The End of the World

Maria Takolander

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922146519

Reviewed by JACINTA LE PLASTRIER
 
 

In native American and other cultural traditions, the raven has a powerful symbology. It is considered a messenger who carries information between worlds, is of the earth but also capable of bridging to other realms. It can also represent the souls of the murdered. In this, it is an apt choice as the cover illustration of Maria Takolander’s second full poetry collection, The End of the World.

There is no direct reference to a raven in any of the book’s 41 poems but certainly it could be argued, as a lens for its reading, that many of them either directly or implicitly address the presence of the otherworldly, the ethereal and the spectral. There are also veils between the earthly world and our perception of it, and between a self’s experience and its familial and historic connections and heritages.

As Takolander writes in the first poem of the book, ‘Unborn’, which addresses pregnancy, ‘Still emerging from yourself, the bud of your nose alone/ makes the universe less impossible. You do not know/ that we are here, but this is how we watch you: on a/ black-and-white plasma screen suspended on a wall/ – the happy technician flicking us between dimensions/ like Dr Who – and as if from an infinite distance.’

This is a second collection and while the poet carries through themes begun in her first book, Ghostly Subjects (SALT, 2009), particularly in regard to poems about the intimate self and her family’s history in the first two parts of The End of the World, it also sets out on what feels like a new orientation – especially in the book’s final third section. These poems spring beyond the field of own experience.

In his recent non-fiction book, A History of Silence: A Family Memoir (Text Publishing, 2013), NZ author Lloyd Jones contends, ‘a writer’s works have a way of tracking back to his wellsprings.’ In the context of his book, this meant an examination of his lineage’s ‘ancestry of silence’, and ‘the sediment within him’. These are useful ideas to apply to the work in The End of the World where Takolander exhumes her own family’s spectres.

These ghosts are not only familial. They are also metaphysical, those of the dark imagination which has inhabited this poet’s work from her earliest poems, published in the 2005 chapbook, Narcissism (Whitmore Poetry Press).

Of Finnish origin, Takolander’s family members were killed in Stalinist purges. Some were exiled or they experienced other horrors of war. The traumatic consequences of these experiences, for themselves and descendants, are insidious and potent.  It is a brave poetry which addresses them.

In one of the finest poems in Ghostly Subjects, ‘Finland: Fables’, Takolander assized this family history in prose-poetry wording, each stanza a long-lined sentence:

In a kitchen there was a man who drank the worlds contained in bottles, but who could never find the strangers he had killed in the
war, whose blood had melted with the snow.

It is subject matter reprised yet differently confronted in a number of poems in Part 2 of the The End of the World, including ‘Mushrooms’ and ‘The Old World’. These are moving poems. In them Takolander explores not only for herself, as poet and a self, but also in poems such as ‘The Old World’ gives voice to the those gone before us, whose aching for what has been lost might (perhaps inevitably will) re-sprout in those who follow. The poem closes, ‘See how the sun burns all night, like a promise/ of the end of the world.’ This is one reference to the book’s title.

Later in Part 2 is the poem actually titled ‘The End of the World’. The subject matter is the history of and a visit to Punta Arena, Chile. Written in five-lined stanzas, it closes in language of an edged, gothic beauty:

…       
            their skullbones and cross-bones now encrypted
in the cemetery across the way, where angels dive among
            cypresses manicured into a wonderland silence
that takes the edge off death and the sight
            of all those abominable dogs, ranging everywhere.

This poem is an example of what has marked Takolander’s poetry since its beginnings. There is a discipline of form though she is writing in free verse which allows it to have the echo of formal metrics within it.  This tendency is always an opportunity for a poet to clarify and amplify their poetic thinking – the movement of mind in the work. There has also prevailed in her poetry – though it might be a strange term to use – a discipline in the language she chooses as her oeuvre’s ‘field’. It is an educated vocabulary but with a sense of the pared, of having been boned – also of the elemental or even glacial. I think of an earlier poem like ‘Storm’:

…

It may be true we don’t deserve this,

Our earthly things reduced
To shadows we dream

Things from: the firs, the stooks,
The fence posts¾none belong.

They don’t belong.
Yet we’ve always waked and slept

When the sky says we should,
Like birds and monkeys,

Abandoning the world
Evening after evening…

The majority of poems in The End of the World combine this clarified language with a formal control – and their poetic ideas are robust – but there are a number which don’t, and which make for uneasy reading. In these, certain lines or phrases are weak but the main concern is that the poetic conception has not been deepened – pressurized – sufficiently in the process of their creation. One example is in a poem about her forebears, ‘Missing in Action’. The material is unusual and powerful – her great-grandfather, ‘lost to Stalinist purges’, an eldest uncle, ‘dysentery got him as an infant in Karelia’, a grandfather of which she writes ‘(Hung over, he would beat the horses, their flanks shivering.’). And the formal structure is clear. There are lines in the poem which spark, but a major part of the poem’s language and its thinking through is not brought up to the task of interrogating – and so unearthing meaning – of such a tragic territory. (This is most definitely not the case with the earlier ‘Finland: Fables’, which traversed similar subjects.)

It is uncomfortable to criticize a poem whose material is profound, and of obvious importance to the poet. Having said that, in stark contrast is perhaps the finest poem in the new book, ‘Stalin Confesses’. Adopting Stalin as subject, the narrating, poetic voice is both authoritative and, in the most positive sense, destabilized and destabilizing. One wonders, at different points through the poem, ‘who is speaking now?’ This shifting of angles is beautifully controlled. The poem begins: ‘At my side I have concealed a child/ whose body was twice trodden by horses/ hauling carriages through our boggy village,/ the hooves like machines./ The child’s father, sludge-drunk and stone-fisted, beat him,/ as did his mother, full of God./ The seminary silenced his Georgian tongue,/ and the Russian army, even in war’s thick, rejected him./ The child’s face is smudged as the moon’s.’ Here is poetry whose language is muscled, precise yet allusive. It startles, and its promise drives through the whole work. Later is this: ‘He once entrusted to me a chronic dream/ in which his mother, father, unborn brothers,/ soiled villagers in their carts,/ the priest in his finery, and even God Himself/ will not, no matter the torment he inflicts on them,/ look upon his scorched soul/ and confess they were responsible.’

In Part 3 of The End of the World, Takolander takes up a different poetic drum. This poetry is sometimes fantastical – the final four prose poems are inhabited by Aesopic animals and the twists of fable. The part opens with poems, one section in catalogue form, inspired after 19^th-century ‘scientific’ treatises on criminology.

Here, in a later poem, are the opening lines of ‘Witch’:

Her Hair was the Colour of Dirt, her Fingernails
of Stone, but she did not Lack Shelter or Know Hunger.
She Knew how the Body forces the Foetus to leave
its Mucous Womb and Breathe Air, and she could effect
Certain Remedies for Those Unwanted, rendering
The Creatures, While Still Hidden, Powerless. Small
Corpses were not Such a Problem.  …

This final part to the book is adventurous and its subject matter and wielding, strange and beguiling.

JACINTA LE PLASTRIER is a Melbourne-based poet, writer, editor and publisher. Her poetry collection is forthcoming with John Leonard Press. To read more,  Jacinta  Le Plastrier

The Petrov Poems

by Lesley Lebkowicz

Pitt Street Poetry, 2013

ISBN 9781922080141

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

Lesley Lebkowicz’s The Petrov Poems is a verse novel that keeps its offerings close to its chest: at eighty pages the volume is slim and unassuming, its cover inconspicuous. While this reserve accords with its theme of espionage, nevertheless its subject — the defection of the Petrovs, an “escapade which rocked the sleepy town of Canberra in April 1954” (Jacket blurb) — ensures there is more to this verse novel than its appearance suggests.

The Petrov Poems required “massive amounts of research,” Lebkowicz acknowledges (Interview). Not only did she spend many hours accessing documents, including ASIO files, in the National Archives and the National Library, she spoke with Canberra people about their memories, and “walked around the Embassy, the Petrovs’ house and the Hotel Kingston”, until, she adds, “the details infiltrated the poems” (Interview).

The material was abundant, Lebkowicz recalls: “the Petrovs’ lives were choc-a-bloc with material made for a novel” (Interview). Lebkowicz has been mindful to ensure the content is accessible rather than overwhelming; the verse novel comprises four sections of interlinked poems in chronological order, and much of the narrative backstory and plot is in place by the end of Part I. The historical details are re-presented in a credible story world.

Initially Lebkowicz intended to write the story from the point of view of Evdokia Petrova and the other women involved (Madame Ollier, a diplomat; the air hostess, Joyce Bull). In order to do this, she had to know about Vladimir Petrov as well, and before long, she acknowledges, “I realised he was a gift” (Interview), though not exactly the stereotypical spy — “bumbling” is the term Lebkowicz assigns him. Nevertheless Lebkowicz wanted to convey Vladimir Petrov and Evdokia Petrova “as people, not as spies” whose “dilemmas were human and often heart-rending” (Interview). Her approach to speech and thought representation was “to take the reader in as close as possible to the Petrovs” (Interview). Lebkowicz states she chose “the intimate forms of their names (Volodya and Dusya) and gave a lot of their interior lives, especially Dusya’s”, but resisted first-person mode, realising that omniscient third-person narration in past tense would allow the overview she required (Interview).

How Lebkowicz embodies the Soviet diplomat-spy is often visceral, evoking a corpulent Volodya: “his fingers white slugs on the saucer”; “softness has long fled / his mind” (4). In ‘Blood II’, however, his body and mind dissemble along with future plans:

Each drink had laid down errant cells
in the dark of his arteries. They came loose and sidled
along networks that threaded his body.
His blood struggled.
His heart laboured.
A clot jammed the flow in his brain
and then nothing worked. Now words richochet
and can’t find the path to his tongue. (79)

The poem ‘Disintegration’ iterates the unstoppable advance of mortality: Volodya, post stroke, has lost his memory. When Dusya visits him in the nursing home, he does not recognise her: “No more strangers he yells. I want my wife” (80). It is poignant but moreover ironic treatment that Lebkowicz aims for in The Petrov Poems, and achieves. There is paradox, too, in this narrative of political asylum, in contrasting the metaphors of life networks as “a kind of containment” (78), and of ‘the body as a prison’ (79) with ‘the body needing shelter’.

If there’s a predominant poetic form in The Petrov Poems, Lebkowicz believes “it is probably the sonnet — but not the formal sonnet of earlier centuries. No end-stopped rhyme, though generally fourteen lines and a volta of sorts” (Interview). What may vex readers expecting a more prominent poetic template is this verse novel’s stylistic preference for description over trope. That is not to say that personification, simile, metaphor, are not present. Rather, poetic elements are muted, and the poetic narrative is naturalised and accessible:  “Water flirts with the boats.” (3); “…the letters she types / skitter over her desk like dry chaff.” (78)

Why many poems are expository, more focused on describing narrative space and the narrative events taking place, than on elaboration, is in part, attributable to the need for narrative momentum. Fewer poetic embellishments, in Lebkowicz’s design, “keep the pace fairly fast”  (Interview). The emphasis on description is also instrumental for spatial and temporal presentation. Description is a discourse strategy for the disclosure of spatial information (Ryan 2014), a means to convey “the physically existing environment in which characters live and move” (Buchholz and Jahn 2005).

The emphasis on description, therefore, is a concession to narrative ends; effective for reconstructing the temporal sequence of the events of the Petrov’s defection. This stylistic foregrounding of space and time is evident in the titles or subtitles of poems, for example, ‘Inside the Embassy I’; ‘Volodya crashes on the way to meet Mme Ollier in Cooma. 25 December 1953’; ‘Petrov and Richards meet in a car behind the Kingston Hotel. 26 March 1954.’; ‘Bialoguski’s flat, Point Piper, 19 March 1954’ and ‘Flight from Mascot to Darwin, 19 April 1954’.

Yet the emphasis on description extends the textual spatiality of The Petrov Poems beyond its setting, that of mid-twentieth-century Canberra, Australia, and also beyond its spatial frames — those separate locations where events transpire: the ship Orcades; the Russian Club; the ASIO office; the Embassy; Government House; Bialoguski’s flat; in a car behind Kingston Hotel; the airport; the safe house and the nursing home — to encompass story space, “the space relevant to the plot, as mapped by the actions and thoughts of the characters (which) consists of all the spatial frames plus all the locations mentioned by the text that are not the scene of actually occurring events” (Ryan 8).

The story space can then also incorporate Russia, Stockholm and the valley about which Dusya Petrova dreamed, “where almost-twin girls/took milk from a cow” (79); the labour camp where her husband was taken and died; and the “big room in Moscow” (17) where she and first husband, Román, lived together “with Román’s books on the shelves above the bed” (17). Story space in The Petrov Poems also maps the places about which Volodya Petrov thinks: Sinkiang, the autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, and one of the province’s largest cities; Yarkand, the ancient city on the Silk Road, once a major transport hub and centre of moneylending and trade;  the village of Volodya’s family house; the USSR; the farm he was raised on; Moscow; the countries of Canada and Japan from which other agents defect; and the farm he imagines himself living on, sometime in the future.

The narrative unfolds without a single specific reference to the Cold War, nevertheless it  becomes possible to convey Cold War divisions. Readers envision the frontier “to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region” imagined by the 1954 formulation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation — formed between the United States, France, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines — as they bring further spatial information — narrative (or story) world space — to the text on “the basis of cultural knowledge and real world experience” (Ryan 2014).

Lebkowicz, an accomplished poet, wrote The Petrov Poems without “a conscious model” although she had read other verse novels — by Dorothy Porter, Judy Johnson, Geoff Page and Vikram Seth. The act of writing The Petrov Poems was to affirm Lebkowicz’s enthusiasm for the verse novel: “It’s a powerful form —flexible and compelling” she asserts (Interview). The publication of The Petrov Poems by one of Australia’s small poetry presses, Pitt Street Poetry, consolidates Lebkowicz’s previous credits, a book of poetry and a short story collection.

Readers who regularly engage with the verse novel form, come to know its infinite variety.

The Petrov Poems is one of a growing number of verse novels internationally that narrativise historical material. The Petrov Poems does so without ostentation, yet its approach to its subject, at once compassionate and penetrating, arises from careful research, and ensures a worthy contribution.

WORKS CITED

Buchholz, Sabine and Manfred Jahn.“Space.” In: Herman. D et al. (eds): Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 2008 [2005]: 551–54.
Lebkowicz, Lesley. Interview by Linda Weste, 6 July 2014.
—. The Petrov Poems. Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2013.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Space”. In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University.  [view date:1 July 2014]
 “Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 1954”, Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, United States Department of State.  [view date:1 July 2014]

 
LINDA WESTE is a poet, editor and teacher of creative writing who researches poetic and narrative interplay.

Circle Work

by Cameron Lowe

Puncher and Wattmann

ISBN: 9781922186232

Reviewed by VANESSA PAGE

Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work is a graceful collection of poems, with no trace of the masculine, high octane themes that you might expect from a book bearing this title. Instead, the reader is drawn into Lowe’s strange and beautiful landscapes – where there are certainly circular themes at play – the simple cycles of things, seasons, relationships and days.

The circle symbolises a wholeness – a completeness, but also the idea of movement and motion, the elapsing of time. From this perspective, the idea of ‘circle work’ as a broad umbrella to hold over this collection of poems, seems apt.

The sense of movement is one of the most striking features about this collection. In particular, the visual movement that Lowe creates through the arrangement of the poems on each page. The words dance, skip and sometimes yawn and stretch across the pages, leading the reader subtly and deeply into the delicate scenes that Lowe has created.

The arrangement of the poems in Circle Work also appear to follow a loose seasonal pattern. In the opening piece, ‘In Memory of Flowers’, this scene is set, providing signposts to the season, setting up that sense of motion, but also a sense of waiting for the season to change, for the flowers to bloom.

And so, as winter/rain falls steadily/upon bluestone,
again the limits of/patience strain/to make flowers
(9)

Precise and seemingly ‘hand-chiselled’ observations and fragments linger constantly on the edge of the ‘domestic world’, melding effortlessly with the ‘natural world’:

a sky so blue
it dissolves
the noise of cars
(48)

This interplay of the earthly and the other-worldly through razor-sharp observations is at its most mesmerising in the piece ‘The skin of it’ which is told in six parts.

These observations, on the surface appear quite simple, but the poems are deceptively hypnotic, and have a way of working under your skin, with a gentleness, and sense of calm that makes the reading of them a pleasure.

The lapping of light over light – and the clock ticking in the kitchen, rhythmic as the dripping tap.
(13)

From this distilled beauty, Lowe shifts effortlessly into a contrasting space in simple vignettes that provide pockets of relief. I liked ‘At the Geelong Art Gallery – a great Australian poet discovers a potato cake in his pocket’ – a funny, simple poem that reminded me of one of major reasons I love the art form of poetry – the way so much can be said with such few words – this brevity, combined with Lowe’s seductive knack for opening windows onto crystal-clear and carefully painted scenes is on display here. A fantastic and tongue in cheek poke at ‘poet-types’’.

The book’s moments of beauty are frequent and lead the reader deeper into the collection. I found myself wanting more of them.

There are numerous references to sparrows and birches, flowers, the sky and the behaviour or light as it slips between the seasons, creating a strong, botanic thread throughout the collection.

In ‘The’ Lowe’s mastery of observation is at its beautiful best, as he once more leads the reader in the natural world through his keenly focussed viewfinder.

binding sunlight to bird/to blue sky/to the honey-cream colour/of dry grass – / a tuft of white wool/caught on a barb (31)

There is some repetition in references to onions frying, white pickets, powerlines and aerials even the presence of sparrows. While these references are evidence of the domestic mooring for many of Lowe’s poems their repetition is not enough to distract from the collection. It is, however, noticeable enough to provide little speed bumps that I found made me slow down while I thought back to the poems where I’d heard them before.

Still, it seems Lowe’s poems seem based on familiar aspects, scenes and surroundings and it is this consistency in the setting for many of these poems that helps to bind the collection together.

There is something very domestic about this collection – you could almost imagine the poet writing these poems while looking out upon the same familiar scene, perhaps in his own home, perhaps in another frequented place.

This domesticity is at play in ‘Practising everyday life’ where simple meal preparations, the narrator’s scene from the balcony hooks the reader into a much deeper internal conversation about his own relationship explained in the context of this ‘keeping on’ this cycle of things – both natural and domestic.

It’s there/in the no need to really think ease of the balcony
Or the clean, taut/ lines of aerials/at dusk
(68)

Wherever the setting, it is clear that Cameron Lowe knows how to document beauty and weave these moments into delicately powerful poems with transportational qualities.

I found the book to be accessible –this is simple language, done well. The type of writing offers a bridge to readers, whether they are regular readers of poetry or not. This is the type of poetry I like to read – where I can experience an emotion, open an imagined window onto a scene so clear and so precise that I could be standing in it myself.

Night sweeping by, the moon hidden, not a star to see
and you twisted suddenly in your sleep
as if something hurt or scared you
(67)

As all great art has that point of connection, it is here in the lines of Circle Work – in the relationships, the emotional responses, the observations and the sense that as a reader you are forgetting yourself.

This is a gift and Circle Work succeeds on this level. And while the repetition of scene, some references and subject matter is present, there are also cleverly placed moments of humour and relief to provide balance. Certainly the strongest poems in this collection draw the reader in, walking them along that tightrope between the natural and domestic worlds and offering  up countless opportunities for connection.

Find it, noting its shape that is something like a heart but more comely, something like a thought but more defined, something nurtured at the margins of the leaf itself.
(22)

VANESSA PAGE is a Brisbane poet who has published two collections of poetry: Feeding Paper Tigers (ALS Press, 2012) and Confessional Box (Walleah Press, 2013). Confessional Box won the 2013 FAW Anne Elder Award. She has previously been shortlisted in the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the ACU Poetry Prize, and blogs at vanessapage.wordpress.com.

Maps, Cargo

by Bella Li

Vagabond Press, 2013
 
 
 
 
The Tulip Beds

by A. J. Carruthers

Vagabond Press, 2013

Reviewed by TAMRYN BENNETT

As Rare Object #94 and #92 respectively, Bella Li’s Maps, Cargo and A. J Carruthers’ The Tulip Beds are set to become even more recherché as Vagabond rounds-out their long-running series at #100. Vagabond’s Rare Objects are revered, not only as one of the finest chapbook series of recent years, but for the Press’ cultivation of so many debut collections. This tradition of careful curation and experimentation continues to shape the transitory spaces of both Maps, Cargo and The Tulip Beds.

Li is a cartographer of a different kind. Her map-making is as aesthetic as it is topographic, plotting fragmented histories, horizons and the spectral lands of memory and dream. Coordinates ‘E 44 10 N 33 15’ mark the first poem and the prophet Mohammed’s journey ‘In the year of the Hegira 622, driven from he city and exiled’ (p.1). Rather than patch together gapped historio-graphic accounts Li allows the poem to remain open to multiple imaginings, an approach that resonates with Lyn Hejinian’s overthrowing of fixed meaning in her paper ‘The Rejection of Closure’ (1985). The openness, participation and uncertainty invited by Li’s deliberate spaces is emphasised in the line ‘Concerning the origins of the name “ ” (in the palace, there was a small )’ (p.1).

These gapped expeditions continue to traverse continents, drifting through centuries of knotted cargo and ‘drowned’ coastlines (p.8). Above each of the travellers a constant damp of clouds hovers, and after the precise ‘Accounting of knives, guns and hats’ (p.3) Li steers towards more subliminal waters with the poems ‘Two children are threatened by a , 1924 (Ernst)’, ‘Drowning dream’ and ‘Window’.

‘Drowning dream’, my favourite mirage and perhaps the most melancholy offering of the collection, adapts its first line from Anne Sexton’s ‘Imitations of drowning’ (1981):

That August I began to dream of drowning. It was the season
of water—strange storms troubled the air. All day I crept
along the edges of rooms, avoiding the precious windows—
half ajar, propped open with old newspapers where the
green sky pooled (p.11).

Here, the clouds that loom like lodestars above the travellers give way to storms and rising seas that swallow gardens and swell timbers of a seemingly abandoned house. The slow wreckage of exteriors is mirrored in the basement of the house ‘where a man—quiet and still as a mouse—floated face down in the dark’ (p.11). There are no numbers to navigate, no landmarks, only the hum of the house above and hope of a different nightmare. The final poem, ‘Window’, draws back curtains like ghost nets inside a blue room of sleep.

Something coming
through the window and you
can feel the hairs on your
neck do their little dance
and when you exit as
you must now that
you have entered
it is though
the win
do
w. (p.12)

Like the chipped histories stacked around it, the house and window offers nothing whole. Instead the poem calls us into the unmapped, where flotsam and forgotten songs wait to be rediscovered.

Cosmic hollows and harmonies also shape Carruthers’ The Tulip Beds – a toneme suite, a collection as intricate and interconnected as the sources that sparked its creation. In the opening TONE/ NOTE Carruthers explains the alchemy involved in assembling this work:

‘Multiple procedures converged in the making of this piece. Initially, I was struck by a photo image of the extinct filter-feeder Siphusauctum gregarum, which appeared to show a three-line “stave”, in a 2012 article by Lorna J. O’Brien and Jean-Bernard Caron. I then used this article, as well as English translation of Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi (1619), and Aristoxenus’ Elementra Harmonica, as source-texts. Many of the images were generated thanks to the extraordinary website www.seeingwithsound.com’ (p.1).

This omnium of sources problematises classification of The Tulip Beds in a similar vein as the fossilised tulip-shaped creatures that remained incertae sedis for such a long time . The incongruent categorisation of these soft-bodied creatures echoes in the first ‘bars’ of the suite as Carruthers recounts the mystery of flower-like filter feeder:

In which a fossilized
species deserving of
the name Problematica
is poeticized by a
scientist, who found in
the three lines of a
stave an image worthy
of the poetry of nature (p. 1)

With the puzzle of Siphusauctum gregarum finally solved by science, the suite curves into the mysteries of planetary motion. Carruthers splices lines from Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi with Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and images generated by sound augmentations. The curve towards such chords also mirrored in the pixelated image squares that sit beneath each stanza. The tulip-like calyx that populate the first 14 stanzas morph into grainy planets and human hands as the suite scales tunings of Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and the Earth.

tonoi

(The earth sings MI,
FA, MI so that you may
infer even from the
syllables that in this
our domicile MIsery
and FAmine obtain.)
SOMEHOW EXPRESS-
ED IN THE EXTREME* (p.12)

While this citational poetics of source matter, semitones and symbols riffs in original and unexpected ways, the collection succeeds most, for me, when Carruthers gives space to his own tones within this celestial cacophony. Perhaps the next instalment of Tonemes, a chapbook forthcoming from SUS Press, will score more of Carruthers’ original compositions.

NOTES

Hejinian, Lyn. ‘The Rejection of Closure’ (1985), in The Language of Inquiry, Berkley: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 40-58.

O’Brien, Lorna J.; Caron, Jean-Bernard. ‘A New Stalked Filter-Feeder from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale, British Columbia, Canada’. PLoS ONE, 1, 2012.
 

TAMRYN BENNETT is a poet and artist. Since 2004 she has created artist’s books and comics in collaboration, exhibiting works in Sydney, Melbourne, Switzerland and Mexico. Her poetry and essays have been published in The Drunken Boat, Cordite, Nth Degree, English in Australia and ImageText. She has a PhD in Literature from UNSW and is currently Education Manager for The Red Room Company.
 

Naming the Ruins

by Dinah Romah

Vagabond

Reviewed and launched by MERLINDA BOBIS

 
 
What do you do with loss? Or with the violated body? Or the devastated dream? What do you with ruins?

You name them. You story them. You incant them into ‘oracles of love.’

This is what Naming the Ruins and its poet Dinah Roma have done: ‘Make oracles of love.’ Even if the poet herself says, ‘No more’, in the opening poem Coda—

The first call
after the pain exhausts—
the voice valiant
in distance. No more
the need to pull in,
to muse on what
could have been.
Or make an oracle
out of love.
(9)

So, the poet protests: ‘No more’ to ‘make an oracle out of love.’ Even as each poem in this book is, in fact, an ‘oracle of love.’

Of course, there is a marked distinction here: To make an oracle out of love is to make love a portent or a promise, a harbinger of something else. But to make an oracle of love is about the loving in the making, as when a poem is loved into being, so

The words are uttered,
each syllable freed
for what it is.
(9)

So the loss, the violation and devastation, the ruins fall away, and what remains is

The sound of heartbeat,
crisp on the verge
of song
not of misery,
nor of joy,
(9)

But of desire, as desire is always on the verge of, which is the very locus of this book—this body re-instating desire that was once violated, devastated, lost.

But how paradoxical that this song which the poet verges on is, in fact

… the silence
of great cathedrals
as the last note
falls
in praise.
(9)

It could be the silence of relief, rest, or illumination after loss and lament, or even after reading a poem. It could be all of these silences, but more compellingly, it is also the silence of praise. That hush of awe.

I hear it in this collection—and strangely, or perhaps aptly, in the white space after a solitary word falls.

I, too, hear Rainer Maria Rilke coming into this white space, as if coming into the light in his Sonnets to Orpheus—

Only in the Realm of Praising should Lament
walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain,
watching over the stream of our complaint
that it be clear upon the very stone

that bears the arch of triumph and the altar.
—(The Sonnets to Orpheus, 237)

So I am led to ask: What right do we have to lament if we cannot praise?

Lament there is in Dinah’s poetry—and always, always praise. And even in the lamentation—whether it is for love betrayed, or for lives wrecked by superstorm Haiyan, or for the loss of a culture in Angkor Wat, or for a mother being laid to rest—lament becomes praise, when it becomes a poem.

In ‘Consuming Sorrow’, the poet raises both query and command—

Why waste the rites
of lament when they can be
put on show? Inside the pantry,
sorted out in cans, labeled
with fancy fonts. Each name,
a use. Or beside a vase of blooms,
magnificent in minutiae,
an exotic figure hand-picked
from a bazaar of all lost
and transported. Or let it
hang from your neck, the sheen
of gems guarding an order
of value, their shores and hills
polished after the silhouette of bone.
Or let a ring grasp the full
diameter of eternity in vows
engraved in indelible death.
(16)

There is a self-mocking stance towards the making precious of grief and its performance—something to be consumed—even as the poet strategically makes sorrow flesh, real, touchable—

Its nature is solid. Its measure
is mass and volume. So let it stand
among your prized possessions.
Let it say: here, touch me,
don’t be afraid. …
(16)

Hear the doubleness of the invitation: ‘Touch me’ and touch the grief (it’s out there, on display), and this body-in-grief (it’s me before you, reader). Make me solid too.

don’t be afraid

A call to courage like a call to arms, in a bid for kinship: from solid to solidarity.  So with her reader-witness, the poet is brave. To lament, to wail, to speak of ruins, to make them seen and heard as incantation—as Philippine shamans would. They who know how praise and transcendence are organic to lament; they who live by oracle-making.

So as we “witness” each poem in this book, we too are co-opted into this oracle-making.

… We [become] bodies
circling into radiance unimpeded
into the trail of sudden tremor.
(34)

It is this sudden tremor of consciousness after each poem that astounds in this collection. That returns us to the silence of great cathedrals.

So witness the lived bodies in this book—utter them, incant them.

Yes, Roma is a Philippine poet. She writes about her specific culture, its world and worldview—that she expands beyond this specificity, beyond the white spaces around her spare lines, beyond the page, the book, and into the air that we breathe.

Roma writes from the voices of her own home. And yet these voices can come alive in our own mouths: other breaths suddenly in our breath. Because—

I am the story told many times over.
I am someone in someone else’s
body of someone else.
(12)

Lest we forget: all of us are that ‘body of someone else.’ But only if we are willing and unafraid to acknowledge it.

NOTES
The Sonnets to Orpheus (I, 8),’The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans & Ed Stephen Mitchell. (1989). NY: Vintage, 1989, p237.
 
 
MERLINDA BOBIS is an award-winning Filipino-Australian writer. She teaches at the University of Wollongong
 

Sea of Heartbeak (Unexpected Resilience)

by Les Wicks

Puncher & Wattman Poetry

ISBN: 9781922186348

Reviewed by JOHN UPTON

 
Before you open Les Wick’s latest collection he’s already playing with your eye and your mind: the title is a joke and an admonition: it’s “Sea of Heartbeak”, not “Heartbreak”. A sentimental cliché becomes a warning – take nothing for granted.

Inside is much serious intent and more jokes, but the most immediate feature is Wick’s striking poetic technique, developed over 35 years of publication. Consider this:

Feed the stairs
roll the corridors like
your last smoke at this edge of lamps. Someone chose
this wacky orange for the waiting room.

An “array” of tests (military language).
Cancer is coming. Cancer has gone.
Moles bloom on atom geography.
Amidst a darkling fever
we delve.

Double barrage, his cinched levis.
Our bones aren’t a cage.
Armour, defence,
these constructs our words have mortared-in around
the pledge of mortality.

No-one would vote for this
but it’s ours.

(‘Calibrated’ 29)

A visit to a doctor’s busy waiting room is deconstructed and re-cut, slightly askew, so that we remain aware of the elements as well as the divinity of the whole. Wicks’s obliqueness makes us search for meaning. (Though one must admit this chopped reality sacrifices the elegance and sensuality of a long, voluptuous line).

Wicks’s style loves a different image in each line:

Silver whistles slept.
Trains had abandoned
that brittle underlife.
In the empty waft of untapped electricity
he was somewhere up the way
& I
in my plastic-bucket-blue uniform
was afraid.

(‘The Hinge’ 13)

This is the opening of the third poem in the book – the situation is set rapidly, there’s dramatic involvement for the reader, but each line is a separate idea, its build is subtle. An employee in the railway underground, perhaps Wicks, is sent to find a vagrant sheltering in a tunnel. A common situation made uncommon by the illuminations. This poem is a long narrative, unique in this collection, and it catches another important element in Wicks’s work – his sympathy for those marginalised and fighting for urban survival. Sympathy for the dispossessed links arms with his suspicious disrespect for authority, the same disrespect captured by his aggressive, choppy style that jiggles your elbow for attention. His poetic is personal but manages to wear its heart on its sleeve without being mawkish about it. Towards the end of “The Hinge”, the narrator finds the NFP (someone with No Fixed Place of abode) and brings him back to the railway office, where the police are called:

He was put
down on a stalwart vinyl chair at the security office,
a bent & filthy hope.              The police
smashed his head
into a matching grey desk.
……

All our days are numbered
moral failure                           impotent vicinities.
Rills of snot,
NFP leaked scared & crying –

the constables thought they had a simple solution,
No point laying charges with fuckin’ NFPs
YOU will never (bash)
come to Central (bash)
again! (bash).

Another moment caromed past,
into the linger of weight
like stone above air, late shift lives on lines.
Still or in flail,
our culpable hands.

(‘The Hinge’ p 16-17)

Violence occurs elsewhere in the collection, but it’s never as explicit as here. That exploration is of a different kind – of perception and reality, of morality, of the emotions. The world is glimpsed in vivid flashes, sometimes from lightning at night, sometimes from passing cars, or in glimpses in harsh daylight from the corner of an eye. The flashes are then edited into sequences that are sharp but puzzling, familiar and yet disturbing, dramatic but amusing:

Leaving the apartment block, note
Barry has a buzz on, a brim.
He sings & howls seamlessly. Down the street
a couple whisper like wire brushes, their love is a nail.

Later, on the train two troubled blondes
from a wooden part of town
exhaust what credit they have on the phone.
Some graffiti – Acpopulus Later. Yesterday, I was served by an assistant
in Islamic scarf & Santa hat. I fit in here,
this country when it works … no worries.

At Rockdale the promissory Black Garter Escorts
sits patiently beside White Lady Funerals.

(‘The Necropolitan’ 18)

Wicks works his ideas through images rather than argument. The poems are visceral; each shaped towards an emotional experience. As a technique for examining history, society and art, postmodernism excels; as a form to illuminate feelings and experience, it can drain the essence if poorly applied. Wicks understands that.

A different aspect of his work is his attitude to words. He’s as exuberant as James Joyce with a spray can and a wall. He plays the punster funster, having a ball: “we are a crowd of trees, awestruck / a crowd of fleas, hungry fleeing / crowd of pleas, more”; “eulogies of eucalyptus”, “lantana manana”, “plucked the snake out of sass”, “suit yourself or suture yourself”, “sprinkle wrinkles”, “[a cop] blocky blond and aerated with action”. His titles include ‘Magic Nihilism’  & ‘The Problem of Splendour’,  ‘The Necropolitan’, ‘On The Nature Of Wickedness And Plums’, ‘Ted Near Dead & the New Lyricism’, ‘Flotsam Ahoy’. He’s like a biblical prophet caught doing stand-up, who can’t believe his luck.

But mostly his eye is quick and exact:

The desert wind wears a blunt dust
cantankerous yap
lifts sheetmetal
from the deaths
of the snub-nosed Silverton buses all
cut like raw opal
pressed into a humiliating servitude
windbreaks for camels.
Punctuation of crows
affixed on air.

(‘Aeolus at the Mulga’ 49)

One reason his postmodern re-cutting works is because Wicks does a neat line in aphorisms. They’re scattered throughout the poems, but in “Secret Saids – Everything I Know” he piles up three pages of them, heaped like strawberries: “Certainty is fickle”, “Your dreams will wake you up”, “One can find truth in a bottle / but the light’s a bit distorted”, “Money isn’t everyone”, and my own reflexive favourite, “Nothing belongs to us all”.

Wicks has an aggressive and striking technique but what, ultimately, is he on about? Well, can you evangelize secular humanism? Wicks believes so. But he implies rather than lectures, his vision accretes through poems and instances, in nourished glimpses rather than a steady stare. And though the tone is knowing, cool, a bit sad, it’s also alert to fecundity and wonder. World-weariness is still a few drinks away.

Usually, though, wonder is understated – ecstasy isn’t cool in these back streets and corner pubs so the verse doesn’t soar –as, say, Murray can – but prefers its urban irony.

Wit is on the prowl, however, and can be warm, sly and cheeky or savage and judgmental: an evening railway station with  “scratchy girl-less gangs / with all the hate that Saturday / had thrown up all / over their denims” (‘The Hinge’ 13)

Although the voice is vernacular, the intention is literary, sometimes mysterious and deliberately difficult. ‘Healed and Hurt’ opens:

I blame you and the island. There’s an electronica,
champagne-strange tinnitus
that I wear like a lei. Feint complaint
from our hearts, all the uniforms are bleached.

(41)

Wearing tinnitus “like a lei “ is good, but I don’t know what the rest means. Which island? “Feint complaint”? Over-compression can reduce a poem’s impact, like a clarinet heard at a distance, where the melodic line comes only in phrases.

For the most part, though, exuberance and wisdom shine through, as in this celebration of the annual migration of bogong moths:

Small deaths serve simply to mark the way
another diaspora pit stop
on this acne-string of peopled coast.
Bogongs are fooled by trashy suns that humans make;
our floodlit, foodless acres of town.
But they leave this bleak cover
ride again
the lightstained indigo of evening.

(‘Shied’ 78).

Throughout this book, a sharp poetic eye works with practised skill to celebrate newness in the everyday.

JOHN UPTON’s poetry has been published in SMH, The Australian, Canberra Times, Quadrant, Cordite, Best Australian Poems 2014  and many other literary magazines and anthologies. He has had five stage plays produced and has written for more than 20 television drama series. His political comedy Machiavelli won the Australian Writers Guild’s award for Best New Play.

Sputnik’s Cousin

by Kent MacCarter

Transit Lounge

ISBN: 9781921924675

Reviewed by DAN DISNEY

If you are looking for narrative sensibilities or lyric sense-making in a narrow sense, then Sputnik’s Cousin is not for you. About as far out as its Russian satellite namesake once was, this is a book of astronomically strange experiments delivered as ‘poems and non-fiction’ (back cover). MacCarter’s texts are a kind of otherly reportage fed through deviant, garbled syntax, and these little machines of momentary expressive orbit are built to record the fetishistic weirdness of their human subjects. Indeed, and as if Sputnik-ing from the sidereal, MacCarter’s excursive and idiosyncratic inventions sputter heartily to their own trajectories; this is literature but not as we have known it.

The book is organised into seven discrete packages of high-octane oddness: in Sputnik’s Cousin we find prose, faux-sonnets, prose-poems, strange verse, even an historical melodrama. ‘Fat Chance’ is pure gallows humor, an enumeration of unexpected death which has less to do with the darker satires of, say, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 or Vanessa Place’s Statements of Fact, and is more like scrolling randomly through liveleak.com scanning for Darwin Awards nominees; ‘Pork Town’ is a Bataille-esque psychogeographical romp across the patina of Melbourne’s inner-western badlands, and both these non-fiction sections offer generic (but not stylistic) variation from the poems. ‘Stencil’ is a suite of 23 non-accentual ‘sonnets’, ungainly but measured, mostly rhyming; here, we may be forgiven for thinking MacCarter is lapsing into his own version of neo-surrealism. The eighth ‘sonnet’, ‘Geiger-Müller Counter’, seems at least initially to want to party hard with the oeuvres of, say, James Tate or Russell Edson –

A little pony of a man with a tiny pony brain
trots up floor after floor … (42)

But unlike the willed madness of surrealism first championed by André Breton in the 1920s and taken up by Tate et al toward the end of the 20^th century, MacCarter is up to something more state-of-the-art than playing out processes capturing (as Isidore Ducasse framed it) a ‘fortuitous meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. MacCarter’s anarchic fervor is instead sustained by distinctly contemporary experimental impulses –

                        detecting blocks, an office tower
the jaundiced shade of gristle Geoffrey Smart wars, reconsiders
chews over, measures. A centre freeway oyster blade Vein

            this man’s contraptions pulsate along clot hot in kitchen space
tallying ill the zap gone microwaves serve wet tantrums
at employee-meat like a tennis star’s frippery of spectrums
re-heated from the United Colours (sic) of Benetton’s face …

            (‘Geiger-Müller Counter’ 42)

Such is the sheer quantity of chopped and mangled imagery in ‘Stencils’, and indeed throughout this book, that instead of rocket like missile-missives, these poem-vessels propagate a ‘rudiments of barnstorming’ (40) more akin to a poetics of image-as-displacement, or the recording of random detritus. Perhaps echoing Kenneth Goldsmith’s notion of ‘language as junk’, these texts are remnants and remainders, repurposed in a cut-up and readymade mode: a new spin, then, on what theorist Marjorie Perloff brands as récriture (that is, literature as recycling). And it is this that makes Sputnik’s Cousin such a difficult but welcome arrival.

Rather than staging surrealistic mayhem, MacCarter’s poems speak from a different order of assemblage; so often the poems are located somewhere between récriture and reconnaissance, played out in this collection as a repurposing of random snapshots, a mixing/ switching of registers, and the recalibrating of canonical forms. In ‘Smoke Odes’, a multiply-epigraphed suite in which a perhaps-augmented MacCarter nods to his influences (literary and elsewise), we see just how many filters overlay the viewfinder –

Oddity, your small army
of guerilla cosmopolitans and pomegranate cleverness
keeps our gossip sugary and tasteful
in forums
and under Magritte’s derby
cluster our prized ruby gems
… Neil Gaiman, Osamu Tezuka, Eddie the Eagle, Tom Baker, et al
(‘Kissing Frank O’Hara [not on the mouth remix]’ 23).

As promised on the book’s back cover, these texts ‘hum a progress charged by humanity’s witless pursuit of technology and civility’; Sputnik’s Cousin charts a progression from Darwin’s Beagle (87) to near-future potentialities and, at heart, these meditations (at times hilarious, at times confronting, at times outright confusing) promulgate a particular and peculiar worldview churned through eccentric grammar – gerunds, denominal verbs, split infinitives, subjunctives – swirling into vertiginous non-unity. Prosodically then, if after Pope the sound must seem an echo to the sense, these poems are loud expositions of a world falling to pieces.

MacCarter writes how ‘I swear at times I know’ (130), and this book is suffused with deliberately destabilised processes of deliberation. The texts are always fast-paced and straight-faced, but also cockeyed – the poet ‘will oilspill/ your salted waters’ (16), and ‘tip the cup for sip’ (16); these are not so much ‘plots of gibberish’ (125) as febrile examinations of meaning-making (and where that has got us so far, circa 21c.) by a poet who seems altogether at ease as an outsider expressing the contours of exile to his ‘fellow travellers’ (this the literal translation of ‘Sputnik’) –

corroding its circuitry, the hairdos of maniacs
cut to its verb
to be 

remains. What remains (?)
of the grammar and me
oxidize behind
arse factory
supine from its unstoppable whispering
of why?
(‘Mergers/ Acquisitions’ 93)

MacCarter is exploring expressivist possibility here, and indeed experimenting with the plasticity of his material (that is, language); this post-po/mo jongleur is a free range radical stuffing his texts with images not so much fragmented as purposefully blurred. These are snapshots of an existence undertaken at velocity where even affect is bleary, vague, and out of focus: ‘I had bang lick wow they was abject’ (134). MacCarter’s is a savvy but also risky experimentalism, and by intentionally defocussing the image he will certainly be misread by some. But the great value of Sputnik’s Cousin is that it is not derivative (despite the many references to literary influences throughout the book), but instead opens intelligent new heterotopic possibility.

Indeed, Sputnik’s Cousin is a laboratory strewn with sensible inventions, where precision seems to have been intentionally deprioritized, and the view defocused to imitate the speeds of contemporary existence. The broken syntax echoes current conditions of consciousness – multitasking, distracted, spanning surfaces without the depth-experience of connection – and these poems are plausible models, a collection of ummwhatwasIsaying sayings. When surveying the persistence of older modes of the lyric impulse, arché-Conceptualist Christian Bök tells us how he is ‘amazed that poets will continue to write about their divorces, even though there is currently a robot taking pictures of orange ethane lakes on Titan’. File Kent MacCarter’s book under ‘feral’ or ‘HAZCHEM’, and expect the dizziness that can happen when accustomed modes of understanding shift, or the vertigo of non-comprehension when a mutant genus first arrives. Sputnik’s Cousin is voicing the everyday in ways that are lyrically, indeed generically, challenging: a feistier means of having the tops of our heads taken off.

DAN DISNEY teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang University (Seoul)

Onkalo

by Bernice Chauly

(Math Paper Press, 2013)

Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE

‘Say it loud, say it silent’ (Socks)

Bernice Chauly’s Onkalo begins with an extraordinary quotation in the preface from Michael Madison, director of Into Eternity, a documentary on Onkalo, a nuclear fuel repository being built on the coast of Finland:

You are now in the tunnel. This place is not a place of honour. No esteemed deeds are Commemorated her. You should not have come here. You are heading towards a place where you should never go. What is there is dangerous and the danger will Still be present in your time, as it is in ours. Please turn around and never come back. There is nothing here for you. Go no further

This sense of a forbidden place, a place where entry will cost you, where there is no reward and only risk, is an apt vehicle for Chauly’s collection, which documents the poetic idea of bravery and risk, not in the sense of the confessional but in hard-edged reflection of decisive moments in a life; it is a place where the social, personal and political intersect. This place of intersection, this Onkalo if you will, reveals itself through the poet’s mastery of form, whether it be in the refinement of the love lyric or in the exhortation of the political cry. It also reveals itself through the apt placement of individual poems.

It is of interest to reflect on why the quality of bravery is so inherently important to an appreciation of Onkalo. In an earlier collection, The Book of Sins (2008), Chauly challenges her readers by writing with a starling lyricism of incidents of violence (This Love) to tenderness (Forgiveness). It is difficult indeed both psychologically and technically to write of what is inflicted upon us, or indeed bestowed upon us, but the poet succeeds in this regard through the concision of language and image.

In Onkalo inquiry is placed decisively in the political realm as a kind of political ecology, effectively underscoring the personal. The first long poem in the collection, Jerit, speaks to Malaysia as Ginsberg spoke to the  United States of the 1950’s in Howl:

Will you let us write of new pages by those
who in yellow-infused riotous colour
betrayed the hallowed streets of the city
in the hundreds, in the tens and tens of thousands
who fought back the tear-gassed alleys
with brave tears and Maalox

Following on from this is Still, a rhythmically concise poem questioning where ethnic divisions may lead:

When does thought become action?
Will the keris strike yellow flesh?
Will it know when it is satisfied?

The emphasis on what I have termed the ‘political ecology’ of the collection is revealed through apt thematic placement. The title poem Onkalo for instance appears straight after these two overtly political poems, and segues into an evocation of the personal at once  endangered and exposed. Onkalo, a place of ‘eternal thirst’, of ‘spent eviscerated/energy rods’ is called to rest ‘until the fiery skies/call out to you’, captures the sense of flame and risk that appears in Untitled 1 where rest suggests protection and renewal:

I am better off like this
in between the gnarled roots
the folds of black earth, the hands
of fertile leaves that are now in bloom

In Untitled 2 the city is portrayed as a site of metal, fuel and corruption, an Onkalo of now:

The city is tiresome
it vomits interminable streams
of coloured metal, engaged
on roads that toil underneath
the weight of the familiar

But it is also a place (Untitled 3) where one flames, one lives, a place you are compelled and indeed willed to inhabit:

The irreverent thrill
of a wanton evening –
on the flat road to home.

All under the gaze of a malevolent heaven:

The concrete sky
aloof, adamantine
decapitating the haze

With Signs we find an extension of a Persephonian trope, where the poet leaves the Onkalo of a landscape ‘translated by fear/ruled by pain’ to become springlike and ’green again’, ‘populated once again/like pollen’.

This is not to suggest that the collection is subsumed under this conceit. Poems of love, travel and challenge (see the brilliant The Snatch) follow their own trajectory, but with the motif recurring like a theme in musical composition. Mood and climate weave their own variation in such poems of chill winter as The Nut House and In Amsterdam, or in the love lyric Novo Tel. In the exquisite Luang Prabang, longing flows through blossoming nature in order to define what the poet must say, must apprehend:

Maybe this is enough
I tell myself – perhaps longing
is enough

As I imagine reaching out
for your hand, across the
continental drifts
across the long banquet table
pierced with white lilies,
sugared roses, the spirals of jasmine
and the scent of a new world.

The penultimate poem, Sometimes, takes us to the world of death and grieving familiar to reader of Chauly’s fine memoir Growing Up With Ghosts, and in the concluding poem, 1973, she writes:

I chose my suffering
I walked with it
I ate it with deliberation
I breathed it, I drank it all
in its brief longevity
…….

I chose my suffering
but I did not choose to see you die
I have paid grief its price
from the realm of the living
to the dead who still haunt me.

In the scoring of this suffering, Onkalo brings us the complexities of a life, the nerve of being.
 
 
JENNIFER MACKENZIE is the author of  Borobudur (Transit Lounge, 2009), republished in Indonesia as “Borobudur and Other Poems” (Lontar, Jakarta, 2012). She has presented her work at many festivals and conferences in Asia, most recently at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Myanmar (supported by the Australia Council for the Arts) and at the Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators Conference in Singapore.

Radiance

by Andy Kissane

Puncher & Wattmann, 2014

ISBN: 9781922186522

Reviewed by ANNA KERDIJIK NICHOLSON

Radiance is Andy Kissane’s fourth collection of poetry. In my view this collection is a subtle change from, but consistent with, his previous books of poetry (1).

Kissane may be setting out his thesis in the poem ‘Summer’, in which he writes:

Poets are always searching for how things might fit together,
the tongue and groove illusion, the Fibonacci sequence
that can be found in both nature and the sonnet…(61)

The Fibonacci sequence is the mathematical term given to number sequences which progress like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. You add the penultimate number to the ultimate number to get the next number. It’s applied for computer algorithms and graphs. The sequence can also be seen in biological settings, such as branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone. (2)

It seems apt that Kissane refers to the Fibonacci sequence in his work. The sequencing, the attention to lineation and homogeneous stanza lengths, and the appreciation for the organic qualities of the natural world: all these things are present in this beguiling, deceptively off-hand, careful poetry.

In ‘The Bluetongue as an Answer to the Anxiety of Reputation’, Kissane writes:

When I take the poets on a tour of the garden,
Liz comes out from under a log, a life model
unveiling for a portrait. She’s happy enough to bask
in the warm afternoon sun and soak up the attention.
Why fret about where you are in the scheme of things?
Instead, cultivate the blissful solitude of a bluetongue,
grow fat and warm on the exposed rocks
that nature bequeaths you and occasionally open one eye
to gaze at the theatrical manoeuvrings of those
whose blood is thick and cold with unfulfilled ambition.

                                                From ‘The Bluetongue as an Answer to the Anxiety of Reputation’  (36)

The documentary method brings its readers news from the world. In the book’s first poem, ‘Flight’, the poet gives a tantalising prescription: ‘take the afternoon off and head out past Kurnell/to Cape Solander. There, on the white sandstone cliffs/above the vast flood, look for humpbacks’. You are not above the sea or the ocean, you are above ‘the vast flood’ to witness ‘the corrugated whiteness of [the humpback’s] wobbly ascension,/the dark certainty and blazing glitter of its fall’.  And in doing this, even though ‘you cannot name the endangered species/growing in this headland heath’, ‘you can close/your eyes, you decide to do this simple thing,/…/ aware now of this immense, unknown life/going on around you, within you, as the buffeting,/lunging wind picks you up and gives you wings.’

As Kissane writes, these are poems made as a result of ‘A radical attention to the world’(3).

The particular Kissane quality that results from his radical attention to the world is the manner in which he shows us what he has sensed. It is conversational, deeply versed in the Australian vernacular and delivered with a light touch. The reader is never far from a gritty humour and follows the long lines and chatty everyday-ness until they are deeply, unwittingly, in the numinous, the spiritual and the wondrous. The wings the wind gives to the whale-watcher at Cape Solander appear and reappear in many guises, as ‘two tiny bumps forming/near your shoulder blades, the beginning of wings, perhaps,’(4) and ‘when I first loved you and we soared over the harbour, our wings stretched out in effortless, astonishing flight’(5).

To give context to the ‘radical attention to the world’ quote:

… A radical attention to the world
leaves much that cannot be understood, let alone described
no matter the facility with language or craft.(6)

Kissane makes a terrific fist of both. These are elegant meditations, perhaps prayers, which have a touch of magic realism—by which I mean, and probably inaccurately, a little of the sub- and un-conscious—which move us organically toward an understanding. Kissane achieves this with detailed, nuanced description:

The mist seems to lift a little and I notice a woman
wearing an ankle-length dress and a wide-brimmed hat
walking beside me on the strand. I realise that I’m out
perambulating with Virginia Woolf who is talking to me.
“What are you doing in my Cornwall diary?” she asks.
“Well, at least you’re not one of my characters.
I’m sick of the way they think they understand themselves
better than I do. But if we’re going to spend any more time together,
you’ll have to stop that infernal overwriting. What did you do,
swallow a Latin thesaurus? Perambulating? Really, it’s too much.”
I nod at Virginia while dodging an incoming wave
that’s about to soak my Converse runners, but she’s already
striding up onto the headland where she says
we might catch the purple shadow of the pilchards
as it slides across the face of the sea like a blush.

From ‘Three Visions of Virginia Woolf’ (36)

The result, as this quote intends to demonstrate, is a poetry which is revelatory, humorous and intelligent.

The persona of these poems is a man in maturity, ensconced in suburbia, driving, cooking, parenting, arguing, writing; his social conscience is not jaded, he is able to understand what it is to love the women in his life, he’s not scared of being compassionate, not scared by long-dead writers (such as Virginia Woolf) communing with him, and he is attentive to the madness, the incomprehensibility and the deliciousness of what takes place inside and outside one’s head:

…people of hard muscle and freckled skin,
friends I’ve lost contact with, writers whose work I love,
all of them clamouring for fish soup and conversation,
as we suddenly stumble on what we really think
here on the balcony within the visible and vanishing air.

from ‘Prelude: Angophora Submerged in Fog’ (24)

Kissane understands and accepts his place in the world: ‘I perform a role/crucial for adolescent wellbeing: efficient driving.’ But his place in the world is also as witness and curator. He stays at the Canterbury Ice Rink, watches as his daughter goes off in her electric blue jacket to practices her Lutz:

I can see her as she concentrates on the long backward
glide, digs her toe pick down hard into the ice, lifts
and spins into the air, striving with her whole body
to land this difficult jump for the first time
from ‘Trip to the Ice Rink’ (61)

In his curatorial role, he selects material from his ‘radical attention to the world’ and he selects the quantity and manner in which it is presented. Kissane excels at using what he calls ‘the grit and gyprock of words’ (60). He fashions the poems into elegant patterns on the page and is fond of three-line stanzas. All this apparent ease of expression, rather like his daughter at the rink, is practised and wrought. He has divided the book into four sections and each section has within it a narrative of meaning, with the poems carefully sequenced to develop the thought. Within the poems, the flowing lines have careful line endings, the words at both end and beginning of the lines selected to bear the slight emphasis of their position in the line and there is plenty of enjambment to lead you (often literally) down the garden path, past the joke to ‘suddenly stumble on what we really think’, and to radiance. This poise, this hard work in selecting and arranging, brings a subtlety and structure to this mature poetry. It makes for a very elegant book.

The final part of the collection, The Sea of Tranquillity, is a long riff on the metaphor of Kissane being married to the Moon, which he personifies effectively.

‘Like an umbraphile, I drove a pale green Corolla
up the Hume Highway from Melbourne to Sydney
with my belongings in the boot and a rolled-up futon
crammed into the back seat. Arriving at a friend’s house
in Croydon Park, The Moon opened the front door.
I saw shadow bands, a single intense diamond
and a fluttering corona pulsing around her outline.
When she stepped forward, I realised she’d been blocking
the light in the dim hallway. She smiled and her top lip
glowed with these red spots, but when I blinked
they were gone. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick.
I was launched into blissful orbit, stranded in the trackless
heavens, unsure of the right angle of attack,
how to come down to earth without burning up.’

                                                From ‘Total Eclipse’ (67)

The Sea of Tranquillity brings together the components of Kissane’s very particular style which are at work in this collection: his magic realism; his ability to describe love and adoration, warts and all; his humour; his long narrative line and his unveiling of radiance/Radiance. The collection as a whole is slender, elegant and well-constructed.

1. Facing the Moon (Five Islands Press, 1993); Every Night They Dance (Five Islands Press, 2000); Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009)
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number
3. From ‘Summer’, p61
4. From ‘Beloved’, p31
5. ibid

ANNA KERDIJIK NICHOLSON‘s second book, Possession, received the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Prize and Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2011 it was shortlisted for the ACT Judith Wright Prize and the NSW Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry. She trained as a lawyer, lives in Sydney and is on the board of the national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry.