Author: mascara

Ashley Capes Reviews “Readings From Wheeling Motel” by Franz Wright, Music by Michael Rozon, Daniel Ahearn

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Readings from Wheeling Motel

by Franz Wright

Produced by Daniel Ahearn, Chris Ahearn

Music by Michael Rozon, with Daniel Ahearn

Riparian Records 2009
Recorded by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

http://readingsfromwheelingmotel.bandcamp.com/

Reviewed by ASHLEY CAPES

A musical collaboration between the US poet Franz Wright and Los Angeles musicians/producers Daniel Ahearn (Ill Lit) and Michael Rozon (Brazzaville, Melvins).

When I received Readings from Wheeling Motel, by Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, Franz Wright, I was immediately struck by how convincing Wright was as a reader. He does not rush a single moment, and brings a sense of assuredness to the recording, with his willingness to leave space where space is needed. Having Ahearn travel to the poet’s home in Waltham, MA to record the readings may have added to this, as the studio can be a demanding place, where budgets and schedules often hang over a performer.

The publisher notes that the original music, recorded by Ahearn and Rozon in Los Angeles, “creates a dreamy counterpoint to Wright’s delicate, deliberate lines” and “offers the rare opportunity to experience this world-class poet in a uniquely personal and direct manner.”

I agree. It is a highly personal experience, at times an unnerving one too, both musically and thematically. An extensively self-referential collection of pieces, conviction comes from a willingness to both examine and criticise the self. Even to run across the bruises at times, as in the mercenary tradition of much poetry, Wright tears through his own life and ends up sharing stunning material. “Night Flight Turbulence” is a perfect example of a personal moment becoming shared, through both its interaction with the music and the listener. The recording builds a tight space around the narrator, enhanced by heavy, reverb-drenched atmosphere, courtesy of the piano’s legato phrasing and reversed guitar. Wright’s expression of confinement is made more tangible with a word choice that is both conversational and abstract:

               In the greenly-lit restroom,
               I looked pretty ill, like
               a vampire locked in
               a confessional;
               the drug had no effect
               whatsoever, maybe
               slightly more arctic and fearful.

Here and throughout, Wright’s voice is like an anchor, holding everything in place. The music moves around and beneath his raspy tone, never intruding, but instead supporting his imagery and deft use of metaphor and simile. At times the music almost sounds like it chills him, despite being recorded after his reading.

Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue seems comparable. Both recordings are musically cool and reflective, often pensive, or simply dark. And both voices are deep, raspy and weathered, but clear (though more so in the case of Wright). And it’s that clarity of voice that’s so frequently mirrored in his poems – “At 54” is a wonderful moment of revelation, where ‘place’ becomes everything:

And I can’t wait

               to return to this chair
               in which I am sitting, this
               world, the one where

               each object stands
               for nothing at all but
               its own inexplicable existence.

Listening to Wright read his poetry, I found myself at his mercy; I experienced each piece like a movie – knowing so little about what was coming next. It kept me involved in a way that was different to the page. In fact, one of the greatest challenges in writing about Readings from Wheeling Motel, is that I can only show you the words, I can’t let you hear them. And it’s important to feel the way in which the intensity of the poetry is counter-balanced by Wright’s calm, measured reading, the open, unobtrusive music. Now, when I re-read sections of the poems here, the intensity is stronger than the calm. Wright, who has battled alcoholism, addiction and psychiatric illness, is biting when it comes to the limitations of prescription therapy, as with “Paediatric Suicide”, which begins with the line:

Being who you are is not a disorder.
Being unloved is not psychiatric disorder.

This launches an attack, going well beyond defiance:

And seeing a psychiatrist for 15 minutes per month

some subdoormat psychiatrist, writing for just what you
need lots more drugs

               to pay his mortgage Lexus lease and child’s future tuition
                          while pondering which wine to have for
                          dinner is not effective

treatment for friendless and permanent sadness.

Child your sick smile is the border of sleep.

The poem is one of the most beautiful and heart-rending of the collection. For as much as it is haunting, brooding and bleak, there is beauty, defiance and strength. Wright’s mix of tenderness and harsh realism weaves its way through so many poems, like “Waltham Catholic Cemetery” or one of the longer pieces, “With a Child”:

                                                 And the words
               for these things are so terribly small;
               and the world of those words

               only slightly less mortal
               than this instant of taking your hand,
               of taking care to look both ways,
               not to squeeze too hard, or be too aware
               that no such mercy will be proffered

by a world that has no need
of words, or us.

At times it sounds like Wright is searching for and finding the right words, as if he does this ‘live’ as he reads. This space is used to great effect, such as in the list-like poem “Intake Interview,” where each line is given the room to stand alone:

        Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one
                               else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination
                               of indigenous populations?

The entire recording is sequenced with space in mind. During the poems and between them, there is enough time to feel or think, between one poem and the next. The music, at times quite dramatic, though usually so understated, is transitional between pieces, but also allows the listener room to absorb the poem themselves.

The impressionistic sketches and musical fragments (arranged by a big supporting cast) comprise at the least, piano, pedal steel, nylon acoustic (on the delicate “Out of Delusion,”) electric guitar, wordless vocals. During “Day One”, a simple, hard drumbeat underscores the humour in the piece:

               Good morning, class. Today
               we’re going to be discussing
               the deplorable adventures
               of Franz Wright and his gory flute.
               Just kidding.

One of the more dissonant pieces of music in the recording is from “Abuse,” which brings a silent film or saloon to mind, with an off-kilter feel, one that is a surprising but not unwelcome contrast with the rest of the collection.

“Bumming a Cigarette” follows and returns to a slow, marching tone, for one of the most harrowing moments as Wright seems to accuse himself of becoming his father, who also suffered with alcoholism and who eventually died after being diagnosed with cancer of the tongue:

               And you can only armour yourself in death-wish for so long, the
               blows are not muffled, it will save you from nothing;
               and the idiot drive to go on, and actually be glad to go on,
               keeps breaking through, ruining everything, even
               this last chance for some sort of peace.

The collection does have the feel, at times, of a startling eulogy. Death features large in the collection, both its inevitability and, perhaps, its inability to be explained away by religion (“Everyone, Lord who wakes up in a cell./Everyone Lord who wakes up in the cancer bed.” from “No Answer No Why”). I came to the closing track looking for something tender, more hopeful, and “Wheeling Motel” delivers this. Settling on a reflective moment, it is framed beautifully by piano and a wordless vocal with a gospel, Amazing Grace/Great Gig in the Sky-feel, where Wright closes with an echo, subverting the famous American Civil War poem and personalising the conflict by referencing himself and his father, suggesting an ability to reconcile, to forgive:

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

It’s a privilege to be introduced to Wright’s work in this manner. Hearing a recording is an experience that many of us will never have. There are poets from the past whose readings are impossible to record. Contemporary poets may be prohibited, or lack the opportunity. There are so many stumbling blocks between poet and listener. But here, Ahearn, Rozon and Wright tear them down and present the poetry in a way that brings the reader, in Ahearn’s words “disorientation, transcendence, a strange peace.”

Andy Quan Reviews “Equal To The Earth” by Jee Leong Koh

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Equal To The Earth

by Jee Leong Koh

Bench Press, 2009

http://www.benchpresspoetry.com/

Reviewed by ANDY QUAN

Poetry is both universal and specific. Its rhythms and cadences can tap into something like an original language. An image or sentence might reach deeply inside of you telling you that your understanding of the world is shared with others.

At the same time, poetry can be the most specific of experiences. The music of a poem may require it to be read with its native accent. A set of cultural, geographical or temporal references may lose a reader completely.

In this way, I find Jee Leong Koh’s first collection of poetry, Equal to the Earth, published by Bench Press, particularly interesting in how it will connect with different readers: immigrants and ex-pats, gays and straights, lovers of language and rhyme. As a gay Asian poet, living outside of the country I was born in, I feel a kindred spirit in Koh, while conscious of our differences.

Koh’s use of rhyme and formal poetic structures is one of these differences. An Australian novelist and critic, Ian McFarlane, wrote in the Australian Literary Review (3 Feb 2010): “Until quite recently rhyme was crime and sniffingly discarded from the poetry editor’s slush pile, preferably with a pair of surgical tongs.” But he proposed that “we are disposed to rhythm and rhyme”, noting Nicholson Baker’s notion “that rhyme provides poetry’s true form”.

I note my cultural bias. My Canadian peers and role models most often wrote in free verse charged with conversational rhythm. So, I’m not inclined to rhyme but was impressed with Koh’s experimentation with rhyme and form, and caught myself noting how subtle rhymes could elevate an idea into song, enlivening phrase and sentence (in the poems “Pedestrian” and “Actual Landing”), and matched at times with gentle play and humour I (“Spinoza on Love”, “Thank you, thank you”).

A few poems I thought weaker had a central idea, and rhyme, but not enough internal energy to set them alight. I wondered if the rhyme patterns were constraining the energy of language, stronger ideas and words unable to break free. But perhaps I’m biased as one of my favourite of his poems was rhymeless, an intimate lament:

we both know, my love, who is no longer my love,

we’re standing at the very edge of Long Island

but, no, neither wild nor desolate is the edge.

(“Montauk” p.79)

I prefer this voice of Koh’s, when he matches the intensity of what he is feeling with something that reaches for something that is all at once, grand, universal and specific. In a few poems, I detect a depth of emotion that is somehow dampened, almost tossed away so as not to hurt as much. A poem to his father, “What’s Left” has the themes of familial betrayal, neglect, duty and resentment, and yet I noticed more the rhyming structure, or the repetition of the “sigh”, his symbol for his grandfather. Which could be the point: an Asian stoicism rather than a stronger reaction, but the poem still left me flat. Similarly, in “New Year’s Resolution”, the narrator battles loneliness by treating it lightly and the conversational language (“your friends sincere and good-looking, sort of”) lacks charge.

I enjoyed the frank, bold narratives of the handful of sex-oriented poems (including “Glass Orgasm”, “Cold Pastoral” and “Chapter Six: Anal Sex) though as a fellow romantic, I worry for a narrator who “mistakes loneliness for love” and is excited by the sound of a man, more than any man he’s met. But lots of us poets are tragic romantics and will sense a kindred spirit in these passages.

What I was most impressed with was the first section of Equal to the Earth, “Hungry Ghosts”, in which the narrator inhabits different men from China’s history who were attracted to other men – it uses Asian imagery and ideas in ways that are not kitsch but instead playful and original and matches it with a voice that crackles with energy. (“…kings are threaded with assassins, / male favorites, butchers, turtleshell diviners…”; “…the graying calligraphy, / the bamboo ribs bound by a belt of twine and worn / by age and use.” p. 13-14)

At the end of this set of poems, unexpectedly, the narrative shifts to the present-day, where the narrator describes a simple walk and a soon-to-occur visit from his male lover. The speech is natural and truthful and charged all at once, the rhymes subtle; this voice I felt I could listen to for far longer than it lasts. I liked it also because it wasn’t reaching for a big idea or a closing line, and yet it was resonant with meaning – aging, parental acceptance, sexual identity, companionship – and in a way that is compact and perhaps more successful than the seven-part poem “Talk About New York” about a reunion with an old friend from Malaysia.

Sign me up for the next installment.

Critic John Leonard wrote in Five Bells (Autumn/Winter 2009) that poets “swim in a current of mutual encouragement” and argues for a “climate of debate” which will lead to better poetry and wider readership (p. 18). At the same time, what is exciting about younger and less established poets is a freshness of voice, an energy and enthusiasm; different than the wise, practised voice of established poets, but valuable in their own ways. So, what I’ve aimed for in this review is balance so that my praise for what I very much enjoyed in the book is made more truthful by pointing out what didn’t resonate with me. Though to each his own, I disclaim.

First books of poetry are often exciting and compelling as they introduce you to a poet’s concerns and give an idea of where a poet will go in his next book. I’ll be interested to see how Koh builds on his strengths: a light touch applied to the right topics, an openness and accessibility, strong feeling and inventive images rendered in original language. Beyond the poems as individual works, I feel a writer who is working hard at his craft, publishing widely, and excited by language.

Maya Khosla: Red-Tailed Hawk

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Fiction.

Maya Khosla was raised in India, England, Algeria, Burma, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Those cultures as well as her background in biology strongly shaped her writing. As an independent wildlife biologist, Maya is comfortable wandering through oak woodlands or waist-deep in silty waters (wearing chest waders). Her books include “Keel Bone,” (poetry from Bear Star Press; 2003 Dorothy Brunsman Award), “Web of Water: Life in Redwood Creek,” (nonfiction from Golden Gate National Park Conservancy Press, 1997) and “Heart of the Tearing,” (poetry from Red Dust Press 1995). Performing, teaching and writing have earned her awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Poets and Writers Inc., and the Ludvig Vogelstein Foundation.

Red-Tailed Hawk

The flowers you give

are my maps. If I am ever lost

their petals’ scent will pull me

toward your musk again.

January 1, 2008

It’s a cloud-lidded morning. Thoroughly soaked, the fenceposts lining my little backyard are stained so dark the lichen growing on them looks fluorescent green by comparison. Rain is a mark of auspicious beginnings, though Michael just walked out of my condo with his spare motorcycle helmet and running clothes.

“I’m moving to the Philippines, Tash,” he declared before leaving. “It’s home.”

He has often mused about emigrating. But the emphasis on home gave his announcement a ring of conviction I haven’t heard before. We were standing in my condo hallway next to the stairs going up to my bedroom, where we shared New Years resolutions last night. I searched the olive-green flecks mixed into the browns of his pupils that drew me in from the moment of our first date, years ago, when he lifted me into the air in spite of a sore left shoulder.

But this morning his eyes were too dark to see the greens. He sank to the edge of my second stair to tie his shoelaces.

Michael was raised in the Philippines. His Dominican mother, siblings and the online game company he works for are all based there. I’ve visited Manila, Kanlubang, and Makiling with him. I too have most of my family overseas, in India. So I sympathize with his sense of home in a distant country of seven thousand-plus islands. It’s the warmth, the ability to buy a single cigarette, to figure out ways to return home from office for an afternoon nap. It’s the tropical air that can get so heated and heavy with moisture that when it breaks into drizzle, it’s hard to notice the difference.

He stood again, filling my condo hallway.

“Give me a hug? I won’t be seeing you again.” He leaned forward, arms reaching, the fingers of his square hands spread. His lips were in a pout, his eyes focused, intent.

I shook my head. As if yielding meant he would leave my place, California, the country. As if leaving without that hug meant he would have to reconsider.

When he turned to fumble with the front door locks and pick up the helmet, his right hand came within inches of me. I felt an urge to grab and shake it vigorously. He slipped out and I held the door open, breathing in the scent of post-drizzle moisture.

Sun behind veils, salts of loss on the tongue. An Anna’s hummingbird dashed past in a streak of shiny vermilion, wings beating about eighty times a minute, like a pulse racing over words held down. Its speed emphasized its ground level opposite, a two-legged trapped as if in torpor, unable to rush out and beckon her partner back.

It’s quiet here; guilt deadbolts me in. I made him leave. My hallway looks whole shades dingier. The dining table and its contents, two freshly drained tea mugs, a persimmon and a sliver of leftover fruit loaf, shrink-wrapped in plastic, hold the weight of a recent conclusion. Upstairs, my unmade bed is too tousled to allow for a quick smoothing over. It needs to be stripped and redone.

The blooms he brought me yesterday are louder in his absence—red so saturated it looks wet. They are a reminder. We had planned a morning hike. The remainder of today was supposed to form neatly around the crystal of its there-and-back symmetry, the sweet scents and rush of blood and breath.

Last week’s storms have filled the North Bay’s soils and streams and enriched its forests and meadows with every color except this drained gray of sky. I have spent twelve winters here working out in the wild, so I know. Coho salmon are torpedoing up towards their deaths against the flow of swollen creeks. Frogs are emitting creaky calls from under umbrellas of dripping ferns. Bulb-bright highlights of new growth are re-greening every limb-tip of every bishop pine, redwood and fir. When a hawk alights, the branch gripped in its circlets of claws will shake and sway and splash. Winter wrens and varied thrushes in the vicinity will fall silent.

I haven’t the energy to emerge.

Michael is driving south to his home in Novato. Inside his car, he will switch the air vent back to ‘cold’ since I’m not with him. He will brush his hair impatiently with his left hand, the dark curls springing back after each stroke as if in protest. His eyes will be locked ahead as he waits for a chance to enter the right lane, glide past the slower car and swing back across highway dots and dashes.

The New Years resolutions we bantered about seem utterly irrelevant. Mine included accomplishing symbolic nuggets of what I hope to achieve within the next three hundred and sixty four days. “First thing’s first: begin it feeling new,” my mother used to launch forth. “Wear pressed clothes without a trace of past perfumes. Take six deep breaths at an open window. Make modest wishes…”

I do. Today they were good food and exercise, fresh air and water, a respectable chunk of work and a search for bobcats, raptors and frogs. These were the seeds I wanted to set, the emblems of my intentions for 2109.

Moving to the window, I twist the angle of the faux bamboo blinds and put my face close. A cold smell is all. A few weeks ago Michael gripped my battery-powered drill in both hands and worked on each fitting with single-minded diligence, asking me to hand him a nail here, a bracket or a blind there, stepping back to view it before moving on to the next one. Hours later he had installed them in all my windows. We whispered our verdict in unison.

“Wow!”

He drew down the new blind, placed my drill inside its blue box on the coffee table and closed the distance between us. When we kissed, a slight leak in his right nostril wet my upper lip. I moved to wipe myself and he drew back to clean his nose with a quick apology. He was just as quick to advance again. The thudding in my ears blended with the salts and frictions of touch and the nose-drip was forgotten — until we parted to climb the stairs and the same wet spot chilled with evaporation.

When I get the angle correct, cloud-light glances off the blinds’ buttery hue and lights up the red and yellow cushions scattered across two futons that frame one corner of my living room. On the shelf in my downstairs closet is the new brocade sweatshirt I planned to throw on before leaving. Next to it a blank space where Michael’s white motorcycle helmet was stored. The sight propels me upstairs. On the top shelf of my bedroom closet, his running tea shirt and shorts were kept folded next to my field shirts that have clung to their mud-and algae-stains through wash cycles. He’s neater than I am. He’s meticulous. Even the absence of clothes looks rectangular.

I can’t bring myself to move my shirts and woolen shawls over to fill the empty space. Leaving it empty falls in the same category as refusing him the goodbye-hug. It’s a safeguard that could protect against an absence so complete it’s irreversible. Against losing my grip on those arms that looked weighty with rest just hours ago in this room.

The dishes, counters, and tabletop are clean, the bed made. I pressed the persimmon from its ends so the flesh gave, easily, two halves of a whole. The orange flesh had the consistency of an overripe mango but was sweeter, chalkier, full of rich sugars and salts. It was comfort food.

I threw away the fruit loaf that began our quarrel. I had taken it out of the freezer and warmed it in lieu of my homemade date-oatmeal bars, which I had run out of.

Michael eyed the density of fruit and nut between bites.

“Who’s been here? You had a whole loaf a couple of days ago.”

“This? It’s been sitting in the freezer,” I argued.

Still chewing, he scanned my living room and shook his head.

“I don’t think so. Look at those two cushions lying by the fireplace. You’ve had company. Recently.”

I tried to remember when my friends Susan, Mella, and Sally had been over, whether they’d eaten much of the loaf. We had met sometime before Christmas, probably two weeks ago. Then I realized it didn’t matter what I said.

Michael was chuckling, shaking his head. “Tash, it’s obvious someone’s been here. Cozy evening with him?”

“You know what, Michael? Enough.”

He stared at his empty tea mug as though making a calculation. Then he sprang up. “You know what? It’s obvious you’re involved with someone. I’ll do the same.”

“I think you need to leave,” I heard myself say. He responded with the wide-eyed gaze of a frightened child. Then he went around the corner and I listened to the thump-thump of his feet up the stairs.

It’s 1:44 p.m. When I get online, Michael is there too.

“I am completely devasted and cant even breath,” he begins his chat.

He’s back. Except the misspellings reveal a carelessness rare for him.

He types, “I just can’t imagine being without the love of my life and yet I bring us so much pain and turmoil.”

It’s a shot of lucid light searing the gloom. Perhaps we’ll get through this. He writes that even his divorce was easier than losing me.

“You are not losing me!” I reply.

“It’s this seroquel,” he writes. “It’s making me crazy.” Seroquel is his latest antidepressant.

Two hundred and ten emoticons of a face in tears arrive on my screen. I have never understood how he does that so fast. I want to reach through the electronic windows separating us and cover the hands that type unfiltered fears and push the return button with the urgency of one who is trying to check his fall in a dream.

He does not mention the fruit loaf or cushions.

It’s a little over a mile to the cement-lined ponds and greens of Sonoma State University. I’ve worn my new sweatshirt for ritual’s sake, and a rain jacket over it. There are footprints ahead, but no one else is walking the Copeland Creek Trail now. No one is playing in the football field south of my path. The creek is invisible behind a riparian world that has risen like fire; swaths of green and nubs of new leaves-to-be are pointing skyward like a multitude of hopes. Their savings account, groundwater, is rich and gurgles underground like a secret.

There is a slap and suck to each step through muddy softness. Crossing a puddle the brown of soil-flour, I think of the hike we missed this morning. The same eight miles through Point Reyes National Seashore along Bear Valley Creek became a habit for us long before Michael’s counselor began giving him prescriptions for antidepressants. We stuck with the eight: Bear Valley Trail to Meadow, Meadow to Sky, Sky to Mt. Whittenberg and back down to Bear Valley. Is there some significance to our missing out on the first of the year? Was it best, asking him to leave when I did?

A white-crowned sparrow clings to a spindle-thin twig among a perfusion of bare branches. Its gold beak is an ember opening to release a series of plaintive trills. I watch with binoculars. It catches sight of me and dips into the creek-side tangle.

A red-tailed hawk circles on the air thermals above. Its tail swivels and I catch a glimpse the red dorsal feathers. My binoculars magnify the down-turned head, shifting slightly from side to side as it scans the football field. Hunting is a swift dream, mired in instinct but crisp with the single-minded focus of pursuit.

In a breath, it bunches up its wings, extends its claws and plunges fieldward. A predator’s drive looks so sure, yet it is in the dark about itself. The wings unfurl as claws touch grass. Now it’s hopping, now still. Apparently it has missed its target.

A few seasons ago I encountered a fallen red-tail. That too was a cloud-wrapped day. I was surveying for burrowing owls in rolling grasslands close to Altamont Pass, where wind turbines cover the ridge-tops for miles. The raptor must have collided with the turbine roaring above us.

“If you throw a large cloth over it,” a woman at the nearest wildlife rehabilitation center explained when I called, “it will calm down. If you don’t have one, back off or you’ll risk having your wrists lacerated.”

I shed my fleece jacket and spread it wide, measuring. It was no large cloth. I made a split-second decision and advanced in terror. The bird stood regal, head rising, hooked beak bared, crest feathers standing. They looked damp—rain or sweat? Every inch of its foot and a half tall body was designed to intimidate.

Still, I advanced closer. It took one hop away. The left wing was dragging in a pathetic antithesis of the poise that was using up so much of its body’s meager energy savings. It raised the talons of one leg at me with a predator’s regal fury. The beak was still bared. I couldn’t afford to hesitate. Let instant darkness calm it.

I had been given good rules over the phone; I had sat through training classes in Golden Gate Raptor Observatory before that. But when the moment closed in, adrenalin-fired fear eclipsed all thought.

I dropped my fleece on the bird and all was very quiet. I bent double and gathered up the raptor in my jacket. It had calmed down— immediately. It sat still, trapped, light as held breath.

Walking uphill with arms outstretched, I was panting soon. My car was parked under the wind turbine and its wails grew and grew as I neared the ridgeline. Inside my jacket, all was so still that there were moments when I was convinced the red-tail had slipped out. I turned back once, but the capture spot was already out of view.

Was it comfortable inside? Would it heal, hover in the updrafts again to decipher—the way no human eye can—the day-glow ultraviolet ribbons of mouse urine, the twitching, racing maneuvers that must look utterly futile from a bird’s eye view?

And most important, had I folded the broken wing correctly, given it enough breathing room?

I didn’t dare check. Awareness of a human face would have caused more stress to the bird. The questions were torture, though. They haven’t left me, though I now know one of the answers.

Alex Skovron

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and came to Australia aged nine. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Autographs (prose-poems, 2008), as well as a prose novella, The Poet (2005). Awards for his poetry include the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, and for his first book, The Rearrangement (1988), the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His novella was joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction. He lives in Melbourne and works as a freelance editor.

The Mist

We chased each other, childish, hilarious,
Round and around the lit kitchen table
That multiplied for cardgames, meals, painting
Of eggs at Easter, shelling of beans.

As I swerved laps of tablecloth – the mirth
Of the occasion as much a mystery
As a measure of the reason for itself –
A futileness, strange but convivial,

Passed like a limpid mist across the memory
Of something I had yet no right to know.
As if you think you could catch me, is one way
The mist translates itself. As if it matters …

It was a moment of pure insight, distilling
A recognition sharper than wisdom –
Bright as a giggle, its closing ellipsis
Muffled in the frenzy of our running.

The point, it laughed, and I understood:
Whether or not they caught me round that table
Was not the point. What mattered
Was the clamour of their wanting, the complicity

Of wood, the night at the window, the clock
And the crockery trembling above us,
The playcards scattered, our conspiracy
Of laughter – and most precious of all,

That shiver of a question, fleeting, permanent,
As if it could ever let go of me …

Night-Errand

A man lies awake gazing
at the curtain into the past
that hangs in front of his eyes.

He can discern shifting images
beyond the delicate gauze
and the ache in his diaphragm

Is pleasure and regret,
the silent curlicues of desire
trapped in the chamber’s gloom.

The future is hurting
but he knows nothing about the future,
he traces the trembled outlines

Of each dancing apparition
(for each dancing apparition is
himself), and struggles for focus.

He strains to re-enter
the cathedral of the past, it is prayer
(the past is prayer)

And he could worship there
if only the gauze would clear
and he touch the flesh

Of history. Because he needs
to know again, know
again, he needs to touch

The outlines, pry them apart,
push his entire being
into every last one of them

And maybe then, maybe
then he would know
why the curtain is forever

Stirring in the breeze
of his desires, why the gauze
shimmers like reprimand,

And why each curlicue
of the music that breathes him
is singing the irony of time.

Liam Ferney

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Liam Ferney is a former poetry editor of Australian online magazine, Cordite. His first collection Popular Mechanics was published by Interactive Press in 2005. He lives in Brisbane, Queensland.

“Room 14, please.”

Apparently Singapore is an island.

At the expat bakery

desperate for a macchiato.

It has been years since mangoes

& I wonder if too much rice

leads to forsaken cereal

while Obama wins a primary & Rudd says sorry.

The days between dispatches

have grown long & I can’t

gurney the dust from my knees.

& the noise from next door,

as unlikely as it seems,

a muezzin’s call to morning prayers.

Portraits of Famous People

“Even when the subject is different,

people paint the same painting.”

Andy Warhol

for Luke

It was supposed to have been a gift. When she asked for it back he had turned to stand in the doorway, as elegant as an apartment block. As rugged as William Holden he held secrets like trump cards. There was a right time for martinis but that had passed. “You were always going to leave,” she said. As wistfully as an unbeliever’s incantation. And he looked beyond the Bugatti appliances, out towards the balcony. This city was no grid. The characters: just imagined. And when the hour passed it disappeared. A click, indistinct from the 3600 that had proceeded it.

Houses of Neglect

A door ajar, the louvered window

through to a retreating brown roof,

the tips of the gums fingerpoking

into the oil paint perfect blue sky.

To win at this game you’ve got to lose;

every jazz man propping up a bar

scatting along with Trane about the one

that got away attests to this.

The problem is familiarity,

slipping in and out

of it’s private school uniform

forgetting that every star

is for someone a setting sun.

To avoid didacticism and melodrama

you play like a politician and keep it obtuse

not letting on, you still don’t understand

what it was you did

to leave everything as busted as a Nissan Pulsar

the colour of curdled milk, weeds pushing

through the floor in late summer humidity

like oil in a Texas dirtbowl.

The neighborhood cottoning on

and the parts start to disappear,

first the radio, then the battery, the alternator

some hoon strips the tyres before

the last cheeky monkey flogs the engine.

Vikram Teva Raj

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Vikram Teva Raj is a 24-year-old Singaporean in his second year of a Bachelor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. These two poems are his first published pieces. “An Old Vintage” was inspired by a Chinese rentmate, while “My Turkish Rentmate at 37” was about a Turkish rentmate, now 38. He lives comfortably, on account of never having shown them the things.

An Old Vintage

For Tony

A bird is long dead by my pathway home,

frosted over in the humidity of spring and stiff,

a crumbling baseball glove sloughed down to just the dark palm

and a taut white finger pointing down the road.

Here is our garden with the pruned tree

that in its day never failed to raid our laundry,

its green scissor-fingers now excised,

ghost limbs capped by beige fingernails

tight around a new feathering

like the shattered telltales of a more meaty diet.

The clouds are crossing like crazed yarn on a dark loom

that promises cold fire tailing up the breath of the road

right through my balcony door: a sliding grille under strong fabric

that you might expect to keep the rain inside down to a vague dust

but which is more like a fan leaning water in out of the wet.

Now I see a hand forming in the sky,

a long, ornate jester’s cap twisting slowly

like a compound whale, wrung by an invisible fist

to spout from each teat a slow, heavy liquid,

decanting the length of each belly

to filter down muslin miles to land.

As the rain’s curtains snap in the wind and the ground outside

trembles like a tight sail, I see again through unformed crystal

my Chinese father, pouring warm wine out for my new family,

pledging a dowry of close-smelling currency

sealed by the ancient unlit tallow

that melts between changing hands.

My Turkish Rentmate at 37

Reminiscent of NatGeo pics

of that sea eyed Afghan girl

before and after ten adult years,

her face clearly once magnificent

ravaged by her Turkish life spent

designing Renault dashboards

and famous brands of fridge.

She stutters around in English

asking our rentmate the unhappy professor

horrible, tactless things he patiently answers

like she was his wayward first son

paying attention again.

Coming in, she didn’t hide her disgust

at how moth-eaten the place was.

She gave up and then a week later

everything was new and she’d got herself a TV,

silently mouthing along with old Hollywood.

She was going to learn accounting

but her own balance meant a bad job now

but she thinks a hairdressing course

would be hard money in the long run.

The other day her door was open.

Table, toiletry bag, carpet, window,

it was all grey save her white down jacket

and black TV: dust-free,

her own Gone With The Dead

of windrows of ash neat enough

for answering machines.

Anindita Sengupta

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Anindita Sengupta’s full-length collection of poems City of Water was published by Sahitya Akademi earlier this year. Her work has previously been published in several journals including Eclectica, NthPosition, Quay, Yellow Medicine Review, Origami Condom, Pratilipi, Cha: An Asian Journal, Kritya, and Muse India. It has also appeared in the anthologies Mosaic (Unisun, 2008), Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009), and Poetry with Prakriti (Prakriti Foundation, 2010). In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing and in 2010, she received a writer’s fellowship from the Charles Wallace India Trust for the University of Kent, England. She has contributed articles to The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Outlook Traveler and Bangalore Mirror. She is also founder-editor of Ultra Violet, a site for contemporary feminism in India.

Entropy

(to grandfather)

A fuchsia scatter in the courtyard:
the bougainvillea dishevels.

Sheila and I squat on the back porch
where the clothesline frays in the wind.
Elephant grass gnaws at cement
and a spider silks the windows shut.

‘Weeds have outgrown
mangoes this year,’ she says,

rubbing her sheared head
with one hand. I light a cigarette.

We drag quick and sharp,
as if you’ll still tap down
the garden path, find us there,
grown-up children,
shame us with a frown.

The house falls in flecks—
our clutch of childhood
now wasteland, warm dust,
wormhole.

Storm-Chasing

I came to find the essence of it,
to taste on my tongue its whiteness
like sugar crystals.
I came for the blur and hurry,
the blurry hurl, the hurly-burly
of devastation.
I rattled up in a red jeep, battling
eyes open against wind.
Past my window flew bits of paper,
tin cans, a shirt from a forgotten clothesline.
I hunkered down, gripped the wheel,
and pressed my big toe
on the accelerator. (Speed was essential.
It would distract me from fear.)
I came for the infinite moment.
I came to chill the tornado’s coil
around me like a giant python.
I came to risk blood.
I came to inhale the un-breathable breath
and fill up like a balloon.
I came to burst or rise,
to dazzle through air like Dorothy,
to dissolve like stardust.
I came to find that one moment
when nothing mattered. Not sex
or sin or ache. Not even love.

There are things a storm can do to you, darling,
that you wouldn’t imagine.

We left Bombay to start over

We left Bombay to start over.
It was tumbling rain and vegetarians.
Strings of sausage, once hung like rosaries
at grocery stores, were replaced with rows
of frozen peas. Orange flags had gagged
lesbian flicks. Between polls and pools,
we didn’t know which was dirtier.
A stampede was due.
We left because there was money to be made
in a city with thighs of steel. We left
because hope is tiny and lodges
between a man’s ribs like cancer. But mostly,
we left because we were promised things.
We flew south like geese, twigged a nest
in the outsider neighborhood.
Flyovers flayed the city
but none would hook us across.
We didn’t know that then.
I sat in cafés, scrabbled for love,
stashed postcards like stamps,
tried to stop sneezing.
There comes a time
when home and home
begin to sound the same.
That hasn’t happened yet.
But I’m told a decade’s
too short.

Eileen Chong

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Poetry.

Eileen Chong is a Singapore-born, Sydney-based writer and photographer. An essay of hers was published in Hecate in 2008. Her poetry has appeared in the first issue of Meanjin this year. Her Polaroid photography has been featured in D2, a Norwegian arts magazine. She lives with her husband and two moggy cats.

What a poem is

A poem is a heavy thing. It weighs
as you scrub the potatoes,
rub them with salt, then decide
to boil them instead. A poem
is a heavy thing. You carry its strain
as you lay plates on the table, as you set
out cutlery. A poem is
a heavy thing. Even the brownness
of the chicken’s skin reminds you
of your grandfather’s hands
in the dirt. Of his feet on the deck
when he caught the fish. A poem is a heavy
thing. You’d wanted greens
but instead bought beansprouts, pale
with their arching necks, tails intact
because you couldn’t bear the smell
of your grandmother’s hours
at the sink: plucking, washing, plucking.
A poem is a heavy thing.
When your husband comes
home from work, you think
man, labour, dust, evensong
as he kisses you and asks
how your day was. Heavy,
you tell him. Heavy.

Blue Velvet

I bought her those shoes. I was the only one
who ever bought her shoes. I knew her
size. I knew what she liked. She’d always
picked on me, but I was the only one
who ever bought her shoes
in her size that she liked.

She had told her oldest son
that when death called
for her, she wanted to be wearing
those shoes. He said
they were house slippers, too flimsy
for her walk in the other world.

Yet in the end, afraid, he gave me
the shoes – hand-embroidered
with phoenixes decked out
in sequins, gold thread, green
beads for eyes – I sheathed
the old lady’s cold, rigid feet.

Thank god I had bought them
in blue, not red. She would not
have been allowed to been buried
in anything red. Not unless we wanted her
to come back from the dead, shuffling
in those slippers, going to the courtyard
to beat the night’s blankets
in the dawning sun.

Summer in London

Summer in London is not
to be experienced without
a raincoat and an umbrella.
London cabs are big and black
but their drivers are not. The British Museum
is a collection of loot. The pubs
are the same as English pubs everywhere. The food
is awful. The train stations are beautiful
with their skeletons of efficiency
and clockwork hearts. Trains coming
and leaving like lovers, disgorging passengers
like bile. The Underground is exciting, but only
in name. The warrens smell
of pee. The streets have the same names
as the streets in Singapore, in Australia.
We’ve all dreamt
of Piccadilly Circus. Mine is complete
with horse-cabs, bobbies and whips. It turns out to be
just a rather large roundabout. The hotel
is not grandiose. The bed
has broken springs. At night I turn to you
but, your back hurting, you face
away. I close my eyes
but London calls. My London
with its clocks and castles and
the will-o-the-wisp shimmering
over the moonlit moors.

Sushma Joshi: Shelling Peas and History Lessons

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Fiction.

Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. She co-edited New Nepal, New Voices (Rupa 2008). Art Matters, a book of art essays, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou. Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her fiction and reportage deal with issues of social inequality, environment and gender. Sound of Silence (1997) her first documentary, was screened at the New Asian Currents at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. Water (2000) was screened on the Q and A with Riz Khan on CNN International, and the UN World Water Forum in Kyoto. The Escape (2006), a short about a teacher targeted by rebels, was accepted to the Berlinale Talent Campus. Joshi was born and grew up in Kathmandu. She studied in Dowhill School, Kurseong, for four years before finishing her education in Mahendra Bhawan and Siddhartha Vanasthali Institute. She received a BA in international relations from Brown University in 1996. She has a MA in anthropology from the New School, NY, and a MA in English Literature from Middlebury College, Vermont.Joshi contributes The Global and the Local, a weekly op-ed, to Nepal’s leading English daily, The Kathmandu Post.

Shelling Peas and History Lessons

“And then? And then?” Sapana asked, six-year-old impatience catching up with the slow pace of thought of an old woman.

“Yes, yes,” said the old woman absently, caught up in a world that was a long time away from this hot, dusty May afternoon. A long time ago, when the mist covered the early mornings, and the ice froze on top of wells. Long ago, when she was still young enough to clamber barefoot on the winding, stony paths of the hills. Young enough to drink the icy water of the springs and let it wash away the pain in her legs. Young enough to nibble the chutro berries from the branches like the goats, and then sit down with a sharp splinter to take out the thorns embedded in the soles of her feet.

Bubu moved easily between these two worlds. This hot afternoon, with the sun baking the tiles of the verandah as she sat in the shade with the six-year-old in her yellow frock, shelling peas together to the distant roar of the traffic. And that other world of brown dust between the toes, the water that sprung out of the hills like a blessing, the echoes of people calling from one valley to the other.

“It was a long time ago. Sixty, sixty-five years ago? Maybe more. I was small then, about eight maybe. Just a little older than you are now. All the little ones would be sent into the hills every morning to search for firewood.”

Sapana dragged a straw mat down from the wall so she could sit comfortably on the scorching tiles. She was the only one at home. Buba and Ama were in the office, and so were all her uncles and aunts. They would get home only in the evening. Her school ended at three pm, unlike all her cousins, who got off at five. Sapana, left alone in an empty house, had finally wandered up to the roof, where Bubu was engaged in endless chores. Bubu, who usually did not say a whole lot, sometimes could be egged on to reveal a parable or ukkan-tukki that Sapana had never heard before. The old woman, with a turban of faded red cloth wrapped around her head, continued to shell the peas. The two green halves exploded under her calloused fingers, pop-pop, like corn popping open in heat.

“The jungles were still very thick then, not like today, where you have to walk for half a day if you want to find a tree,” said Bubu, stretching out her long legs in front of her. She was tall, taller than some of the men in the house. A faded choli was tied around her thin chest. Sapana could occasionally catch a glimpse of a withered breast through the gap in the middle of her blouse, which didn’t close. “I don’t know how the people will manage when those start running out. Anyway, we wouldn’t have to go very far those days. We would fill our patuka with popped corn, and eat that when the sun got hot in the sky.”

“Just popcorn? Nothing else?” asked Sapana. She popped a pea and felt the tender juice spurt out in her mouth. The softness of the green halves turned to pulp between her teeth. She stuck her tongue out to see the squelchy remains.

“When we went to get the firewood, we would take the goats with us to graze, and some of the younger children would drink straight out of the teats. I never did that though. Disgusting habit,” said Bubu, wrinkling her patrician nose. Bubu noticed the empty pea-shells wilting in the heat, and pushed them under the shadow cast by the huge bottlebrush tree. The red brushes hung down in drunken lethargy, filled with the sweet honey hum of a thousand bees.

“Then there were the berries and amla that grew in the forest. The forest floor would be covered with them, we would not even have to climb the trees. Sometimes, if it was the season, we would put some soybeans and peanuts into our patuka too. Ah, those were delicious. You have to roast them over the hadi pot to get the flavor out. Now I don’t even have the teeth to bite them…”

“But you always grind them up and put them in your tea,” said Sapana, pulling out the ragged edges of the straw mat. She now had a long straw in her hand, and she was carefully weaving the two ends into little Os to make a pair of spectacle frames.

“That’s right, Baba. I shouldn’t complain. I have all my cares taken care of.”

There was a long silence as the woman drifted off into another reverie. Her hands moved swiftly, automatically, her mind elsewhere. Sapana’s fingers slipped and slid over the pods, unable to pop them open like her Bubu was doing so effortlessly. She wondered when she would be able to shell like the old woman, when she would be able to pick them up and pop them open with speed and efficiency without mangling anything. When she would not have to rip them open with her teeth, and she could have an entire bowl of round peas without tooth-marks in them. All of the peas she had managed to extract in various stages of wholeness had either rolled into the grass or ended up discreetly in her own appreciative mouth.

She was more a hindrance than help, and she knew it. She also knew that Bubu’s patience was limited. In a short while, she would start getting irritated by either the flow of questions, or the wasteful shelling, and that would be the end of Sapana’s daily dose of both stories and peas. Sapana, with six-year-old wisdom, knew that she had to be judicious in order not to cut off the flow to either of these precious things. So the peas were popped into the mouth with uncanny timing each time Bubu looked away, and the solicitations only piped in when it looked like the old woman was too lost in her own thoughts to notice the prompting.

Bubu tolerated Sapana’s presence, her inquisitiveness, more than she tolerated many other things. The child was her little baba, her darling. She was not a demonstrative woman, and she had strict rules of impartiality towards her nine charges. But there was something about Sapana, who was the smallest and followed her around mercilessly, begging for lumps of sugar and stories with equal insistence, that made her special among all the children she had nursed. Perhaps she was still too innocent, and didn’t yet realize the rules of the world. Perhaps she would grow up to become a cold-hearted woman who would forget old Bubu, like all the other children before her had done.

Nobody even bothered to talk to her nowadays. She was just there, the servant who had been around for so long that people took her for granted, like the giant empty grain-jars in the basement. But Sapana still ran to her with her questions.

“How do you know a spider’s web brings wealth to a home?

“Why can’t Ama touch the loukat tree when she is bleeding?”

“Why is Mami being nasty to Sanuama?“

“Because a spider is lucky.”

“Because when a woman is bleeding she makes the crops die.”

“Because Mami thinks Sanuama is not doing enough work, and that she should stay at home instead of going to college.”

And then the answers, which were not really answers, would elicit more questions: Why is a spider lucky? How can a bleeding woman make the crops die? And why shouldn’t Sanuama go to college if her brothers can? The questions were never-ending, an answer promptly giving birth to the next inquiry, in an unending web of interrogation.

Bubu looked forwards to the times when the little girl would come running up, asking her slyly if she could help with shelling the peas, emptying herself of all of her questions in her head, and demanding to know the old woman’s too. The old woman hadn’t talked about her life for sixty-five years. Perhaps she had mentioned her brother to the woman who came to sell turmeric. It was difficult for her to talk about her life. Nobody had ever bothered to ask her, and she would not have told them anything even if they had asked. Indeed, why should they? But Sapana needed to know.

“What about the tigers? You said there were tigers in the jungle. Weren’t you scared they were going to carry you away?”

The old woman laughed, the laugh instantly turning to a hoarse cough. “The tigers never came near us. We would see them only from a distance; they were as scared of us as we were of them. I know of only one person who was attacked by a tiger, and that was by accident. He was walking at night alone, the idiot. You should never walk alone in the jungle at night, you never know what might happen.”

Sapana held her breath. It was one of those rare moments when the old woman’s mind rambled into exciting territory. She hoped Bubu would not lose her train of thought. Often times, Bubu would decide to stop the story randomly in the middle. Once in a while, she followed her stories to the end.

“He came too near to the cubs. The mother flew at him, and who can blame her. One has to protect one’s children, especially when their father is not around…”

“Did you have any children, Bubu?” asked Sapana.

There was silence. The traffic continued its muted roar in the distance. The koel bird went coo-hoo. Sapana felt a shock of fear at having breached an unknown taboo. Bubu had never talked about her children before.

“Did you?” Her voice muted was with fright, but she pressed on, because she was six and at six one knows only that one has to know, even when it is forbidden to know.

“Uuhuh. Long time ago. I had a son,” said Bubu. Her voice, rough as sandpaper, sounded almost soft.

“Where’s he now? Is he as big as me?” Sapana asked.

Bubu looked at the small figure sitting on the mat, straw frames perched on her nose. “He’s gone,” she replied gruffly. What would her son have looked like at the same age, she wondered.

“Oh.” Sapana felt a rush of pure shame, mixed with guilt. But death was a topic too close to her heart for her to stop wondering. The shame was overshadowed by the desire that had arisen to understand this sudden opening up of the secrets of Bubu’s life. Why had she never told Sapana that she had had a baby? Why had she kept it a secret? She knew it had to do with death, which was shadowy and smelt of old people and brought tears, hushed telephone conversations, and the puzzling disappearance of adults. Her father had not returned home when his great-uncle had died. He had re-appeared, with a shaved head, dressed all in white cotton, down to his tennis shoes, thirteen days later. Old people died all the time, and they were always talking about it right in front of her. But they always whispered when a baby died.

“How did he die? Was he sick like Prerana diju? Will she die too? I don’t want her to die. We were planning to climb the loukat tree when she got well again. Now she’s covered with red blotches.” Sapana imagined her cousin being carried away on the back of men on green bamboo, tied up in a saffron shroud. She quickly wiped the thought out of her mind.

“Now don’t you two go up that old tree. Those branches are rickety. A branch might break and then you would be all set for the next six months. You saw what happened to Prakash, didn’t you?” Bubu asked sternly, waving a bony finger in front of Sapana’s face.

“He said he was Tarzan and he jumped out of the tree,” Sapana said, jumping up from the mat to show Bubu how Prakash Dada had done it. “He was right on top of a branch, and then he started to jump, and the branch went winggg!, and he fell. Like this,” she said, rolling on the floor to demonstrate.

“And broke his leg,” added Bubu.

“He has a white cast on his leg now,” said Sapana. Her cousin’s dare-devil exploit, which had brought him so much pain and popularity, had taken on the status of heroism in her mind. She could not help feeling that she needed a white cast, just like all her other cousins had done before her. Perhaps breaking a bone was like losing teeth. Everybody has to do it, and if you don’t, there must be something wrong with you, she thought.

“Are you planning to climb that tree?” queried Bubu, hearing the admiration in Sapana’s voice.

“Nooo,” said Sapana. I can just climb the tree up to the fork between the two branches, and just sit there, she thought. I won’t jump on the branches.

“Yes? No?” Bubu asked, waving her finger threateningly. “Do I hear a lie?”

“No, I won’t do it,” Sapana said quickly, sensing threats bubbling in Bubu’s mind.

Bubu, satisfied, went back to her peas. “Of course, Prerana’s not going to die, you silly child. She’s just got the measles. Everybody gets it,” she said, wiping the sweat from her brows.

“Did Buba get it? Did Ama get it? Did you, Bubu?” Sapana looked at Bubu, her skin hanging like a soft, washed leather pouch from the bones of her face. It was unblemished, except for two big, black moles next to her lips.

“Sure I did. I got it particularly bad. I had to stay in bed for months,” Bubu said. She remembered the hours of loneliness sleeping in the bed, recovering from sickness. But her grandmother had been there to brew her concoctions, and she had slowly recovered.

“Did everyone in your house catch it? Mami says I mustn’t go near Prerana Diju because I’ll get it, then it’ll pass to everyone, even the baby. Did your son get measles too?” Sapana added.

“No. He was too young to get measles,” Bubu answered.

“So how did he die?” Sapana knew she was going to get scolded very soon, but she had to know. She wet the tip of her index finger with spit and traced an elaborate face with three eyes on the hot tile.

“He died when I came down into the valley.” Bubu’s face, turned slightly away, looked lost in thought.

“Why did you come down, then? Why did you not stay at home?” Sapana asked. The saliva had evaporated instantly, leaving her with nothing.

“Stop asking so many questions. It’s rude. Women should not ask so many questions,” Bubu answered shortly.

“But I don’t want you to be all alone. Where are your Mamu and Buba?” Sapana asked, distressed. She could not believe Bubu was holding back this essential information from her.

“Well, it’s a little too late for me to be having a mother and father, let me tell you.” said the old woman, chuckling. “My mother and father are long dead. They lived in Bhimsen Tole, where my brother is now, and… “

“When is your brother coming, Bubu?” Sapana interrupted. Bubu complained constantly about how her brother did not come to visit her more often. Sapana had been five when she first saw Bubu’s brother. They had sat outside on the bench, talking for hours in low voices. Sapana, running up to sit next to Bubu, had felt uncomfortable, as if she was not supposed to be there. Bubu had turned to look at her with a far-away glance. Sapana knew Bubu wanted to be alone, so she had left, reluctantly. Sapana felt jealous of the brother, who only came rarely but yet got such lavish attention. Bubu belongs to our family!, she wanted to clarify to the brother. But he was so big, and had such a gruff voice, that she decided it was safer not to say it. Maybe he wanted to take Bubu back to the village. Maybe Bubu would decide she no longer wanted to live with them, pack her boxes, and leave. Bubu’s brother, in his long-drawn out drawl, talked about whose land had been bought and sold, whose daughters had gotten married, whose sons had left the village to go to the city. Two days later, he left, carrying a tin trunk filled with clothes that Bubu had bought with her savings.

“Uhh, who knows,” went on Bubu, without pausing. “He tells me he has too many things to do in the village. But he’s not too busy to come down when he needs the money. He was pampered because he was the only son. Not me. I was the eldest among eight.” Bubu shooed a crow that had been hopping closer and closer, head tilted consideringly on one side, eyeing the bowl of peas.

“I didn’t get to live with my parents very long. I was married off to another village seven kos away when I was nine years old. Same age as your Priti Diju. Just two years older than you, my girl.”

“Weren’t you sad about leaving all your friends, Bubu? Did you tell them that you wanted to live at home?” Sapana asked, troubled now. She imagined Prerana Diju getting married and going away to another place seven kos away. She didn’t even know how big a mile was. Maybe it was far away as India, or China, or even farther. How horrible. Then she would never be able to play with her Diju again.

“That would have done me a lot of good now, wouldn’t it,” said Bubu derisively. The old woman had a bite to her that could sometimes scare the children. “It was different in those days. Not like now, where you have all these girls old enough to be the mothers of five babies staying at home. Behaving like children themselves. They have no shame nowadays. All the girls then were married by eight or nine. If one was not married by then, people would begin to think there was something wrong with the girl.”

Sapana did not like it when Bubu got started to get into these frightening moods, when she suddenly became stern and started talking about marrying girls off. The worst was usually when she started singing:

euti chori, mayaki dori, abha kasle lane ho

One daughter, a thread of love, I wonder who will take her away.

Sapana hated that song. She maintained a cautious silence.

“My parents were lucky to find me my husband. He was the son of a rich family. His family was rich, they were. Owned seven cows and hillsides of land,” Bubu reminisced almost triumphantly.

“I’ll be seven in four months,” Sapana reminded Bubu. She wanted Bubu to know that she was too small to be married.

“Yes, that’s right. Seven, or eight? Seven, I think. I was nine when I got married. My husband was older, much older. Twenty-three-years older…”

“Twenty-three-years?” Sapana could not fathom this age difference. It sounded enormous.

The old woman looked at her with something like slightly condescending contempt; an almost benign malignancy. She alarmed Sapana when she became like this, almost as if she would declare that girls should still get married at nine even in these changed times. “We weren’t sitting at home going to school like you, Baba. We got married early. People didn’t look for husbands the same age, as they do nowadays. I got pregnant when I was thirteen.”

“Where’s your husband now?” Sapana asked, trying to change the conversation. She sneaked another pea into her mouth as the old woman turned to get a broom to sweep up the pods.

“The river took him. There was a massive flood, one, two years after we were married. The bridge was swept away. Then the men went down to see if they could re-build it. They say he went too close. There were lots of rocks under the water that you could not really see…”

” Did your Sasu kick you out of her house, like Sukumel did when Daya’s husband died?” Bubu swatted away the little hand that was sneaking into the bowl of peas as if it were a fly. Sapana retreated hastily. The old woman could be deceptive, appearing to be lost in her thoughts when she really wasn’t at all.

“My mother-in-law was a kind woman,” Bubu said reflectively. “Kinder than the rest. She let me live in the house until the baby was born. She could easily have sent me back to my parents house, but she didn’t. Then they thought I would have a better life if I came down to the valley, worked at one of the big houses. So they sent me down.”

“Did you want to leave your village, Bubu?” asked Sapana, anxiously. She wanted to think that Bubu was here because she wanted to be here, not because she had been forced to.

“It didn’t matter what I wanted,” said Bubu, tiredly. “Who would listen to me? But I wanted to leave too. I thought my son would have a better life down here. Old man Astha helped me to get into the Ranaji’s house. Then they sent me here because the Ranaji’s wife didn’t want me in her house.”

“Ranaji’s wife sent you here because she was afraid her husband would want to marry you. Because you were pretty. Ruku told me. She said the wife must have been jealous of you. Ruku said so.”

“Ruku is an old chatterbox,” said Bubu, straightening up and lifting her chin in the air. “She talks too much. When I came here, the eldest Dulahi-saab had just given birth. She couldn’t suckle her own child. She was a princess, you know, and princesses didn’t do that then. She was the granddaughter of Chandra Shamsher Maharaja. I hear the young women do whatever they want nowadays. Feeding children out of bottles. Whoever heard of such nonsense. The women now, they have no sense.”

“Darshana drinks out of a bottle. Will she grow up to have no sense too?”

“No. She’s a bright child. She will have sense. Anyway, they hired me to be the dhai for Mohan-raja. Yes, he was a little baby then. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Now he’s balding, he looks old.” Bubu had been happy at the idea of nursing two babies. She had imagined that the two of them would suckle her together, one on the left, the other on the right. “But they said there was not enough milk.”

“And then?” Sapana held her breath. The peas were all shelled. Inside her closed hand Sapana had a fistful of peas that she had removed from the bowl and which she was saving for later. The old woman usually went inside the kitchen after all the vegetables were done. Would she leave Sapana hanging in the middle?

Bubu ambled around for a bit, then dragged out the comb from underneath the straw mat and started to comb her hair. “So my son had to be sent away. They gave him to Hira to look after. Remember the old woman with goitre who comes here and brings us bay leaves? That was Hira.” Bubu raked the bamboo comb through her hair. “She used to come here occasionally, so the mistress asked her to look after my child for a bit of money.” She stopped to pull out the strands of silver hair entangled in the bamboo teeth. Sapana knew there was no need for prompting. The old woman was talking almost as if she was all alone.

“I remember that last day, holding him in my arms, feeling him breath before Hira took him into her back. She stopped coming to the house after that. I heard she used to come looking for me with the child in her arms, but nobody called me because they thought that if I was upset that would effect the milk.”

The sun slowly dipped down through the purple blooms of the jackaranda trees. A loud clamoring broke the silence as the crows came back home to roost in the bottlebrush branches. “And then?” said Sapana, underneath her breath.

“So then I never saw my child again. I heard he died six months later.” Bubu had found out about the death of her child only two years later. They had told her he was well and thriving. She had asked the mistress to give all of her salary to Hira. Hira later told Bubu that she never received any money, not even the promised stipend. Hira said she gave him all the food she had in the house, but that was just rice, and he couldn’t eat that, and she did not have the money to buy him any milk.

“She said that when he died he was just skin and bones…” Bubu’s face, pure silhouette in the sunset, was fathomless. But Sapana felt her pain, musky and old, curling up like smoke in the evening air.

A pack of street dogs started to howl, cutting through the sounds of the temple-bells. Sapana felt the loneliness in a way she never had before, a sharp cutting loneliness that seemed to transmit from the old woman and seep into her throat, making her heavy from hurting. She wanted to say something to comfort Bubu, but no words came. She waited, feeling the pain, dark blue as the night sky that was starting to descend. Slowly, the old woman picked up the bowl of peas, and walked into the kitchen. A few seconds later, a small bottle filled with kerosene and a wick flickered alight onto the surface of the windowsill. Only then did the little girl follow her inside.

Debbie Lim Reviews “Feather Man” by Rhyll McMaster

Written by mascara on January 1, 2011. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Feather Man

by Rhyll McMaster

Brandl & Schlesinger, 2007

ISBN: 9781876040833

Reviewed by DEBBIE LIM

What repels can often also compel. In Feather Man, author Rhyll McMaster seems to know this as she draws us into the life of Sooky – a girl who is sexually abused by her neighbour in 1950s suburban Brisbane. The story opens with Sooky helping her perpetrator, Lionel, in his chook yard. By the third page, we cannot help but read in growing horror as Lionel commits the violation that will set up the damaging patterns that define Sooky’s relationships in adulthood.

The confronting scene in the chook shed could be a microcosm of the novel’s world. This is a visceral place that’s stifling and grubby, where women rank low in the social pecking order. But it’s also in these early pages that Sooky’s gift for observation becomes apparent:

I saw a pair of chook’s legs walk by my head. Even the chooks acted as if everything was normal… But my thighs looked unusual, the way Lionel had jacked them up and spread them apart. I wasn’t used to seeing them that way. They looked pale and nude, the inside of frogs’ legs, as if they were too unripe to be like that.

This ability to ‘see’ leads Sooky to become a successful painter in later years. Her capacity to find an idiosyncratic beauty amongst the urban squalor is also what allows us to venture into what could otherwise be a bleak setting. One morning, for example, when the adults are still asleep after a night of partying, she goes outside:

I walk out onto the grass in the sloping backyard and bend down. There is much to look at in this close-up world. The heavy dew lies in tiny round crystal balls on the clover. A grasshopper with a green spike extending from its head springs out of nowhere onto my hand. Its mandibles graze my skin. I can feel it eating me…I am queen and king of this region and nothing can harm me.

Ultimately, Feather Man is a novel about self-identity. In Sooky’s case, it’s less the search for identity than a struggle to reclaim the ‘ordinary’ self that was taken from her by Lionel as a young girl. For while her artist’s eye is acute, her heart still knocks to the dysfunctional rhythms of childhood. After breaking off an engagement to a besotted but conventional footballer, Sooky marries her childhood idol, the charming Redmond – who is also the son of her abuser Lionel.

For Sooky, the attraction is primal:

The first and most important thing to mention about Redmond is his burnished hair. It is the colour my father brings up out of mahogany, as he polishes in small oily circles. The fox coat. Deep and rich, active, alien.

But Redmond also turns out to be a cruel narcissist. This becomes increasingly apparent after Sooky marries him and they move overseas so he can forge a career in the London art world.

It could be said that none of the characters in Feather Man are particularly likeable. Even Sooky is not conventionally endearing: she is blunt, obstinate and unpredictable. But it is also her lack of convention that makes her such a sympathetic character.

Neither is Sooky one of the two stereotypes she might easily have been: the victim quietly nursing her wounds or the veering car crash leaving a trail of debris. While she has aspects of both, she is intelligent, resilient, introspective and, perhaps most importantly, has agency. Her dispassionate observations can be blackly funny. For instance, during the first time she has sex with Redmond:

The moment has a flavour of clinical deadness. He has taken off his trousers and his shirt and I see he wears a string singlet. Oh, Redmond, I grieve.

Below the dreadful singlet, in the light from the street, I can see his erection. That looks funny too, a polyp or sea worm waving around in the current. I admonish myself: It is not really waving.

One of the achievements of Feather Man is that, via Sooky’s internal reflections, it explores the complicated and enduring relationship between victim and abuser. It is due to McMaster’s skill that, rather than bog down the narrative, these sections deepen the complexity and our understanding of the issue. With Sooky’s eyes, we see how the beast of abuse wears a coat of subtle shades of grey, how it operates in the liminal zone, where the back fence is ignored and boundaries blurred.

Since its publication in 2007, Feather Man has won the 2008 Barbara Jefferis Award. It remains a relevant and powerful book. I was also happily surprised to discover that Rhyll McMaster’s personal website provides detailed notes on the novel’s development. This includes original sections that were later edited out and even the initial reader’s report by the book’s publisher, Brandl & Schlesinger. It’s a fascinating and refreshingly open look into the author’s creative process.

Readers familiar with McMaster’s poetry (she has published six books of poems) will likely be fascinated to learn that her debut novel incorporates poems from two of her previous works (Flying the Coop and Chemical Bodies). According to McMaster, poems have been re-worked as prose in an ‘attempt at post post-modernism’. Also woven throughout are numerous references to fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

The pages of Feather Man bristle with animal imagery. This is skillfully used to depict humans in all their brutality and strange complexity. Sooky’s father, for instance, keeps a tank of sea horses and anemones. However, his seeming fascination with the creatures reflects his disconnectedness and lack of self awareness:

He liked the idea of horses and flowers underwater. He searched for the ridiculous or the out-of-place, the askew, the left-handed, like himself… He looked at those sea horses with so much incomprehension.

In another passage that echoed vaguely the voice in Nabokov’s Lolita, Sooky likens her susceptibility to Lionel’s attentions as unavoidable as basic cell replication:

Lionel, how I loved you…I was a plate of medium in a laboratory ready for someone to seed me with the bacteria of love. Anything might have stuck. Healthy, unhealthy, fungoid, parasitic. I couldn’t discern between them.

McMaster frequently uses animal similes to describe the characters, resulting in vivid portraits. It also lends a sense of dissociation, a certain fantastical edge. The ultimate beast, of course, is Lionel who is the menacing ‘Feather Man’ of the title. As the name suggests, he looms as a type of half-man half-animal, the childhood monster from the henhouse that eludes capture.

The actual animals that appear in the novel typically don’t fare well under the custodianship of humans. The seahorse tank cracks and gushes its inhabitants onto the carpet, chickens are scalded and disembowelled, while the family cat is put down without warning and perfunctorily replaced. Overall, humans are seen as negligent and with a tendency to abuse power.

In Feather Man, life is a savage place where only the fittest survive. This is a powerful and uncomfortable work that refuses easy rescue. Although self-empowerment through art is one of its themes, in the end this is not a lofty tale. There are feathers on the ground, grit under the fingernails, and a sense that the wolf will always be watching from the shadows. Even so, in McMaster’s hands, there is a strange poetry to be found for those whose gaze remains unflinching.