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The Colour of Care by CB Mako

Written by mascara on . Posted in Creative Non-fiction.

CB Mako is a member of West Writers Group and art student at Footscray Community Arts Centre. In 2016, she won the Grace Marion Wilson Prize for non-fiction. was a panelist at the Emerging Writers’ Festival’s ‘Late Night Lit: Fandom’, and read her non-fiction piece at the Melbourne Writers Festival’s ‘Storytelling at the Dock’.  Her works were published in The Suburban Review, The Lifted Brow, The Victorian Writer, and Pencilled In.  CB Mako can be found on Twitter as @cubbieberry  and Instagram as @cb.mako
 
 
 
 
My Twitter app chimed a reply. ‘We’re called “caregiver” here in the USA.’ My American friend couldn’t understand the word I used when I chatted with her online. She was a caregiver to her eleven-year-old child with autism.

Later, a blogger-parent from the UK—who has an eight-year-old daughter with Down Syndrome—tweeted back, ‘We’re called “carer” here in London.’    

While in the Huffington Post Australia, carers of young children were simply called ‘parents of children with special needs.’

Carers Victoria defines carers as ‘diverse as the Victorian population.’ The definition continues: ‘The work of unpaid carers contributes enormously are disadvantaged [sic] regarding health and safety, holidays, work, leisure and financial security … Many carers and the people they care for are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and experience additional difficulties.’

I am a mother, a carer of a child with Down Syndrome.  My six-year-old daughter had open-heart surgery at three months of age, which was followed by a cancer diagnosis when she turned eighteen months old.   

Exhausted from caring for my daughter during her eight months of chemotherapy, I barely knew how to get through the day. Meditation and mindfulness therapies didn’t work anymore. As my last resort, I went to see a psychiatrist, and was prescribed antidepressants.  

*

Having two children born in Australia, my husband Chris and I—both migrants—have no immediate family to turn to in an emergency or in times of need. While it was said that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, our own migrant community was wary of us and we were wary of them. Not only were we new migrants, we also bore a child with a disability. We didn’t follow the highly expected migrant story—fully employed, owned a large, well-furnished house in the suburbs, with more than one car. We didn’t give our parents back home the opportunity to brag to their “amigos” and “amigas” about their progeny overseas.

Whenever we attended familial or religious gatherings, there were two kinds of greetings.  At the onset, they would say that our daughter was lucky to be born in Australia, with its universal healthcare, excellent paediatric cardiac surgeons, and Melbourne’s brand-new, state-of-the-art Royal Children’s Hospital. But their furtive glances gave away their strongly-held traditional, superstitious beliefs that we, as parents, were cursed because we disobeyed our parents, and we were being punished by God.  

Were these simply imaginary interpretations and conversations in my mind? Were their furtive whispers actually their clumsy attempts to start an awkward dialogue about disability? Whatever they were, any future attempts of amicable discussions remained futile. In our reshaped, post-cancer lives, we found ourselves avoiding visiting old friends and relatives.

Online, it was difficult to assert myself as a carer. I only had one week—during National Carers Week—to rally to the cause for carers, and safely express my thoughts on social media. As Roxane Gay (2014) contends, ‘This is the modern age. When tragedies occur, we take to Twitter and Facebook and blogs to share our thoughts and feelings.  We do this to know that maybe, just maybe, we are not alone in our confusion or grief or sorrow or to believe we have a voice in what happens in the world.’  

However, on that same week, news broke about a migrant family from Colombia, South America—with two young children with autism—who had committed filicide.  

On social media, disability advocates raised their angry voices, asking why news reports assumed that the family’s deaths had anything to do with autism?

I took a step back and observed the tweets and who tweeted them. The online critics were women. But were they white women or women of colour? Were they women born in Australia or were they migrants? Did these angry women have families and friends nearby to support them in their time of need?

As a migrant woman myself, a woman of colour, and a carer, the questions I wanted to ask were different: Was there help given to the migrant parents? Were the parents of these children—disconnected from organic, migrant communities—having a difficult time as carers? Was the mother the primary carer of her two children? Was she alone most of the day? Did her local council provide her some respite care in order to take a break for a few hours a week for self-care?  

As Melanie Cheng writes in Meanjin (2016):

Migration is hard. To a great extent, the smoothness of the transition depends on the circumstances in which the individual migrates … The relationship a migrant has with their adopted home can an extraordinary complex one.  Unfortunately such complexity is rarely explored in the media today. We tend to hear rags-to-riches tales about migrants who are eternally grateful or—at the other extreme—stories of radicalisation and extreme hatred.

Coming from a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) background, there was no direct translation for the words ‘mental health’ or ‘depression’ in my country of birth. The closest translation to the word ‘depression’ in the Philippines was ‘crazy’. Eventually, I learned that in other cultures as well, it is taboo for women to discuss or admit they have had mental health issues.

I woke up to a stark realisation that other forces—outside of caring for a child with a disability and cancer—had re-written our family’s story, altering the course of my narrative.  The universe had a unique sense of humour. Apparently, not only was I cursed with bad karma, and punished by God; I was also crazy.   

As a carer and a woman of colour, with mental health issues, where did I fit in?   

*

I once enquired about applying for a writing group about disability and the first question they asked was, of course, ‘Do you have a disability?’

I paused, unable to reply. Should I openly admit that I had mental health issues?  My deepest fear in admitting that, ‘yes, I am taking antidepressants and was clinically diagnosed with depression’, was that my children would be taken away from me.

This fear reminded me what Khalid Warsame wrote in Overland (2014):

I wanted to write a story about the “immigrant experience” but I didn’t want it to be a story just about the immigrant experience, as if that were the only kind of story someone like me could write.  The reluctance came from a place of fear.  Somewhere along the line, I accepted that how I see myself is intimately tied up with how I perceive others to see me … But the question remains: if one is scared to write one’s own story for fear of writing … too consciously, then what else is there to write about?

When an Australian literary journal put out a call for submissions on the topic of disability, I wondered if a carer’s narrative would be included in their special printed issue. Were there carers like myself, looking after their children with disability?  Did they have disabilities themselves?  Eventually, my piece about the carer’s voice was not accepted.

In Australia, whether on parenting websites or in literary magazines or literary journals, when mental health stories revolve around women and children, the stories are those of white women and children. An article in The Saturday Paper, despite being written by a person of colour, featured a white woman with postnatal depression from Footscray, an inner-west suburb of Melbourne. Didn’t Maribyrnong Council tweet last year that their city was the second most diverse city in Victoria?

Where were the people of colour who had mental health issues or disabilities? Why was there no representation of intersectionality in these areas? Were we too complex, too complicated to be part of the mainstream narrative?  

In The Victorian Writer, Maxine Beneba Clarke (2016, p12), argues that:

the current dialogue around women’s writing in Australia is biased and stagnant. Few commentators seem game, engaged, or interested enough, to ask the uncomfortable questions … But we are so afraid to complicate things. It’s just too hard. Perhaps there’s a fear that highlighting this lack of diversity dilutes the primary cause of advancing women’s writing in general. White Feminism has operated on this basis for time immemorial. Perhaps there are some inconvenient truths. Perhaps we are those inconvenient truths.

Was writing about the narrative of the carer of colour an inconvenient truth?

 

References

Carers Victoria. ‘Carers in Victoria – the facts:  Fact sheet’. Carers Victoria, http://www.carersvictoria.org.au/
Melanie Cheng. ‘Our Lucky Country: Finding home in a new land.’ Meanjin, vol. 75, issue 2 (winter 2016), pp. 132-133.
Maxine Beneba Clarke. ‘Inconvenient Truths.’ The Victorian Writer, (June-July 2016), pp. 10-13.
Roxane Gay. ‘Tragedy.Call.Compassion.Response.’ Bad Feminist, (2014), p. 297.
Khalid Warsame. ‘The Authentic Writer Self.’ Overland, issue 217 (summer 2014), pp. 3-7.

Dimitra Harvey reviews “Fragments” by Antigone Kefala

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Fragments

by Antigone Kefala

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-925336-19-1

Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY

Stark, radiant imagery; lean punctuation; the slightly disorienting effect of the syntax; an imaginative vision of sensuous waking life enmeshed in subterranean realms of memory and dream, struck me on my first encounter with Australian poet Antigone Kefala’s work: an English-Greek bilingual edition I stumbled across several years ago containing selections from each of her then published collections, The Alien (1973), Thirsty Weather (1978), European Notebook (1988), and Absence (1992). Fragments (2016) represents Kefala’s first collection of new poems in more than twenty years. Like those earlier collections, Fragments effects Banksy’s famous maxim, that ‘art should…disturb the comfortable’.

The voice of Fragments travels across countries – cities and shorelines, edgelands, bushland, and dream – as it attends to states of grief and aging, to the intricate entanglements of sensory experience, memory, and imagination. Kefala’s attention to these entanglements disrupts what theorists Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch conceived as the ‘political-cultural construct’ of modernity – the ‘seamless continuum’ of rectilinear time (Seremetakis 19-21). Oriented towards the past, rendered ambiguously as ‘a coolness / we thirst for… / a poison / we thirst for’ (7), and by which the present is constantly interrupted, judged, made sense of, and ‘reimagine[d]’ (75) – the collection resists the future-orientation of setter-colonial society, its practices of’ ‘concealment’ and ‘amnesia’ (Rose 16, 11).

Kefala engages the senses with startling vividness. Fireworks pour from the Sydney Harbour Bridge as ‘a rain of stars… / crushing against the polished / marble of the waves’ (25). The eyes of kangaroos are ‘large sequins / splashing in the night’ (31). In the divers of ‘The Bay’ (26), we meet ‘strange amphibious creatures / with black rubber skins / wrestling the waves’. Throughout Fragments, the interplay of sensuousness and memory evokes non-linear temporalities. In the opening poem, ‘the sound’ of a voice thrusts from memory to synaesthetic presence: the speaker feels her ‘veins full of ice’ as the voice ‘travel[s] / at high speed / releasing fire’. The sensory-emotional cascade ruptures unilinear time as the speaker observes ‘this return / the past attacking / unexpectedly / in the familiar streets’ (3). Akin to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of time-knots, which identifies ‘a plurality of times existing together, a discontinuity of the present with itself’ (in Rose 25), in Kefala’s poem we witness the past violently rupture the present – ‘return[ing]’, resisting closure – and implicating the experience of time in layered, cyclical trajectories.

Trajectories of return permeate the collection. In poems such as ‘On Loss’ (40), remembering the dead embodies the ‘contradictory, equivocal, and ambiguous’ return of exhumation (Danforth 69). As anthropologist Loring Danforth points out, ‘the return that takes place upon exhumation should be an occasion for joy. But an exhumation is not a joyous return…The exhumed remains are above ground, no longer separated from the world of the living, yet they are only bones’ (66-69). In ‘Letter II’ (4), the ‘light…clean as if made of bones / dried by a desert wind’ reminds the speaker of the ‘you’ she addresses. The implication is clear: that person is dead, the body decomposed. The poem pivots on the paradox of being a letter to one who is no longer alive to read it – reminiscent of poems such as Donald Hall’s ‘Letter with no Address’ (103); however, in Kefala’s poem, the crystal hardness of the imagery generates the aura of a rite. Light exhumes memory even as it returns knowledge of total separation: ‘nothing will bring you back’. Like the ‘hard white bones’, evincing ‘[t]hat which has been separated so painfully cannot be rejoined… and the contradiction between our lives and our deaths can never be resolved’ (69), the speaker in ‘Letter II’ acknowledges that there is ‘only this light / falling… / in an unbearable indifference’.

Kefala links the seasonal cycles with aging and death. The title of ‘Moon Wolf’ (33) reverses the Native American seasonal term, specifying the full moon of midwinter associated with death vis-á-vis extreme cold and scarcity. The speaker sees the moonlight ‘aiming at [her], swooping down / a bird… / its hollowed eyes / pencilled in crimson / its incandescent tail… / searing through the air / …closing in / burning the ground’. The sense of the speaker as prey and her awareness of her mortality crystallise in the image. In the suggestion that the speaker has approached the ‘winter’ of her life, the threat and proximity of death is intimated as both material fact and something that preys upon her mind. This is unnervingly intensified in the final observation of the moon’s light stalking ‘at [her] feet’: ‘the white wolf / the tense arch of its back / blue phosphorescence’.

The cyclical trajectory of aging emerges within poems such as ‘Letter to Chitra’ (42), where the subjects take on the appearance of pre-adult states: ‘Our friends are… / holding themselves / in their emaciated bodies / exposed faces that have acquired / the look of adolescence’. In ‘Birthday Party’ (67), ‘she was waiting on the couch / very pale, white dusted / incredibly small now… / not coping with her glasses / that had grown / to a giant size’. Much of Fragments meditates on the physical and psychological impacts, as well as social alienation, of aging, in a culture that largely dismisses its elderly; ‘a culture’ – as Dmetri Kakmi points out, ‘that has set a taboo on ageing, and makes a cult of youth and the inordinate preservation of the body’ (103).

The biting poem ‘The Neighbour’ (43) lists the actions carried out after an elderly woman dies:

On Monday, she said
they took her away
on Tuesday
the dog was put down
on Wednesday
the furniture went.

And poor bob
still at the Resting Home
that nice place
the walls white, the bed covers red
and he sitting there in his pyjamas
drinking tea
unaware of the maple coffin
and she lying dead
and all the lovely flowers.

The noting of perfunctory tasks trivialises the woman’s death, reducing her life to material fragments, easily dismantled. The casual, conversational tone amplifies the brutal apathy of the failure to notify the nursing home-bound husband, making the poem a pointed critique of neglect.

In ‘Day by Day’ (75), cycles and seasons correlate with backwards and downwards trajectories that gesture to moral accountability. The speaker’s observation of ‘another spring / the peach tree in flower again’ spurs the looping verse of the second stanza: ‘backwards me turn / we turn backwards / measure our failures’. ‘Day by Day’ contests the ‘deflection of responsibility’ embedded within what Deborah Bird Rose describes as the Australian settler-colonial ‘paradigm of progress’. Oriented to the ‘future that will emerge from, and will be differentiated from the present’, as the present was from past, and through which ‘current contradictions and current suffering will be left behind’, ‘progress’ encourages ‘us to turn our backs on… social facts of pain, damage, destruction, and despair’(16-18). Yet for the speaker of ‘Day by Day’, the past appears as neither closed nor disjunctive with the present. Retrojection enables her to ‘measure our failures / with infinite patience’. Kefala traces the past underfoot as well, with pigeons ‘assiduously tapping the earth’ alluding to the underworld and the dead who become soil where the peach tree sets roots. In order to ‘reimagine the times’, we also must ‘assiduously’ touch, tap, turn up, examine the past. Kefala resists the notion that we should ‘accept an account of history that enables us to feel “comfortable and relaxed”…[or that] amnesia should surround that which causes discomfort’ (Rose 11).

Poems such as ‘The Snake’ (48), ‘The Fatal Queen’ (50), and ‘Pilgrim’s Tales’ (51), also offer resistance to these paradigms, embodying the ‘post-mythic’ storytelling mode explicated by anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis (31). The speaker of ‘The Snake’ situates herself and an accomplice – possibly the reader – in the narrative: ‘Dusk, the two of us / waiting in silence / at the waterhole’. She describes a failed attempt to seize a powerful, ancestral-like being, evoking the ‘substance and fragments of myth’, and fusing them to the present. The omission of the verb ‘to be’ (i.e. ‘are’ or ‘were’) in the first stanza, as well as the final stanza, ‘We still at the edge / watching the water’, makes the tense ambiguous, inferring and enmeshing multiple temporalities, creating ‘passageways between times’. ‘The Snake’, and others like it, interrupt contemporary ‘myths’ which quarantine the past from the present and portray them ‘as separate homogeneities’ (Seremetakis 31).

Kefala’s critics over forty years have almost obsessively characterised her poetry as ‘foreign’. A great deal has been made of the fact she’s a migrant, and of her writing’s (non-Anglo-Celtic) European, and apparently therefore ‘un-Australian’ sensibilities (Duwell in Radford 200; Page in Gunew 210). But perhaps these characterisations demonstrate more the insularity of the hegemonic white literary landscape. These characterisations enable Kefala’s critics to cauterise the disruptive ethical and cultural implications of her work, which remains firmly rooted in the modern Australian condition.

WORKS CITED

Dandforth, Loring M. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1982. 66-69.
Gunew, Sneja. ‘“We the only witness of ourselves”: Re-reading Antigone Kefala’s work’. Ed. Vrasidas Karalis & Helen Nickas. Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey. Melbourne: Owl Publishing 2013. 210.
Hall, Donald. The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015. 103.
Kakmi, Dmetri. ‘On Poems – a bilingual edition in Greek and English’. Ed. Vrasidas Karalis & Helen Nickas. Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey. Melbourne: Owl Publishing 2013. 103.
Radford, Kristian. ‘Antigone Kefala: Alien Poet’. Ed. Vrasidas Karalis & Helen Nickas. Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey. Melbourne: Owl Publishing 2013. 200.
Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press 2004. 11, 16-18, 25.
Seremetakis, Nadia. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996. 19-21, 31.

DIMITRA HARVEY has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from the University of Western Sydney and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her poems have appeared in Southerly, Meanjin, Mascara, and Cordite, as well as anthologies such as The Stars Like Sand and A Patch of Sun. In 2012, she won the Australian Society of Authors’ Ray Koppe Young Writer’s Residency.

Robert Wood reviews “Annihilation of Caste” by Ambedkar, introduced by Arundhati Roi

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Annihilation of Caste

B.R. Ambedkar

UWA Publishing 

ISBN 9781742588018

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

When I was living in Chembur (Bombay) in 2016, there was a statue of a portly and bespectacled B. R. Ambedkar at the end of my street. This suggests he has been lionised in India, if not quite canonised, something aided in ‘the West’ by Arundhati Roy’s well-publicised talk ‘The Doctor and the Saint’ that favourably compares Ambedkar to Gandhi. And so, it was with the contour of knowledge that I opened Annihilation of Caste. I do, of course, come from an Indian family and have parents who were born as colonial subjects in occupied Kerala. But our path to liberation was different from the national story, inflected by a regional identity, a Communist atmosphere and a Catholic bent. So what was I to make of the lessons in Annihilation of Caste and what can we learn from them to make sense of contemporary India?

The Annihilation of Caste was a radical work for its time, a critique too of the establishment as it set about decolonising itself. Its central plank revolves around the negative impact of the caste system as it matters for ‘untouchables’ like Ambedkar himself. This was about the liberation from a centuries old social structure that oppressed a huge number of people. Ambedkar highlights one particular case, where Hindus demanded that Balais (‘untouchables’) follow the rules listed below:

Balais must not wear gold-lace-bordered pugrees.
They must not wear dhotis with coloured or fancy borders.
They must convey intimation [=information] of the death of any Hindu to relatives of the deceased—no matter how
far away these relatives may be living.
In all Hindu marriages, Balais must play music before the processions and during the marriage.
Balai women must not wear gold or silver ornaments; they must not wear fancy gowns or jackets.
Balai women must attend all cases of confinement [= childbirth] of Hindu women.
Balais must render services without demanding remuneration, and must accept whatever a Hindu is pleased to
give.
If the Balais do not agree to abide by these terms, they must clear out of the villages.

Having established this as a fact of dalit life, Ambedkar asks a series of rhetorical questions to political-minded Hindus, namely:

Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow a large class of your own countrymen like the untouchables to use public schools? Are you fit for political power even though class of your own countrymen like the untouchables to use public schools? Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow them the use of public wells? Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow them the use of public streets? Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow them to wear what apparel or ornaments they like? Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow them to eat any food they like?

The effect of this is to pierce the Hindu consciousness, to highlight the inequality through emphasising the basic conditions of India at the time. This political question, or the question of political reform is coupled with social reform and economic reform, thinking through the entirety of Indian society from the perspectives of dalits. For Ambedkar, it is caste that prohibits real progress including the ability to form a truly national society; it is caste that prevents a fellow feeling of social inclusion; caste that inhibits uplift of aboriginal peoples. His ideal social contract is one of true equality and liberty, an India of genuine freedom at all levels of society. To destroy the caste system is possible only with the destruction of the shastras and so Annihilation of Caste ends up being a critique of the holy scriptures of Hinduism itself as well as its material manifestations. This is a critique levelled with passion, logic, panache, flair and evidence. It is written from a truly subaltern perspective and informed by liberalism, freedom and personal experience. Reading Ambedkar today still gives one nerves, hope and possibility.

The caste system is still one of the central aspects of Indian politics, society and economy today. However, and thanks in large part to Ambedkar’s articulation, there is most definitely a self-aware subaltern politics just as there is a broader sectarian/communal question that focuses on religion in general. However, both of these seem to prevent a conversation about gender rather than leading to liberal intersectionalities as they matter in ‘the West’. The true liberation of India must involve the material freedom of women, girls and those who female identify. That is what it is to read Ambedkar now and learn from his example. One can only hope that the opening he makes in the field can lead us away from female infanticide, the negative aspects of the dowry system and towards femme empowerment in the workforce and home as well as making public space safer on the whole. It is not only the annihilation of caste that we seek then but also the annihilation of chauvinism in the 21st century.

ROBERT WOOD grew up in suburban Perth. He has published work in Southerly, Cordite, Jacket2 and other journals. At present he lives at Redgate in Wardandi country and is working on a series of essays.

Sinking Ship by Hasti Abbasi

Written by mascara on . Posted in Fiction.

Hasti Abbasi holds a BA and an MA in English Literature. She recently submitted her PhD thesis on Dislocation and Remaking Identity in Australian and Persian Contemporary Fictions. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Antipodes, Southerly, Verity La, AAWP, and Bareknuckle Poet Journal of Letters, amongst others.

 
 

Sinking Ship
A woman as thin as a shoelace is standing next to a tripod aluminum tripod easel. On which “Iranian Film Club” is engraved. “Hi, welcome,” she smiles. “Hi, thanks,” I say. The door in the southeast corner of the hall leads to a big room. A flat-screen TV is mounted on the wall. There are a few people standing around a table, each holding a mug of tea.

A robustly handsome, black-haired man scratches his nose, approaching us. “Hi, I’m Shahab, I usually manage the group discussions after we watch the selected movie. Welcome to our club.” Going by the wrinkles on his forehead, he is at least forty.

“Hi, I’m Celin, and this is my husband, Saeed.”

“Welcome to our club,” he says as the corner of his mouth quirks upward, creating a dimple.

Shahab explains to us, considerately, that there are both tea and coffee making facilities in the kitchen area.
“I’ll grab a mug of tea; would you like one?” Saeed asks me, looking quite sheepish.

“No, thanks.”

Everybody takes a seat. I take the middle seat in the second row, next to a beautiful girl. Her white jacket is appropriate for the cool night air. “Hi, I’m Sara,” she says. “Hi, I’m Celin.”

She appears to be in her late twenties, a decade or so younger than me. “Which city of Iran do you come from?” she asks.

“Karaj.”

“Lovely. I love your skirt—red’s my favourite colour,” she says. I feel sexy and confident. “Which flight did you take? Emirates or Etihad?”

A pounding in my head starts on the left side and goes up to the top and down the bottom, and very quickly I feel my heartbeat in my neck. Emirates or Etihad? Which one is better? These people have all gotten on and off planes.

“I’m a gynaecologist. What do you do?” is her next question.

“OK dear friends, let’s play the movie. I hope you will all enjoy it,” Shahab says.

Somebody turns off the lights.
What a relief.

Runner. That is the name of the movie. The setting is Abadan, an Iranian port city. My whole body misses this flat salty plain, its sandy and dust storms, and grimy railroad stations. My hometown.

A young boy is enthusiastically shouting and waving at an oil tanker that is disappearing slowly through the mist.
The day I told Mum about our plans, she sat down on the steps silently, flashing me a wan smile as she struggled to keep in her tears. “The sea is bottomless; you will regret what you are sewing when the storms rage.”

The movie is about how a young boy, Amiro, sees the world. In his struggle to survive the adult word, he collects floating bottles from the harbor, and sells cold water. A man on a bicycle rides away without paying for the water, making Amiro run after him for a long time. Why should a young boy fight so persistently for what is rightfully his? Does he know that he is deprived of the most basic rights? Just having the desire to fight is what matters to him, the desire we killed in our son the day we chose the apparently simplest way to fight for our rights.

I feel uncomfortable. I wish I could stop the movie or at least leave the room, but I might distract others if I walk past them. I slowly lean back in my chair and shut my eyes tightly. I will not watch the rest; neither will I think about anything.
I realize the movie is finished when the audience breaks into thunderous applause.

The gynaecologist turns to me, probably to ask further questions. I quickly get up and walk towards the table. A number of curious eyes stare at me as I stretch out my hand for a small biscuit.

A woman with an impressively high forehead approaches us. “Hi, I’m Kimia.”

After realizing that we are new to Brisbane, Kimia smiles and says, “I’ve been in Australia for twenty years. I’m a graphic designer, but I used to be an electrical engineer.” She adds that Iranians living in Brisbane are kind and welcoming, always ready to provide information and support. We, as new immigrants who may have a lot of struggles in the beginning, can ask for their support. “Any time,” she declares.

I shove a hank of my dark hair out of my face. “Thanks.”
People sit in a circle: Nine men, six women.

“OK, friends. Thank you for your attendance. It’s always more enjoyable for me to watch a movie with you all. So, what did you think of the movie?” Shahab asks, “Let’s start with Maryam.”

Maryam did not like the story. That is all she says sternly. Her pullover sweater and striped pants look good on her slim figure.
“I believe the director is expressing his dissatisfaction with the structure of the society, the rich and poor condition of Abadan,” a clean-shaven man says.

They are all talking; one after the other, each giving an example of the new wave in their defence of why they think this movie is a personal and biographical reflection of the director’s childhood rather than a pessimistic representation of Abadan.

“Do you have any idea, Celin?” Shahab asks me.

“No.” I say, waving my hand self-consciously.

I never let the slightest ray of intelligence get in the way of my stupidity. I think an IQ test would come back negative if I did it.

“Give your mind a rest,” Saeed whispers in my ear a few minutes later. I am happy I did not let another child have him as his father.

After they finish discussing the movie, we say goodbye to them, and walk out and down the street towards our car in a swelling silence.

Saeed seems to be concentrating on something. Time for his introvert party. Keep thinking; you’ll come up with a silly question soon. “Were you shy or something?” There you go.

“Why?” I ask, as I get in the car.

“You didn’t say anything when they asked for your opinion.”

“Don’t know,” I say, looking out at a fat, gray-haired pedestrian with a jacket slung over his shoulder. He presses the crosswalk button.

Yes, I was shy. I was embarrassed to sit in a movie club freely while my brother is developing suicidal thoughts.

When we arrive home, I take off my clothes and lie down on the couch. Five minutes later, the door opens and Armin comes in, his mobile in one hand and a Domino’s pizza in the other. As usual, he is wearing his ripped grey jeans and a plain white t-shirt. I explain to him that we have Fesenjan for dinner and he replies with a cold “I don’t like Fesenjan.”

“I’m thinking of going swimming tomorrow,” Saeed addresses Armin. “Would you like to join me?”

Armin does not favor his Dad with a reply; instead, he pulls a long string of gum out of his mouth.
The lunch dishes are still piled up by the sink. I wish we had a dishwasher.

“Mum?” Armin calls me.

“Yes?”

“I like your hair. Have you had it cut?”

“Yes, thanks,” I say, as I fill the sink with soapy water.

“I wish you were dead,” Armin had said, looking me dead in the eye when they were taking me to the Nauru hospital. “It definitely is the best way to stop carrying the responsibility of making us more miserable than before.”

Do it again; throw yourself under a car, he whispers in my mind. At least I think it is a he. I mean the ghost who follows me everywhere I go.

I sponge the dishes and rinse them with hot water, heat up the Fesenjan, and set the table.

“My armpits smell so bad recently,” Saeed says as he comes out of the bathroom.

“It’s time you stop having garlic and onion in every meal you eat,” Armin says, with a grin. He takes the pizza out of the microwave. He usually has pizza, fries and soda for dinner.

“I will, and it would be great if you stop eating junk food.”

Armin sits at the table.

“Did you get your tablets?” Saeed asks me, scratching his head in confusion.

What’s your confusion about? You little man. Why didn’t you ask me on our way home?

“Yes,” I say.

He screws up his face in a concentration.
“How much did you pay?”
Damn you.
Armin squirts ketchup all over the pizza.

“Forty dollars.”

“What about the rest?”

“They will deduct twenty dollars from my account next month.”

He likes the fact that stupidity is not a crime.
Armin’s lips twist into a satirical smile.

“How’s school going?” I ask.

“The same,” is his response.

How did your meeting with the social worker go today? Did she talk to the principal about the money you are supposed to pay for the textbooks? I desperately want to know.

“Try some Fesenjan,” I smile a quick smile, “you’ll love it.” He gives a mock shudder. “I’m fine, thanks.”

Saeed drops a ladle filled with Fesenjan into his plate. “This is the best Fesenjan I’ve ever had.”
I will call the social worker tomorrow and ask her about the meeting.

Armin makes himself a coffee. “Good night,” he says, stirring his spoon in slow circular motions.
Give me a kiss. “Sleep well,” I whisper.

Armin bestows upon me a kind and generous smile and goes to his bedroom.
Saeed washes the dishes. I take my allocated four pills and go to bed, recalling the night when two officers held my arms, dragging me into a room.
Why are you sleeping? Your brother is so cold he probably can’t breathe, the ghost softly whispers to me.
My brother is subject to twenty-four-hour observation by guards in a camp where the only thing people encounter every day is never-ending insecurity and uncertainty about every moment of their lives.
I moan and grunt and push him away as hard as I can. “Go away.”

I close my eyes and visualize the brutality of the sea and the slap of water on the rocks. Armin is standing on the edge of the boat, gazing out to sea, tall and thin. Saeed is standing above, holding something in his hands. He follows my eyes, discovering my concern. “Armin! Be careful,” he says loudly. Armin turns around and looks straight through me. He walks towards me. “You’ll be fine, Mum, we’ll be there soon.” He takes my hand, and kisses me on my forehead with quivering lips.

In the distance, I hear the shrill of an ambulance. I open my eyes, smelling the insulting sea and its hostile moving water. The ghost appears again: you don’t deserve to be alive.

“Leave me alone,” I plead. He seems to be expecting a response from me. “It was your fault my baby died. You made me take twenty Panadols. Go away, you bastard.” I say, feeling like I am drifting back to the sea.

Sorry about your loss. Sometimes death happens the same way life just happens. But soon you’ll be able to spend some good time with your baby in the other world, he says.

“How do you think I should do it?”

Cut your vein.

“Now?”

Are you silly? You don’t want Armin and Saeed to see you do it, do you? Wait for tomorrow when they both go out.
Saeed opens the door. The ghost disappears. “Talk to you later,” I murmur in my mind.

“It’s your Mum,” Saeed says, handing me my phone.

“Hello, Mum.”

“Hi my beautiful daughter, how are you? How are Armin and Saeed?”

“We’re all fine, thanks. How are you? Is Dad OK?”

I can hardly hear her. She’s in a noisy place.

“Yes, he’s fine. Have you talked to Kamran? I’m so worried about him.”

“Yes, I talked to him in the morning, he’s doing great,” I lie.

“If only I could hug you and Kamran once more, I wouldn’t ask for anything from God. It’s all I want before I die. Is there any news about when they might send him to community detention?” she asks on the other end of the line, thousands of miles away from me. The woman who held me in her womb for nine months and did her best to raise educated children is now wishing for a simple hug. Just a hug. I hate myself.

She is crying. She has been crying every day for four years. Yes, he’s joining us tomorrow. I’ll make him Ghorme Sabzi, his favourite food. I will protect him forever. I wish these were the things I would tell her. “No news yet, but I’m sure he’s fine and will join us soon.”

“Inshalla. Inshalla.”

Armin is screaming. The phone flies out of my hand as I run towards his room.

He is sitting on the edge of the bed, burying his face in his hands.

“Did you have a nightmare?” Saeed asks as he hands Armin a glass of water.

Armin is stunned. Truly traumatized. I do not know what to do, where to look. “What were you dreaming?” I ask.

“The same dream,” Armin says, locking his hands behind his neck.

“You’re fine now. We’re here,” Saeed says.

I am on the verge of tears. I leave the room.

“Is he asleep?” I ask Saeed when he comes out about ten minutes later.

You shouldn’t have left the room, his look says. “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry. Wash your face and stop crying. Please,” he says, putting a reassuring arm around my shoulder.

“You sleep; I’ll watch a movie first.”

I want to know what happens to the hero of the movie, Amiro. I play the movie. His friends ask him to play football with them. He gives them a wonderful smile. One of the most impressive ones I have ever seen. He is crying because his only friend departs to work on a ship.

“I did not know I was pregnant,” is what I keep telling my social worker. But the truth is that the baby would need a predictable and safe environment, a dream world I never thought possible. That is why I took the pills.

I stop the movie, and get up to look through Armin’s bedroom’s half-open door to make sure he is asleep.
I turn back at my mobile’s message tone.

“Hi, this is Shima. We met in Nauru detention. How are you? Are you awake?”

Oh my God. There is definitely something wrong with my brother. Why else would somebody I don’t even remember message me from Nauru? My head twitches. Saeed, I want to shout. I can’t. I have a knot in my throat.

I call back the number with a feeling of constriction in my chest.
It rings. My heart is being grabbed and squeezed. Nobody answers. I call again. No answer. I want to walk towards our bedroom, but my legs feel weird. I feel like water is running over my feet. “Saeed, Saeed,” I whisper. I open the door to find Saeed faced down naked with his hands flat, next to his shoulders, with only a tiny towel slung on his hips. I hear the running tide and the call of the sea. A sea of blood. “Saeed, Saeed.” Saeed opens his eyes. “Are you OK?”

“Read this message.”

Saeed reads the message, looks at me, reads it again. “So what?” he asks, sounding confused.

“There must be something wrong with my brother. I haven’t talked to him in the last three days.”

“Calm down,” Saeed says, dialing a number on his mobile. “Hello, Yes, this is Saeed. Listen, Celin is very worried about Kamran. Do you have any news about him?”

Saeed lowers his eyes from me, a worried expression creasing his forehead.

What has happened Saeed? Please place the phone on speaker, what’s he saying? Damn you, say something.

“What is it?”

Saeed doesn’t raise his head. “OK,” he pauses, as if to reflect. “Yes, yes.” He ends the call.

“Is Kamran OK?”

“He’ll be fine,” he says, nodding.

“What do you mean he’ll be fine? What’s happened? Has he hurt himself?”

Saeed’s mouth is moving around frantically. For what seems like hours, I can hear nothing but the sound of my teeth being pressed together. The indignity and the most embarrassing moments of my journey all march in front of me, one after another, like a series of flashcards. The wave is about to capsize our boat, and take it down. Armin falls off the boat. He is floating on the sea. People are shouting. Kamran dives into the water and pulls him out. He turns Armin’s head to the side and then back to the center, breathes into his mouth. He then checks his pulse in the deafening silence that follows. Everybody is staring at Kamran. Afraid, shocked, upset. “He’s alive,” Kamran smiles and then cries his longest, loudest cry.

I open my eyes to the sound of Saeed. “Kamran will be fine,” he says, breathing hard. Saeed lets out a sigh and removes a half-smoked and dead cigar from his mouth.

Jenna Cardinale

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Jenna Cardinale writes poems. Some of them appear in Verse Daily, Pith, The Fem, and H_NGM_N. Her latest chapbook, A California, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2017. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

 

 

At Least this Music

I’ve filled out
my entire
form.

/

What about decor. And how
does light work. The shadows of
the lamps. Static skeet.

/

In the shadows some of the people are small.

/

I’m not great at holding
up this heavy conversation.

This body. A gun.

/

Listen for the violence
of bow to curve.

 
 

Shark Eye, February

The way we walk on
ice.

I am an American, but
I still only find empty
shells on the beach
between the edge of ocean
and an auto-lit development.

The way we remember snow.
                What it covers.

There are fewer shootings after
summer.

Everyone is well-read and understands danger.

Then a tiny predator

                (that’s what we call it)

falls out. Dried out. Dead.
 

Darlene Soberano

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Darlene Silva Soberano is a young Filipino poet who immigrated to Australia at an early age. She is currently completing a Bachelor of Arts at Deakin University. This is her first published poem. You can find her on Twitter at @drlnsbrn

 

 

You Like The Smiths?

 there’s someone in class today who looks like
you / she’s got the hunch of your back / the
spread of your teeth / & your hair when we
were 17 / but she’s not you / & I’m sorry for
that, but I’m glad, & I’m sorry for being glad /
sorry I never called you again / sorry this is
gonna be the year I don’t forget about your
birthday / but won’t send you a text / sorry
about ignoring you at the party last year / you
know which one / sorry you’ll never be a
passenger in my MINI / when we had so many
memories in my mother’s car / the Christmas
lights on that street in Wyndham Vale / & the
time we sat / singing / to die by your side / is
such a heavenly way to die / all the windows
down / a country road / I’m sorry I never
looked over at you like you always wanted
/ sorry we never got the scene in a film right
before the truck hits the car / I swear that was
never about love but about safety / which I
suppose are the same thing anyway / which is
all to say I loved you from our 15-minute
drives / to our 2-hour drives / & to the trip to
Sydney we planned but never went / & I loved
you when we walked / I loved you when we sat
on your bed listening to Stevie Nicks / singing
/ well, here you go again, you say / you want
your freedom / well, I got my freedom now / &
I listen to Stevie Nicks, still / & think of you /
singing / I’ve been afraid of changing / ’cause
I’ve built my life around you / well, I hadn’t
back then & I still haven’t now / & I’m sorry
for that too

R.D.Wood

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

R. D. Wood is of Malayalee and Scottish descent and identifies as a person of colour. He has had work published or that is forthcoming from Southerly, Jacket2, Best Australian Poetry, JASAL and Foucault Studies. His most recent collection of poems is Land Fall

 

 

Watching the Curry Van at Margaret River Mouth
 
watchsprings
                cleared
                the council dousing
                the frailty of
                cretaceous acne,
the river effervescent
          looms, bodies bristle,
          defiant
                sharp
                unwavering
                lifting
where our identities pale

 

On the Roof by Roland Leach

Written by mascara on . Posted in Flash Fiction.

Roland Leach has three collections of poetry, the latest My Father’s Pigs published by Picaro Press. He is the proprietor of Sunline Press, which has published nineteen collections of poetry by Australian poets. His latest venture is Cuttlefish, a new magazine that includes art, poetry, flash fiction and short fiction.

 

On the Roof

The three sons are on the roof mending the ridge-caps, mortaring the cracks, cleaning the gutters. It is a mother’s day gift. They would like to say it is an act of love long overdue, but they want her to sell.

I have never really noticed the garden till I am on the roof. My mother has a bird bath, a little bird-house for them to rest. It hangs from a hook in the tree like a square uterus, its dark whale eye staring around the yard. She tells me the doves live in the sheoak, she comes out at dawn and feeds them. There are magpies that walk up the backsteps, crows whose whoosh of wings she hears from the kitchen, the occasional kookaburra and lorikeet, where would she go if she couldn’t feed the birds?

On the roof I stare into the jacaranda and see her life of busying herself: years cooking pots of soup or roast dinners, even the shank broths made for her dogs, are no longer needed. It must be lonely at night, till she hears the birds crazy with morning.

We all agree she is getting worse with age, She is half-mad and stubborn. She had been good with small children and animals, things that were helpless and loyal, but now all the grandchildren have grown up, her dogs died years ago and are buried side by side in the backyard. There is nothing left but these stupid birds.

From the roof I look across the hibiscus, the morning glory engulfing the fence, I hear the birds in the old jarrah tree, the doves are speckled along the ground, my mother must have just fed them.

Perhaps the roof will hold, I tell my brothers, as I fill in the cracks, rip out the loose concrete and tuck the mortar, using my fingers for the first time, at last ready to dirty my hands.

Geoff Page reviews “Bull Days” by Tina Giannoukos

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Bull Days

by Tina Giannoukos

Arcadia Press

ISBN

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

Tina Giannoukos’s first book, In a Bigger City (Five Islands Press 2005), was a highly evocative and rather unsparing portrait of Melbourne at the time. The observations were close and clear-eyed, the tone generally colloquial. There was also a considerable social range in the poems though many of the protagonists seemed to be somewhat down on their luck.

Giannoukos’s second book, Bull Days, a collection of 58 sonnets, is very different and not just because of the stricter form employed. Sonnet sequences go back to the late Middle Ages and in their contemporary form (where rhyme and consistent line length are not considered essential) they offer poets considerable flexibility as well as an impression of on-going form.

Almost all the poems in Bull Days are written in the first person and are seemingly confessional (though, of course, this may not be the case). As in most of In a Bigger City the narrator is not very fortunate in love and many of the poems lament poor treatment by lovers who have proved to be less worthy than they seemed at first. A few poems are specifically erotic; most are more generalised. Occasionally, as in “Sonnet  X” and “Sonnet XII”, the narrator seems to change. In the first we have the lines “These breasts are honey to your eyes, / nipples harden as lips close around them”. In the second we have “Her breasts are honey to my eyes, nipples / harden as lips close round them.”

In other poems the (presumably) female narrator seems to identify with a bull being slowly tormented and killed in an arena — along perhaps with mythical suggestions of the minotaur. The last ten lines of “Sonnet XX”, for instance, do much to explain the book’s title and dramatise the “lover’s complaint” theme that runs through most of the collection. “Sex is not easy, but it is natural. / I am your bull charging you and you, / a working matador, show your control, / drive the steel into my heart. / When you removed your blackwinged hat, / recall her to whom you dedicate this bull’s death. / What trophy to keep? My ears, my tail, my hooves? / No, throw the body parts to your sweetheart. / I hope she hurls flowers at you for it. / The crowd will wave their handkerchiefs.”

To some readers this extended metaphor will be poignant and effective. To others, it may seem excessive as do some of the book’s metaphors to this reviewer.  I think particularly of “the mellifluous alphabet of ache” (“Sonnet XV”) or the simile “his sensuous fringe / like blond rivers of yearning” (“Sonnet XXIII”).

Not all of the book, however, is at this level of emotional drama. Occasionally, Giannoukos returns to the colloquial which was such a feature of her first book. “Sonnet XVIII”, for instance, begins with the feisty lines: “All this politicking. It’s a sign. Yeah! / Nothing in it if you’re single. Fuck! / Thirty per cent of women live alone. Whoa! / Let’s work out a way to tax silence. Cool!” Bull Days could probably have benefitted from a little more of this kind of thing.

“Sonnet XXI” is also a welcome change from the tearful and revisits the talent for sardonic social observation which characterised In a Bigger City. At times the integration of dialogue and clever rhyming is reminiscent of Sydney poet John Tranter’s skill with the form — and it’s no coincidence, perhaps, that twelve of this poem’s lines rhyme in the way one might expect. The first four lines establish the tone: “ ‘At the café? Eat in? Or take-away?’ / Oh, that’s my lover being open-handed. / That’s fine for him. He says it’s so passé / the wine-and-dine obsession. I’m branded … “

Taken as a whole, Bull Days, has the flexibility and variety we have come to expect of the sonnet sequence over the centuries. It has more than a few entertaining moments, as the above indicates, but it also strays into the over-written at times. Some readers may complain (in an old-fashioned way) that most of the sonnets don’t rhyme and that many don’t use the pentameter consistently but these features operate mainly to enhance the book’s diversity of tone and manner — which is considerable.

It’s an interesting exercise, on finishing Bull Days, to look back over the opening lines and see what they promise. “Sonnet II” starts: “When you touch me it is the hand of God”. That sounds a bit grand. “Sonnet XLIX”, on the other hand, begins: “My lover is shitty-eyed” and goes on engagingly to point out that: “He will not sit with my friends, whom he calls amoral, / so he sits alone relishing his principles. Now he’s forlorn / and a hypocrite, enjoying surreptitiously / the wobbles of the waitress’s sallow breasts.”

It is in poems like this that Giannoukos is at her artful best: those alliterating “w” sounds (“wobbles of the waitress’s”), the hissing onomatopoeia of “surreptitiously — and so much of the narrator’s irritation and resentment packed into that single word “sallow”. 

It is also good to to see the Melbourne-based Arcadia imprint making one of its relatively rare excursions into poetry on this occasion.

 
GEOFF PAGE’s 1953 (UQP) was shortlisted for the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry. He lives in Canberra and has published 21 poetry collections, as well as novels, memoir and biography. He edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015 (Black Inc.) Hard Horizons is forthcoming in 2017 from Pitt St Poetry

Geoff Page reviews “The Blue Decodes” by Cassie Lewis

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

The Blue Decodes

by Cassie Lewis

Grand Parade Poets

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

The Blue Decodes is the latest collection in a now considerable list from Grand Parade Poets, going back to 2011. It’s a diverse stable ranging from young avant-gardists (such as the late Benjamin Frater) through to Selected Poems from well-established, but somewhat neglected, senior poets such as Evan Jones.

Cassie Lewis’s book also has a sense of retrieval about it. Her three earlier works reach back to 1997 but the most recent, Bridges, came out eleven years ago. The Blue Decodes thus comprises work written in the San Francisco Bay area and upstate New York over the past decade or so. One can consider Lewis either an Australian poet-in-exile or a fully-assimilated American poet who happens to have been published in Australia.

The American influences on Lewis’s work here are strong and go back to her youth in Melbourne in the 199Os where the impress of the “New York” school of poetry was still fairly strong. It’s no surprise to see a reference to An Anthology of New York Poets ed. Ron Padgett and David Shapiro (1970) in the Acknowledgements.

Like much (but not all) of the work by “New Yorkers”, Lewis’s poetry has a surreal tinge and a considerable opacity. It’s as if she’s taken Emily Dickinson’s injunction to “tell it slant” literally. Unlike most Australian avant-garde poetry, however, Lewis’s work has an attractive musical surface which leads one back to subsequent readings and further understandings.  

Lewis’s play with ambiguity begins, rather cutely, with the title itself where the word “Decodes” could be either a verb or a noun and “Blue” could be either a noun or an adjective. Similar games with parts of speech occur in poems such as “Postcard #15”, short enough to reprint in full: “So cold my ears listen / to bells! Snow / its hush. Snow has / fallen a starry blanket.” Again the first use of “snow” could be either a noun or a verb. By removing the putative comma after “fallen” we also have a momentary sense of “fallen” as a transitive verb rather than the intransitive one it normally is. The “blanket” could have been “fallen” by the snow. Even a “blanket” of snow being described as “starry” is arresting enough.

Fortunately, The Blue Decodes is not all games. There is considerable social (and aesthetic) commentary as well. In “Postcard #12”, immediately before the poem just discussed, we have a telling sense of an Australian poet not entirely in love with her new country. “I’ll pay more attention to Chet / Baker. I want to, honest. / And to this country, land / of unsought-for liberty, / where freedom comes disguised / as a book of poems.”

Like much of Lewis’s other work this, despite its apparent simplicity, is not an easy poem to interpret. We can take Chet Baker,  the great jazz trumpeter, as a signifier of U.S. culture at its best (despite his addiction to heroin) or we can make the inference that even one of America’s best musicians is not really worth the effort of listening to closely (“want to, honest”). “Freedom”, of course, is meant to be a prime American virtue but Lewis seems to dismiss it as “unsought-for” (tell that to George Washington) and merely a dimension of the pervasive pop culture from which the only escape is a “book of poems” — by the New York school presumably! However the reader ends up interpreting the poem, there’s obviously a lot happening in a few lines.

The “New Yorker” jibe may be unfair, however, since there are references in The Blue Decodes that range well beyond that coterie — to Keats, for instance; to Theodore Roethke and, in “Lordy, Lordy”, even to William Blake. “Do you ever have William Blake days? / I do. They start amiably enough —  coffee, toast — and lead / into a forest thick and lush as childhood.”

The Blue Decodes is broken into five loosely-grouped thematic sections, ranging from a concern with language, geography, history and the suburban quotidian through to the diaristic final section, “Bridges”. Of these perhaps the most striking are the seven prose poems in “Maps”. Its first poem, “Queenscliff” has a drily complex tone which is characteristic of Lewis’’s work more generally and is  clearly manifest in its last two sentences: “ And from memory, that bus shelter at the edge of the world, with its wads of chewed invective, I see my absent father; mourning, directing cranes over the skyline. Labouring under the illusion that he of all people wasn’t loved.” It’s a disconcerting but stimulating worry that the cranes here may be birds “directed” by an unhappy father or building machinery he is in charge of.

One problem with playful, quasi-surreal, New York influenced poetry is that it can almost forget to be moving —  or perhaps regards such a demand as a bourgeois distraction. It’s encouraging then to read a poem such as “Sophie” where Lewis seems to be writing about her own daughter’s birth and the primal bond that has existed between them from that moment. The poem ends, very convincingly, with these five lines: “But your light is entirely new. / You arrived here from a new charter. Cities so torn / but you were flying, you were running water. Biology is our bedrock. / In labour I woke up, and the nurses brought me you. // I was the door you chose to walk through.”

One has the feeling, after all the “slanted” games and the “trying to seem modern” (as Lewis jokes in “Bridges”) that this “bedrock” of biology is where the centre is — or what The Blue (eventually) Decodes. If you get my meaning.

 

GEOFF PAGE’s 1953 (UQP) was shortlisted for the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry. He lives in Canberra and has published 21 poetry collections, as well as novels, memoir and biography. He edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015 (Black Inc.) Hard Horizons is forthcoming in 2017 from Pitt St Poetry.