The Herring Lass

by Michelle Cahill

Arc Publications

ISBN 978-1910345-76-4

Reviewed by NADIA NIAZ

In a 2011 interview with the Goethe Institut Australia, Michelle Cahill spoke of how her work explores an ‘imaginary habitation in many places’. The Herring Lass is the latest phase of this exploration, demonstrating Cahill’s ability to move and connect repeatedly across massive distances.

The sea, oceans, and bodies of water all serve as the connective tissue of this collection, tracing the edges of the world and all the stops Cahill makes along her way. But expansive as this movement makes the book, the individual poems themselves are acutely observed, the images sharply drawn, the character studies intense and specific, so that each poem has at its centre a stillness, a feeling of a breath held so as not to disturb the moment.

The titular poem opens the collection on the east coast of Scotland. In a few sonorous strokes, Cahill sets the scene:

Not far from the stone harbour, herring kilns
pump wood smoke, smudged into an enterprise of masts
and the hemp rigging of a whole fleet, outward bound.

The long vowels and nasal consonants have a languid effect, creating the sense of a scene that has been repeated for so long that all sense of time is not just lost but irrelevant. But just as the opening stanza lulls the reader, Cahill follows it with:

Her knife flashes in four-second strokes,
her wet hands never stray from a salted barrel.

These shorter, sharper sounds break the spell and focus the reader into the reality of a lone woman gutting fish, of what she sees, of how she must make do while ‘the sailmaker, cooper, boat builder have all prospered’. We leave her then, making her journey up and down the coast to make a living as the ships return with their catch. There is no resolution offered or needed. In zooming out once more, Cahill reminds us that the scene, woman and all, is timeless.

Cahill’s ear for of language is a delight and provides a counterpoint to the contemplative, often dark tone of her poems. Here is a poet who is at ease referencing everything from Classical Greek dramatic conventions to text and internet speak, so that each poem feels like a treasure hunt. She revels in words, in sound and reference. Take for example the marvellous ‘Night Birds’, which contains lines like, ‘Once we chased Mallarmé’s swan, dragging dissolute/ wings into flight,’ and:

…Words broke their
baroque chords creaking in my nest of bones. You wrote
me tempting alibis, singing the frost, blotting out stars.
Night birds slumber. Stay – with arms unhinged we’ll
watch sparks flame as dancing roses, souvenirs of silence.
My body rivers over absent fields, where words rescue
or reduce me…

This is work that demands re-reading, that requires the reader to taste the words, to feel them rolling off the tongue, to hear them ringing in the air.

Migratory birds appear often in these poems, appropriately enough. Cahill’s observations of swans are masterful, but more startling still is the poem ‘Houbara’. At the centre of this poem is a brutal description of the kill, when the hunter’s falcon catches the bustard.

He points from the dunes, he circles her, melding
in a riot of awkward feathers. She cannot be twisted
back, her neck, a broken string he jabs in agony.

But there is more to the poem than just the murder of this endangered bird. Cahill conjures up a vision of the hunt, the technology deployed to locate and track an unassuming bird, the thrum of a generator, singing, four-wheel drives, campsites humming with activity, all against the backdrop of an enormous desert in the Arabian Peninsula. Even the falcon is invested with intention. Most sinister of all, however, is the ‘you’ to whom the poem is addressed, the ‘you’ who turns the organisation, the hunt, the kill into a metaphor for desire that destroys its object.

In the middle of the book sit ‘The Grieving Sonnets’. Unlike the quick shifts of scene in the preceding and following poems, these are all firmly anchored in Australia, even if the speaker is not. Kangaroos, kelpies, wallabies, lyrebirds, Tasmanian devils, eucalypts and many other recognisably Australian fauna and flora crowd these six sonnets, but the mood is still empty, the speaker still lost. The grief at the heart of these sonnets is never named, but in the fifth sonnet, finally, Cahill suggests what has seethed beneath the surface all along. ‘I’m twice in trespass,’ she says, and later, ‘history’s a genocide’. In the sixth, she says, ‘We feel the ignominy of territory, we chase idioms/ borrowed from culture, from memory, the past’s psychosis/ and prison.’

The book continues past this echoing stretch into poems that feel more rooted in the present than the ones in the first half of the book. There is air and vitality in these poems, and although the wind is still often cruel, the present still alien in some way, there are spots of sunshine and even heat that seem to radiate off the page. In ‘Renovations’, for instance, we find ‘the violence of time/whistling through a sou’westerly’ as the speaker packs up her life, copes with growing older and accepts ‘all the drop sheets, all/the brawn and Epoxy sealant it took to keep me single.’

The book continues its exploration of the present in the ironic ‘Real Life’, which is bursting with digital and virtual life. The idea of reality, of a life, of the self, is questioned and re-questioned as the poems goes from connection to alienation and back again. Although this poem stands out because it is the most conspicuously ‘modern’ in terms of reference, it grapples with the same questions and ideas that the entire book does, perhaps most acutely so.

This is a collection of great depth, both intellectual and emotional. Cahill’s voice never falters as she sweeps the reader along from location to location, bringing each alive for the duration of the poem. Through it all, Cahill’s voice is erudite but also curious – there is a sense of deep thought given to the smallest details, and an understanding and appreciation of their importance. Although she covers great physical distance, the poems are emotionally involved and keenly felt, showing the multitudes that one individual can contain. The itinerant Herring Lass haunts the whole book in this way, her small, sharp knife probing moment after moment before she must move on.
 
 
NADIA NIAZ is  a Melbourne-based writer and editor. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne where she teaches Creative Writing.  Her work has previously appeared in Cordite, TEXT, Strange 4 and The Alhamra Literary Review.

The Historian’s Daughter

By Rashida Murphy

ISBN: 9781742588940

UWA Publishing

Reviewed by VIVIENNE GLANCE

Set in India, Iran and Australia, and spanning several decades, The Historian’s Daughter tackles personal and political trauma through the eyes of Hannah, a young Anglo-Indian girl. Hannah, her sister, Gloria, and their two brothers, love their gentle, caring mother, Farah. She cooks delicious food, and heals their hurts and sickness with herbal medicines, earning her the moniker, the ‘Magician’.  Iranian-born Farah calmly tries to protect her children from Gordon, their ill-tempered, unpredictable and abusive father – the ‘Historian’ of the book’s title. The Historian’s aberrant behaviour includes womanising, drinking and locking his so-called ‘mad’ sister, Rani, in the attic. His sanctuary is his library, which is full of books about famous English men, including a series titled The English Conquistadors of India, along with his own father’s diaries. These books are a secret source of fascination for Hannah as she tries to understand herself and her family.

One morning, Hannah discovers that the Magician, Rani and Gloria have all disappeared, and that the Historian has sold the house and is packing them all off to live in Perth, Western Australia. The mystery of these disappearances plagues Hannah as she matures into adulthood, until one day she receives a phone call that starts her on a journey of discovery.

At the centre of this story is an exploration of abandonment, and the fear and insecurity that this sudden change can evoke in a child. By using the adult Hannah as narrator, the emotions of her child-self are handled with hindsight, thus allowing adult readers space to reflect on their own childhood confusions. We are also exposed to the unreliable memory of a child, so places and family are seen from a restricted perspective; one that senses there is more to a situation or a person, but is unable to fully understand what this is.

This childhood perspective, which is set entirely in India, fills the entire first part of this four-part novel, and is titled simply ‘Family’. With well-crafted vignettes, Murphy builds a sense of life set within this rambling ‘house with too many windows and women’, shadowed by hills ‘with their memory of forest, of deodar, oak and pine, of rivers and waterfalls’ (p. 1). Amongst the smells of cooking and the many rooms of the house, we come across aunties who visit and then never leave. They are a background dissonance to the music of the home, as they clean or eat, scold the children or call them ‘half-breeds’, or debate if they are Anglo-Iranian or Anglo-Indian. Hannah who is darker than her siblings, learns from the always grumpy Aunty Meher that she is a ‘kallo’ or a throwback (p. 4).

This sense of uncertain identity gently murmurs throughout the story; it is never explained or excused, but is presented as it is experienced by Hannah, and so is without any judgement or angst. Nonetheless, Hannah’s origins become a central part of the narrative when she begins to suspect her familial ties are not what they seem.

Murphy deftly creates a compelling atmosphere through small moments that slowly accumulate and then resonate around this extended family. By showing us their lives in patchwork we become familiar with a culture and place that may have seemed exotic or distant if merely described.

She also fractures the narrative chronologically, again reflecting memory, telling the story non-linearly. We are invited to sit within this first part of the book, almost as if a guest of the family, and so, over several years, will become familiar with the rhythms of their lives. The weaving of the narrative through time occasionally feels too measured, but by staying with this first part we are rewarded as the book opens out in the second part: Immigrants.

When, Hannah wakes up to discover the Magician, Rani and Gloria have disappeared, she blames herself. The Magician had allowed the son of a distant relative from Iran to stay with them. Sohrab reminds the Magician of her homeland, and Hannah feels the closeness she had to her mother become disrupted as she hears her speaking Farsi to him, and cooking unusual foods. Sohrab and Gloria grow into adolescence, and Hannah is disturbed as she notices they have become close. When she discovers them kissing, this increases her sense of betrayal. Her immature perspective only sees that Sohrab has taken both her mother and sister from her, and in anger she tells the Historian what she has seen. The upheaval that follows is more than the Magician can smooth over.

At the same time, we are taken into the future, when the Historian moves Hannah and her brothers, Clive and Warren, to Perth in Western Australia. It is at this point that Hannah is exposed to other possibilities in her life, and she matures into her own person.

It is also the moment when there is a subtle shift in how Murphy tells the story. Up until this point the story has been set within the confines of the house. The rooms are defined by their function and by the people who inhabit them. Once in Australia, the wider world impinges on Hannah and broadens her outlook.

Two particularly stunning passages describe the effect seeing the ocean and Kings Park has on her. Her limited horizons are quite literally expanded, such as: ‘Nothing could have prepared me for the ostentatious sky, silver sand and emerald water on a summer morning’; or Kings Park ‘where tall eucalypts carried the names of lost soldiers at their base and the hill sloped down towards the city and the river’ (pp. 101-102).

As Hannah moves from the interior world of her childhood to the outdoor world of Perth, she matures into a young woman who no longer fears the Historian and begins to strike out on her own. She meets Gabriel, a wood turner, who is a kind of iconic Australian male, complete with a red dog and shed. Until that phone call.

It is this incident that promotes a quickening of the pace of the narrative and we are thrown into the turmoil of dislocation and trauma. Set mainly in Iran, Hannah is thrown into a world where real terror comes in the form of soldiers knocking on doors in the middle of the night and taking people away. Where any misstep by a woman in public could lead to her death. Unable to leave her sister to escape from Iran alone, Hannah accompanies Gloria on the dangerous journey, aided by people smugglers. Their fear of uncertainty contrasts with the need to trust unknown others with your fate; blinded by the dust of the road and sustained by meagre bowls of rice and scare water to drink.

Murphy takes us on the journey many desperate people have endured to find safety, and effectively pulls us into their orbit. She shows real people struggling to stay alive, and avoids easy polemics by keeping us as much in the dark about the future as Hannah is. We are there with her as she is shut up for days in the back of a van, or hidden in a room in Karachi with little food.

Murphy does not allow the story to be side-tracked by politics or the bureaucracy of illegal immigration, being more interested in the emotional journeys of her characters, particularly the women.

Her focus throughout the book is firmly on how women navigate the places they find themselves in. The Historian’s Daughter provides a unique perspective by adding in questions of racial identity, familial duty, the challenges of immigration and dislocation, and the lasting effects of trauma from abandonment. How the women of this book are treated by men and the wider society, and how they treat each other, creates a compelling story for both male and female readers. Avoiding exoticism, we are invited to look through the partially opaque windows of memory and see the present-day struggles of immigrants in a new light.

The Historian’s Daughter is a fine debut novel from a writer who is confident with her material and takes risks with her narrative structure. Murphy presents us with deeply moving moments that test her characters, and creates a poignant atmosphere that resolves through reconciliation into a hopeful future.

VIVIENNE GLANCE’S work as a playwright, short story writer and poet,  has been published and presented in Australia and internationally. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia where she is an Honorary Research Fellow. Her interests particularly lie at the intersection of science and art, and advocating for cultural diversity in the arts.

Derrida’s Breakfast

By David Brooks

Brandl & Schlesinger

ISBN 978-1-921556-99-9

Reviewed by JONATHAN DUNK

This slender but wide-ranging collection of essays approaches the question of the animal from a number of complimentary and dialectic angles. Conceived through different paradigms and contexts a figure of the animal emerges in philosophy and poetics functioning as a liminal mechanism, a boundary stone constructed to police the edges of the structures and systems of the human image. The historical force of this translation of animal being is such that its ethically obvious and urgent problematics are stymied by the aporetic tensions implicated in any rethinking of the animals we are and are not.

This is elucidated most concretely in the volume’s titular essay, which interrogates one of the more salient iterations of the conceptualised animal’s tendency towards paradox. Derrida’s turn towards the question of the animal in his late phase stands among the more spectacular and influential developments in recent animal philosophy. Most notably in The Animal That Therefore I am (2008), but also elsewhere, Derrida pursued his own deconstructive method to its ‘logical’ implication, and with characteristic force, that “the animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to another living creature.” Like many scholars, Brooks is sensible of the generative energy of this critique, however he situates it in the context of material ethics to examine why Derrida’s brilliant explication of this lacuna did not translate into more substantive political action, and specifically into consistent vegetarianism. The conjectured Derridean answer is that vegetarianism qua vegetarianism constitutes a foreclosure, a release of the tensions of ethical doubt, or in David Wood’s terms, an attempt to “buy good conscience on the cheap” (22). Understandably, Brooks reads this gesture as a sophistry, and interprets this hesitation more generatively through several forms of structural psychoanalysis. Derrida’s incongruous hesitation becomes an iteration of an Oedipal “deep doubling that seems both endemic and epidemic when it comes to thinking the animal” (26, emphasis Brooks’.) This doubling effects a form of circular or helical ressintement, a misrecognition of the possible connections between philosophy and the literal animal – prompting an attempt to cure system with system. In effect this means that Deconstruction is finally as incapable of addressing animal suffering as other intellections, which remain complicit with the metonymy of domination: “the mind alone, Western and otherwise, is for the moment so enmeshed in defences of its own monstrosity that no such leap is possible to it” (33). While generative, Brooks is being deliberately obtuse here, and owns the “naïve, crude and simplistic” (33) aspects of this reading on the firm ethical imperative that drives it. This move is successfully justified, but it remains the most tenuous aspect of the volume’s intellectual structure. It rests on a lamentably ubiquitous mistranslation of il n’y a pas de hors-texte and – knowingly albeit – evades the colossal significance of Derrida’s final efforts in The Beast & The Sovereign, which, certainly, speak more lucidly to the latter part of the dialectic, articulating the last gasps of the Pax Americana then transpiring in the disastrous stupidities of the euphemistic War on Terror. This measured criticism notwithstanding, this essay is a rigorous challenge to the ethical limitations of philosophy’s hegemony over praxis.

This argument is extended and clarified in terms of the particular semantics with which the word of the animal is invested in the second and third essays ‘The Loaded Cat’, and ‘Meeting Place’ which perform strong, nuanced readings of figurations of the animal in a range of literatures. The latter effects a particularly striking revision of Derrida’s own reading of D.H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake’, in which the philosopher mistakes, or prefers, an allusion to Coleridge’s sacral, innocent albatross, for Baudelaire’s self-piteous anthropomorphism. The difference inflects Lawrence’s reading of the animal palpably: Brooks’ interprets the poem as a mea culpa, an admission of the absurd arrogance implicit extending the obligations of hospitality – the master-theme of hospice being property – to the animal in its alterity. Derrida’s reading however, like the persona’s final futile gesture of anger at the snake’s trespass asserts the closure of ethics, and of philosophy, even as it ruptures it.

I found the collection’s final essay ‘At Duino’ its most provocative. Here Brooks’ concentrates the nuance and rigour of his critique specifically upon poetics, and the implications – political, aesthetic, and psychological – of the Orphic tradition. At a conceptual level the influence of this tradition, or complex, likely touches most European elegiac forms, but it’s present with particular intensities in the work of Rilke. Exemplifying his broader attempt to make philosophy stand upon the question of animal suffering, Brooks revises the Orphic myth through the eleventh poem in the second book of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus written in response to observing an expedition of dove-hunters. The poem is unsettlingly powerful, and the “handful of pale doves” (82) flung from darkness into light are figured as a readily appropriable resource for Eurydicean metaphor, a ritual of rhapsody. The Karst doves are disturbed from their limestone caves by lowered lengths of linen cloth which, as one of the poem’s shifting apostrophic subjects actuate their paradoxical connotations – cerecloth and virginal robe – into a figure of sacrifice – a being sacrificed to the chthonic deity of the darkness below,  interpretable as a register of negative capability. In return for the temporal sacrifice of the beloved in time, the poet receives the enduring stasis of the rarefied art object, a “calmly established rule of death.” This paradigm has been the subject of extensive revisions. Among many others, Blanchot in The Space of Literature argues that the movement of the orphic project:

“does not want Euridice in her daytime truth and her everyday appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed body and sealed face… not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the foreignness of what excludes all intimacy, and wants, not to make her live, but to have her living in the plenitude of death.”

Art, in this configuration, desires the beloved through the beloved’s displacement into art. Such is the power of that displacement that Rilke abjures pity, on the grounds that: “Killing too is a form of our ancient wandering affliction” (emphasis Rilke’s). This logic is observable in many of Rilke’s poems, including Requiem for a Friend written a decade before the Sonnets. Brooks’ singles out this poem because it clarifies his wider argument of a metonymy between the Orphic sacralising of death, and the ease with which we justify animal slaughter. Thus violence becomes the poem’s deep theme: culture’s ‘rules of death’ are seen to subsist upon a model of Cartesian dominion, whose first symbol is the hunt. If this reading seems too atavistic or bluntly Freudian for relevance, consider John Taggart’s discussion in Conjunctions of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson: “the poet becomes a hunter by putting on power… Power is pitiless”. It’s worth noting here that Taggart and Howe draw heavily on Heideggerian schematics, particularly the notion of the Open as a site or space of disclosure, itself drawn originally from Rilke. The song of Orpheus’ descent into the underworld becomes the aestheticized violence of the hunt by which Heideggerian poetics assume the risk of composition in language’s wilderness – read as ‘wilderness’ a waste land theatre of projected solitudes, not a living ecology. The fascist implications here are obvious, and even without them the slippage inherent to metaphor renders death itself becomes thinkable as poem, as a cultural meaning rather than a horizon of event, of which it doesn’t take much to see the twentieth century’s industrial symphony of deaths as a synonym.

To utter peace to the animal, Brooks argues, we must liberate poetics from the power of Orphic myth. A functional poetics must be cognisant of death however – not least of its own – and at this juncture Brooks doesn’t suggest what an Anti-Orphic poem might look like. John Kinsella, another Australian Derridean – for want of much better words – and who appears in Brooks’ acknowledgements, illustrates a possible direction in the third movement of his poem ‘Graphology: Pastoral Elegy – An End Written for the End When it Comes’:

3. Signing Off

It was always going to finish in an airless room,
sketchbook air freshener, deodoriser;

only enough light coming through; substantives
plebiscite, like planting crops

in carpet-folds. Furrow is all
there is, the biro’s ink run away

from ballpoint, dry bearing. Signed books
can’t go back to the publisher, unsold

remain in limbo. I sign off, wheatbelt
poet, anarchist, for whom copyright

was something others did:
Eros, artworks, the dark.

This poem faces its own aporia without the involution of a doubled other, and without veiling its own means of production in metaphysics. Its power is piteous in every sense, gesturing beyond the narcissine projections of the Orphic gaze, and the fascist onanisms of the hunt.

NOTES

1. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans Ann Smock, Nebraska UP, 1982, 172.
2. Derrida, 208, 392
3. Taggart Conjunctions no. 11 (1988, 270-273)
4. Graphology Poems 1995-2015 Volume II, 5 Islands Press, 2016, 184.

Getting By Not Fitting In

by Les Wicks

 Island

Reviewed by CAROL JENKINS
 
 
 
 
Getting By Not Fitting In is Les Wick’s thirteenth book. As someone who has arrived at poetry latish, thirteen seems a lot of books. What would one have left to say? Plenty it seems. I came to Getting By Not Fitting In, after reading Sea of Heartbreak (Unexpected Resilience)(Puncher & Wattmann, —a good place for readers new to Wick’s work start. Getting By Not Fitting In (GBNFI) possesses the same Wickensian kaleidoscopic concision, wit and dexterity as Sea of Heartbreak. There is something Ginsberg-esque about Wick’s range and anti-hero stance, his keen eye for the cultural milieu, we have the Golden Age of Sydney Pub Music instead of The Beats, but without Ginsberg’s grandiosity and neurotica.

The collection is set out in seven thematic sections; the first two look at men and woman in general, and the next two others take up the themes of their namesakes’ Narrative and Location, the following two parts build portraits of the characters Matt Kovacs and Tess Manning, and the last section, ‘What Ends’ forms a coda.

There is a gritty piquancy in Getting By Not Fitting In. Wicks has a keen eye for how society bends people into and out of shape. The title suggests a study of those living on the margins, but in Getting By the marginalised become the mass market—a phenomena we have seen play out in the USA with Trump’s triumph in selling snake oil to the disenfranchised. We find the mass market, and the masses, messy as they are, concern Wicks, in general and in particular. His poem a ‘Brief History of the Mass Market’, is pulled into focus by the mass media — movies, TV sitcoms and Facebook, as the poem skips from Annie Oakley, through Glen Miller and comes around to the FBI it is constantly nearly making an argument. On one level it is seems lucid but on another just beyond coherence, and so works to deliver a symptom as well as a synopsis, he seems to be saying, take this dose of not-quite confusion, not-quite denouement, our cultural chaos.

Amongst the tea candle economics in the first section ‘The Company of Women’ there is an unsettling sense of living in housing commission high rise on benefits, even when the poem is located in suburban garden, as in ‘Suburban Fabric’ where the characters are scrapping by, even the social-worker downwardly mobile. All this makes for a disturbingly real atmosphere. For those in government that argue we are a classless society Getting By Not Fitting In would a salutary read, showing us as all the greasy perplexities of a society that accepts or ignores those whose lives teeter into poverty.

Something similarly disarming happens when Wicks re-jigs the common slang. He has a penchant for reversals, ‘dodo as dead hill of the king’ in ‘A Staunch Life in Common Sense’ The reframing leaves the reader acutely adrift in the every day language of ‘Common Sense’ where the protagonist’s easy shortcuts act as a kind of social anesthetic— a Novocain for the relationships that a certain type of men have with society. The witty reversals of sets, ‘chicken gum and chewing wire’ gives a visceral churn, a nearly queasy undoing of language that supplies an air of surrealism to what might be a study for a character in an Australian version of BBC TV series ‘Shameless’.

Location brings us Sydney in spades, the kind you might dig a grave for your dog with. Wick is an aficionado of the multi-use homophonic sequence, ‘Oatley Pleasure Ground’ we progress through, leaden, leading, led a little further on to the laconic turn of ‘a new toilet block—/strident stainless steel like Soviet dentistry’.

‘Oatley’, is too clear-eyed to be nostalgic. While the title gives you its temporal setting, so we settle acutely into the park alongside the St Georges river. While Oatley was not one of my youthful haunts, it could easily be Woy Woy or Ettalong, with its sunburnt lawns and inadequate trees, and of course that telling toilet block. I came back to the Soviet dentistry simile a number of times when I read and reread this poem — like a wobbly tooth you can’t stop wriggling— there is a jab of painful accuracy to it, a stab of recognition, which strangely gives an odd sense of ownership to this piece of Oatley though I’ve never been there, and the poem is an invitation not to, but I might as well have been there, so closely does it evoke its period and hanging out at the beach or waterfront. As with many of these poems, we are connected, and, as he counsels on the final page of Getting By Not Fitting In, that interlocking might just be the point.

In ‘The Sydney Problem’ Wicks tweaks the old Tinsel Town tag to Trinket Town, while skewering our collective lack of determination to preserve ‘historic clutter’ — the deprecation of history to clutter, suggesting both an authorial complicity and culpability in this problem, and so deftly avoiding what is one of the most annoying postures in contemporary poetry, ‘eco-piety’, to steal Peter Kirkpatrick’s elegantly coined term, though here it the subgenre ‘preservo-piety’ would be more accurate.

In the fifth and sixth sections we find first Matt Kovacs and then Tess Manning, two people in overlapping stages of drug fueled downward spirals, each new opportunity a new chance to demonstrate their penchant for destruction. These two parts and final coda might be a crazy storyboard for a TV series, Wicks’ writing here is filmic, an evocation of place and mood. These sections work something like a mini-verse novel and there is drive to the storyline that is more top-less grunge than bodice ripper. When we get to the seventh part , ‘The Sixth Intersection’, where Matt and Tess, our characters, briefly intersect, both asking the other ‘Are you happy?’ and go their ways, leaving us to ours, and giving us something substantial to ponder.

 
 
CAROL JENKINS is an Australian writer and publisher. She lives with her family in Sydney, near Balmoral Beach. Coming to poetry from a career in chemical regulation, her first poem was published in 2004. She has two collections of poetry Fishing in the Devonian (2008) and Xn, 2013 both from Puncher & Wattman. Her most recent book and silliest book is Select Episodes from the Mr Farmhand Series. In 2007 Carol launched River Road Press, which has recorded and published 21 audio CDs of Australian poets. She has a blog Show Me The Treasure (www.showmethetreasure.blogspot.com.au

Have Been And Are

by Brook Emery

ISBN: 978 0 994 5275 3 0

GloriaSMH Press

Thinking Poetry: Brook Emery’s have been and are (Gloria SMH, 2016)

[From the launch speech given at the Friend in Hand Hotel in Glebe on Saturday 10 September, 2016.]

Welcome everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Luke Fischer. I’m a poet and philosopher, and this afternoon I have the great pleasure and honour of launching Brook Emery’s splendid new book of poems, his fifth collection have been and are, published by the new Melbourne press Gloria SMH. Jacinta Le Plastrier, whom many of you would also know as the current director of Australian Poetry and who formerly worked at John Leonard Press, is the publisher and co-founder of Gloria SMH. At the outset I’d like to congratulate Jacinta and her colleagues on the beautiful production and design of this book.

While I am quite used to swapping between my philosopher’s hat and my poet’s hat, in certain cases this is neither appropriate nor adequate. Sometimes it is necessary to wear both hats at once, one balanced on top of the other, or the two stitched together. This is eminently the case with respect to Brook Emery’s poetry.

At times, when art and poetry aim for a philosophical significance they end up reproducing in an inferior manner a theoretical content that would be better articulated in a philosophical treatise or essay. This is evident in what for the present purposes I will call ‘second-rate conceptual art’. However, this is not true of the best conceptual art nor is it true of Brook Emery’s poetry. The philosophising that takes place in Brook’s poetry, both at the level of form and content, is worked out poetically, is native to the poetry, and in significant respects gets at aspects of experience and the world in a manner that surpasses conventional modes of philosophical articulation. For instance, the question and nature of embodiment and perception are key concerns of philosophers, but there are few, if any, philosophers who are able to describe embodied experience as richly and concretely as Brook’s poetry. In addition, whereas philosophers usually present their readers with their polished arguments and conclusions, Brook’s poetry invites the reader into a philosophy in process, the mind at work in questioning and deliberating. There are, of course, important strands of twentieth and twenty-first century European thought in which philosophical writing has become more literary and poetic than it has traditionally been. In this respect Brook’s poetry can be viewed as a significant contribution within a larger cultural movement in which philosophy approaches poetry and poetry approaches philosophy.

The title of Brook’s new book, have been and are, is extracted from the last sentence of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and intimates a central theme of the book: the relation between past and present, and time in its various forms and scales, including the geological time of evolution, human history, autobiography, transience and human mortality. The full sentence from Darwin is also the title of the penultimate poem: ‘Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful / have been and are being evolved’. And Brook’s poems relatedly suggest how the continuity between past and present lies in change and transformation, and the present is evolving into the future.

have been and are is at once expansive in its explorations of diverse and significant themes and impressively cohesive, a livre composé. The titles of all the poems, except the final one, are quotations selected from a wide range of texts by poets, philosophers, scientists, novelists, historians, anthropologists, musicians, artists, and others… Each poem responds to, expands on, subtly critiques or digresses from the content suggested by its title-quotation. What is implied by much poetry, namely that each poem one writes is in conversation with other poems and poets, and with poetic traditions as one understands and evaluates them, is explicitly embedded in the book’s architectonic and inner workings. The individual poems are also filled with direct references as well as subtle allusions to other texts and thereby develop further intertextual connections.

The book’s cohesiveness is also evident in the way each poem picks up or develops a thread from the preceding poem. Every poem ends with an ellipsis, which serves to indicate its open-endedness and its anticipation of the subsequent poem as a complement and supplement to what has thus far been elaborated. The themes of the book organically emerge, develop and transform, and the poems enter into dialogue with one another as well as with the reader. As suggested by the epigraph from Virginia Woolf that opens the collection, we find ‘a voice answering a voice’, including the poet speaking and responding to himself. At both a macro and a micro scale the structure of the book reflects the title-quotation of one of the poems, which is taken from the American poet Robert Hass: ‘Echo, repetition, statement / and counterstatement, digression and return’.

While at the level of form and content Brook is interested in the possibility of cohesiveness, he is opposed to any kind of closure. Brook is just as interested, if not more interested, in the ways in which we misconstrue ourselves and the world as he is in experiences of belonging. In this poetry we find a poet-philosopher restlessly interrogating what in German Idealist philosophy was called the Absolute, a supposed ultimate unity of mind and world, spirit and nature, thought and being. For Brook any sense of ultimate unity can only be momentary or provisional and thus not ultimate: the feeling of beauty or harmony fades, what we assume to be true is subject to revision.

A significant philosophical insight underlies Brook’s emphasis on both the necessity of a relationship between self and world and a disjunction between them. The very problem of knowledge presupposes disunity as a starting point. An omniscient god would know and experience unity but would have no questions and could not make errors of judgment. There would be no problem of knowledge as everything would be ever-present and evident. As human adults we also do not have the option of retreating into a prelapsarian existence, of returning to childhood, or of enjoying the unknowing unity and bliss that Rilke ascribed to primitive animals, which possess sentience but are far from the human form of self-consciousness that divides us from any immediate sense of oneness with the world.

It is the gap between ourselves and the world, language and experience, thought and being that makes it possible for us to establish some connection between them. In one of the late poems in have been and are Brook develops this notion with the image of shadows: ‘Shadows are an intercession / between me and not me, a suspension // between “I feel” and “it must mean.” Words / shadow other words, shadow other worlds…’ There is a slight gap between what we aim to say and what we manage to say. The very first poem includes the following lines near its beginning: ‘There’s a dappled light falling / across my forearms… Mmm…there’s that word ‘dappled’, that won’t do. It’s not a bad word…’ and the poem proceeds to reflect on the spaces and connections between linguistic predication and being. It is worthwhile to mention that Brook’s interrogation of how we speak about the natural environment makes a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to crucial concerns of contemporary ecocritical theory and ecopoetics, and the specific need to find a way of bridging a postmodern awareness of the constructive role of language with a realism about the natural world that is being destroyed.

One of the many remarkable features of Brook’s poetry is the protean way in which it moves between walking, swimming or body-surfing and speculation, evocative description and philosophical reflection, and also seamlessly unites them. Take this description involving seaweed: ‘I float on my belly as still as can be /in the softly lulling swell. Sea-grasses / and rasp-edged kelp float back and forth in unison / or a quarter tone off key, caught and tweaked / by competing currents.’ We have here at one and the same time a vivid image of floating seaweed and the encapsulation of a broad philosophical idea that there is a cohesion to the world but not a perfect harmony; the musical metaphor of a choir singing in unison is qualified by the subsequent judgement that the voices are a ‘quarter tone off key’.

Brook is often a brilliant imagist and offers the reader moments in which he/she experiences a sense of participation in a re-enchanted nature. However, he does not want us to remain captivated. That would be a naïve and self-deceiving return to childhood. Here is an example from the short poem that is titled with a quotation from Piet Mondrian: ‘I, too, find the flower beautiful / in its outward appearance: but a deeper beauty / lies concealed within’:

I’m trying to remember a train trip south,
the particulars or even the generality. The glass-grey,
reflective flatness of the river, the immobility
of the tethered boats (their patched and peeling hulls),
a passage through split rock (weather-dulled, oxide blotched).
And trees, eucalypts stretching back and up the hillside,
textured, darting light shifting slantwise into shadow,
picking out this or that, catching at the eye.
I am inventing this, the verbal surface of things…

The poem opens by drawing us into its descriptions of scenery from a remembered train trip, but then as though telling the reader not to get too absorbed, not to fall asleep, we encounter the self-reflexive line: ‘I am inventing this, the verbal surface of things…’ Children, when they watch a puppet show, almost take the puppets for animate creatures and are oblivious of the human hands, rods, and strings operating behind the scenes. In Brook’s poem it’s as though the show were interrupted mid-scene and the instruments exposed to view, but in this case the instrument is language.

It is arguable that the advent of free verse as a dominant approach to writing poetry in the early twentieth century reflects a larger cultural process of fragmentation and individuation, of dissonance between the individual and the collective. Brook himself places this development within a broad historical context when he writes: ‘The old verities – Christianity, Communism, rhyme and metre – are dimmed…’ Nevertheless, even though free verse cannot adopt a pregiven form, this does not mean that it is formless or arbitrary, that it lacks aesthetic cohesion. T. S. Eliot famously criticised, as did Denise Levertov later in the twentieth century, the adjective ‘free’ in ‘free verse’ because of its implication of arbitrariness. While I don’t share this objection because there are other relevant ways of construing the word ‘free’, the significant point is that any successful poem must convince us that there is an integrity or even necessity in the way it is constructed.

Brook’s poems are assiduously and masterfully crafted free verse compositions, which reflect and embody the dynamism of his poetic philosophy. They at once accentuate the temporality of the unfolding poem and the temporality of thought in progress. Like the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, as well as Hegel and Heidegger, Brook has a deep interest in contradiction and apparent contradictions. He also loves paradoxes, oxymorons, chiasmi, and aporias. Like a poetic equivalent of Hegel’s progression of thought through the generation of contradictions in The Phenomenology of Spirit, there is a dialectical momentum to Brook’s poems. The very first poem in the collection begins with: ‘It’s not about me…and of course / it is.’ Not much later we find the statement: ‘This book is all about / how lucky I am to be walking under these trees…’ The reader can surmise that, of course, it is not really all about this, but only partly about this. The poems propel themselves forward through judgments that are shown to be provisional, through negations, qualifications, contrasting propositions, and revisions. The poem with a title drawn from Wallace Stevens, ‘The poem must / resist the intelligence almost successfully…’ begins as follows: ‘I’m dawdling. Killing time. Or time / is killing me…’. These lines employ a device that in classical rhetoric was distinguished as an antimetabole. The terms of the proposition ‘I’m…killing time’ are reversed in the statement ‘time is killing me’ to epigrammatic effect. Characteristically Brook has also placed an ‘or’ before ‘time is killing me’, highlighting the provisionality of this second judgment.

If Brook were a painter, in an analogous manner to Cézanne’s late watercolours he would leave many white spaces in his paintings, so as to allow the viewer to imaginatively decide on how they might be filled in. Or he would paint his canvas in layers while ensuring that the later layers allow the earlier layers of paint to peer through. He certainly would not aim for the realism of the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis whose painted grapes were supposedly so realistic that birds flew down and pecked at them. Rather, he would leave clear evidence of the brushstrokes on the canvas.

Brook himself refers to a number of painters in the collection (Mondrian, Hokusai and others) and one of the passages, which comes as close as Brook gets to encapsulating his philosophy, involves a description of a painter. Those of you who are familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology will recognise the deep affinity to his philosophy in the following lines, which present the invisible as the other side of the visible rather than as other-worldly or as merely subjective:

From this angle or that perspective, day after day,

in painting after painting, an artist friend tries to capture light,
not capture, not even render, tries to apprehend light’s temptations
on cloud and sea. It’s a search for the invisible in what is visible,

something that depends on sense but is beyond the senses,
what cannot be expressed without distortion: the reflective
and absorbent qualities of water, the way it is sometimes grey,

sometimes blue or green, sometimes so reflective it is invisible
and simultaneously opaque: the texture of this world in time and place.
It strikes me this is ground on which to stand…

In spite of the emphasis on provisionality in Brook’s poetry there are moments when the perceiver and the perceived, mind and world seem to cohere, moments of beauty and harmony, even if the ‘concord’ is ‘teetering on the edge of discord’. While some of my characterisations of Brook’s poetry might make him seem like a predominantly rational poet, this is not my intention. The book contains many deeply felt passages and poems, and the poem titled with a quotation from C. K. Williams, ‘Everything waste / everything would be or was’, is among the most moving and poignant poems I can remember reading anywhere. After evocative and brilliant descriptions of a seashore and basin at dusk, it also includes this line on almost-completeness: ‘What if we could hold all this like the sail almost holds the breeze…?’

Brook’s poetry explores and aims to do justice to the complexities of existence. It neither advocates a simple lyricism nor does it oppose feeling and thought as, unfortunately, occasional reviews of Australian poetry still sometimes do. Subtle irony, self-scrutiny, humour and wit are also sprinkled through the collection. I delight in the humour of these lines from earlier in the aforementioned poem: ‘At the water’s edge livid green strands tangle / and flop like snakes writhing in a B-grade / horror movie.’

While it has only been possible for me to touch on a few of the salient features and main themes of this wonderful and expansive book, I would like to at least mention one other poem. In a sequence of historico-political poems there is a long poem with a title-quotation from Joseph Conrad, ‘The brown current / ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness’. This complex and formally innovative poem intertwines an unfolding description of the natural environment of the eastern beaches of Sydney and its brutal history of colonisation with factual synopses and examples of the worst atrocities in human history from ancient times to the present day. Its masterful handling of this difficult material reminds the reader that Brook was a history teacher for twenty years.

I wholeheartedly encourage you to buy, read, re-read, and think about Brook Emery’s new collection have been and are. I am delighted to declare the book launched.

Luke Fischer is a Sydney-based poet and scholar. His books include the poetry collection Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013), the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems (Bloomsbury, 2015), and the forthcoming poetry collection A Personal History of Vision (UWAP, 2017). For more information see: www.lukefischerauthor.com