Author: mascara

Aden Rolfe reviews “Land Before Lines” by Nicholas Walton-Healey

Written by mascara on May 25, 2015. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Land Before Lines

By Nicholas Walton-Healey

Hunter Publishers, 2014

ISBN: 9780987580269

Reviewed by ADEN ROLFE

‘Is it even possible to photograph a poet?’ asks Justin Clemens in the introduction to Land Before Lines, presumably written some time after he had his photo taken for the selfsame publication. The image features Clemens casting a scowl and a defiant glare at the reader, embodying at once the character of his poem, ‘Wifebeater’, which is printed on the facing page, as well as with his distaste for this beer-swilling degenerate.

This is the basic formula of Land Before Lines: each spread juxtaposes a short poem by a Victorian poet with their image, the works entering into a dialogue sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental. The pictures, taken by Nicholas Walton-Healey over a two-year period, are tight portraits, close-ups of the poets’ faces. The images rarely extend below the torso and never as far as the feet. At this proximity, it’s impossible not to notice the eyes, whether they’re directed at the viewer (Jo Langdon, Alex Skovron), cast up or looking away (Komninos, Maxine Beneba Clarke) or closed (Josephine Rowe, Luke Beesley). Whether imploring or vulnerable, tired or enticing, there’s a self-consciousness in all of them, a kind of performance. There’s no way not to pose, it seems, whether you embrace the camera or avoid it, nowhere to hide. In Kent MacCarter’s words, ‘I’m so here and pose’ (‘The Green Jacket’); in Jennifer Harrison’s, ‘I placed myself inside the photograph’ (‘The Image’). Even those not placing themselves – like Jennifer Compton, whose photo Walton-Healey ‘snatched/after we had finished shooting’ (‘The Hand’) – still appear to be posing, so it amounts to much the same thing. It made me think of an essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan, ‘Getting Down to What Is Really Real’, where he posits that reality television shows don’t contrive a version of the off-camera real world but simply capture people ‘in the act of being on a reality show’. In Land Before Lines, everyone is caught in the act of being in a photograph.

The focus on eyes in this volume is reminiscent of another photography-poetry collaboration: Unrecounted, wherein Jan Peter Tripp’s black-and- white photos of eyes are set alongside short poems by prose writer and poet W.G. Sebald. That collection achieves a greater stylistic consistency than this one, presumably by virtue of having only one writer to contend with, but also because Tripp’s photos, which only show eyes and are all printed in the same hues, produce a unity that’s not quite present in Land Before Lines. Walton-Healey pictures his subjects differently in different photos, places them in different spaces, with different light and colour palettes, photographed at different shutter speeds – sometimes stock still, sometimes with a smear of motion. The result is a series of images that seem linked more by content – the poets – than by form.

Clemens writes in his introduction that poetry can only ever be a gathering of singularities: different identities, ethnicities, histories, politics, styles. In light of this we can see that Walton-Healey has created a series of portraits that respond to the poets as photographic subjects, not objects, with the effect of setting up the illusion that this is a collection of poems, accompanied by photographs, not a book of photography that just happens to include poems. It’s both, of course, but it’s first and foremost the latter, something you forget because form cedes to subject.

Take, as an example, the respective portraits of Bella Li and Steve Smart. Li stands in a green dress against a black backdrop, a no-place, having just stepped out of her poem, ‘eyes glazed and fixed on what arrives petrified, moving’ (‘La Ténébreuse’). Or rather, eye. She holds her left hand over her other eye, a gold ring on her middle finger. The image is blurred, resonating with the paradoxical quiver of the poem – a combination of a still image (petrified) and fretful motion (moving). On the cover of the book, where Li is framed in close-up, she is all surface, but printed in full, a depth emerges between her figure and the viewer as she recedes into the background, shadow reaching around her shoulders. She is a painting from the chateau described in the poem. Walton-Healey’s image is a photo of a painting, ‘a copy softly of a copy softly stepping, backwards through the frame’.

Steve Smart, by comparison, is in a real, if out of focus, setting, that of a bright Victorian-era hallway, as of a university, cream walls offset by the black-and-white chequered floor. While the depth in Li’s portrait begins and ends with her, the perspective in Smart’s starts just in front of his face, the hallway receding to a vanishing point somewhere behind his head. His features are rendered in sharp focus, individual hairs stand out in high definition. The photo is cut off at the collar, and he’s lit with afternoon light that seems warmer than it is. In his poem he refers to a different light, to fluorescents, writing, ‘these lights alter: sight: thought: perception’ (‘Paris Under the Fluoros’).

Viewed side by side, the formal differences between these images don’t announce a single photographer, much less mark themselves part of the same series. It becomes interesting, then, to follow the clues in Nathan Curnow’s poem, ‘Violent Light’, toward what we might think of as Walton-Healey’s signature style. The poem recounts the event of Walton-Healey taking Curnow’s picture, the latter telling us the former ‘speaks of Caravaggio’, the Italian Renaissance artist who brought to prominence tenebrism, a style of realist painting that made dramatic use of light and shadow. The title of Li’s poem, ‘La Ténébreuse’, now takes on a greater significance.

Once you start looking for it, you can see a Caravagesque inflection throughout Land Before Lines. It’s in the spotlighting of the poets’ faces and bodies, in Walton-Healey’s interest in the way light enters a dark space and folds over the objects it finds there, in the contrast between bright foregrounds and ambiguous backgrounds, murky to the point of disappearance. The effect of these elements is further enhanced by Walton-Healey’s use of a very narrow depth of field. Many of the portraits appear crisp, the creases on foreheads and cheeks individually mapped. But take another look at Smart’s picture: you only need go as far as his ear before things are already starting to blur.

While not the most extreme use of chiaroscuro in the volume, the image of Ania Walwicz is one of the most complex. Here we have a primary light source issuing from beyond the right of the frame, concentrated on the poet’s face and hair. The ray illuminates her neckline and a patch of her jacket before being lost in its folds. The light is strong enough to give some sense of the setting – a window with articulated panes, what appears to be a flue or pipe to the right of it – without disclosing the particulars. The white light on the window seems to come from a different source above; we’re tempted to think the moon. Candles line the windowsill, their lantern houses providing no context for whether we’re indoors or out, themselves not a source of light so much as light-objects, part of the background.

As a composition of light and form, it’s a scene of which any tenebrist would be proud. Walwicz, however, takes a little convincing, at least at first:

‘…I don’t see me from out outside but I feel me now in dark in darkness a lesson now how to feel and how to be and I said to nick no no no not that photo now find someone else and something else and someone else and not this now and now I accept this just this now I accept this and any any any any any else I accept now I say yes to me yes yes yes this is me now…’ (‘Photo’)

In his role as photographer, Walton-Healey has become a closer collaborator with his contributors than the typical editor, not simply by taking their photographs, but through his presence in their poems. Walton-Healey is mentioned both obliquely and by name; the event of the photograph is often described in the poem; the echoes of photographic language inhere throughout the volume. The subjects pose by imagining how they look through the photographer’s eyes. They then compose after seeing how they actually look through this lens. An alternative title might be How Poets Feel About Being Photographed.

In his impressionistic exploration of American photography, The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer asks: ‘Can we agree, in Whitman’s words, “that much unseen is also here”, that it’s not necessary to discuss – or even mention – every picture ever taken of a hat in order to learn something interesting about pictures of hats?’ Which is to say, any photographic survey opens itself up to criticisms of completeness. In the case of Land Before Lines, this will invariably about who’s represented and who’s not. What’s surprising about the book is just how many people are in it, every other page yielding a familiar face. The value here is at once contemporary, reflecting the present moment, and projected, something we can point to later and say, These were the poets who were in or from Victoria at that time. As Judith Rodriguez puts it, ‘This is the face that will survive my face’ (‘Photo Life’). So, how many portraits does it take to say something meaningful about pictures of contemporary Victorian poets? Walton-Healey’s answer: about 70.

ADEN ROLFE is a poet (works published in The Age, Best Australian Poems, Cordite, Overland) and performance writer (radio dramas commissioned by Radiotonic, Airplay). His new radio series, A Thoroughly Wet Mess, will be broadcast on ABC RN in 2015. www.adenrolfe.com

Michele Seminara reviews “Distance” by Nathanael O’Reilly

Written by mascara on May 25, 2015. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Distance

by Nathanael O’Reilly

Picaro Press (2014)

ISBN 978-1-921691-76-8

Distance, Nathanael O’Reilly’s first full-length poetry collection, is separated into three sections – ‘Australia’, ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ – the first and most substantial section (which deals with the experience of growing up in Australia) functioning as the emotional cornerstone of the collection. The title and section headings immediately alert us to the major themes of the book – distance, separation, identity, expatriation, connection and disconnection – but the distances and proximities explored here are not simply geographical or physical; they are also temporal, cultural and emotional.

The book’s first poem, ‘Crabbing’, evokes a strong sense of the speaker’s location in a small corner of an alluring, yet incomprehensible world. Boys crab as they watch boats that ‘have travelled – / from the top to the bottom / of the earth just to fish’, and wonder at ‘the vastness of space’. The boys’ ability to pull the crabs ‘out of their world’ foreshadows the journey Distance will take us on, moving us progressively (and often painfully) away from the familiar. The terrain of the familiar – the people and places of childhood – is explored joyously in this first section of the book: in the poem ‘Ballarat Scenes’, a series of fourteen sensual images moves us progressively through the speaker’s youth, culminating in a moment of reflection as he looks ‘for my surname on headstones / erected a century before my birth.’ The poems here are marked by light and landscape, and also by a strong sense of childhood security and lack of personal responsibility. They are nostalgic without being saccharine, looking back fondly on a time when the world – and time itself – seemed to spread out endlessly. In ‘Sinking’ the poet revels in a period of life when he could

… meander in and out
of consciousness
knowing I have nowhere
I have to go and nothing
I have to be after sunrise

These are the halcyon days, ones made all the sweeter by being viewed in retrospect, tinged with the knowledge of loss and time’s inevitable passing. In ‘Lost Suitcase’, the speaker recounts returning ‘Home after two and a half years’ and searching for a suitcase of ‘letters received over a decade’, only to discover ‘a continent emptied of friendships’. Similarly, in ‘Your Funeral’, (a standout poem and the last in the ‘Australia’ section), connection to place, people and – by extension – self, is further eroded when the speaker attends his grandmother’s funeral and realises ‘that now you are gone / I am running out of reasons to return / to the place where I felt most at home’.

The theme of displacement is further explored in the ‘Europe’ section, where the speaker feels ‘I understand little’ and ‘am like the wind’. Lack of Australia’s vast spaces, light and natural landscape is keenly felt here. As he did in the ‘Australia’ poems, (‘Frenchies, rubbers, dingers’(17)), and as is common in his poems generally, O’Reilly – in his laconic and vernacular fashion – now draws upon the names and colloquialisms of his new environment (staying in an ‘Ikea-furnished apartment /on Goethestrasse /overlooking an art gallery, / Trinkhalle and a strip club’(45)), to describe the clash he finds between the ancient and garishly new. Pinning for belonging, the speaker looks to his Irish roots, climbing ‘The Hill of Tara’, to tie a handkerchief on a ‘rag tree’, and in doing so

taking comfort in a ritual
foreign to me, but routine
for my people, seeking
to connect through a simple
gesture to our ancestors

In these Irish poems the mood elevates, the speaker finding (as he did long ago on the gravestones of Ballarat) that ‘On the main street of the village / my ancestors called home / half the shops had my surname written above the door’. Here there is an uneasy sense of belonging and yet not-quite-belonging, as the speaker relies upon a friend to

… guide us safely
across borders we could not see,
navigating cartography
visible only to a local.
(‘Invisible Borders’)

Nationality and identity seem inextricably bound for O’Reilly – in ‘St. John’s Wood’ every character is defined by it: the speaker shares ‘a room with a Canadian / and two racist South Africans / next to a roomful of farm-raised Kiwis’, buys ‘international phone cards / from surly Pakistani newsagents’, and sleeps with ‘an ex-ballerina / from Altona’. Displacement from country has clearly engendered a disrupted – and yet paradoxically heightened – sense of national identity in the poet. Like the stones in the poem ‘Skimming’ – which hit ‘the water again / and again and again, before / sinking to the bottom sighing’ – the speaker searches for his own resting place, ‘scanning the hillside / for the home of our dreams’ with his wife in the poem ‘Cote d’Azur’.

This restless search for a ‘home away from home’ leads the speaker, in the closing ‘America’ section of the book, to finally, and not without struggle, reconfigure his sense of self. No longer drifting, he now speaks of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, and is challenged, by the ties of marriage and fatherhood, to fit into his new American home and culture, a culture which has scanty knowledge of his own: ‘You ain’t from around here, / is ya? Where y’all from? /… You speak English real good’, drawls the hairdresser from ‘At the Hair Salon in Big Sandy, Texas’. However, such fundamental change requires a reassessment of the old concepts underpinning ‘self’:

The conflict went deeper,
all the way down to childhood,
religion, family politics, gender
norms, culture and nationality.
(‘Blue’)

and a subsequent rebuilding:

We entered armed
with wine, a knife,
cheese, crackers, cigars,
a lighter, your photographs
and my poetry.
(‘The Woods’)

Ultimately, in ‘Texas Life’, the speaker learns that there is ‘enough between us’ to create ‘a private universe.’ Still, he is haunted, in ‘Reminders’, by

reminders of a life left behind,
connections to places no longer
part of everyday life, ancestors

decomposed in graveyards,
friendships suffering entropy,
halcyon days impossible to recover.

In the final poem of the collection, ‘Expat Christmas’, the speaker resigns himself to staying ‘with my American / family in my American house / going to my American job’, but still attempts to ‘destroy the distance’ (between America and Australia, past and present), by drinking ‘Jacob’s Creek’ and eating ‘salt and vinegar chips’.

Distance is a hugely nostalgic collection, traditionally, elegantly and simply (in the best sense of the word) written. Marked by a sense of both internal and external exploration, the poems take us on a journey through time and place, charting the terrain of identity, nationality, connection and belonging within the context of spatial, cultural and temporal displacement. These poems have the power to make one pine for one’s own childhood, reassess one’s own identity, and reconsider one’s own connection to ‘ancestors’ and ‘country’.

Geoff Page reviews “Suite for Percy Grainger” by Jessica L. Wilkinson

Written by mascara on May 25, 2015. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Suite for Percy Grainger

by Jessica L Wilkinson

Vagabond

ISBN 978-1-922181-20-6

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

It has always been hard to know what to make of the Australian composer and pianist, Percy Grainger. There have been at least six major biographies and “companions” and something of a revival of interest in his music since the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2011. Melbourne poet, Jessica L. Wilkinson, who has been immersed in Grainger’s life and work for some years, has now produced a verse biography of the man.

As the poet says in her notes at the end, “ … sometimes I wonder if there was not one but many Percys: Percy the Pianist, Percy the Composer, Percy the Folk-Song Collector & Arranger, Percy the Experimenter, Percy the Nordic, Racist Percy, Sentimental Percy, Percy the Language-Reformer, Long-Distance-Walking Percy, Generous Percy, Mother’s Percy, Percy the Lover, Percy the Flagellant, and so on.” Clearly , all this must be a challenge for 118 pages of poetry.

Understandably, not all these Percys are given equal weight but Wilkinson leaves the reader in little doubt about their importance for one another, even while there are few, if any, one-to-one psychological explanations offered. Wilkinson’s list may also be incomplete. She doesn’t, for instance, mention the Antipodean Percy who, in the last stanza of “Colonial Song”, seems to have a considerable understanding of his own “weirdness” and its possible origins: “We are so far, here / so far to go. Sooner / or later it must tell / & we will get weird / brave shoots arising / from the virgin plains.”

As can be sensed from the above, Wilkinson is mainly interested in the man’s undeniable “strangeness”. Her oblique, fragmentary and generally experimental approach to the whole project seeks to reproduce this, and perhaps to dramatise it, but certainly not to “explain” it. That would be a serious challenge even for the most experienced psychoanalyst . It is also important to note that Wilkinson would hardly have been so interested in Grainger’s personality had he not had a substantial body of work in the first place.

On the other hand, there are a few occasions where Wilkinson draws a close parallel between Grainger’s sexual enthusiasms and his compositional practice. In “Cream, Jam & Dizziness”, based on letters from Grainger to K.H. (presumably Karen Holten), the poet talks of: “A stress against the canvas — a stroke for the excitable score / evolving across a taut, wet thigh / notes, struck into the text / and sustained.”

For those ill-versed in Grainger’s work — and his life more generally — it’s a good idea to read the reasonably informative Wikipedia entry before attempting Wilkinson’s book. A few tracks on You Tube might also help. Although much of Suite for Percy Grainger is composed from intriguing details, Wilkinson makes no attempt to be “comprehensive” in any encyclopaedic sense. Her approach throughout is suggestive rather than definitive.

The suite is divided into five sections (“Movements”?) which are roughly chronological: “To Begin & End Together”, “Compositions & Arrangements”, “Archive Fever”, “Loves and the Lash” and “Thots & Experiments”. The poems often use musical fragments on the stave as well as the resources of “concrete poetry ”. Some are lists; others are best described as “found poems”. Many of the poems, but not all, spin off from, and bear the same title as, Grainger’s compositions.

It’s hard to find a “typical” quotation to illustrate the tone of the collection as a whole. The last part of “Gardens”, dealing with the first reactions to what would become Grainger’s signature piece, his setting of the folk tune “Country Gardens”, is reasonably indicative:

if you like, as I play
a few tuneful snippets
to satisfy the first need:
to be loved (by the old folk).
Sharpe says ‘good work’

but it is a shallow success
as Balfour jumps up
at the fragment & says:
‘how awful‘ — with a lusty shout!
(into his handkerchief).

This quotation is also perhaps an example of the strength and limitations of “non-fiction poetry” as a genre. In the absence of footnotes (and extensive reading) we can’t be sure whether this is a lineated version of part of one of Grainger’s many letters or whether it’s a separate poem by Wilkinson based on those letters. To some extent, this shouldn’t matter but to more literal-minded readers it probably will. Some of these readers may wish to pursue the matter further in Felicity Plunkett’s Axon essay, “Hosts and Ghosts” on “non-fiction poetry” and related matters .

Balfour, it should be noted in passing, was not the politician but a friend and fellow musician. The phrase “a few tuneful snippets” is an early indication of the self-doubt that troubled Grainger in his final years. He knew that, earlier on, he had somewhat set aside his composing for his career as a concert pianist (even a society pianist) and his relatively small quantity of original work (as opposed to the setting of others’ work) seems to have troubled him — not unreasonably.

Some experts have argued that at least a few of these difficulties were the result of the undue influence of his mother, Rose. It seems she was both an enabler and a constrictor. It’s difficult to imagine Grainger’s early success without her. Rose’s suicide in 1922, when Grainger was forty, was both devastating and liberating. Wilkinson records it rather brutally: “Rose Grainger jumped off New York’s Aeolian building in 1922 maddened by syphilis and incessant rumours that she and Percy were intimately involved .” One feels impelled to add that Rose caught syphilis from her womanising husband some years beforehand and that the rumours were almost certainly untrue .

One relative omission from Wilkinson’s Suite is much information about Grainger’s wife, Ella, a Swedish artist, whom he married in 1928 and whose nineteen year old (“illegitimate”) daughter he also happily took into the family. It’s perhaps a forgivable prurience to want to know more about how Ella managed Grainger’s sexual proclivities. The poem, “To a Nordic Princess (Bridal Song)”, does provide a few clues. It runs, in part:

Percy is content; he has found her!
a very goddess of the breed
& sharp of tongue—she is his:
henchman! pavement artist!
skilled milkmaid! bells-companion!
free music craft-partner! experienced
lover, hands over eyes for the
parapara spurting on her belly! …

In this context, it may be relevant to consider Grainger’s statement (in “Free Music Gins”) that “Everything in my art is based on violently sentimental emotionalism & must be received on that basis to get anything out of it .” It’s hard to know how considered this statement was but it is certainly part of the puzzle.

Some readers may resist the significant amount of poetic experimentation that runs through Wilkinson’s Suite; it can make for frustration at times. It takes many forms, many of them difficult to reproduce here. They include overprinting and fading, arrows connecting one part of the text with another, distortions of the printed line etc. Most readers will soon see, however, that Wilkinson’s approach is also one that Grainger, with all his work on “free music” and the instruments with which to play it, would have approved.

Wilkinson may not have “solved” the enigma of Grainger’s life and work but she has vividly re-created its dimensions — and forced us to recognise the impossibility of any facile resolution to the “problems” he presented as both a man and an artist.

CITATIONS

Plunkett, Felicity. Hosts and Ghosts Hospitality, Reading and Writing, Axon Issue 7 http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-7/hosts-and-ghosts

GEOFF PAGE is an Australian poet and critic, editor of Best Australian Poems 2014. His awards include the Grace Leven Prize and the Patrick White Literary Award.

Christopher Brown reviews “Maze Bright” by Jaya Savige

Written by mascara on May 25, 2015. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Maze Bright

by Jaya Savige

Vagabond

Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER BROWN

The title of Jaya Savige’s chapbook, Maze Bright, previews several of the book’s concerns regarding writing and writing as process. While the title suggests itself as a single adjective (hyphen omitted), it equally proposes itself as an anastrophic syntax, one signalling perhaps the glaring complexities of the linguistic terrain as well as the varied directions and likely wrong turns in language that lead, potentially, to illumination.

Questions of direction and orientation infuse the opening poem, “Etude”, which looks to the games arcade and Pac Man, and the maze-like layout of each, as sites analogous to writing. The opening lines of the book read: “I’ve lost the blueprint but from memory/the maze idea emerged first as a way/of mastering the art of being lost /by simulating it under controlled circumstances”. This seems clear enough but for, “the art of being lost”, which teasingly problematizes the question of direction for how does one “master” the purely negative condition of “being lost”? Read “being lost” as an ironic substitute for “finding one’s way”, that is, read it as a disruption of logic, are we’re invited into the spark and intelligence of the collection.

If the early stanzas preface a poetry of indirection, “Etude” soon shifts the focus, questioning the ephemerality of the artwork via the transience of its eighties context, and concluding with the lines: “Quick, before the window shuts/ and my blinking initials vanish forever from the end screen of the custom/French walnut tabletop video arcade/circa nineteen eighty-eight.” The unpunctuated line, “French walnut tabletop video arcade”, which in its temporal span echoes the first line of the poem, “Pac-Man is my minotaur”, merges classical and contemporary allusion exemplifying the proximity of antiquity and, thus, the agency with which new may be made old. Additionally, there’s the sense in this kind of appropriation that the mythologies themselves are re-contextualised and vitalized within their new poetic domicile.

The question of myth and the means of its integration becomes an engaging element of the work. When in the poem, “Wingsuit Journal” Savige refers to his persona as “some pissed off Apollo”, the question of allusion as a certain default position for analogy suggests itself, but then, in this poem, we are talking about human flight and so a godly comparison can only seem apt. “Magic Hour, LA”, invites similar consideration. Savige compares a “folding screen depicting notable scenes in feudal Kyoto,” with, “a buff pimp in denim cut-offs…outside a 1 hour photo”, it being more than the rhyme that fuses ancient and contemporary worlds, and very much the “folding screen” and instant photograph that together suggest some continuing human propensity towards mediated reality. Myth is part of continuum and LA merely a latter-day phenomenon of an enduring human fascination.

The epistrophe of the closing stanza of the same poem asks further into LA as an icon:

…when the locust sun descending on
a field of bending wheat is prologue
to a tale stripped of all denouement,
and silhouettes are all our dialogue

In this instance, the emphasis on a stage or cinematic terminology speaks to various aspects of the Californian character: LA as “Tinsel Town” of glam, and generator of myth par excellence, but as Hollywood, historical home of American film-making, whatever myth the latter and its product imply.

“On Not Getting My Spray Can Signed by Mr Brainwash” seems a distillation of concerns around the value of art and object in a consumer age. It’s a poem that concedes the appeal of a modern material world while dissolving boundaries between traditionally revered antiquity, emblem here for “culture”, and modern, disposable commodity. It’s rhyming stanzas again smooth the edges between a modern consumer world and world of art and culture: “I appreciate/a top shelf invader piece/ as much as any Eurydice.” The poem isn’t, however, without its misgivings in regard to consumerism and can be “pretty sure” of “the way our fetishisation of the toy assault rifle inflects his [a toy Elvis wielding an M16’s] canonization as The King”. Stanzas five and six exemplify the poem’s expository style:

“The hubris is in thinking of each meme-savvy mashup as a protest, allied to a flash mob trashing Topshop. It’s not. This canvas is passive as TV. No caulking with irony can prevent its schtick’s hull ripping on the reef of cliché.

The poem ends memorably with an appeal to Duchamp, appropriate figure here for the way we value art and object. Savige “prays” to Duchamp that he not be affrighted by contradiction, but rather accept the potential for complex, contradictory relations with the world. The final lines, “…unfazed that he’s conscripted/by the thing he criticizes,” suggest perhaps a conflict with the poetic object as much as a conflict with consumer fetish.

Probably more than any other poem featured here, “Act of God”, resonates with certain of those from Latecomers, and the way that collection describes a human presence in nature. It’s a short but strikingly sinuous and gritty poem describing a moment in nature, a meeting between birds, in the context of an indoor garden in a corporate building. I was intrigued as to what its act of god might refer? Is its reclamation miraculous? Does it refer to the corporate gods? Are we lured into some anthropocentric position in which we read humanity as god, but perhaps forget nature itself? The corporate building in question is the Suncorp building, somewhat divested of signification if read it as just another bank in Queeensland. And this is part of the appeal of the work; we have the reified Suncorp building and attendant myth on one hand, and a plausibly concrete locality on the other, and so an interesting tension. There’s lots to consider in this poem but what really struck me is the strength of every line, right up to the superb ending (not quoted here.) A sample reads: “Among the starlike flowers…she met a blue-faced honeyeater…To gain its trust she noshed on freshest sushi of the soil…an Hibiscus Harlequin beetle…whose bright shield shone…as she crunched it for protein.”

What surprise, what incongruity do we find in nature taking up home in the corporate void, of investing it with life (there’s the act of god). And what incongruity do we see in a rock icon lunching with an ageing monarch? I am not proposing any particular thrill of ironic delight at this, only that in the poem “Nick Cave at Buckingham Palace”, we again encounter a mythological mergence, one more about culture here than time or place. But here’s a delicious offering, a trenchant and energized parody of Australian celebrity culture, totally at home with the subtleties of Australian life and language – as the following passage indicates:

Naturally I fall
           in with the play
            wrights
                       and an oddly
                       foppish
                                   yob from Toowoomba
                               fluent
           in several ocker dialects…

           Like salacious columnists
                       we’re in bits just witnessing
            “The Body” sluice
                       through a bank of tail-
            ored suits, still hot as lime juice
                   on a torn
                   cuticle…

The rest of the poem reads with matching acuity. Describing a cast of Aussie guests to the palace, and Cave as, “high priest of duende…currawong among a froth of swans”, the poem does much more than create a giggle out of its apparent contextual incongruities. It deftly engages an Australian idiom, “…poor Clive is properly crook”, which addresses an older Anglo-centric Australia, parodying Rolf and Clive and the monarchy, perhaps, as archaisms; it presents a lively discourse on language as relative to context: “My patois is a heady mix of amnesia, empire and capital”, as if the palace were the perfect location in which to conveniently forget one’s language and one’s origins.

The book continues, losing none of its early urgency. “Citicity” re-engages ideas of abstractions of place, and the poem “Cinemetabolic” abstracts language through a process of homophonic extrapolation: “Shore, hive bean cauled ah word-shipper of falls codes…Whey cup, hits thyme two hacked…” Indeed, poetry is for reading aloud.

Of the ten poems that make up Maze Bright, each indicates a depth of resource and intelligence. Some were written in Paris, others first published in the UK, and while each poem embodies a wealth of cultural reference, and interplay of myth and allusion, they are also, in a lively and demotic way, Australian. I’m guessing this book comes as one of the last in the vagabond Rare Object series (which has given way to the more recent deciBels undertaking). It’s best not to look at books such as these as “necessary fore-runner to the subsequent full-length collection” but to view them for what they are, in this case, a joyous offering in Australian writing and publishing.

CHRIS BROWN lives in Newcastle. His poems have appeared in Southerly, The Age, Overland and Cordite and were recently anthologized in Kit Kelen and Jean Kent’s anthology of Hunter writing, A Slow Combusting Hymn. He is writing a book of poems: “hotel universo”.

Ali Cobby Eckermann in conversation with Jaydeep Sarangi

Written by mascara on April 12, 2015. Posted in Interviews.

Writer, Ali Cobby Eckermann was born in 1963 at Brighton, Adelaide, on Kaurna Country, however, she grew up on Ngadjuri Country. She has travelled extensively, living most of her life on Arrernte, Jawoyn and Larrakia country in the Northern Territory. When she was 34, Eckermann met her birth mother Audrey, and learnt that her birth mob were the Yankunytjatjara people from north-west South Australia. Her mother was born near Ooldea, south of Maralinga on Kokatha Country. Eckermann relates herself to the Kokatha mob too (Ali Cobby Eckermann 2013). Her first verse novel is His Father’s Eyes, and her second verse novel, Ruby Moonlight, won the Kuril Dhagun Indigenous Writing Fellowship, which is part of the black&write! Indigenous Editing and Writing Project sponsored by the State Library of Queensland. Ali has won several awards including: First Prize in ATSI Survival Poetry competition in 2006, First Prize Dymocks Red Earth Poetry Award NT in 2008, and was Highly Commended for the Marion Eldridge Award in 2009. Her poetry has been translated and published in Croatia, Indonesia, Greece and New Zealand. Ruby Moonlight was published in 2012 by Magabala Books, and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and was awarded the “Book of the Year” at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2013. Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Nunga poet, is the second Aboriginal writer to win the top prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, in consecutive years. Ali Cobby Eckermann’s important works include:

little bit long time APC, 2009
little bit long time reprinted by Picaro Press, 2010
Kami Vagabond Press, 2011
His Fathers Eyes Oxford University Press, 2011.
A Handful of Sand: Words To The Frontline co-edited with Lionel Fogarty Southerly Journal 2011
Ruby Moonlight Magabala Books, 2012 Deadly Award Outstanding Achievement in Literature
Love Dreaming & Other Poems Vagabond Press, 2012
Too Afraid To Cry Ilura Press, 2013

JS: Could we start with you telling us a little about your childhood, schooling and tertiary education?

ACE: My childhood may sound unusual but it was a regular childhood for many Aboriginal children born in the 1960’s. I was adopted as a baby by the Eckermann family and grew up on a farm in the mid-north of South Australia. Mum and Dad couldn’t have their own children, so adopted the four of us kids. It was a good life: baby lambs and chickens, kittens, the cubby house, gardens and orchards, and the iconic tennis court!

Our family was German Lutheran so we grew a passionate respect for good food and the sharing of it. Collectively our family was self-sustaining, We had a dairy, milked cows every morning and every night. So as children we learnt the practise of hard work. At a young age we learnt to grow sweetcorn, watermelon and tomatoes. My parents were kind people, and I remember their generosity to others. But it was the social arena outside the family group that I found confronting. Even at a young age I remember racism; I did feel that I did not really belong here. Of course this became more evident in my teenage years, at high school, when I met other Aboriginal students, some adopted and some with their families. I had no concept then of the extent of the Stolen Generations in Australia.

JS: You have a strong need to educate and also give a voice to those, who for whatever reasons (lack of education, poverty, marginalisation), cannot get their stories told. Do you know of any specific reasons you care about this why you care so much about this?

ACE: Mostly I feel I have this obligation to myself. In hindsight I grieve the fact that when I was a teenager, and life became very difficult, I can’t remember anyone asking me if I was okay. As an angry young person I did not know how to voice my emotions, and as a result I succumbed to the adoption of my only son. This led to many years of addiction. And it was years later during rehabilitation, that I began to recognise the value of every story, and how to value my own. These skills were reinforced after finding my family, especially by the Aboriginal Elders. It is a true value of my culture, to care for others.

JS: What are the traditions of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Lionel Fogarty?

ACE: Actually, Lionel Fogarty is one of my best friends. He has been an incredible mentor to me, in my early years, as an up and coming writer. I find his writings powerful; much of what he wrote 35 years ago is relevant today. I was somewhat sad to find Oodgeroo Noonuccal at a mature age; I regret that I did not learn about her poetry whilst in school. Sally Morgan’s My Place was the only book of Aboriginal writing that I discovered and read in my young years.

JS: Who are Nunga?

ACE: Nunga is a collective term for Aboriginal people who live in South Australia. In Queensland the term is Murri, in other states the term is Koori. My traditional family in the desert are known as Anangu.

JS: How are they different from other Aboriginal communities in Australia?

ACE: I believe, in respect to Aboriginal literature, there is a collective spirit. As Aboriginal writers we need to truly support each other, and support each other to mentor the craft. Each writer will identify by their Language Group name, and may casually refer to the collective terms. Mostly I identify as a Yankunytjatjara writer, and most of my poetry is influenced by the natural landscape of my people.

JS: Who are some of the important contemporary Indigenous writers ?

ACE: Lionel Fogarty is one of Australia’s most important writers. He first published his poetry as a young man in his 20’s. The journey of his life has been shared through his poetry, and is a truly honest gift to the world. Kim Scott and Alexis Wright have both won the Miles Franklin Award, the most prestigious literature award in Australia.

A Facebook site BlackWordsAustLit is the best resource of Indigenous Literature in Australia. It is both an archive and an introduction to our newest writers. Check it out and follow the prompts.

JS: How many Indigenous authors write in English?

ACE: Most Aboriginal authors and poets write in English. I believe the publishing world requires this, for the selling of our books. It is also a legacy of the removal of so many of us from our family. And the cost of translation in Aboriginal language is very expensive. I feel sometimes the cost is the preventative, and of course we are not empowered to change this. On the other hand the resurgence of Aboriginal language, at a community level, is truly inspirational. Many families and young people are relearning these ancient languages; our mother tongue.

JS: Tell us about the Stolen Generation?

ACE: My mother was separated from her mother at the age of seven. This is very confusing for her, as the mission where they lived had a Children’s Home, to prevent the removal of children. It seems my mother was an amazing student, and it was deemed that continued association with her family would be detrimental to her education. She told me that she would watch from the window as her siblings went with Kami and other family members to hunt for lizards and other bush tuckers. She told me she felt sad. And this is one of the main legacy’s of Stolen Generation removal, the sadness that still exists inside us.

I was 33 when I found my mother. At the time she was the Co-Chair for National Sorry Day, an annual day of remembrance and celebration dedicated to the Stolen Generations. Her legacy in life is amazing.

JS: Many of your poems start with “ooooo’. What does this mean?

ACE: This was an error, a typo. The title of these poems is clear. I did get a shock when I saw the publication of this. Now it remains as a mystery for the readers.

JS: What are your important themes of writings?

ACE: I would hope all my writings achieve my basic goals; to promote healing and understanding between Aboriginal people and the rest of the world. As I travel internationally I often hear how media has portrayed us incorrectly, that our rights have been returned to us, how past issues have been resolved. This is not the truth!
I do enjoy meeting writers from other cultural backgrounds. Mostly our issues are similar, and often we share a similar expressionism. This has an empowering effect on me. I love reading global poetry.

JS: Could you please mention a few poems which represent you as a Nunga writer?

ACE: Circles & Squares, First Time, Love Dreaming, Ribbons, Wallaroo

JS: You have written verse novels. What stories do they tell?

ACE: My first novel His Fathers Eyes was commissioned to explain the Stolen Generations to upper primary and lower secondary students. It is published by Oxford University Press in the series Yarning Strong. My second verse novel Ruby Moonlight is a story of massacre, the often unmentioned history of colonial impact. It tells the story of Ruby, who survives the massacre of her entire family. I set this story in the 1890’s. I was moved beyond words in 2012 to receive the Deadly Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature (an Aboriginal Award) and again in 2013 when Ruby Moonlight won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the NSW Premiers Book Of The Year. This book should be in every school library.

JS: You have already attended translation workshops in India. What is your experience? Do you think that translation works are close to text/original?

ACE: The experience of the Autumn School for Literature Translations is an amazing experience. The passion of the selected students is paramount to the success of this. I was immersed into wonderful conversations; I shared many photos of my family and traditional lands. We discussed every detail. And my heart told me during the final recitals that the students had achieved the best translations of my work.

The unforeseen publication of my poems by the Deptartment of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University is a testament to this. Some of my poems will sit with two or three translations. I am proud that the student’s names and their work will accompany my words. I believe this will become a unique handbook of international translation, due to this shared experience.

JS: What do you hope your work will achieve?

ACE: I write in the hope that my grandchildren will be safe in their true identity in Australia. I write that they will not have to assimilate or change any cultural aspect of themselves to achieve what they want. I write in the hope that Australia will become more mature, to embrace the values that only diversity can bring, to be kinder to the impoverished and the poor, and to stop pretending that these issues do not exist within the national identity.

JS: Are you familiar with Indian Dalit writers?

ACE: In 2012 the University of Western Sydney hosted a two-day festival for Australian and Indian writers. Alexis Wright and I were invited to open panel discussions with two Dalit writers who had travelled from India for this event. It will remain a highlight of my writing career. The panel was judged one of the highlights of the festival.

The opportunity to return to Kolkata, to travel to New Delhi and attend the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2015 will allow me to meet with Dalit Writers again.

JS: Can you describe an “average” working day for you?

ACE: I day dream a lot! Much thought goes into my writing, long before it reaches the page. And some time ago I quit my regular job and returned to visual arts; I love sculpture and painting. I find these two artforms compliment my artistic process. My visual arts actually funds my writing career. So my life is frugal and exciting. There is no ‘average’ day.

JS: If you were to prepare an anthology for school students would you include some of your own poems?

ACE: Of course. Our literature is necessary to inform that our culture still exists, beyond tourism. I would also include oral readings of Aboriginal poetry by Aboriginal poets. I believe our voices bring a beautiful timbre and rhythm of our words, which is both healing and powerful.

JS: Do you believe in Literary Movements? What are its weapons?

ACE: I guess my ‘literary movement’ is the establishment of my Aboriginal Writers Retreat. It is an environment for all writers, however it is Aboriginal themed. Every participant must ‘leave their ego on the highway’ and arrive to a place of equality. This is how we learn. I have enjoyed sharing my space, and watching the outcomes in people. Lionel Fogarty was my first Writer-In-Residence and we co-edited Words To The Frontline: an edition of Southerly, Australia’s premier literary magazine.

Originally I established the retreat in my home at Koolunga, in South Australia. However my personal career has grown beyond my wildest dreams. So I am now in process of mobilising the retreat, and am looking for sponsorship to purchase a caravan. The caravan will be customised to include a workspace and include an extensive library of Indigenous literature. Many grassroots Aboriginal writers have not been exposed to multi-cultural writings. Sometimes there is no literature of any kind in their home environments.

It is my wish now, to travel to communities and transport my workshops there. I believe the main benefit will be tri-generational story-telling and writing workshops.

JS: What are your current engagements?

ACE: Currently I am in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in America. It is a three month residency and is funded by the US Deptartment of State. The program has been running since 1967 and has allowed Iowa City to become the only UNESCO City Of Literature in America.

JS: Would you please share a recent poem with us?

Ngingali

my mother is a granite
boulder I can no longer climb
nor walk around

her weight is a constant
reminder of myself
I sit in her shadow

gulls nestle in her hair
their shadows her epitaph
I carry

a pebble of her in my pocket

* Ngingali is Ali’s mother’s traditional name

JS: Thank you! You are an amazing source of inspiration.

Jaydeep Sarangi, is a bilingual writer, academic, editor, translator, and the author of a number of significant publications on Postcolonial issues, Indian Writing in English and Australian Literature in reputed journals/magazines in India and abroad. He has recently collaborated as peer reviewer for CLR, Universitat Jaume I, Spain. He is one of the Editors, “Writers Editors Critics” and the Vice President of literary organization, GIEWEC (head office at Kerala). Widely travelled and anthologised both as a poet and a critic, Dr Sarangi has delivered keynote addresses in several national and international seminars, conferences and read poems/research papers in several continents. He is Associate Professor in the Department. of English, Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri College (Calcutta University), 30, Prince Anwar Shah Road, Kolkata-700033, WB, India. E mail: jaydeepsarangi@gmail.com

Denisa Duran translated by Florin Bican

Written by mascara on April 8, 2015. Posted in Translations.

Denisa Duran (b. 1980) is a Romanian poet, translator and cultural manager, author of four poetry books: the award-winning debut collection Pufos şi mechanic (Fluffy and Mechanical), Bucharest, 2003, was followed by the bilingual book Omul de unică folosință / Disposable People (translated into English by Florin Bican), published by Galway Print in Ireland (2009) and promoted during a reading tour in Cork, Limerick, Galway and Dublin; in 2012 she published Sunt încă tânără (I Am Still Young) – a selection of which was included in the anthology The Most Beautiful Poems from 2012; in December 2014 her new book came out, Dorm, dar stau cu tine (I Am Asleep, Yet Keep You Company), accompanied by illustrations. She signed her first three collections with her maiden name of Denisa Mirena Pişcu.

Selections of her poems have been included in several national and international anthologies and translated into: English, Czech, Bulgarian, German, Italian, Turkish, Arabic and Finnish.

Amintirile atârnă în mine

Amintirile atârnă în mine
grele
ca nişte mere verzi
cu viermi.
Viermi
şi sub ţărână,
departe,
în adânc,
au spălat oasele
alor mei.

Netezesc mormântul

Netezesc mormântul,
smulg buruienile,
trag cu mâinile de pământ,
ca de-o pătură,
încercând să-i trezesc.

Oamenii se adună în jurul lui

Tatăl
mânca din mâna mea
cu greu.
Şi a murit.

Oamenii se adună în jurul lui
grijulii,
preocupaţi
să nu se molipsească de moarte.

Candele

Am fost ieri pe la Europa
să împrumut o cană de ulei
pentru prăjit cartofi
(sunem mulţi şi mereu se termină uleiul
de parcă l-ar da cineva pe gât).
E drept, E. nu ştie
şi nici nu e treaba ei,
dar o părticică din uleiul pe datorie,
încleiat sau lucios,
eu îl pun la candelele aprinse
pentru morţii mei
şi ai săi.

Memories Hang Inside Me

Memories hang inside me
as heavy
as green apples
ridden with worms.
Worms
under the dirt,
deep down
in the earth,
have also washed clean
the bones
of my people.

I Level the Grave

I level the grave,
I pluck out the weeds,
I tug with my hands at the earth
as if it were a blanket,
attempting to shake them awake.

People Gather Around Him

The father
would eat out of my hand
with difficulty.
And he died.

People gather around him
reluctantly
worried
lest they catch death.

The Lamps I Light Up

Yesterday I dashed over to Europe
to borrow some cooking oil
for frying potatoes
(there’s too many of us and we keep running out
as if someone were guzzling the stuff).
Truth be told, E. doesn’t know,
nor is it her business,
that I pour the tiniest portion
of the oil on loan,
be it rancid or fresh,
into the lamps I light up
for my dead
and for hers.

Jordie Albiston

Written by mascara on April 7, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Jordie Albiston’s latest titles are XIII Poems (Rabbit Poet Series, 2013) and The Weekly Poem: 52 exercises in closed & open forms (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014). She lives in Melbourne.

Rubidium

Rb– Woodward was obsessed with blue    tie    office ceiling    parking space    all painted blue perhaps he did not know love    love is there in the flame emission spectrum    a brightness of
rubidus    love-ly dark red    & tomorrow evening    just before 9    she will wind her way up to
Paisley Park for the Lebanese fireworks & hold to her lover & enjoy the burst of atomic time
shower the end-of-year sky    love is forever almost    his half-life thrice the age of the universe
scientia vincere tenebras

the storm last night was large    & morning’s sea is Shut like a jaw
it leaves not even the heel of a shoe of anyone gone “home”     for
some while we walk    chaotica strewn all over the shore & scores
& scores of miniscule beings bereft of kith & kin    a shag protects
what is left of a jut    a bit of rock thrown up like joy from the very
floor of the world    you know my emotions before I feel them you
know my definitions    & gulls fly sullenly through the sky    mirror-
ed there in the continental drift of your vapoury silvery eyes    if I
break you open    you will catch fire    if I say the wrong thing    say
it wronger    if I just say nought nought nought    but I don’t pick up
I don’t know the signs & where was I when all this was taught    we
turn ourselves toward the wetlands & for some while we walk    I
keep half an eye for a Lewin’s Rail in the tangled lignum & sea club-
rush but nothing nothing nothing    no Baillon’s Crake working the
reeds or glasswort sedge or grass    the storm last night was large
o where do they go when the wind blows faster than time?    the
word is —    & I like how it sounds but I don’t know what it means
don’t know if I know if it matters this morning    & this is no time
for being a poet    the pieces are here but nowhere to put them the
word is here —    the kisses are here —    but no mouths

Alan Botsford

Written by mascara on April 7, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Alan Botsford serves as editor of Poetry Kanto, Japan’s oldest bi-lingual poetry journal. Author of the essay-dialogue-poetry collection Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Sage Hill Press 2010) as well as two poetry collections, mamaist: learning a new language (Minato no Hito 2002) and A Book of Shadows (Katydid Press 2003), he teaches at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan, and lives with his wife and son in Kamakura.

a mamaist heat

i was thrown into the white heat, the tumult and trial,
the ferment and turmoil, the flurry and disorder.
i was convulsed by and floundered in
the shivering and shuddering,
i ebbed and flowed, i waxed and waned,
i pumped in the swinging and fluctuating
to quiver in the sway
and flit in the pulse.
i pitched and plunged, i bobbed and weaved,
i tossed and tumbled from pillar to post,
side to side, round and round, in and out, up and down,
and now the ardor of the cheerful fire has me crackling,
thermally loose in the burning and fully alive in the blooming,
the blush of dawn, the glisten of night
gleaming and blazing in my blood,
gossamer and solid are the circuits of my heart.

a mamaist shot

The brain shot through
With Eros
Has a mind of its own
Were it opened for business
Where the heart shot through
With Eros
Is the lion among us
Alive and well
Fiercely loyal to
No bottom line but its own
Mystery
Like
The stomach shot through
With Eros
Hungry for Otherness while
The intestine shot through
With Eros
Absorbs the lessons

Vinita Agrawal

Written by mascara on April 7, 2015. Posted in Poetry.

Vinita, author of Words Not Spoken, is a Mumbai based, award winning poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in Asian Cha, Constellations, The Fox Chase Review, Pea River Journal, Open Road Review, Stockholm Literary Review, Poetry Pacific among others. She was nominated for the Best of the Net Awards 2011, awarded first prize in the Wordweavers Contest 2014, commendation prize in the All India Poetry Competition 2014 and won the 2014 Hour of Writes Contest twice. Her poem is one of the prize wining entries to be published in the British Council’s Museum Anthology 2014. Her current manuscript of poems has been accepted by the Finishing Line Press, Kentucky, USA and is due to be published this year. She has been widely interviewed by national and international journals. She can be reached at www.vinitawords.com

Raw Silk

When at last we meet
do not say hello

That greeting for strangers…
We’ve shared too many moons on the palettes of our nights

When we meet
Leave the race behind. Face me

Become scent
Stretch my lungs

Become jaggery
Color my tongue

When we meet
Come undone like a knot in the wind

Me the shuddering threads
You the hunger for silk

When we meet
Make sure I die of love

Letter for Reza Barati by name withheld : Manus Detention Camp

Written by mascara on April 7, 2015. Posted in Writers In Detention.

Hello dear Reza,

How are you?
Are you in a good place?
Everyone is here and they are saying ‘hi’ to you.
I’m sure you remember Mustafa! He is saying to you, “Let’s play cards!”
Ali is saying, “Do you remember you would always get 6-6 whenever we played backgammon?”
Hussain is saying, “Do you remember whenever we played soccer, you would always be the goal keeper because you were tall?”
Behrouz is saying, “My mother goes to your mother every day and they cry together”. Hassan is saying, ” Forgive me, when you departed, there was a bit of displeasure between us”.

Reza! Do you know anything about Hamid Khazaei?
Are you together?
Please say ‘hi’ to him and say to him that we miss him.

Reza! It was hard to believe you had departed, we can’t believe it now either.
We would never think that they would kill the strong stocky Reza Barati, unjustly under a stroke with their hand. Reza, no court of law has been established for you yet!
Your murderers and their masters are walking freely and they are showing off, blocking the way your blood is beside.

Reza, I don’t know if you know what they have done to us in this year that you weren’t here. It’s been really hard. Reza, they shed the blood of those like you and Hamid Khazaei in the name of human rights and they did not even care.

Do you know what Scott Morrison said after your death? He said “the way to stop these deaths is to stop the boats”. It is shameful.

Reza, they are more ruthless that the dictators of our own countries. They kill people at once there, but here, they kill slowly and by torture. They killed Hamid ruthlessly as well. Maybe he’s told you himself or maybe his pride hasn’t let him tell you that, how they did treat him ruthlessly. He died slowly slowly in front of our eyes in less than a week.

Reza, this is end of the world, no one helps us. They completed their racist confrontation by killing you and Hamid to show how mean they are.

But you don’t know that great people amongst them in Australia honoured you after your death. We can remember in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and many other places. Thousands of people shed tears for you and they condemned their government and that is your actual court. You don’t know but thousands of kind people lit candles for you and sit in streets. They showed humanity has not died yet and the account of the Australian people is separate from their racist government. Today, we are hopeful in the aid of these people with their great souls to achieve our freedom.

You are closer to God there, so pray to God that we will be freed from this prison very soon. Reza, I know freedom was nothing more than a dream for you and Hamid, an unachievable dream that you did not achieve here but now you are completely free, so rest in peace!

Dear Reza, I don’t want to keep you busy for a long time, but you will be in our hearts and souls forever. If the tree of our freedom gives fruit, we will not forget the blood of you and Hamid by it.

We love you both!

Translated by Ali Parsaei