Author: mascara

Jack Stanton reviews “The Grass Library” by David Brooks

Written by mascara on September 7, 2019. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

The Grass Library

by David Brooks

ISBN 978-0-6482026-4-6

Reviewed by JACK STANTON

“If only ethics operated on the one plane,” (137), David Brooks laments in The Grass Library, which, like his previous work, evades neat classification but falls somewhere in between memoir and philosophy. On one level, The Grass Library urges his readers to reconsider their relationship with our fellow earthlings, through his own disenchantment with eating animals. To summarise the narrative, however, would be reductive. On the macro level, the story begins when Brooks and his wife T. Become vegan, beginning a chain of events that results in them exchanging their life in Sydney for a farm in the Blue Mountains. This is precisely what makes the book interesting: he knows how to locate and illuminate the ideologies that underpin daily life, in a way that blooms naturally from his own experiences.

From what I take away, Brooks’s central argument is that our dominion over animals is mostly a product of a particular state of mind, an entitlement, which “has difficulty navigating the rough terrain of reality” (213), a difficulty enforced by ancient social/cultural/historical “fences” established between animals and humans. For Brooks, these fences are ideological, fixed in the ways we talk about animals.

Indeed, writing about animal rights and vegan/vegetarian activism has a long literary tradition behind it, one that Brooks self-consciously writes within. He is in good company, the likes of Tolstoy, Kafka, Mary Shelley, and Plutarch. Tolstoy was famed for denouncing eating animals as profligate and senseless. “A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food,” he writes, “therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.” What Tolstoy saw as moral responsibility actually reversed the hierarchy of power, with humans, at the pyramidion, seeking to protect rather than exploit those beneath them.

Brooks writes about his metamorphosis from an omnivorous Sydneysider to owner of his refuge farm in the Blue Mountains, a fresh vegan seeing the world anew, all the while trying to find a harmony with animals, forever writing down his observations of how humans should (or were meant to) live. I use this word, metamorphosis, rather than a less-decorative cousin, such as ‘change’, because there’s something essentially creatural in Brooks’s becoming. He transgresses “fences”, (51) a metaphor for boundaries within the human mind and language. “You don’t realise the guilt you’ve been carrying around until you no longer feel it,” he writes. (10)

On the surface, The Grass Library tells a simple story. In the Blue Mountains, he begins to establish a sanctuary for wayward animals, most notably their dog Charlie and four sheep: Henry, Charlie, Orpheus, and Pumpkin. But in true essayist style, Brooks tells the reader they’re in for more than what’s on the narrative surface—“this book isn’t about veganism, or guilt,” he writes, “but ultimately and more simply it’s about discovery and wonder: wonder, and wondering.” (10)

Which is true: Brooks doesn’t moralise. He focuses on identifying problems about writing about animals in the first place, because already I’d started to encounter these [problems], the way the language seems stacked against them, conditioning us, subliminally, to keep up the cruelty. (17)

Here, I agree with Brooks. Consider the French: fruit de la mer. Fruit of the sea. This is what Brooks means by a “fence” in language.

But before getting too far ahead, a brief aside á la subliminal conditioning. When Brooks suggests “if something seems untenable then perhaps is it because it suits the status quo to have it seem so” (17), he is urging readers to challenge their hardwired, default setting. In his speech ‘This is Water’, U.S. writer David Foster Wallace argued that our default setting is the belief that we are the absolute centre of our own universes. He further argued that being able to recognise your default setting and push against it was the “no bullshit” real life value of a liberal arts education.

But are these just semantics? Or do the words we use to talk about animals have real life meaning in our treatment of them? Predictably, Brooks argues in favour of the importance of language and its relationship to reality, quoting Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase “we see all things through the human head and cannot remove that head.” (25) Here’s an example. While discussing his first two adopted sheep, Henry and James, Brooks writes against traditional wisdom, which advises don’t give them names . .. because then you won’t be able to use them, by which is meant kill them, or to do so readily the other things you need to do to them. (52)

This juncture in language is best seen through binaries, such as pet/livestock, common/endangered, wild/tame, and so forth. These distinctions “masquerade as recognition of some value inherent in the animal itself.” (74) In other words, the use (or misuse) of language positions animals as property, closer aligned to a ‘thing’ than a person, and, Brooks opines, people don’t often name their property; it’s considered strange to befriend your fridge.

In Katoomba, Brooks witnesses two tragedies. During the first, he sees ducklings swimming in his pool. Some have drowned. Their mother swims beside them, idle, either confused or unsure about what’s happened. He scolds himself. The ducklings have drowned because the pool’s water level has declined. The tired ducklings couldn’t escape.

The second tragedy is even more minuscule. A cicada trapped inside its own shell, midway through its metamorphosis. It’s here, using the microscopic world as a gateway to the philosophical one, that Brooks’s The Grass Library is at its most compelling. He creates this gateway by pondering the above two tragedies, thus:

If the word tragedy can’t accommodate a drowned duckling or a cicada trapped in its own larval shell then we must ask not only how much of its use to us is a tool for defence of our own self-centeredness and misguided mastery, but also how many other of our implicit, unquestioned, and seemingly innocent assumptions might be the same. (129)

Like any considered perspective, Brooks pre-empts and refutes the stances contrary to his own. He isn’t bothered by accusations of anthropomorphising, responding with an accusation of his own, namely that “barbarity itself begins with the thought that we are so different from the creatures we live amongst that we cannot know or even hazard how they feel.” (25) Yet another fence in the mind.

Besides, what Brooks has set out to achieve in The Grass Library pretty much depends on being able to speculate on, and empathise with, the animals he lives alongside. He describes the book as a narrative turned “upside-down” (68), not about his life with T. in the mountains, or only ostensibly so. Instead he has devised a narrative in which “the animals that are normally suppressed or swallowed by a story, or serve as accessory to it, have been brought toward the ‘fore’, and humans play a more supporting role.” (68)

And true to the upside-down nature of this meditation on animals in philosophy is a scene from the opening pages that has stayed with me, a scene in which Brooks sees a spectre from his past, a version of himself wandering along Martin Place, while he was protesting the use of battery cages. Brooks, a senior lecturer at USYD, is crammed into a cage in Martin Place, wearing a chicken mask—watching the vice-chancellor of my university walk by, brushing aside some of my fellow protestors in the same cavalier way I might have used myself a year or so before. (11)

Yes, the anecdote is attractive for its amusing imagery. But it also conveys a powerful second image behind the immediately comic idea of Brooks wearing a chicken mask, because here we see the strength of Brooks’s metamorphosis of the mind. Throughout The Grass Library he has tried to see the world through their eyes, wearing an animal mask while he writes.

JACK CAMERON STANTON is a writer and critic based in Sydney. His work has appeared in The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Review of Books, Southerly, Mascara Literary Review, Overland, and others. He teaches at UTS.

Fernanda Dahlstrom reviews “Prisoncorp” by Marlee Jane Ward

Written by mascara on September 7, 2019. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Prisoncorp

by Marlee Jane Ward

ISBN: 9781925589542

Brio Books

Reviewed by Fernanda Dahlstrom

Prisoncorp is the third volume in a young adult speculative fiction trilogy that engages with issues in contemporary Australian society. Marlee Jane Ward posits a near-future setting where current legal and economic trends have gone to an extreme, but which contains enough of the current features of our country to ring uncomfortably true. The first book, Orphancorp won the Victorian Premier’s Award in 2016 and was heralded as timely, in the same year that confronting footage of human rights violations in Don Dale Youth Detention Centre became public, raising questions about the criminalisation and institutionalisation of vulnerable youth.

Ward’s series centres around orphan Mirii, who believes herself to be Aboriginal, but has lost her connection to family and country. She knows her last name means ‘shooting star’ in an Aboriginal language, but only because she looked it up on the Tab that is her only connection to the outside world. In Orphancorp, Mirii counts down to the day she will obtain ‘age release’ from the privatised foster system in which she has grown up. A rebellious girl with a dirty mouth, Mirii is subjected to brutal forms of discipline in the days leading up to her release from the ironically named Verity House, where information is near impossible to come by.

In the sequel, Psynode, we re-join Mirii a few months after her age release. She is staying in a women’s dormitory and feeling that, while at Verity House it was ‘us and them’, now it’s her against everyone. Mirii gets a job and waits impatiently for the day she is supposed to meet up with Vu on the steps of the old Sydney Town Hall, one of the few old buildings still standing. However, her plans go awry, and she is arrested for a suite of offences committed in the process of trying to free Vu, the girl she ‘like-likes’, from her captors.

Prisoncorp opens with Mirii being held in a solitary confinement cell at the notorious corporatized prison located in a remote part of the Australian desert. She is not, however, alone. Her nemesis, Freya, is with her and the novel plunges straight into action with a fist fight between the two girls. Mirii reflects that although she earlier had an epiphany about how their enmity ‘played into what the system wanted of me’ (p.2), Freya has not achieved this insight. Relationships between women are consistently foregrounded in Prisoncorp. Mirii’s friendships are staunch, but we are afforded no illusion that any general sense of sisterhood can be counted on. An unknown prisoner of whom Mirii asks a favour promptly tells her, ‘go fuck yourself’ (p. 6). A day out of solitary, Mirii discovers her crimes are so serious as to warrant a ‘real, human lawyer’ (p. 31), whose face pops up on a screen to tell Mirii that she will be doing 25 years for manslaughter.

Mirii is soon reunited with kids from Verity House. Young people who grow up in the system are seen beating a well-worn track into prison, a familiar pattern that reminds us of how far along the path to this future we have already come. The privatisation of the prison system, which began in Australia in the early 90s, is now complete, with the prison headed up not by a Warden but by a Chief Operations Officer (COO), who ‘represents the board’ (p. 36). Ward’s depiction of prison from the point of view of an Indigenous woman alludes to current concerns about prison demographics. The fastest rising incarceration rate in Australia is currently that of Indigenous women This concern is made explicit when another prisoner tells Mirii, ‘There are a lot of us in here…it’s a crime to be Koori in our own bloody country’ (p. 97).

Ward presents the prison industrial complex and the immigration detention industry as inseparable, with the screws announcing unceremoniously that 200 immigration detainees are to be amalgamated with the prison population. This prompts Mirii to reflect:

I feel about as hopeless as they do. I wonder where they’re all from, how they thought their new life in Australia might go. Did they expect to be rounded up and put into this dusty camp, to waste away on starvation rations? Weren’t they seeking something better, and is this better, or is it more of the same? (p. 61)

The book’s engagement with current human rights issues gives Ward’s predictions an uncanny immediacy, but it also leaves us craving more detail. How did we get from the Australia we know to this near future? Why are there few old buildings left? Where does the climate crisis stand? Where is this hellish private prison located?

Mirii’s sexual involvement with Vu is presented as unproblematic throughout the series (except to the extent that touching anyone is forbidden in the Orphancorp). Ward also presents a number of other same-sex sexual encounters and their queerness passes without comment. Monogamy seems to be a thing of the past, as do fixed sexual identities. In Psynode, Mirii recounts a history of sexual experiences that would make Tony Abbott and other opponents of Safe Schools shudder: boys, girls, threesomes and kink. The unproblematised sexual fluidity of Ward’s characters provides welcome relief from the overall bleakness of her premise. It allows the focus to remain on the struggle of these young women against a brutal and oppressive system while suggesting some more liberal developments in Australian society in the near future, taking Ward’s vision beyond a simple dystopia.

The plot progresses swiftly, with Mirii’s initial hopelessness turning into resolve as she and her friends conceive of an escape from Prisoncorp, which snowballs into a full-scale riot. Characters express doubts over where they will go after breaking through the fences, given they are in the middle of the desert. The situation calls to mind the mass break-out of the overcrowded Woomera Immigration Detention Centre during a protest by refugee activists in 2002, which led to clashes between Corrections and asylum seekers fleeing across the South Australian desert.

The novel climaxes with an uprising that confronts us with some of the ethical dilemmas associated with rebellion. How to treat one’s captors once they become one’s prisoners? To what extent can individuals be blamed for acts committed in obedience to orders? Can you justify risking the life of someone whose name you don’t even know to attain freedom for the group?

Prisoncorp includes an epilogue of only a few pages in which we glimpse the aftermath of the series’ dramatic conclusion. This is precious little space to explore the myriad ways characters have developed over the three books or how society may look outside of the institutions where most of the action has taken place and this feels like a missed opportunity. However, Prisoncorp offers a powerful vision of the future of the carceral state and a warning of the dark places to which prison privatisation threatens to lead.

FERNANDA DAHLSTROM is a writer, editor and lawyer who lives in Brisbane. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Art Guide and Feminarsty.

Paul de Brancion translated by Elaine Lewis

Written by mascara on September 1, 2019. Posted in Translations.

Paul de Brancion is the author of about fifteen novels and poems. He is regularly involved in transversal artistic projects, with contemporary art centres or music composers (T. Pécou, J-L. Petit, G. Cagnard, N. Prost, …). He lives and works between Paris, Corsica and Nantes. Where he organises and presents “Les Rendez-vous du Bois Chevalier”, annual events dedicated to literature, science and poetry.
He is editor-in-chief of the magazine Sarrazine, president of the Union des Poètes & Cie and representative in France of the WPM (World Poetry Movement).

36

Ça fait tout drôle, ce manque de légèreté. Des maisons, des meubles, des tapis, des mauvais livres, une sorte d’indélicatesse du goût. Comment peut-on survivre à cet environnement d’un si mauvais genre ?
Profusion, c’est le mot en français. Excès. Mor avait quelque chose d’excessif que je craignais infiniment. Il était dangereux pour moi d’être en relation avec elle. Même mon amour pour elle était inconvenant. Elle parlait très vite et beaucoup. Un déluge de mots était prononcé et je m’éloignais en marchant le plus loin possible du courant continu de ses phrases. Elle était le maître de la vérité. Elle priait et sa prière était un écroulement. Elle ruisselait devant le Seigneur Dieu. Comment peut-on dire cela sans être fauteur de scandal ?
Je n’arrive pas à rassembler une idée globale ou une image fixe. Toujours mouvante, elle était toujours mouvante, émouvante, éprouvante, épouvante, Mor.

43

Cette nuit cauchemar, cauchemère, j’en ai honte. Je crois qu’elle est tombée par terre dans l’entrée de damier noir et blanc froide et humide de l’enfance. Elle portait une longue robe bleu-gris sombre qui collait à son corps. Elle était allongée, elle se sentait faible. Je suis venu pour l’aider. Elle n’a pas appelé. Elle était allongée sur le sol, ses yeux étaient fermés et le teint blafard. Je sentais son cœur qui battait la chamade. C’est la fin pensai-je avec émotion.
De fait, elle est morte du cœur, d’une faiblesse du cœur et non du cancer qui rongeait ses entrailles. Voilà, cela arrive enfin. Presque soulagé parce que j’ai attendu ce moment précis toute ma vie. Je les considérais, elle et le vieux panard mon père comme immortels, éternels, alors c’était cela, ils pouvaient bien mourir, eux aussi. On y était arrivé. Le grand passage de Mor.

Elle est morte d’une attaque cardiaque. Elle avait pris beaucoup de médicaments. Son corps était en train de pourrir. Il a été décidé de ne pas lui inoculer des produits stabilisateurs qui empêchent qu’elle ne pourrisse de l’intérieur.
Mauvaise décision

Translator’s note: In Danish, 'Mor'means Mother. The original version of this poem was written in French, Danish and English. French and English were common to mother and son but Danish was his alone.

36

It feels weird, this lack of lightness. Houses, furniture, carpets, bad books, a sort of indelicacy of taste. How can one survive in such a hopeless kind of environment?
Profusion, that’s the word in French. Excess. There was something excessive about Mor that I feared greatly. It was dangerous for me to have a relationship with her. Even my love for her was unseemly. She spoke very quickly and a lot. A deluge of words was delivered and I walked as far away as possible from Mor’s continual stream of sentences. She was the master of Truth. She prayed and her prayers tumbled down. She gushed in front of the Lord God. How can one say that without stirring up a scandal?

I can’t put together an overall idea or a fixed image. Always moving, she was always moving, emotional, difficult, frightening Mor.

43

That nightmare of a night, nightmother, I’m ashamed of it. I think she fell over on the cold and damp black and white checked porch of our childhood. She was wearing a sombre long blue-grey dress that clung to her body. She was stretched out, she felt weak. I came to help her. She didn’t call out. She was lying on the floor, her eyes closed and her complexion pale. I felt her heart beating wildly. This is the end, I thought emotionally.
In fact, she died of a heart disease, a weakness of the heart, and not of the cancer that gnawed at her entrails. There it was, happening at last. I am almost relieved because I’ve waited all my life for this precise moment. I always considered them, her and that old dog my father, everlasting, then this was it, they too could die. It had happened. Mor’s great passing.

She died of a heart attack. She took a lot of medicines. Her body was rotting away. It had been decided not to inject her with any stabilising drugs to stop the deterioration of her insides.
Bad decision.

Formerly a music educator and writer, Elaine Lewis created the Australian Bookshop in Paris in 1996. She met poet Jacques Rancourt and began translating for the Franco-anglais Poetry Festival. Her book Left Bank Waltz was published by Random House Australia in 2006. She is currently co-editor and book review editor of The French Australian Review, the journal of the Institute for the Study of French Australian Relations and is a committee member of AALITRA (Australian Association for Literary Translation). She has translated poetry from Guadeloupe, Haiti, Switzerland, Canada, La Réunion, Belgium and France, published in La Traductière and Etchings (Ilura Press).

Caitlin Wilson reviews “Too Much Lip” by Melissa Lucashenko

Written by mascara on August 11, 2019. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Too Much Lip

by Melissa Lucashenko

University of Queensland Press

ISBN: 978 0 7022 5996 8

Reviewed by CAITLIN WILSON

Talking Back: Too Much Lip, Melissa Lucashenko

If this book were a sound, it would be the roar of a motorcycle down an empty road; bold, and for the moments when it’s in your path, dominating of all your senses. This book swallowed me and churned me in its guts and, as all good books should, spit me back out, a little bit different.

Its premise is not unfamiliar: a woman is called to return to her home as her grandfather nears death to say goodbye, and finds more waiting for her than she had anticipated. But Lucashenko renders this framework classic rather than clichéd. Melissa Lucashenko’s name has been synonymous with vivid characters negotiating the complexities of belonging since her debut novel Steam Pigs was released in 1997. Tangled and tumultuous relationships are her hallmark, and the Salters, the family around which Too Much Lip centres, are no exception. The story boils with emotion, and its characters carry scars both physical and invisible from their shared past.

In Too Much Lip, a stranger rides into town, “but it wasn’t a stranger, it was Kerry”— the novel’s observant, funny and immediately likeable in a she-says-what-we’re-thinking way protagonist. She roars into frame on the back of Harley, headed to her hometown of Durrongo in Bundjalung country, northern New South Wales. Kerry is a marvellously difficult woman to pin down—a self-described lesbian who falls for a man, a ‘lone wolf’ who thinks often of her ex-girlfriend and cares deeply for family, almost despite herself. The novel doesn’t dwell overly on romance, but Kerry’s burgeoning relationship with her handsome former schoolmate, Steve Abarco, complicates her understanding of herself. Kerry never calls herself bisexual rather than a lesbian, a fact that was jarring at first. However, I came to see it as a part of her all-or-nothing image of the world, rather than any oversight on the part of the author. That the exception to her sexuality is a white man is even more of an about-face for Kerry, who treats the white ‘redneck’ townsfolk of Durrongo with earned suspicion:

“Had they realised at all that running was a bulwark against the taunts slung about so casually at Patto high? Nigger, nigger, pull the trigger. Kerry would sneer at the white faces mouthing the words- Abo, black bitch, boong- and picture their owners wheezing on the edge of the track as she floated past triumphant, her giant banner reading: Whatever, maggots.” ( 59)

Jim Buckley, the land-grabbing white mayor of Durrongo, slights Kerry nearly as soon as she arrives home, and threatens a beloved site of family history for the Salters. Drawn into the fight for her family’s land, Kerry is a reluctant activist, her cleverness and rage useful weapons against greedy developers. While it would be easy to call Jim Buckley the antagonist of the novel, he is only its human form: personifying white selfishness and the disrespect of Indigenous people that is all too persistent, in fiction as in historical fact. White Australia’s callous disregard for Indigenous people is the social and structural violence at work in this novel; and slaying it, or chipping away at it the best one person can, is Kerry’s heroic journey.

Too Much Lip is thus as much about repairing past damage and safeguarding against future destruction as it is about new romance. The Salters distance themselves from each other in ways literal and metaphoric. They are tough, loving, violent and soft by turns, never easy and certainly never dull. Kerry’s older brother Ken drinks and rages without quite knowing why, his son is entranced by the escapism the computer screen offers, and her mother’s Tarot cards guide her way through the world. Kerry and her middle brother, Black Superman, have put physical distance between themselves and Durrongo, and their sister Donna, missing since her sixteenth birthday, is a gaping hole of absence in the Salter family.

Despite—or perhaps because of?—its depth, Too Much Lip retains much of the dark comedy for which Lucashenko’s 2013 novel Mullumbimby was so well received. Winner of the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, Mullumbimby also circled themes of the bittersweet familial obligation and the sacredness of land, though Too Much Lip arguably pushes Lucashenko to darker and more personal places. Lucashenko herself described the writing of Too Much Lip as “frightening” and “retraumatising”, and while the enduring rawness is evident, the novel reads as anything but fearful. Lucashenko’s characters feel real and personal. The first chapter is preceded by a quote from a 1908 court case, where an Indigenous woman has shot a man. This woman, Lucashenko reveals, was her great-grandmother, Christina Copson, and a source of inspiration for Too Much Lip’s incisive depiction of the white people in power in Durrongo.

Early in the novel, Kerry stumbles on a quintessentially-Australian image of sublime natural horror- a crow, having tried to eat a dead brown snake, has caught its head in the skeleton of the snake. This grotesquery is Australia writ-small; a penetrating force attempting to invade that which it does not understand. Three other crows that have gathered near the snake speak to Kerry in a mix of English and Bundjalung, a moment which allows Lucashenko to establish the uniquely Indigenous realism of her novel.

“The snake-crow tilted its mutant head at her.
‘Gulganelehla Bundjalung’. Speak Bundjalung. A test of good character.
‘Bundjalung ngaoi yugam baugal,’ she said. My Bundjalung is crap. The bird hesitated.” ( 9)

Moments like this evoke Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: terming them as ‘magic realism’ undermines the deft translation of an Australian experience as real and complex as any described by a Tim Winton or Christos Tsiolkas text. Too Much Lip doesn’t gesture at universality, or attempt to speak for anyone. Instead, it speaks personally on shared issues of family, home and loss.

Indeed, one of the many remarkable feats this novel achieves is its determined peeling away of the layers of toxic masculinity to reveal the trauma at its core. The male characters in Too Much Lip, particularly the four generation of Salter men, carry heavy burdens that are revealed bit by aching bit through their interactions with each other and the women of the novel. Even the local landscape, so loved by the Salter family, imparts an omnipresent threat of violence:

“Maybe it was a dog to begin with, or a doob, for that matter. But make no mistake. That mountain’s a fist now, girl.” Pop told her, letting his arm drop. He looked at her in anguish.
“It’s a gunjibal’s fist waiting for us mob to step outta line, waiting to smash us down. We livin’ in the whiteman’s world now. You remember that.” (64)

Memories like this proliferate the novel, as the Salter siblings attempt to make sense of their past and protect their future. Lucashenko’s writing is never sentimental, and yet the careful revelation of the secret darkness rotting the heart of the Salter family is deeply moving. By lovingly sketching characters who are deeply flawed, Lucashenko hints at redemption without the need for saccharine prose. It was fascinating to read this book in the wake of the debate over the cogency of Erik Jensen’s decision to disqualify from the Horne Essay Prize “essays by non-Indigenous writers about the experiences of First Nations Australians”. While it’s a complex issue I wouldn’t presume to be able to solve, I was struck reading this book the importance of telling your own story, your own way. What makes Too Much Lip not only engaging while reading, but memorable, is its tangible roots, which burrow deeply into the realities of Australian existence, through the author, this country, and now, this reader.

Citations

Chernery, Susan. “Melissa Lucashenko: Too Much Lip was a frightening book to write”. The Sydney Morning-Herald. 27/07/18. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/melissa-lucashenko-too-much-lip-was-a-frightening-book-to-write-20180724-h1326h.html

Lucashenko, Melissa. Too Much Lip. QUP. 2018. Pp. 9, 59, 64.

Wahlquist, Calla. “Horne essay prize scraps rule change after judges resign in protest”. The Guardian. 24/9/18. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/24/horne-essay-prize-scraps-rule-change-after-judges-resign-in-protest

Wright, Alexis. The Swan Book. Giramondo Publishing, 2013.

CAITLIN WILSON is a Melbourne-based student and writer of criticism and poetry. Her poem was recently short-listed for the University of Melbourne Creative Arts poetry prize, and her criticism can be read in Farrago and The Dialog, among others.

Gabriela Bourke reviews “Lucida Intervalla” by John Kinsella

Written by mascara on August 10, 2019. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Lucida Intervalla

by John Kinsella

ISBN: 9781760800079

UWAP

Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE

Can art make things happen? John Kinsella says ‘yes’. ‘Poetry functions more directly in cultures at different times, but it is part of most things we do. Consciousness of poetic language informs reading the newspaper as much as it does listening to songs on the radio.’ (Watts 2013) Kinsella’s most recent novel, Lucida Intervalla, is set in a frantic and failing world almost indistinguishable from our own, except that the things we fear happening – coastlines that are no longer coastlines, fire hail raining from the sky – are already happening. Lucida Intervalla might be read as a deliberative novel, one intended to provoke discussion and inform change, or it might be read as a novel resigned; to climate change and climate denial, to fallen cities and interminably displaced refugees, to an end ‘…without style. So bland. So fated.’ (233)

The world may be plummeting ever closer to self-destruction, but Lucida grants it little attention. As a child, she creates self-portraits in vomit and menstrual blood, the latter for which she is expelled. References to rising temperatures are rife and the planet seems on the precipice of collapse, if not already there. If this novel is a bildungsroman describing Lucida’s trajectory from troublesome child to super-celebrity; it is also one reflecting the gradual and uncomfortable movement of humanity toward accepting what is has done: to the earth, to the animals, and to ourselves, ‘…drowning and choking on its own goo and efflatus’ (219). This is unsurprising from Kinsella, a self-proclaimed anarchist pacifist vegan (link to Kinsella’s blog provided below) who coined the terms ‘pleasurism’ and ‘leisurism’ to describe acts of environmental degradation for, you guessed it, the purposes of pleasure and leisure. Uneasy and destructive relationships between humans, other species and the natural environment appear often in this novel. Wildlife is synonymous with road kill and forests only exist in conjunction to bulldozers. Young Lucida keeps mice as pets, one of which aggressively procreates and then eats its own offspring (32). Although mice are identified as herbivores and it is true that they can exist as such, they are opportunistic eaters who feed on what is available, much like humans. The incorrigible Pinkie, then, with the blood of his own and others’ infants on his snout, is the harbinger of society in this novel as in life.

This is the battle that rages between the old and new world in Lucida Intervalla, foregrounded by measured references to Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Lucida’s big break comes in the form of a trip to interview an aging and reclusive artist who has rejected the brave new world and retired to Centralia – a state which thus far does not exist, but is borne from the tentative idea raised by former Territory and federal MPs to merge parts of South Australia and the Northern Territory into one state. This move is touted as being a significant opportunity to reinvigorate this part of the country by taking advantage of its relative proximity to Asia, but Centralia as represented by Kinsella is as weary and shrivelled as the artist who has taken up residence there.

‘He is an artist and he should be in his prime…but his brushes dried with the wet and he’s not even done a sketch. It’s gone, whatever he had and whatever he hoped for. In the open, he is confined. In the open, and the blue sky, he is isolated. The birds are thoughts flitting by, or pecking at their stems. The heat haze shimmering within a few metres is the mirage he’ll never reach, never have.’ (50)

Centralia is hot, dusty, uninhabitable but for the regular delivery of water and other resources. The earth will not provide, not for aged celebrities nor ‘stray cows with calves, nibbling at the thin sheen of dead grass soon to be skin and bones…’ (54) yet it is from this dead earth that Lucida mines her fortune, capitalising on the fame that comes with proximity to celebrity. ‘Industrialism, consumerism, greed and general rapacity seem universal wrongs to me,’ says Kinsella (Watts 2013).

Lucida is an anti-heroine in that she actively profits from these things. At one point, envious of an author’s success, Lucida along with her team of managers and creators put together a book branded with her name which is published ‘…in a first print run of three million copies which took out a large chunk of forest’ (173) while the e-version ‘ate the energy from a dozen power stations around the world’ (173). Trapped and unable to cope with a conversation concerning indigenous land rights, she interrogates the speaker about the ways in which rodents are poisoned on his farm (183). This refusal to participate in imperative discussion concerning the future or lack thereof of postcolonial society repeats often throughout the novel, as each reference to climate change is followed by the increasingly desperate responses of deniers, each person willing to make positive changes stymied by the raising of a separate topic that successfully halts progress of any kind. This distraction away from imperative discussion of indigenous land rights toward an altogether unrelated – and comparatively unimportant – topic is an apt example. These kinds of unproductive conversations where significant issues are countered by irrelevant rejoinders abound in the media. Perhaps Kinsella, a vegan of many years, has participated in fruitless discussions with those claiming that the growing movement toward rejecting animal agriculture is pointless when rats continue to be poisoned in the process of wheat production.

Passivity is a violent act in Lucida Intervalla. Pro-Green artwork is funded with mining magnate dollars, activism is inefficient and often tainted with that which it seeks to reject and overall, things seem fairly hopeless. The characters are frogs sweating in water fast coming to the boil, unable or unwilling to leap out. And yet, perhaps Kinsella’s forlorn imaginings are deliberative. Perhaps the call-to-action is to jump from of the pot as quickly as possible, in any way possible. Lucida is an antonym to John Kinsella. He notes ‘[Lucida] …doesn’t like me much, and would disagree with most of what I have to say. She determines her own paths, many of which I find frightening.’ (Acknowledgements) Lucida is not a likeable character, but she is painfully familiar to anyone who has chosen to circumvent the difficult conversation and engage in behaviours we probably shouldn’t. She’s familiar to us all.

Humans should leave well enough alone, according to Kinsella. ‘People don’t have to occupy every square metre of the planet. Some places should just be left to do their ‘own’ thing.’ (Watts 2013) Reading is to be enjoyed, and books don’t need a takeaway to be satisfying, but if Lucida Intervalla is to continue to be speculative fiction rather than contemporary fiction, we need to do better.

Notes

Ryan, Tracy, and John Kinsella. 2019. “Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist”. Poetsvegananarchistpacifist.Blogspot.Com. http://poetsvegananarchistpacifist.blogspot.com/.

Watts, Madeleine. 2013. “Interview With John Kinsella”. Griffith Review. https://griffithreview.com/articles/interview-with-john-kinsella/.

GABRIELA BOURKE is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at USYD

Helen Gildfind reviews “Calenture” by Lindsay Tuggle

Written by mascara on August 5, 2019. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Calenture

by Lindsay Tuggle

ISBN: 9780648056812

Cordite Publishing

Reviewed by HELEN GILDFIND

The striking title of Lindsay Tuggle’s poetry collection is immediately defined in her preface:

Calenture, n:

A fever incident to sailors within the tropics, characterised by delirium in which the patient fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it. (ix)

This title, Tuggle’s preface, the book’s dedication to her dead sister, Kate Middleton’s introduction, and the notes that complete the text, provide an intriguing and welcome frame through which readers can ‘leap into’ Tuggle’s darkly beautiful worded-world.

Tuggle’s preface notes that: ‘Every elegy needs an author. And then, an autopsy’ (ix). The themes and impulses shaping her book are thus clear, and she describes her collection as an:

ossuary to a constellation of deaths, some sudden, all strange. It is also a catalogue of medical and mercurial oddities, curiosities that call forth the exquisite corpse hard at work beneath our living flesh. The echolalic duet between what is lost and what is left behind. The phantom limb. The wandering womb. The book bound in skin. The face that ghosts itself. The fever dream that ends in drowning. (ix)

Tuggle clearly loves language that is ‘diagnostic, archaic, hysteric, mesmeric’ (ix). She writes knowing that the ‘management of thresholds / is perilous business’ (49), and her collection thus maps the obscure imaginative landscape that joins the living to the dead, the personal to the universal, and the abstract to the concrete.

Tuggle’s collection is divided into two suites. The first shares the title of the book, and is introduced by three eerie quotes, including ‘We need a dead woman to begin’ (Hélène Cixous), and ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted’ (Emily Dickenson). In this suite, we meet a woman who cannot live ‘within her limbs’: she feels ‘on fire’ and ‘cut to pieces’ (34). We meet another woman (the same woman?) who ‘wakes to remember / her garnet cluster of early deaths’ (9). We glimpse ‘wrists / graced in the master’s hand’ (8), ‘mouthfuls of gravel’ (41), ‘bruised’ and ‘bandaged’ tongues (3, 5), and ‘feral anorexics’ (5)—including ‘the concave half of a sister’ (5).

This reference to ‘a’ sister shows how it is never quite clear who the subject and object of these poems are. This ambiguity is elaborated by the poems themselves: ‘Some days her face obliterates my own’ (15), and ‘we wear / each other’s faces’ (4), and ‘I trespass her name as my own’ (25). Of course the reader assumes, as they’ve been directed to, that such phrases refer to an actual ‘sister,’ and Tuggle’s ambivalence towards this relational identity is expressed when she refers to the ‘ambiguous wound’ (19) of her loss, to the ‘old grievances’ (‘shame’ and ‘blame’) that riddle such relationships (20, 21), and to the archetypal sibling emotion of jealousy—expressed when she looks upon a female corpse and wonders: ‘do I covet her still / diluted by sleep.’ (5) The narrator chillingly concludes: ‘I love the dead more than you / always will’ (6). Tuggle’s ambivalence towards the ‘biological gift’ (21) of a sister can also be read from the poems’ most common structural constraint of couplets—two lines, coerced into a relationship, across time and space.

More ambiguity is built into this first suite by reference to other deaths, including that of a man who lay ‘lay unfound’ for days (27), and the ‘integral burial’ of a flooded town where the ‘measure of loss’ lies in the ‘submergence of trees’ (31):

in the vanishing tendency
of the object

where descent
is watery and burns.

[…]

The wet are pretty. (33)

This deadly flooding is mirrored in a later poem, when a woman ‘walks in blindfolds’ into ‘bitumen tributaries,’ where ‘drowning ends in a glassy sprawl’ and roadside altars whisper ‘fire soars’ (41). As above, such vivid and violent references to suicide, death, drowning, burning, basalt and glass are often juxtaposed against the ostensibly trivial notion of ‘prettiness.’ Is drowning ‘a pretty way to die’ (19)? The ‘pretty suicide guide,’ would say so: ‘beauties never harm their faces’ (27). Of course, there’s nothing benign about the value of feminine beauty. This is made clear when the narrator looks upon a female corpse and thinks: ‘she’s prettier now / in coffined silhouette’ (5). Isn’t this the ideal woman? Pretty—and inert, silent, and surrendered to others’ devouring gaze? The narrator defies this value system: the female which dazzles (3) her gaze is a ‘raving’ (39), ‘ungroomed and carnivorous’ (3) ‘slattern’ (41).

The second suite of poems responds to the work of anatomist and naturalist Joseph Leidy (1832-1891), and the poet and naturalist Arsène Houssaye. Both men shared a bibliophilic ‘fetish’ for ‘anthropodermic’ books—that is, books bound in human skin. These books were normally created by surgeons, with Houssaye’s own book of essays bound in skin sourced from the ‘unclaimed’ body of a French, female mental patient (63,64).

The woman (women?) alluded to in this second suite call out to the women-sisters of the first—relating the latter’s more personal specificity to the more universal history of ‘the diasporic womb’ (56). In the first suite, the very ambiguity of the poems’ subject-object allows them to enlarge on their own anyway, especially in the poems referring to medicine and asylums, like in ‘Asylum, Pageantry’ (‘it is best not to dream for long / here medicine disallows her florid stutter,’ 3), and ‘The Heretics’ Asylum’:

The physician knows nothing
of angels with proper names.
Reverence is permitted only
toward unseen patients,
an innate distrust of that
which can be embodied
in a creed. (24)

In the second suite, we enter a world where a woman is literally disembodied—torn from her skin:

A splayed book attracts all the gazes.
You are the title closeted gazelle.

Just another posthumous seduction

[…]

To best display her character

no other decoration is placed. This
book deserves its own human cover. (53)

Sickened, furious—and utterly entranced—the reader asks: what does the woman deserve? This ‘brutal homage’ (54)? Here, the woman becomes another version of the inert ‘pretty’ female corpse in the first suite—one which others can literally ‘open’ and inscribe their own ‘creed’ into. This ‘echolalic duet’ between the first and second suites thus evokes the notion of an everywoman—an anywoman—who literally fights-to-the-death against patriarchy’s reduction of her to ‘flesh / toying architecturally with bone’ (56).

What Flannery O’Connor says of prose, surely applies to poetry also:

‘The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning… A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four.’

In Calenture, two sisters are absolutely more than the sum of their parts, and the sophistication of Tuggle’s tightly crafted, cryptic and compelling ossuary—her home for the bones of the dead—becomes evident with each reading. Like the best poetry, this book is first and foremost an experience—one which no analysis can do justice to.

Note

Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1970 (c. 1957), pp.96-102

H.C. GILDFIND (hcgildfind.com) is the author of The Worry Front, published by Margaret River Press.

Lindsay Tuggle reviews “Stone Mother Tongue” by Annamaria Weldon

Written by mascara on August 5, 2019. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Stone Mother Tongue

by Annamaria Weldon

ISBN: 9781742589930

UWAPublishing

Reviewed by LINDSAY TUGGLE

Resurrecting the Oracle: Stone Mother Tongue

Annamaria Weldon’s luminous fourth collection returns the poet to the archipelago of her birth. Stone Mother Tongue begins in prehistoric Malta, where Weldon mourns the “goddesses we trample[ed]” across the centuries. The poet guides us through shifting incarnations of her homeland, where “Recollection is mapped country folded backwards / along familiar creases” (50). Weldon’s poetry enacts a uniquely feminine divination; she calls forth a goddess oracle unbound from history, a statuary tongue unloosed from time. Ancient relics —museumed, looted, or abandoned—are portals to haunted islands where “pre-history seems just offshore . . . time’s lost coast in stone, not words.” Weldon elegantly negotiates the fraught territory between conflicted and conflicting histories: collective and personal, traumatic and resilient, human and divine.

At first glance, Stone Mother Tongue is arranged geographically and chronologically: Part 1) Prehistoric Malta, Part 2) Phoenician Malta, Part 3) Anthropocene, Antipodes. Yet Weldon’s mesmeric slight of hand is already at play. Within each section, her poetry unsettles both geographical borders and linear time, paradoxically disturbing the author’s own system of organization. Weldon’s readers cross and recross liminal thresholds, inhabiting poetic interstices where boundaries and clocks have no sway.

In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) signifies the ambiguity of middle rites, when the seeker has shed her pre-ritual status but has not yet completed her rite of passage. Arnold Van Gennep integrated the concept of liminality into anthropology in his 1909 study Les Rites de Passage, which outlines three distinct phases of ritual progression: separation, liminality, and incorporation. Van Gennep’s ritual trinity is relevant not only to Weldon’s poetically resurrected antiquity; the anthropological concept of liminality also captures the elegiac melancholy of her work. At once preciously specific and sweeping in their historical resonance, her poems mourn the erasure of deities, landscapes, selves and beloved others.

In a land where “asteroids once smashed to earth,” language remains as eroded as geological history: “Each remnant’s recorded by era, / but Beta counting only calculates rates of decay, / a relic’s meaning remains cryptic (50, 23). This curated vacancy creates space for illumination and divination. Weldon calls on “incantatory” stones to resurrect an ancient, maternal language, born of a time “When everything was the Goddess /and stone was our mother tongue.” Her elegiac “undersong” mines the blank spaces beyond and between words, the inability of language to capture the most enigmatic aspects of human history: our ancestors and their deities. Yet, she insists that the oracle’s translation can only ever be partial. The Goddess speaks “a language [as] untranslatable as stars in daylight.” Despite the poet’s efforts at resurrection, “a relic’s meaning remains cryptic” (23).

The first section in Part One, “Divining the Neolithic,” shows us that even when ancient matriarchal rituals and relics have been ravaged by time and violence, traces of divinity linger. “Geomancy” reconfigures the “broken altars” of abandoned temples.

Time and weather, the ploughman’s husbandry
and urban sprawl effaced them, leaving us to guess
the geomancy, gutted now from enigmatic temples. (32)

Agriculture, exposure, and expansion have “effaced” this holy site, but the final desecration is rendered as an anatomical wound: the temple has been “gutted.” Part of Weldon’s poetic magnetism lies in her capacity to evoke visceral responses through language that is often violently acute: “History’s survivors have heard it all before / the sound of invasion that some call arrival.” Yet, Weldon asks far more of her audience than simply outliving the open wounds of history. Survival, she tells us, “is not endurance alone” (20-21). As an (inevitably partial) antidote to the unceasing escalation of gender violence across the centuries, she conjures divine maternal voices from the deep past, a chorus that both harrows and heals.

Goddess, when your body was worshipped
as holy matrix of the world incarnate
no clerics or sceptics mocked our devotion
and love conjured more power than hate. (18)

Throughout Weldon’s work, divination is disturbed by the arrival of new wounds, both personal and cultural. The deconsecrated temple has become a tourist destination, its deities reduced to ancient curiosities.

Inside the sanctuary walls, torba floors endure
as bone-white ground, broken as the silence now
deities are curios, gift shop souvenirs. (31)

While it may not be possible to resurrect the goddesses that once inhabited this hallowed ground, Weldon compels us to try. She invites us to listen beyond the gaudy white noise of our century, for the low hum of an oracle who keeps the secrets of her own survival well guarded, despite the hoards of curiosity seekers who trample her grave. Yet, Weldon’s poetry is far more nuanced than directive. While she argues that survival entails more than mere endurance, she does not reveal the resilient alchemy for surviving history’s ravages. That mystery belongs to the deity, alone.

Catalogued as myth, in time She was denied
all ceremonies, those rituals that temper
time’s lapse to entropy. (45)

This inquiry underpins the poems of Stone Mother Tongue: How do we, as a species, survive “time’s lapse to entropy”? Could the resurrection of ancient, maternally-embodied rituals help us to “temper” the technologically-saturated ennui of late capitalism? These questions are integral to Weldon’s work, even as they are revealed as unanswerable. The goddess’s stone tongue remains immobile, her “silence mystical and terrible” (33).

“In Geotherapy” Weldon’s archival poetics turns inward, enigmatically curating personal wounds alongside antiquity’s ravaged aftermath:

Enlist a devoted archivist to polish history.
When topography frames experience, you will accept
the residual changes heartache left in its wake. (50)

The poet becomes her own “devoted archivist,” preserving histories that are at once personal and collective, ever-present and archaic. In “Devotion’s Aftermath,” the Goddess shines as an elusive specimen of antiquity, “hidden in plain sight” (45).

In “Borderlands,” Weldon guides us into the liminal “Interstice” between the living and the dead. “Disarticulated by its darkness, we / have traversed all the stations of being / from birth to the excarnation of bones.” The portal of “sympathetic magic” is guarded by the “gaze of ancestral protection” — a hollow skull “watching all our futures.” (56). Under the protective eyes of this this spectral guard,, women gather, “as if willingly entombed,” crooning not in mourning but in celebration: “mantras of maternal consolation that rise / and fall with the birthing cries of the woman crouched on the cusp of deliverance.” Now, after the desecration and (partial) resurrection of ancestral deities and their followers, a birth arrives, and “the boundary between worlds is breached” (57). A new divinity — human, this time– emerges from “the cocoon of smooth deliverance. . . / a priestess / is not made, nor merely / born, but recognized” (59).

The poems of Part 2, “Phoenician Malta,” document the atrocities inflicted on the Maltese people by “colonizers, slavery, trade, cruelty” (70). Weldon interrogates what the Phoenicians brought with them as well as what they stole or destroyed, treating the islands merely as a “stepping stone settlement” (73). “Entire seashores, bays and beaches made middens” by an insatiable hunger for beauty that demanded destruction:

A quarter million snails sacrificed
for one ounce of dye.” (69)

In “This Precious Stain,” Weldon questions “What stories lay– still lie–beyond beauty!” and whether, “if we knew / their true cost, would their magic be dispelled / or the enchantment deepen?” Other poems elegize the human cost of quarrying the islands’ precious stones (formerly the source material for the statues of maternal deities who dominated Part One, “Prehistoric Malta”). These stones are now subjected to a “violent separation.” “Enormous slabs” are quarried and “prised open with fire, sanded smooth to elide the trauma / of calving rock.” The colonizing labour of unsettling these relics of geological time is equally violent: “Boys died here from a moment’s slippage, manoeuvring the masonry.” “Crushing has many sounds,” including “an exhalation / vaguely human, hanging in the air / hauntingly as final breath.” (71)

Alongside the desecration of the islands’ people and resources, the Phoenicians left something behind: an alphabet. “Newly designed Phoenician letters” gave those who survived the invasion and its aftermath the words to record their trauma: “incised on clay / or inked on papyrus. Before their invention / thoughts that could only be wept / sank unmarked into the dark water.” (67) In “A Shoreline Scripted for Heartbreak” we follow the “arrivals and departures” of the “Literate, captive women . . . assigned as scribes to passing merchants.” Starkly rendered in sparse language, the poem elegizes the “Ill-fated, unrecorded, charged encounters” these women endured in the “ceaseless maritime traffic” of “colonisers, pirates, naval flotillas, hospital ships, refugee boats, cruise liners, smugglers.” Weldon once again holds our hand to the flame, forcing us to see the harrowing similarities between the human trafficking of their century and our own.

Part Three, “Anthropocene, Antipodes,” merges Australia’s cultural amnesia with the aphasia of personal grief. “What I Saw at the War Memorial” articulates the national tendency towards historical erasure with the compulsion to create monuments that privilege nationally sanctioned deaths, while participating violently in the erasure of other, marginal massacres.

Grief is the gap where words
won’t meet. Time is a stone-cutter
quarrying rocks for monuments.

Memorials are what we build
to limn the invisible, mark thresholds
we can’t cross [.] (101)

In the 21st century’s amnesiac liminality, such thresholds of grief remain invisible and impossible to cross, rendered in fissures of language and memory. The poems of this final section embody an enigmatic loss of unity, sketching a deliberately fragmented picture of “grief’s blurred peripheries” against the hazy backdrop of “memories that rise like mist” (99). Weldon’s final poems elegize a multiplicity of losses, including a harrowingly beautiful tribute to her father’s remaining memories as he struggles with dementia:

when all that’s left
of your former life are those memories of the journey,
sightings and oracles remind me who you are — had been
before your mind soared to where there are no maps. (103)

In the end, Weldon brings us full circle, the poet herself becomes an oracle in “Leaning Back Towards the Neolithic.” Returning to her ancestral homeland, divination is not invoked or invited, but embodied:

From village to hamlet, the valley path from Gharb
to Birbuba has become my pilgrim’s way, each step
rephrasing me as I walk it. Words come unasked,
immersive as the weather of prayer, heartache
like a fig tree’s barren longing to bear fruit.

In her “Epilogue,” Weldon shows us that even when the statues of ancient dieties have all been effaced, the oracles silenced for centuries, poetry can offer a portal into the liminal threshold of harrowed divinity — if we only are willing to seek out the ruins, and to listen to the halting echoes of our Mother’s stone tongues.

LINDSAY TUGGLE is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens (The University of Iowa Press, 2017) and Calenture (Cordite Books, 2018) which was commended in the Anne Elder Award and shortlisted in the Mary Gilmore Prize. She has been a fellow at the Library of Congress, the Mütter Museum / College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

William Farnsworth reviews “Glass Life” by Jo Langdon

Written by mascara on August 4, 2019. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Glass Life

by Jo Langdon

5Islands Press

ISBN: 9780734054272

Reviewed by WILLIAM FARNSWORTH

On opening the first pages of Jo Langdon’s second collection, Glass Life, one might, at first, have the sense of reading through a poet’s travelogue. Among the first few poems there are descriptions of the modernist Hauptbahnhof station in Berlin or the glaze ice sculpture of the nativity scene (Eiskrippe) in Graz, Austria. Here, a theme integral to the collection is implied: fragility and strength in balance with each other; a starting point for Langdon’s lyrical journey of introspective musings and wanderlust.

Through the snow glazed landscape of central Europe, Langdon’s poetry evokes an emotional sincerity that is not unlike flicking through undiscovered diary entries. Her emotional inclusivity combined with her technical ability is on par with the best of contemporary feminist poetry, and indeed many of her verses are dedicated or are in direct reference to poets whom she admires. Some of the titles or epigraphs are from poets such as Barbara Guest, Emily O’Neill, Eleni Sikelianos or Denise Levertov. The poem “Making love & omelettes” takes a line from poet and theorist Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s “Pfarr-Schermz (Village-Anguish)”. Feminist artists are referenced; in “After Ana Lily Amirpour,” Langdon expresses clear admiration for the Iranian filmmaker’s visual landscapes and her tongue-in-cheek attitude to the world.

These referential phrases and dedications are a small part of what makes the collection so rich. Any poet who puts their pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards) will very quickly identify other writers, past or present, to whom they owe a debt of gratitude. These dedications are like words of thanks that are now a part of Langdon’s own works in one way or another. In her poem, “Felt” we encounter the sense of dissecting the very reading of poems:

She says. ‘I felt your message
but haven’t read it
yet—’

Hook & hold
of words—the glide

& chime of tram
to lights; the city
(42)

Langdon immerses the immediate reactions of interpretation with the emotional impact of the work. We see a writer who is both writing and unpacking her poetry at the same time. She analyses the link of writing to the ephemera of rain, water, city and traffic, ending with the phrase which is quoted from, once again, Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s poem, “Cordelia: or, “A Poem Should not Mean, but Be”” itself a line derived from “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish.

Langdon is careful, though, not to let these intertextual references override her poetic task. “Then” and “Apropos” are two favourites of mine, and her two prose poems “Biographic” are delicately phrased narratives of immense power concerning the early life of her Oma in Holland ‘(a)fter the girls’ home,’at the time of the second world war. Here, the focalisation shifts from personal to public; the image of the navel is pivotal. It evokes the stigmas of poverty and pregnancy, partially exposed by insinuation:

…To jam on bread her moeder
said, What, you’re pregant as well now? This new shame. How
awful, she said later. What happens to the navel, how it opens out.
(58)

Reading through this collection, one sees more than mere reflections of memory and thought but also, and in the style of feminist poets such as Adrienne Rich, there are reflections on beauty and sadness. The speaker finds her own place in the world around her as a writer, whether witnessing the sadness of others or understanding her own, which, to me at least, seems to reflect the power of poetry as a therapeutic device. These are poems that seem to inspire the necessity to write.

Although many poems are about specific memories and experiences, Langdon keeps us invested through phrasings and aspects that many can identify with. Two poems exemplifying this are “Negation” and “Blues of Summer”. Both are about unwanted attention dramatising uncomfortable feelings experienced by women, the harassment instantly recognisable by Langdon’s choices of words, her skilful lineation and enjambments as in this cameo from “Negation”:

the time I pretended to leave
a train towns early
because of a man
with a wedding band, whose fingers
travelled more than once
to my knees.

This uncomfortable scenario precedes the description of yet another, becoming surmised and controlled by a more defiant voice:

I like to think
I would be fiercer, now. By sleeper
each town sped
me past.

and later in the same poem, that confident register imbues the language, lingering in the reader’s consciousness:

Views— like words — flare and go:
(30)

Surmising these experiences from anger, to recovery and release of tension, makes Langdon’s poetics an activism that is poised, thoughtful and emotionally charged.

The iconic, “Blues Of Summer” begins with one of her finest opening lines: ‘Pretend beauty and hope it shows …’ This beautiful yet angry poem about body image and the male gaze, which are key themes, is one of the very best of this volume. Characteristically, the images are precise and there is deft control of the shifts between public and private address. The poem maps out the constrictive power exercised on the simple act of walking along the beach into a battleground. Langdon evokes the steely power of the gaze, outwardly and inwardly, whether it be casting doubt over one’s own view of oneself or the dangerous call outs of men:

Breathe in hard to hold
the shape of you—pin back
shoulders & see

that your ankles don’t collapse.

This jetty is full of men & lit cigarettes
smoke & weed
in water, sliding soft.
(31)

Hard-won resistance to misogyny couples with disciplined emotional sincerity in poems such as these. Nonetheless, they seem directly lifted out of life and dramatically transformed. This is a poetry of insistence and empowerment, which, to put it simply, deserves to be read.

Glass Life is a fine achievement. This is a book of extreme delicacy and beauty, from its gorgeous cover, by the artist Susanna Majuri, which reflects the poetry and its aims wonderfully. Langdon’s poems are sweet, tender, angry, exciting, reflective, sad, and ecstatic, all varying on differing ideas, phrases and situations. Its key themes of fragility and strength are what keep these poems consistently powerful, reflecting through experiences and thoughts that are like the vagueness of lost memories yet recovered through the looking glass of poetry and its own fragile power.

WILLIAM FARNSWORTH is a 22-year-old writer who works and lives in Geelong and Melbourne writing poetry, articles, and reviews in various publications. He has worked in theatre and in film for the past 4 years, distinguishing himself in touring plays about Australian history and co-founding Geelong’s first LGBTIQ film festival: GPFF (Geelong Pride Film Festival).

Jill Jones

Written by mascara on August 1, 2019. Posted in Poetry.

Jill Jones has published eleven books of poetry, and a number of chapbooks. The most recent are Viva La Real with UQP, Brink, The Leaves Are My Sisters, The Beautiful Anxiety, which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2015, and Breaking the Days, which was shortlisted for the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her work is represented in major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Ed. Nicholas Jose and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry. In 2014 she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University. She is a member of the J.M.Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide.

Patience Without Virtue

Everyone loves the female voice.
Am I forgiven for having one?
I wait patiently, hoping it’s only
to do with simple flowers. It never is.

I dissent again, the moon goes as it came.
There’s nothing transcendental within reach.
What must I do amongst sweat
grey flannel, car parks, and theories?

I can only be a certain kind of lunatic
and women are vaster than history.
It’s the way I don’t step forward politely.
No point sitting on the fence.

It’s the way I have to fix things
by painting a sign. ‘I can’t believe
I still have to protest this fucking shit.’
I can’t put the leaves back.

My affinity is always a question.
I can’t recall when these things didn’t happen
in my cells or beaten-up memories.
I’ll never be as dead as a man.

Judith Beveridge launches “Vishvarūpa” by Michelle Cahill

Written by mascara on July 19, 2019. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Vishvarūpa

by Michelle Cahill

ISBN 978-07340-4205-7

5 Islands Press, 2011

second edition UWAPublishing

ISBN: 9781760800352

Launch Speech by JUDITH BEVERIDGE

As Michelle tells us in the notes, Vishvarūpa is a Sanskrit word meaning: manifold, having all forms and colours. This aspect of diversity is beautifully played out in Michelle’s book. She ranges from different locales in and around Sydney, to Mumbai, to Dharamasala, around an impressive range of mythical and cultural references, and around voices, which are both personal and imagined.

This is a book of highly textured, rich, elegant poems that probe into Eros, power, mortality, place, dream, culture, myth. The particular way this book juxtaposes and interweaves Australian and Indian experiences makes it unique. Its contribution to contemporary poetry I’m sure will be regarded by many as highly significant, and a book that will act as an important touchstone for the way that different cultural experiences can be sustained and interwoven.

So Michelle is juggling quite a few balls with this book, yet I never had the sense that she was taking on more than she could manage, or that the risks were tipping her over, making her lose control. What is so impressive about the book is the singular strength, confidence and vigour of the language.

We as readers know when we are in the presence of language that’s being used in exciting, brilliant combinations, whose effect is immediately intoxicating. You’ll notice an astute control of diction in this book, a diction that can accommodate formal elegance, the vernacular, specialised knowledge, the mundane world. A diction that can range from words such as: tumuli, orogeny, haptic, myocardium, porcine, swithering, glutaraldehye: to crow, magnolia, butterfly, motorbikes, possum, rain.

We know as readers we have to be a little wary of poets who create dazzling surfaces, but who don’t, finally, have all that much beer under the foam. But with Michelle’s work there is a sense that text and texture are rightly married, that the poems are “imaginatively right”, that the rhythms move as the mind moves. Michelle’s poems flow exquisitely from phrase to phrase and line to line. She also has a remarkable ability to do jump-shifts that seem to change the tone quite drastically, yet still maintaining an overall coherence.

One of my favourite poems in the volume, “The Abbey” illustrates this point. This is an intensely evocative poem, full of a strange, unsettling sensuality, and it attains its power from the way in which beauty and menace play off against each other. There’s both a sense of the corporeal as well as a ghost-like insubstantiality, which provides a great deal of tension and suspense:

The Abbey

Why do you ask? Haven’t we already touched
as we lay on the lichen, the stones, uneven and
tessellated into a path, your hand on my dress.

We lay with forget-me-nots, whispered vows
resting our gaze. The air was heavy as the scent
of lilies stewed and spilt across the dry grass.

I felt the shock when you parted my hair.
I saw crushed petals falling from the sky
like paper moons in flawless pink and red.

I believe there was a dead dove, its neck swollen
as if it had been strangled. And I saw what looked
like one stagger into the shade of a fluted yew

We could hear the voices of those we knew,
the organ player’s notes receding from the abbey,
the sound of wooden bells. Or was it broken wings?

Impossible to read the names. How could we see
the living or the dead ghosts rise from their graves,
pacing, becoming frantic. Our eyes were stitched.

All that we saw was the soil, sweet and sad, leaves
beginning to fray, to curl, and the splatter of moss
sown like a seam through stone, a silent threnody,

a trickle beneath the earth’s skin as if something
stirred in darkness that was unspoken, the dove’s
wings, perhaps, or the heart weighing its secret.

(18)

This is a common feature in this book, the play of contradictions. Pablo Neruda in his essay “Toward an Impure Poetry” said that he wanted poems “smelling of lilies and urine”. There is something immensely appealing about juxtaposition, about the concurrence and interaction of unlike truths, of lines or sentences where one impression confronts another. In Vishvarūpa Michelle has made this her own aesthetic, she is often shifting her stance, or assertion and making us as readers feel the world as multi-toned, as manifold.

In the poem, “The Ghost Ship”, another one of my favourites, the scent of the albatross feathers are described in terms of both beauty and disgust:

a musk
pungent as magnolia, tossed with brine and bilge.

(19)

In the poem “The Chase” the speaker talks of:

the lavender scent of evening

which is a drug. It drives you to the periphery, the deepest part
of this gorge where we last crossed the river, our feet cold
amongst, the tangled roots and the rain.

(21)

In the poem “Tryptich of Wings” – the dead butterfly has one wing “bright as velvet” the other “Mendelian, a mosaic sequined with ants.”

In “Ode to Mumbai”, the speaker declares:

I hang in a gap between the sound and meaning of words
dipping my subconscious in different time zones, where
my bed is a temple and a brothel, where dream defines me.

(23)

I love the richness and all the compound, multi-layered impressions that Michelle evokes. She seems so able to make cosmos out of chaos. Her two poems about Mumbai – “Ode to Mumbai” and “City of Another Home” so adeptly portray the multitudinous and multifarious aspects of such a place. All the contrapuntal comings, goings and doings of a wide-range of people- from the haggling women, the taxis, the beggars, the spivs, the sadhus, the cows, the dogs, the middle class folk, the members of a Laughter Club, the auto-rickshaw drivers that inhabit Mumbai are all so seamlessly threaded through the poem, and by the end we get a sense of rightness and peace:

City of divine deliriums, the dogs are chained. the Laughter Club
members fatigue their raucous morning bellows from a plinth
of recreational park. the auto-rickshaw wallahs doze in the shade.

(39)

Some of the most powerful poems in the volume are the poems, which either speak about or assume the voices of various Hindu Gods and Goddesses. There’s ” Kālī from Abroad” ” Pārvatī in Darlinghurst, ” Durgā: a Self Portrait”, “Ganeśa Resurrected “”Laksmī Under Oath” to name some of them. Michelle has a great deal of fun with these destructive and capricious deities. She modernises them, flirts with them, taunts them, brings their faults and foibles to the fore. There’s a strong sense of the erotic, of taking these figures off their pedestals and revealing their feet of clay. These are multi-toned gods and goddesses revivified in contemporary settings.

Kālī is described as ” adroit in drugs and aphrodisiacs/ a nude dominatrix/ a feminist export with a sado-masochistic bent”. She wears “punk-blue leggings” and has “skull-and-scissor charms.”

Here’s the goddess Pārvatī speaking of the affair between herself and Shiva in the poem “Pārvatī in Darlinghurst”: The tone is sarcastic. Pārvatī is confident, fully empowered, full of her own intentionality and will:

We scorned the Purānas, our tryst no Himalayan
cave, but a hotel bed I had draped with stockings,
lingerie, and the crystal ice of a Third Eye. I admit
that’s why I spoke with the speed of an antelope.
It seems the acharyas were mistaken: I hadn’t
dated for marriage or adultery, nor with a wish
to deck his house with flowers or sweep his floors.
I am too busy, I declared, for dalliance or abstract
gossip. I have no interest in honeybees and birds.
All I wanted was a good time. I swear as the river
is my sister, that this guy was not my sun or my sky.
No way did it even enter my mind to have his kids.
His first wife’s ashes are scattered all over the city.
Goddamn it, Shiva is a walking disaster; whatever
he touches burns.

(57)

Again the language is uncompromising, beautifully weighted and nuanced.

I found that Vishvarūpa kept me engaged with its rhythms and patterns of sound, with its narrative power and sense of exact detail, with the way the imagery and tone negotiate the very subtle changes of mood or modes of feeling. I love the humour, the nostalgia, the regret, the obstinacy, the tenderness.

There is so much more I could say about Vishvarūpa, there are so many fine poems I haven’t touched on or mentioned. So I urge you to buy it and relish in the poems as I have. I’d like to end on a quote by Octavio Paz because I think it sums up that wonderful quality that Michelle’s poetry has:

Each time we are served by words, we mutilate them. But the poet is not served by words. He is their servant. In serving them, he returns them to the plenitude of their nature, makes them recover their being. Thanks to poetry, language reconquers its original state. First, its plastic and sonorous values, next the affective values; and finally the expressive ones.

Michelle has done all of this is in her book and I’d like to congratulate her and 5 Islands Press for the great gift of Vishvarūpa.

JUDITH BEVERIDGE is the author of six collections of poetry, all of which have won major Australian book prizes or been shortlisted. Devadatta’s Poems (Giramondo Publishing) was short-listed for the NSW and Qld Premiers’ poetry prizes and the Prime Minister’s Poetry Award. Hook and Eye, ed Paul Kane was published by Braziller in New York. Sun Music: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2018 by Giramondo.