, Dog Boy explores another aspect of this age-old tale through Romochka’s knowledge of what it means to be human. There is no need for the question raised in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life: ‘What species does [the wild boy] think he might belong to? Does he recognise his own?’ (p. 52). Romochka knows he was once a boy and his contact with humans is frequent and, ultimately, essential. Indeed his reflections on his past life are fundamental to his character:

Romochka could remember this place, but it seemed utterly changed. He savoured the memory, curious. He had been a boy then, with a missing mother and uncle, following a strange dog. He remembered how cold and hungry he was. How unknown the trail ahead. (p. 40)

Romochka quickly adapts to his new life and Hornung convincingly describes what it might be like to live in a wild world. She shows Romochka and ‘black sister’ sharing a slippery rat, each inclination of a paw as loaded as language; Mamochka, his dog mother, licking Romochka’s sores as his clothes tighten or lie wet on his skin; and Romochka’s developing understanding of the territory as marked out by the scent of his brother, ‘black dog’. Romochka becomes so immersed in his dog-world, boundaries begin to blur and the story not only becomes plausible, but realistic and entirely believable.

The language is terse and tight, perhaps reflecting the fact that Romochka has little time to meander; he must quickly move between the hunt for food and the hunt for warmth. In brief moments of abandon he connects with his dog brothers and sisters, tumbling and biting in play, but the frivolity is always short-lived and we are soon drawn back into his isolated life. Given Hornung’s background as a human rights activist, the isolation and exile Romochka experiences could be suggestive of asylum and other states of displacement where the absence of language becomes, like detention, a barrier to inhabiting place.  Similarly, although Romochka is accustomed to the harsh Moscow winters, the cold weather, at its extreme in the concrete bunker of the dogs’ den, does little to ease his transition to his new life.  Romochka spends long stretches of time unable to face the outdoors, to fend for himself, instead relying on the dogs to bring him food, a practice he finds demeaning, even in his vulnerable state.

Although there is scope for action and tension in Romochka’s situation, little seems to infiltrate the dogs’ world.  Any sense of danger is quickly resolved, and, as a mother would reassure a child, the support of Romochka’s dog family is quick to materialise. Because Romochka lives in an in-between world, he is accepted on the periphery of existence: tolerated and feared by humans and dogs alike.  The nearby residents who scavenge on the rubbish mountain and the population in town largely ignore them. When a threat finally comes, it is not in any physical sense, but in an emotional sense, when Momochka brings another human baby back to their home.  Here, emotions that have no place in a dog’s world start to surface and our concerns begin to shift away from the present—where the family have proven their resilience time and time again—to each boy’s future.  That it takes the introduction of another human to bring about the crisis is an inevitable consequence of such a new and complex emotional world; in dealing with his boy brother, Romochka is forced to confront himself.

There comes a moment in the second half of the novel when Romochka sees himself in a mirror for the first time. When he sees a boy—a boy with wild black ropes and tendrils for hair instead of fur—he is shocked: ‘He wasn’t what he thought he was … His calloused paw and scarred forearm were stringy, bald, filthy, long. Wrong’ (p. 161). It is almost a relief to see Romochka in this way, shocked into his own existence. It’s a timely reminder that he is a boy and a life beyond the lair beckons. As he stares at his reflection, all he has come to believe starts to unravel and it’s hard to imagine what the future holds for him and his brother. Can they survive in a human world? We do know that whatever happens, it won’t be an easy journey. After all, the question of how to bridge the indefatigable space between worlds is a question not even humans can answer.

KATHARINE GILLETT has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Newcastle and a background in community publishing and cultural development. She is the coordinator of the Newcastle Poetry Prize. 

Symptoms of Homesickness

by Nathanael O’Reilly

Picaro Press, 2010

ISBN 9781920957896

Reviewed by EA GLEESON

With dedications to Conlon and Quigley and geographical cues such as Yambuk, The Lady Bay Hotel and The Moyne, the nomenclature of Symptoms of Homesickness orientates us towards the Irish Australian Diaspora and particularly as it is lived out in Victoria’s South West. Closer reading reveals a wider geographical terrain but the real landscape of this poetry is the cultural and emotional territory explored through childhood, teenage years and young adulthood.

O’Reilly has paid attention to experience and brings it to the reader in a poetry that is descriptive. The opening poem in ‘Deep Water’ places the reader in a childhood place many might choose not to remember.

                On winter mornings, the State
                Put children to the test
                …
                While teeth chattered,
                Swimming caps squashed
                Ears, testicles retreated.

More enticing to those who thrive on nostalgia might be O’Reilly’s description of ‘Stopping for Fish and Chips’.

                the sweaty package
                Of butcher’s paper and grabbed hot
                Handfuls. Escaping steam fogged-up
                The windows. We gripped sleeves
                In our fists and wiped windows clear.

                                    … 

More of the poems have to do with burgeoning sexuality, friendship and risk taking.

I enjoy the way O’Reilly plays a situation to transform a seemingly ordinary activity such as waiting in the library for the protagonist’s dad to collect him, into a chance to explore some of the adult magazines housed in the library.

                 I could not
                 Imagine the flat chested, uniformed girls
                 In my class with ribbons, baubles and pig-tails
                 In their hair developing such adornments,
                 Shamelessly spreading themselves on car bonnets.
                                             (“Afternoons Waiting in Libraries”)

O’ Reilly’s approach is to tell. This is reflected in titles such as ‘Folk LPs and No TV’, ‘Stopping for Fish and Chips’ and as cited above, ‘Afternoons Waiting in Libraries’. Events are reported in detail.

                 Evenings were spent at home
                 Drinking my parents’ wine
                 Eating thick slabs of cheese
                 Grilled on toast while watching
                 Day night cricket matches on telly.
                 Or if the Austudy hadn’t run out, 
                 Drinking Carlton Draught downtown
                 In the Shamrock Hotel or the Rifle Brigade…

Events of the heart are often presented in a similarly descriptive style, “oscillating between melancholy and desire” (Anna Karenina in Canberra), with a reliance, sometimes, on the use of adverbs.

                 She needed someone to hold. 
                 I eagerly took up the task,
                 Tracing the contours of her
                 Delicate face with my finger,
                 Gratefully inhaling her warm breath,
                 Entwining my limbs with hers…
                                                     (“The Present”)

I think the impact of this can be to emphasise the physical detail at the expense of the emotional impact and hence, to lessen the likelihood of surprise. I found myself sometimes wishing O’Reilly would place more trust in his reader. On the other hand, I was taken with the way he presented some of his ideas so evocatively. His strongest poetry alluded to possibilities. This was particularly evident in some of his endings:

“Saying yes, yes to the unknown” (The Present) or “you showed us the world, then let us go” (Mentor) and the last line of the book, “The Trinity of your Australian Life”.

This final example ends one of the most moving poems of the collection, ‘Requiem’, in which the internationally situated grandson is not able to attend his grandfather’s funeral in Australia due to the pending birth of his child. A poem based on such poignant points of the cycle of life, with the inherent knowledge that this man was not able to hold his dying grandfather and the great-grandfather will never hold his grandchild would have to affect the reader.  But it is the details of the grandson that made this poem live for me. Images of the expatriate grandson; opening the package containing his grandfather’s “duct-taped binoculars and dusty green corduroy cap”, being held by his wife “as he sat on the toilet and wept”, of remembering his music and stories and potato crop while he held his newly born daughter. Poetry rich with imagery but controlled by emotional truth is a potent poetic combination.

The title poem “Symptoms of Homesickness” works differently from others in this book, but cleverly. The expatriate protagonist laments somewhat ironically, the aspects of Australian life he misses, and with his musings, the tone shifts from poignant to self- deprecating to funny. So it is a shock when the final lines read,

                     When the pain is almost too much to bear.
                     Wondering how much it costs to fly a body home.

Although I would call for a tightening of the poetic technique and editing in Symptoms of Homesickness, it is a work that has me buzzing. Its content is interesting and does the important work of preserving a unique cultural history within the Australian experience. Most significantly, it projects work with a distinctive Australian voice. Elements of the poetry are entertaining, beautiful and frank. I am grateful to the poet-teacher in ‘Mentor’ who “convinced a roomful of teenagers that poetry matters”. The most significant poems have me excited about the future possibilities that we are likely to see from this poet. I will be queuing to buy his first full-length manuscript.

E. A. GLEESON‘s poetry collection, In between the dancing, received the award for Best First Manuscript and was published by Interactive Press in 2008. Anne lives in Daylesford, Victoria where she works as a Funeral Director.

Water the Moon

by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Marick Press

2009

ISBN 9781934851128 

Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY

In his essay “Transnational Poetics,” Jahan Ramazani argues that mononational narratives of modern and contemporary poetry are inadequate in view of the cross-cultural mobility and rampant border-crossing-and-straddling that many poets of “transnational affiliations and identities” perform. Convincingly, Ramazani traces the beginnings of transnational poetics to expatriate modernists like Gertrude Stein, who announces “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.”

The transnational poetics Ramazani advocates is necessary to understanding the works of contemporary poets with multiple cultural and national affiliations, a good example of whom is Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who like Stein, has made Paris an adopted hometown. Born in Singapore, Sze-Lorrain is an acclaimed gucheng (Chinese zither) whose international performing career from a young age ensures that she is well-travelled and global in outlook. In these exquisitely tuned poems of her debut collection Water the Moon, her musical vocation is translated into poetic terms, the lyric ear trained to capture the subtlest shifts in cadence, weaving into the lyric line a range of geographical and cultural locales and remembrances. Around Paris the collection orbits, including elegies and tributes to Steichen, Arbus, Bonnard, Van Gogh, Man Ray, Picasso, all revealing an eclectic, cosmopolitan passion that seeks to absorb into the lyric influences from the visual arts. Paris and its cosmopolitan air also provides the springboard and counterpoint for the more intimate poems of familial history that return to the poet’s ethnic and cultural roots.

Perhaps the most compelling moments in the collection occur when Sze-Lorrain transplants her cultural inheritance into the international milieu of Paris, mining her Chinese and Singapore past for memories that could mediate between expatriation and loss. These happens mostly in the first part of the triptych that forms the collection; it is primarily memorial in tone and familial in focus. The key figure here is the poet’s grandmother, a presence/absence that is also an emblem of national and cultural origins. The opening poem “My Grandmother Waters the Moon” deploys the culinary trope that is common but vital to Chinese diasporic writing. Here the tradition of making and eating mooncakes is celebrated in absentia – the grandmother is dead and the poet is now displaced from the country where the ritual originated and the other country where her grandmother had made it a special occasion for the grand-daughter. The poem begins with a vivid re-enactment of the ritual, a rehearsal of the grandmother’s mooncake recipe, with the matriarch in the kitchen preparing the ingredients. Then it shifts from the indicative to the imperative, the baking instructions placing the poet and reader squarely in the midst of the grandmother’s domain, revealing memory’s power to transcend time and place. Embedded into the familial narrative is also the historical origin of the mooncake festival; the mooncake was used to conceal messages inciting rebellion against the Mongols during the Yuan Dynasty:

About histories, she is seldom wrong.

Time to transform the mooncakes golden —

oven heat for thirty minutes. Her discreet

signature before this last phase: watering

green tea over each chalked face. What is she

imagining again? That someday grasses

sprout with flowers on the moon?

All autumn she dreamt of stealing

that cupful of sky. A snack

to nibble for her granddaughter, the baby

me, wafts of caked fragrance

a lullaby, tucked in an apron, sleeping on her back.

The vignette braids memories of her grandmother and homeland into a lyric that salves the pangs of loss attendant upon taking up an expatriate or emigrant life in the west, evoking a moment of generational intimacy and continuity.

But the nostalgia is not simple; there are also gaps and absences that memory fails to resolves. “Reading Grandmother” grieves over the death of the poet’s grandmother while “Par avion” reveals the physical and emotional distance between father and daughter who are “two cultures apart.” If the grandmother represents the matrilineal heritage that the poet reveres and identifies with, the grandfather is a more remote figure and problematic figure. In “The Sun Temple” the poet is alienated from her grandfather and what he represents – Confucian values and the repressive patriarchal structure that her grandmother was at home in: “I tremble to realise that I can no longer/ remember my grandfather – I am merely a tourist.”

While the first part returns to ethnic and cultural sites, the second suite of poems is located in Paris and deals with the migrant’s narrative of settlement and acculturation. As in the first section, culinary motifs perform a mnemonic and mediating role between the present and the past, Paris and the ancestral homeland. While the culinary images in the first section connect the poet with her cultural and familial origins, the gastronomic tropes here explore the poet’s migrant experience. In “Breakfast, Rue Sainte-Anne” a bowl of Chinese porridge triggers off memories of a more authentic cuisine, and of the poet’s father and the “old rickshaw streets of Shanghai.” The other gastronomic poems – “Snapshots from a Siamese Banquet,” “L’Assiette des Trois Amis,” “Eating Grilled Langoustines,” while finely crafted, are perhaps too conscious of their delectable themes and textures, to offer any memorable insights into the relationship between food and identity. Perhaps the strongest lyric is “Rendez-vous at Pont des Arts,” inspired by Brassaï’s soft-focus black-and-white photograph of the bridge:

Days connect years, years become place —

You travel over dreams or on bicycle.

Will I find you at Pont des Arts?

Moon crossing bridge in vanishing starts.

This is classic Paris, but refreshed and made more resonant by a migrant Chinese perspective, the central image of the moon illuminating a sense of fleeting love and belonging:

 The last section, appropriately captioned “The Key is Always Open,” advances the poet’s aesthetic credo. It pays homage to a host of artists and writers, among them Celan, Steichen, Chopin, Van Gogh. The globally encompassing reach reveals the diverse formative and sustaining sources of the poet’s lyric art, and at the same time allows her to transcend her ethnic and cultural origins. “Instructions: No Meeting No World” enunciates a transnational, cosmopolitan poetics above one’s cultural heritage; it counsels “Leave your roots. Leave your ancestors,” as “No life is measured by absence.” The ars poetica embraces a melange of cultural and national sites and practices, weaving them “so that past, present and future/

swells in one immense ocean.”

Water the Moon is a fine example of Ramazani’s “poetic transnationalism,” which allows us to “read ourselves as imaginative citizens of not one or another hermetically sealed national or civilizational bloc, but of intellectual worlds that ceaselessly overlap, intersect, and converge.” There is passion balanced with meditative calm, memory tuned by harmonies of the past and present, and above all a graceful, elegant music in these probing poems of displacement, love, art and loss.

BOEY KIM CHENG teaches writing at the University of Newcastle. He lives in Berowra with his wife and children.

When I’m trapping on the Foggy, / fifteen miles off Catherine Hill Bay, / the world is good” (“Trapping on the Foggy”, lines 1-3) writes Anthony Lawrence in his faux-simplistic manner. In his earlier collections, Lawrence often explores traditionally masculine activities, carried out by men in the company of men, like the drinking and pool-playing at the Anna Bay Tavern in “Lines for David Reiter”, or in solitude, fishing and remembering. The solitary moments are often filled with the urgency of being-in-the-world: the voice plays with these masculine scenes; its subtlety and sensuality is neither obviously male nor female, but both. The themes are human above all, and the voice encompasses many unexpected nuances. In a sense, this renders the voice ‘genderless’, a quality that allows for a more honest probing of the self and the landscape, an honesty that in later collections has seen Lawrence explore trauma  and grief by mapping the emotional landscape with sincerity and integrity.

In “Trapping on the Foggy”, we see the narrator reconciling his Other self, his place in the world, and his childhood. This poem is an excellent example of the deceptive simplicity at play in Lawrence’s work, where fishing is never merely fishing. Indeed, the small slice of universe the persona inhabits in this moment is soon encroached upon by the surrounding world; its wickedness enters already in the next stanza on a local as well as international level:  “In the morning paper, a murder / in Leichhardt; someone’s fist / photographed under rubble in Mexico” (lines 4-6). Even though the natural environment offers some consolation when the “wind makes calm / the most violent of days” (lines 7-8), this is not where Lawrence leaves us. Rather than pursuing the redeeming features of beautiful and uncorrupted Nature, he turns to the image of the tankers that come and go, which place us so visibly in the vicinity of Newcastle, Australia’s biggest coal port—few are the children who have not counted ships on its horizon. It also places us in the larger context of post-industrialisation, and the contemporary pastoral. These lines echo Charles Wright’s “Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night”, where the oil rigs off Long Beach are “like floating lanterns out in the smog-dark Pacific” (line 3), man-made intrusions in the pristine environment (albeit one where the native flora has already been tampered with: the stars are in the eucalyptus, a species introduced to California for its fast growth and commercial value).

Wright’s oil rigs are mirrored in the “mythic history of Western civilization, / Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac” (lines 14-15). Similarly, in Lawrence’s “The Barn, the Moon”, his persona turns upward and struggles to name what he sees, hinting at a conflict between two worlds. The cosmos invites a reading of the microcosm as the idea of the very large leads to the focus on the minute, on ‘you’—the real pinprick in the universe:

Tonight I saw two planets
aligned over the blunt rocket head
of the Point Moree lighthouse.
Guessing their names,
their position in the sky,
I thought of you.

(lines 27-32)

Wright’s (anti-)epiphany—“I have spent my life knowing nothing” (line 18)—comes explicitly from within, an acknowledgement of his existential condition. Lawrence’s epiphanies tend to come from elsewhere; in “Trapping on the Foggy”, as the persona falls into daydream, out of the depths of his subconscious emerges the memory of a shark:

It’s mostly routine, but once
a bronze whaler followed a trap
to the surface – it came out of the water
and laid its great head over the stern,
snapping in the air, tipping the runabout’s
nose to the sky. I looked into its eyes
and knew it wanted me. (lines 14-19)

The fisherman and Lawrence the poet are inextricably linked, the act of fishing a recurrent trope standing for the poetic act. Recurrent, too, are the hints of an underlying threat: the sharks; the sun, which is “a red balloon dragged under by the run of a surface predator” (“Carnarvon” (x) Collecting Live Bait at Dusk Under the One Mile Jetty, lines 16-17); and the funnel-web spiders “at the bottom / of swimming pools, sipping like deadly / pearls their bubbles of oxygen” (“Black Yolk and Poison”, lines 3-5).

Above all, Lawrence’s relationship with the sea is one marked by sensuality and intimacy:

And with every trap, I release myself
slowly, descending through miles
of green, sun-shafted water, down
through the bubbles, in touch with everything.
(“Trapping on the Foggy”, lines 23-26)

The sensuous moment exemplifies this physical knowledge that one gains knowing the world through the senses, through the body. Many poems touch on this affinity and relationship with the sea, and the sexual undertones are sometimes more explicit. The legs of the redbacks in “Black Yolk and Poison” are “like fingers touching fishing line, / translating vibration into hunger, / hunger into death” (Lines 10-12), hinting at the most human of needs. In “Shearwaters,” the qualities of the sea are hard to separate from those of a woman:

an incoming tide of shapes
that merge to seed a furrow
where the sea’s dark pelt and raining wind combine –

[…]

Can the scent and texture of our skin be changed
by such encounters? (Lines 7-9 & 25-26)

The process of creating a poem has a prominent role in Lawrence’s work, as theme and as subject matter. It is as if the poetry cannot be escaped, as if, whether he’s holding a pen or a fishing rod, Lawrence is always writing. This sensation is accompanied by a certain weight. His worlds become one when the lure hits the water, because it must sink into other depths; however, the fishing trope can conjure up an artifice. The idea of being constantly conscious of the meaning of an experience, of its immediacy and pertinence, is exhausting, and potentially means that all moments are tampered with, created, man-made. There are certainly occasions when an indulgence in stylistics and the poems’ self-referentiality dominate:

A pair of sooty oystercatchers are probing
an oyster-blistered mantle of exposed reef
with their red beakspikes. I’ve found it’s
often best to wait a few days before turning
such things into poetry, but the accurate
wading and stabbing of the birds demands
immediate attention.
(“Sooty Oystercatchers, Venus Tusk Fish”, lines 1-7)

Here, a chasm is revealed—the writer cannot fully inhabit the moment: he is changing it through the interpretation he is making (and, notably, its opposite is also true: “I move and I am changed, then changed again / by the telling of it” (“Shearwaters”, lines 34-35)).

In “The Barn, the Moon”, Lawrence offers memorable images and another glimpse of his aesthetics: for Lawrence, poetry is part of the natural order, and the only way to make sense of our place within it:

Some things emerge
from the day’s ordered scene
to arrest our inner attention,
and we respond to them,
using words or actions
until they pass, or remain
to build a small fire in our sides:
sunset through a pane of dimpled glass,
and the table is gold.
I respond with a shock of emotion
these words make visible. (lines 1-11)

Not until the words are written, and the images are translated, do their true significance and effect become real. The reflexive element notwithstanding, Lawrence gives equal attention to his narrative selves and the craft, like in “Trapping on the Foggy”, where he skilfully navigates the gaps and achieves a precarious balance through a Wordsworthian return to lost time:  “I’m a child again,” he writes, “staring into tidal pools, my hands bent / and pale in clear water, counting bright shells” (lines 37-39). Memory is critical to Lawrence:  indeed, to “move beyond the place / where memory harvests meaning” (“Shearwaters”, lines 35-36) is to allow the past a vivid presence.

Clearly, Lawrence is not, as his imagery might suggest, merely a landscape or nature poet. His real exploration is of the inner landscape and the processes at play in being a man and in being a poet. Unlike Murray or Kinsella, Lawrence does not evince a political agenda; nor does he aim to define the Australian landscape and its people. Lawrence makes no grand statements; his is a much more personal, private, and autobiographical poetry. His kinship with the sea resembles Robert Adamson’s affinity with the Hawkesbury, a nourishing and absolutely essential relationship that sees Lawrence, with playful awareness, “finger[ing] the handline like a downcast kite, / translating each bite into possibilities” (“Trapping on the Foggy”, lines 29-30).

The simultaneous presence and absence in Lawrence work—his tacking between inner and outer landscapes—allows for a poetry that speaks eloquently of love and loss; these deeper resonances become more pronounced in his later collections. The mantra that is “The Syllables in Your Name” is whispered in a faraway place, further underscoring the separation. “Infidelity and the Punishments Available” evokes distances growing larger by each stanza. In his lyrical poems Lawrence steers us into another type of unchartered waters: those of the strong psychological states into which he invites his audience. With honesty and openness he speaks of alienation, love, and madness, and again of the role of writing; art, for Lawrence, has become an instrument with which he navigates inner selves and landscapes. In these poems, too, the sea tropes have a prominent place: in “Tidal Dreaming” the narrator ponders having left his “body’s sleeping anchorage” (line 9) and the two characters are in “the wide bays of each other’s arms” (line 10). When Lawrence moves from the narrative into the more lyrical voice, and blurs the line between wake and sleep in this poem, the sensuality of the voice is poignant:

No need to question how far we travel
when behind our eyes time and distance
disengage their symbols to flicker and collapse
 like glass in the skylight of a kaleidoscope.
When I lean forward to kiss you, pine needles
fall from my hair. (Lines 14-19)

This is a beautiful, loving, and most intimate moment to which we are privy. Lawrence’s lyrical poems are secretive, opening doors to rooms that not everyone can enter, and where the masculine imagery all but disappears. In these rooms, “rainbows hang in a bloom of spray” (“Just Below the Falls”, line 24) and a narrator divulges a truth in which we may all share: “I’ve been trying for years / to heal the private wounds of my life” (“The Aerialist”, lines 52-53).  

In newer poems, like “Scars and their Origins”, there is also a noticeable shift in how Lawrence approaches both the moment and the writing of it:

I learned how to listen and when to distance
myself from the moment, and where I once
went to school on the immediate
and the external, now all I have to do
is remember how you wept and turned away
from the open lesions of my anger.
(lines 9-14)

The distance from the moment allows for a different vision, and a space for healing. When Lawrence describes trauma, he takes a more direct approach to his craft and the snare of memory and guilt. His voice is unswerving, and the metaphors less engineered. This is certainly true in “Just Below the Falls”, which suggests a fall in mood and the crucial role of writing to existence and survival:

It’s been coming on for days, entering my speech
and sleep, bringing news from the other side.

This is how it is, where the sandstone ledge
I’m standing on is breaking away, and the whipbird’s
ricochet is lost to water’s thunder.

Something will happen if I stand here long enough –
a poem will come or the ledge give way,
though I’m through with falling back on the notion
of the suffering artist – we all have our demons
to contend with in our time.
(lines 13-22)

Lawrence’s seductive entanglement of the subject and the poem is an invitation to a most intimate moment: the imagery and sensory connection leaves the subject vulnerable, to his predicament and to his audience. This is a careful balancing act, and one at which Lawrence excels. It is a large task, bridging the gaps between inner and outer landscapes, the craft and the image, and the past and the present, but one to which Lawrence is committed. A painful and arduous act, remembrance is ultimately a saving performance—one that keeps us from falling “captive to the constant / awful noise of reclusiveness” (“In the Shadows of a Rockspill”, lines 14-15).

WORKS CITED

Lawrence, A. “Black Yolk and Poison”, in Three days out of Tidal Town, 2002: Sydney, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited.

Lawrence, A. “Carnarvon” (x) Collecting Live Bait at Dusk Under the One Mile Jetty, in Three days out of Tidal Town, 2002: Sydney, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited.

Lawrence, A. “Lines for David Reiter”, in Three days out of Tidal Town, 2002: Sydney, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited.

Lawrence, A. “Sooty Oystercatchers, Venus Tusk Fish”, in The Darkwood Aquarium, 1993: Ringwood, Penguin Books Australia Ltd.

Lawrence, A. “The Barn, the Moon”, in Cold Wires of Rain, 1995: Ringwood, Penguin Books Australia Ltd.

 Lawrence, A. “The Queensland Lungfish”, in Cold Wires of Rain, 1995: Ringwood, Penguin Books Australia Ltd.

Lawrence, A. “Trapping on the Foggy”, in Three days out of Tidal Town, 2002: Sydney, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited.

Wright, C. “Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night,” in Chickamauga, 1995: New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

 Dark Bright Doors                                                                            

by Jill Jones

Wakefield Press

ISBN 9781862548817

Reviewed by  KERI GLASTONBURY

The titles of Jill Jones’ most recent full-length collections, Broken/Open (Salt Publishing, 2005) and her latest, Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), have the contrariness of koans. There is something deliberately ‘puzzlingly poetic’ about them, and as in Jones’ poetry language is deployed as a decoy. Part of me resists this residual idea of the poet as a kind of sage, with the reader positioned as an initiate who must work for cathexis, yet I am also conscious that the experience of reading Jill Jones’ work is an active one. The act of reading becomes a participatory force, necessary to re-energise the detritus of language once the poet has left it. If the nervous system is the body’s communication network, then rather than ethereal disembodiment perhaps Jones allows for the synaptic relationship of poet and reader, from one nervous system to another.

A quietly prolific poet in many respects, Jones does seem to embrace poetry as an everyday ‘practice’. In her review of Dark Bright Doors (ABR, June 2010) Gig Ryan refers to the book’s ‘repetitive vocabulary’, and she isolates two distinct poetic modes that Jones employs: one relying on a form of phenomenological gesture and the other more ‘grounded in the everyday’. I think Jones’ poems work best and are at their most experiential when these two elements are combined, realising the chiaroscuro of the title’s Dark Bright Doors and most effectively capturing the duel sense of ‘being-in-the-worldness’ that the poet strives for. Some of the shorter gestural poems read more like philosophical exercises and I preferred the poems that also contain cultural—as much as natural—weathering, or poems where the transcendental image is usurped by a pithy turn of phrase: ‘gulls riding / what’s left of the air’ (High Wind At Kekerengu). While still predominantly a poet of city and suburb any dichotomy between nature and culture is a false economy in Jones’ poetry, with Jones positioning herself as an intermediatry (not afraid to invoke birds and clouds and flowers). It’s as if she won’t allow the so-called ‘school of quietitude’ to have a monopoly over the metaphysical (as is foregrounded in the somewhat cliché choice of quote on the front cover: ‘poetry of unsettling mystery and beauty’).

Last year Jill Jones co-edited with Michael Farrell Out of the Box: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher & Wattman, 2009) which was notable for its post-identity poetic. I can’t help but read Jones as part of a lineage that would see her partly inheriting and partly resisting the poetry of, say, Pam Brown and Joanne Burns (the poem ‘Esplanade Blues’, for example, could have just as easily have been written by either). Overall, however, I find Jones writes with Burns psychic radar, but less ironic distance and Brown’s interest in the contemporary moment, sans the critical personism. Perhaps the link is as much that all three poets seem to have been recently widely published, with the inevitable risk of establishing individual orthodoxies. That said, of the three, it is Jones who has taken her work into the ‘realm of the senses’ and somewhat changed ‘camps’. Where Burns and Brown remain sceptical, Jones’ work absorbs a recent turn to the language of imagination and ecology. Jones’ resistance to the traditional lyric ‘I’ seems more broadly linked to post-humanist philosophies. This may also have come out of her Doctorate of Creative Arts at UTS with Martin Harrison, another Out of the Box poet whose influence I can read in Jones’ recent poetics, along with the American Objectivists in poems like ‘The Thought Of an Autobiographical Poem Troubles & Eludes Me’:

So I’ve been leaning against

the names of things

not just walls but the very air

the rug, the pen

the silver garbage bin.

and even William Carlos Williams (in poems such as ‘Sorry I’m Late’).

Fittingly for a book published by Wakefield Press (considering Jones now lives in Adelaide) it is possible to read some autobiographical trajectories into Dark Bright Doors, particularly in the poems that refer to Adelaide (however obliquely), New Zealand, Sydney and Paris. It’s a book about movement and distances, but refuses to indulge in direct declamation, as Scott Patrick Mitchell writes in his review of the book: ‘It tetters on the edge of things with a sensual energy’ (Out in Perth). Sometimes I find Jones’ obfuscations too ponderous and in this era of climate change her references to the weather akin to dressing up old poetic tropes as contemporary geosophy. The many shorter poems in this collection, however, build a pressure system much like a weather map with lows and highs, often coming together exquisitely in the more dense poems such as ‘O Fortuna’.

                                                            …Surely

the end is nigh and it’s a faith squeeze, when to be

heterodox, when to hold the line, which comes at you

up front and always, always leaves you past, belated,

but still humid with life at the turnstyles pushing

another weekly into the slot, watching it burst

up again. While folding your damp umbrella

into these sharp hectic hours, you keep appearing.

Jones’ poems are the Dark Bright Doors of perception of the title. This collection continues an experimental tradition in contemporary poetry that refuses some of post-modernism’s past binaries and opens up poetry’s radar as a par exemplar for registering life’s and language’s atmospherics, ensuring (to borrow from another book title) that everything is illuminated.

KERI GLASTONBURY is a lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Newcastle, her poetry collection ‘grit salute’ will be published by SOI3 in 2011.