Straws, Sticks, Bricks

by Cyril Wong

Math Paper Press

Reviewed by AMOS TOH

I first discovered Cyril Wong’s poetry at the same time I was introduced to his music, during the launch of his fifth collection of poems, Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose, in 2006. Perched on a table in the middle of a crowded bar, Wong sang ‘Practical Aim’:

 “Does solitude offer strength over time, or
is denial of it the only practical aim?

(…)

After deep loss, what does the heart

learn that it has not already understood
about regret? When all light finally

forsakes a room, do we take the time
to interrogate the dark, and to what end?”

Wong’s robust countertenor typically commands attention, capable of reducing the room to a stunned silence. This time, however, his voice conveyed the tentative, questioning wonder of a poet recently set free from conventional assumptions about solitude, loss and regret. Both in song and in writing, the questions of ‘Practical Aim’ are articulated with haunting irony, daring us – himself – to embark on a journey of unflinching self-discovery.

This coupling of music and poetry continues throughout his most recent work. Oneiros, for example, is a paean to the lush sounds of nature, providing solace from the alluring static of a city crammed with messages about how we should behave and who we should become. His latest collection, Straws, Sticks, Bricks, answers the lyrical call of ‘Practical Aim’ more abstractly, taking time to “interrogate the dark” when humanity is finally stripped of its pretenses. His findings are presented as a series of prose poems arranged like piano scales, words sliding up and down the slopes of memory, lust and desire.

Wong’s poems impart the appearance of strict form, recalling the painstaking discipline of fingering. Each poem consists of a single sentence, broken up only by the brief, incomplete pause of a dash, comma or semi-colon. This semblance of structure belies the tumult of Wong’s observations and stories. Take, for example, his word portrait of a bowl of apples, which buzz with thoughts of envy, resentment and disdain:

“the apples sometimes wish they were more than themselves; they have heard of apples larger than themselves; apples deny any relationship to pears; the apples wonder if it is true, that green apples exist; the apples riot in the dark, but cannot win; still, they try …”

(‘The Apples’)

The unbroken phrasing conveys the cramped space the apples inhabit, as well as the fog of discontentment that descends upon the “bowl’s bright rim”. If one replaced the sullen, silent masses that file into Raffles Place (the central business district of Singapore) every morning with Wong’s apples, it would be hard to tell the difference.

More direct references to life’s dissatisfactions also thrive on this tension between form and substance. In ‘Notes From A Religious Mind’, the one-sentence structure buckles under the strain of an internal battle to reconcile righteousness with self-righteousness, eventually giving way to unbridled arrogance: 

 “Holier; infinitely more blessed and moral; more beautiful, by default (notice my inner glow); enlightened; modest; assured … countless followers, so many more, and with even more to come; more influential and so powerful; and more right, unsurprisingly, than you.”

Such dissonance is again evident in Wong’s treatment of pop culture, which he views as just another religion of relentless self-justification. The feel-good truisms of pop’s biggest hits become portholes into an alternate universe where life’s tragedies and imperfections are laid bare for all to see. ‘Teenage Dream’, Katy Perry’s anodyne hit single about star-crossed lovers, provides Wong an opening to explore the cracks that begin to form after the infatuation fades. All seems fine at first, but “an arm … lifted too suddenly” or “a deliberately stern word at the wrong time” hints at a relationship that has begun “pouring sideways”.

Teenage lovers yield the stage to a pair of strangers uncoiling from their lust in ‘Born This Way’. While Lady Gaga’s anthem of self-affirmation papers over the complications of gay identity, Wong’s rendition brings them to the fore in vivid, almost grotesque detail. The aftermath of a one night stand takes a weirdly compelling turn after one stranger asks the other to “take a picture of him against the pale orange glow creeping in from the living room”. The impromptu photo shoot that follows captures the desolation of both the photographer and the photographed. The photographer does not want his subject to “look mad and ugly and alone”, but the latter still comes across as a “steroid-junkie corpse-bride” anyway. The garishness of it all “almost makes me want to hug him”, but the “stink of poppers mixed with a whiff of fresh blood dancing down his legs stops me from reaching forward and making no difference in the end.” Every frame of their loveless dalliance is vaguely comedic but also heart wrenching, balanced on the knife’s edge between farce and tragedy.

Wong’s poems are steeped in despair, but they also find redemption in the most unexpected places. The last poem of the collection, ‘Zero Hour’, revels in a universe of one, where the “tremendous weight” of loneliness and time is no longer a pressing reality but a fading memory. “You”, the reader, are dropped into an empty house deep in a rainforest, in the middle of nowhere and everywhere. At first, the solitude is “unbearable”, but you slowly learn to “sit for hours on the porch”, eventually “letting words go” as “what they fai[l] to capture beg[ins], at last, to take over”. Some would call this enlightenment, but Wong resists the glib certainties of language, implying what is achieved by examining the inability to describe it.

The uncertainty of our existence is the lifeblood of Straws, Sticks, Bricks; a void Wong discovers to be “an invitation to everything, the door to unending creation.” (‘Matins’) His poems are not an indictment of our deepest fears (be it death, loneliness or fear itself), but the lengths we would go to escape them. In trying to find The Way, we have lost our way. Why not take time instead to “interrogate the dark”, for no particular purpose and with no expectation of answers? As we rediscover our sense of wonder, fear might no longer become us. Perhaps that in itself is a ‘practical aim’.

AMOS TOH is a part time New Yorker and a full time Singaporean.

Collusion

by Brook Emery

John Leonard Press

ISBN 9780980852363 

Reviewed by SUSAN FEALY

Collusion by Brook Emery explores Daniel Delfoe’s question ‘is it better to be here or there?’ while imparting the experience of being consequent to living inside the question. We enter a deeply reflective, largely solitary world where uncertainty and complexity are paradoxically shaped by quiet balance, precision and dailiness.

The meditative flow of the collection is enhanced by the bold decision to present all poems as untitled, thus removing titles from prior published poems and poems which short-listed in the Blake Poetry Prize 2009 and 2010.

Regular stanza structure within poems, many long-lined poems and most poems being at least page-length further enhance its meditative, modulated quality. The first lines of the ten-line poems begin with an ellipsis, are indented towards the right margin and lines are often enjambed; all emphasise flow. Their compressed energy adds tonal range rather than rupture. The collection is book-ended with a poem of long-lined couplets followed by two short single-stanza poems creating a symmetry that accentuates this collection’s balance and precision.

Emery often combines metaphysical enquiry with images of urban coastline and its weather. The poems addressed to ‘K’ suggest a clear intent to communicate to another and this avoids the risk of solipsism. Yet, this is the poetry of thought and the sense of a solitary self prevails: the mysterious K does not speak back. He or she seems a real or imagined correspondent remote in time and space but may also represent an attempt to reach beyond the everyday self into the poetic self that gives utterance because K is described as ‘my interlocutor, my conscience, my will’.

The internal rhymes are subtle and nuance the pairing of here and there. At times we find sound play in poems such as ‘The half-awake world’ where ‘gloved sounds’ ‘tap the ear – bird-call, leaf-slide, door-creak, door-slam’, but, overall, word music is so effortlessly yoked to meaning, visual and kinaesthetic sensations imprint the mind of the reader more forcefully than the sonic. Sound, when evoked, is rarely the worded voice of another: it is that of machines, white noise, bird call or unworded human sounds.

Silence is the medium of thought so it is no surprise that silence itself is assayed:

Waking at night, silence has the colour
that is all colours, or none at all. …

…

nothing mattered except the need to sleep,
to inhabit silence. Now silence is an alien state
and I am on its rim, sensing rather than seeing
something for which I can’t conceive a name.

(‘Waking at night, silence has the colour’)

Sound as a strange undertow to silence is evoked in a poem about overseeing a schoolgirls’ exam in ‘Perhaps the first thing I notice’:

Something about the silence is amiss. Yes, every cough or
crack or scraping of a chair is startling, but beneath it all I
hear a low collective hum as though, unorchestrated, every
throat is growling. 

Movement is a key motif: we find uncertainty and its flux, indecisiveness and its back and forward movement, expansive flow of thought, the reach of desire, movement of body, breath, water, light, transport, weather and time. A strength of the collection is the way that these elements intersect with each other to create momentary collusions which dissolve and reconfigure. This leads to inventive metaphors where natural phenomena are perceived as thought: ‘dusk as uncertain premise, premonition which cannot last/much longer’, (‘After the lassitudes of blue’).

In the surreal poem ‘You’ve been waiting for something like’, the strange paradox of the dream-world that allows travel which is everywhere and yet nowhere is evoked:

you’re stalled at the border surrendering a passport that’s
borrowed, a face which is mugging, 

‘I’m not. . .’ but you are, there’s a sea in your mouth and sea
in your head, the words rushing out won’t listen to will or
good sense, 

and you’re nowhere specific, just pandering with monkeys
in parakeet clothes, angels in uniforms with heat on their
hips.

The beauty of the natural world colludes with the poet’s ease and the time when ‘light cuts loose the day’ to provoke the imagined unrooting of a jacaranda in the thirteen- line poem ‘In the hour or so before night’s certain fall’. Reprieve from the persecution of the spectator and rational self is found in the liminal (between here and there) and it is often when evoking the liminal that Emery’s poems are the most lyrically beautiful:

… The jacaranda
against the church’s mortared, crumbling mass,
mauve and stunning and substantial as it is –
all indirect flowering of twists and turns –
seems uncontained as though at any moment
it might escape the rooted, understandable restraints
of space and time and float away as weightless
as a dandelion on the emerging evening breeze.

Escaping the limitations of self is explored in ‘You know the way’. Body experience and the fecundity of words are accorded equal weight and measure as means of escape, and in the flow of thought, they seem implicated with each other. Whether intended or not, it seems that long-line couplets sometimes reach beyond the limits of the page and spill into tercets:

… I think of a dancer’s grace as she glides into the
air, or the diver’s equal grace gliding towards the sea: the
body in defiance of its limitations.

going through, beyond. Graceful, gracious, gracile, words that
multiply and spread like flowering vine. Grace notes of
unbelief that still restore the faith. 

 In ‘Gloom off to the west’, Emery’s meticulous account of the interplay of mind and body experience while cycling into an approaching storm, reaches an unusual crescendo of exhalation not unlike Plath’s ‘Ariel’ as body propulsion collides with an intense encounter with the elements and the landscape. It takes him beyond the spectating self who follows fast behind. Unlike Plath, the urgency of here is created with reference to there:

it’s possible to see rain stiffen into spears and, more fancifully,
coalesce into a solid-seeming wall. 

I race towards it expecting in some unlikely way to escape the
unrelenting clutch of earth. I’m mad, you say? 

How so? Light splits the clouds in silver streaks, trees leap to cheer
me on, clap their soft green hands in wild excitement, 

and the future is an endlessness of blue. On the road behind me, a
ghost bike takes up the chase. It’s closing fast.

This poem is balanced by others where body experience conveys states of psychic unease such as the pain of being out of tune with oneself that is found in ‘It comes from over there’:

Speak. Get it off your chest. The three blankets too warm
throughout the night, the dry bed of your mouth when you
got up to pee. This is not what you wanted to say. What
was the something else?

A movement towards and away from intimacy seems propelled by a legacy of pain in ‘Contested ground, this strange persistent beauty’:

co-incidental thing, skin my border, coming into contact
with other skin which touches and retreats,
touches and retreats, flinches at the little slights,
the acts of spite and meanness, the ancient sin of pride,
guilt which eats way. Imagine my love,
an outbreak of silence, and how the respite of ‘now’
would be hounded by ‘once’, ‘soon’, ‘again’. 

When lovers do consummate desire in the surreal, filmic poem
‘In the background there is the music’ it is stalked by the menace
of its consequences: 

…We turn and run to where we’ve been
but dark-suited men step round a corner and advance towards us.
We stop again. Look for a passageway to the left, the damaged door
we can shoulder open. This time it won’t budge. This time…

Poems which celebrate the movement of mind are often the most confident, playful, the most saturated in light or colour, the most inhabited by the natural world and least likely to reach into the overly discursive. However, in typical Emery fashion these poems are not only celebration of mind; they concisely articulate the metaphysical.

For example, in ‘Dear K, it’s light that makes the river flow’, the enquiry into how we know what we know has a propulsion and ease because uncertainty and flux are embraced as process with tantalising potential. The welcome possibility that mind and that which it observes could commune with each other in pre-thought seems to kindle energy and optimism: ‘I like the / dancing light, / the scattered cloud, the river that lies potentially between its banks, / the speeding train. I reach for them. They reach for me’.

Yet, the rational mind’s subverting of potential and spontaneity is seen as a kind of curse in ‘The half-awake world in the half-light’:

A curse on dithering, weighing up and second-guessing,
ordering the accounts, the sad debilitating song, what if,
what if.

In the poem, ‘It’s when the plane takes off’, the intellectual investigation into memory, especially memory of the poet’s past inexplicable actions, seems weakened by too many discursive lines. The potential of this poem seems to lie in the power and feeling of the personal narratives. The poem carries the seed of several myths about fathers and their children. For example, as a consequence of a decision to take his young twins into the surf, a father confronts how to keep them safe when they are separate from each other and in danger. The act of holding on and letting go, is deftly reprised in the holding and letting go of breath and waves:

When my son popped up from beneath tight-fisted foam
his first words were, ‘I’m alive, I’m alive.’ His twin sister
whom I’d pushed into the face of an earlier wave before I turned
and failed to grab my son – I couldn’t hold him – was paddling now
with a group of surfers three times her size and trying not to cry. 

In the moving penultimate poem, ‘…we’re not so unalike’, the possibility of exchange is reached for and envisioned as a connection across a wide distance:

We may slip, misstep, or, not as likely, soar
but let’s maintain this firm, divergent grip:
I can be the tide; you must be the moon. 

In the final poem, ‘Rain as it is only brighter’, water’s flow seems more shadowed than the lighter, faster currents of the first poem. The darkness of suffering, the unknown, mortality and the multiple ways the mind can look at what it sees, offers no certainty except process itself. Most of all, rain seems a blessing in its particularity because the poet is alive in the moment to receive it. And so profound simplicity colludes with complexity in a way that is distinctively Emery.

 SUSAN FEALY is a Melbourne poet whose work has appeared in Antipodes, Meanjin and Best Australian Poems 2009 and 2010.

Thick and Thin Lines

by Phyllis Perlstone

Puncher and Wattmann Poetry, 2012

ISBN 9781921450532

Reviewed by STEPHEN EDGAR

Some years ago I remember watching a television documentary about the English artist Ben Nicholson. At one point, speaking about a particular series of paintings in which Nicholson had arranged some carpentry tools in various geometric patterns, one of the commentators made what is, I suppose, an obvious but also an illuminating observation: the primary challenge for a painter is working out how to divide up the two-dimensional plane of the canvas—or, like the painter in Anthony Hecht’s poem, “Devotions of a Painter”, one could say “getting as much truth as can be managed/ Onto a small flat canvas”. I was reminded of this while reading Phyllis Perlstone’s  new collection, Thick and Thin Lines. Perlstone, as some readers may know, began as a painter and everywhere in her poems you can see the painter’s eye looking, analysing the fall of light, the disposition and changing patterns of objects, persons and events on the plane of the observed world.

You can see this process at its simplest in a poem such as the brief “Water’s work”:

A red wall under blue sky
gives way to a tree top
when the great boughs that shake their leaves
soft pedal their tinkle                      

while water dashing across
mingling with their breeze-blown suspended
weights of green
is flashing. 

Or again in these lines from “The trees and their patterns”:

in front of the door the palm trees
leaves fanning out and turning in –
the sun catches the palms in the afternoon
in the morning it’s the banana-fronds
sunned-on  dangling their copies
on the wooden wall” 

“Dangling their copies”—a wonderfully evocative phrase. It is as though she is not simply looking at and describing what is before her eyes, but analysing it into its component pieces and putting it back together again—composing it. “Looking is such a marvellous thing,” Rilke said, “of which we know little; as we look, we are directed wholly outside ourselves.” The descriptive is never merely descriptive; it can lead to discoveries. Or as Matisse put it, “To see is itself a creative operation, requiring effort.” In Perlstone’s poems we are constantly aware of that creative effort of the observing mind, almost as though the continued existence of the world depends on it. A passage from Russell Hoban’s novel Fremder comes to mind: “Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit of it in front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space.” This somewhat provisional nature of the world’s reality seems to be present in some of Perlstone’s poems too.

   A bird sails by
It’s not knowing about
  gravity or the science of Einstein’s 

curved space
  that keeps things “real”. Pulled into
an illusion  the flat world reopens 

  now
on
  an ibis.
(“Mirroring”)

Note that “real” in inverted commas.

But, despite the truth of Rilke’s remark, the mind looks in as well as out and it quickly becomes apparent that much of what is going on in this book is the mind’s probing of its own practices, its doubts and uncertainties, and that the finely described scenes of the outside world, always moving and changing, are in conversation with the emotional and intellectual dramas of the poet’s inner life. She speaks of “the airiness/ that is either happiness or weather”.

Or elsewhere:

“…In late afternoon’s
winter-heavy, mercury of sea and river
    thicknesses, surfaces are mirrors of the sky
   its canned greys are the mind’s
other side.”

Observation is a permeable membrane. The world flows through into the mind, and the mind flows out into the world. If I may be permitted to quote from my blurb for Perlstone’s last book, The Edge of Everything, “Where does the self end and the world begin? Perlstone is both enraptured and disturbed by the endless process of existence, engaged and estranged by what the light pins down for our contemplation.” These remarks are equally relevant to the new book. So in “Red lights” the return of light and colour in the morning also reveals “the photo of the mother as a child” that “makes her own child sad” and “imparts a memory this child can’t ever have”. The light of day seems to shine not only into the interior of the house but into the perspectives of memory.

These thresholds and portals do not lead exclusively to the realm of the personal. At times poems open out, suddenly and startlingly, onto subjects of historical scope. In “The Yarra and Arendt’s Centenary” the opening view of the calm river and scullers skimming across its surface forms an opposing counterpart to the poet’s “reflected/ stream of consciousness”, which is obsessed with the horrors of the age, from Eichmann through to the more recent follies of Rumsfeld and Cheney. In “Power unconfined”, the sight of an ocean liner in the harbour, and its queue of passengers taking their turn “with the orders of the day”, leads to contemplation of the power that draws the ship’s vast bulk “to where it will be out of sight”, and confronts us finally with images of the ship St Louis and its Jewish refugees, of the Tampa and the SIEV X.

Even so, there is a network of personal relations, personal emotions connecting all these pictures as well—the pictures of the world and the pictures in the mind—connecting them through time, another recurrent theme in the book, as well as through space. I find this poem particularly moving:

Music can fill all possible space
the way a landscape’s long curve
in a bay
reaches to catch the missed image
intimate as glistening drops
of pastness forming—

in a join of then with now
it is grief’s great deal between us
to tender
for a past retrieved 

can we understand
there was a distance once
too far to see
or to talk of love’s existence 

I like the rather dry wit of the book’s title, Thick and Thin Lines. At first glance this seems a rather bald and uninformative phrase, but the motif proves to be surprisingly productive. We find lines of light and shadow, lines of bodies and buildings (“a line of bricks confining space by design”), lines of music (“thinner than a thin flute’s/sound”), lines, of course, of thought (“the stem-line of your thinking”, as one poem has it), lines of action and unfolding experience, lines of division and connection. “I’m talking”, she says at the end of the opening poem, “to slow my reading down/into where I hold/nearness/in a line of work”. A later poem concludes, “In late sun he’s a measure of lines only/The louvres’ pleating patterns/contain him”. The lines in fact end up containing a great deal.

It is, I hope, apparent from what I have quoted so far, that Perlstone’s language is notable for its freshness, clarity and vividness. It avoids ostentatious flourishes but is rich and precise, and full of memorable images: those dangling copies of leaves I mentioned earlier; a plane that is “a flaw in a clear glass of sky”; that ocean liner “ice-cliff white”; “the snail-slicks of a ship/in its morning passage”; “watching the sun/rub off the rain”. I mentioned above the way Perlstone’s acts of looking seem to analyse the view into its component parts. One quite striking feature of her expression is the way certain  compound adjectives mirror this process. For example:

It’s so quiet I can’t think past early morning’s
not-enough light 

Now she might have said “inadequate light” or “insufficient light”, but the not-enough light is curiously effective. The same poem provides “the out-to-sea waves”. Elsewhere we find “lost-on-the-horizon birds-wings” and “my down-on-earth life”.

Thick and Thin Lines is by turns beautiful, thought-provoking, unsettling, moving—and quite original. Now it is possible to make a fetish of originality. Sometimes it turns out to be nothing more than transient novelty. True originality, though, like happiness, is not really something you can pursue and capture directly; it is in fact a by-product of excellence, of the search for the vivid and memorable expression of a unique vision. And that, I think, is what Phyllis Perlstone achieves in Thick and Thin Lines.

STEPHEN EDGAR is a Sydney poet. He received the Grace Leven Prize, the Philip Hodgins Medal; his latest collections are Eldershaw and The Red Sea.

Radar 

by Nathan Curnow and Kevin Brophy

Walleah Press, 2012

ISBN 9781877010187

Reviewed by DAN DISNEY

This shared book between two poets from different generations is a fascinating collection of segues, ellipses, and strange unities. The binaries are obvious: two poets (at different stages of their careers) populate separate halves of the book with their own styles and, more pertinently, diverging forms. Curnow’s free verse texts are lyric expressions of sense-making in response to weird contexts; Brophy’s wilder propositions are prose poems which chime with their own logic. These two separate formal, rhetorical gestures work toward a unity hinted at by Curnow on the back cover of Radar: ‘My poems are (seemingly) conscious, direct confessions and yours are unconscious waking dreams’. The palindromic title exemplifies this book’s unusual coherence: both halves begin in centralized locations (of self) and then move outward across psychic and/or external terrains. I am reminded of Rimbaud’s cri de cœur, ‘Je suis l’autre’: in their own ways, both poets call into versions of the unknown … while Curnow’s wakeful, sentient texts crystalize meaning, Brophy’s incursions into unconscious realms are less interested in thoughtfulness and valorize instead pure affect.

This book, then, contains two modes of response: the thinking of intelligence, and the feeling of wisdom. Turning attention to the first half of Radar, Curnow’s thoughtful explorations reveal a childhood spent enduring ‘the magic burn/ of anticipation bound in faith, belief and trust’ (‘The Curtain’); inside weird arenas where angels visit and stones miraculously turn to diamonds (‘Boy Got a Bullet’), Curnow seems to forgive one parent – walking across sand, the poet tells his father ‘it is easier if I fill your prints’ – while another cannot stop blaming herself ‘for all she can’ (‘The Piano Lesson’). This is a family romance seemingly populated by the usual tensions, humiliations, and resentments: but Curnow’s texts are at their most human when scanning the vistas of memory through the lens of his own fatherhood. Remembering how –

            The last piano lesson I ever had
            ended in a drug raid on my teacher’s house

Curnow reconciles his own off-key upbringing with teaching his children ‘all the right wrong notes’ (‘The Piano Lesson’). The implication hidden in the imperative is that there is such a thing as wrong wrong notes, but Curnow never descends into recrimination; despite a ‘foundation/ riddled with flaws’ (‘The Hallway’), here is a poet generously open-hearted, and unproblematised by the presence of memory.

One gets the sense that a lesser man may have more anger to offer than ‘So we grew up in your shitty houses’ – a sentiment directed not at his parents but toward ‘the High Church Men’. Indeed, rather than an ideological imposition, Curnow views his parents’ religiosity as not much more than an inconvenience – in church meetings, ‘My sister and I would lie across the chairs, tiring of our best behavior’ (‘Boy Got a Bullet’) – or an exercise in illogicality: why, Curnow wants to know, do some get bullets while others receive miracles? And why, amid the monsters, giants and talking animals, is there no mention of aliens in the Bible? (‘Made from the Matter of Stars’) Indeed, Curnow persists with framing whimsically logical questions throughout his half of the book: he asks ’what happens to birth/ if death is undone/ where will hope reside’ (Neruda, anyone?) and the absence of a question mark here contains a trace of the investigative mode made by any religion. But Curnow is never closed off from possibility, and his half of Radar scans unrelentingly for truthfulness. In ‘Blessing’, he starts with his early experience of magical thinking –

It came rushing toward me across the paddocks
all I had to do was stand – the moment roaring
silent and ancient, collapsing into bloom 

and ends in a personal engagement with mystery: ‘perfect questions, rhyming without a word’, and Sunny the horse who, unlike some creatures in the Bible, offer no answers (despite being tempted with an apple).

Curnow’s meditations on his origins paint, then, a picture of childhood as a place for mild incredulity … a good site for a poetic imagination to evolve, and then escape from. As he shifts his gaze, other themes are developed: the final poem from his section, ‘Made from the Matter of Stars’, acts as a coda which tells the story of the young poet taking flight – ‘my bike was chewing gravel for Melbourne’ – in order to flee for an urban landscape. ‘Made from the Matter of Stars’ frames those poems that shift focus toward his own young family, other poets, and the new contexts of adulthood. The sense is that here is a lyric poet scanning for how human connection creates meaning: amid the epiphanies, though, there is occasionally drear honesty too. Of his own parenthood, Curnow writes –

The tight circle of parenting is terminal,
much like my need for escape – the guilt of
imagining a new life beyond the stress
of this disheartening chorus
(‘Family Drive’) 

while his relationship with the mother of his children is cause for both celebration – seen in the surreal ‘Love Song #5’: ‘I will ask if you’ve fed the monkeys/ hand you poetry as a necklace, this lyrical wish/ of elephants in feathers’ – though is not all joie de vivre, captured especially in the pallor of ‘empty sex and non-argument’ (’24 Hour Landscape’). Curnow, who grew up amid religious truths, is not afraid to venture his own versions of well-shaped thoughtfulness, and what I am struck by is his acuity paired to an esprit: these poems about escaping a rough country existence with poorly-fitting ideas – unimpeachable fiats, really – are suffused with sensuality and sense-making but also, most importantly, generosity … surrounded by his family and friendships with poets equally up to the task of observing as a mode of self-clarification, these poems are contoured by kindness and shadowed by the larger circumference of thankfulness. Ultimately, in taking flight (both literally and psychically), Curnow has escaped to himself.

While the themes are somewhat similar, once we arrive at page 59 of this book, form and style shift to signify we are now in for a very different kind of exploration. Championing the prose poem at its emergence 150 years ago, Baudelaire called this paradoxical hybrid a mystérieux et brilliant modèle; rhetorically, prose poems subvert the lyric impulse to unconceal authentically-realized truths from a centralized authorial writing position, and instead act as model platforms for magical investigations, in which prose-like structures (narrative, plot, conflict, dénouement) work to convey an internal, weird logic. Under this definition Brophy’s prose poems are exemplary, and play a very different style of language game to Curnow’s texts.

While Curnow sets out to explain and resolve the weirdness of his lived experiences, Brophy’s texts formally and thematically elaborate oddness. These surrealistic experiments are self-contained universes of possibility, framed from the outset with a quote from Nietzsche: ‘Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler’ … over the page, and the poet dedicates his poems ‘To Andrea, who teaches me how to feel.’ This, then, is a half-book of mindful responses to affectivity; it is not thinking but feeling, a mode of originary not-thinking, that is taken by Brophy to be the most real mode of apprehension. And the prose poem is a form that grants him permission to make incursions into the non-thought of affect through playful innovation; differently to Curnow’s vowing gestures toward unconcealing truthfulness, Brophy acts as both trickster and visionary (often humorously), and his texts refuse to participate in an explicit sense-making program.

Indeed, and rather than explicatory, these texts are instead allegorical, shifting inexorably within unstable, non-logical dream worlds – places in which we can hear ‘scratching noises coming from behind the bookcase: characters trying to escape their novels’, (‘Siege’) or can catch glimpses of a shadow ‘flickering as it left like a movement from a horse at the far end of a paddock caught in the corner of your eye’ (‘Flicker’). Viz. the epigraph from Nietzsche: the shadow (as representation) of thinking versus the horse (as actual artifact) of emotion? Brophy is inviting us to ride with him through scenes of extra-ordinary domesticity, profoundly baffling (Brophy’s words) as the man who decides, in ‘A Less Personal Life’, to turn into an ant (Kafka, anyone?). These texts are weighted far more toward delight than instruction, but Brophy’s intentions are precise: rather than saddling us with random strangeness, Brophy directs attention in one of the ‘Thirty-Six Aphorisms and Essays’ to how ‘All we see and know is dreamed’. This section of Radar blurs, then, with illogicality, magic, and weirdness: the very modes Curnow seeks to wrestle into order, Brophy willfully celebrates.

In this, these discrete but unified sections of Radar build toward a gestalt that embodies and explores terrains T.S. Eliot concretises with his notion of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ (in which, put simply, thought and affect are harmfully separated). Does Brophy consciously homage the only prose poem Eliot wrote, ‘Hysteria’, with his own text, ‘Anxiety’ – which riffs literally on falling asleep: ‘falling asleep he fell into a river, which closed over him. He woke and fell asleep again, falling from a bicycle …’; on the next page, in ‘Against Falling’ we are in the realm of objectified, materialised language: ‘I must claw my fingers into the fissures of this sentence but keep moving, my knees and ankles tight against its flight upwards’ … speculatively, these poems are not about the horse of emotion but the Pegasus, that mythic symbol for wisdom, ascending: rather than the intelligence of thinking, these flights of the phantasmal seem to suggest our only hope of not persistently sleepwalking through our lives, or of falling into confusion and the hopelessness of repetition compulsions, is through consciously (here, literally) grasping the wild ride of affect, and next learning how to harness affect to language. For Brophy, we must learn the foreign realms of emotion; like Curnow’s prevailing gesture, this is an emancipatory quest after all.

There are several instances of neuroses hard at work in this half of the book – in ‘Fear’, a conversation begins with ‘What are you afraid of?’ and goes nowhere; in ‘Library’, perhaps the most sharply satirical poem in Radar, Brophy writes – 

The book he sought was not on the shelf in its place, but there were so many other books on this and other shelves on this and other levels of the library that he almost vomited up every word he had ever read. 

While this short poem may seem hilarious (and agonizingly accurate to those who, like Brophy, spend time researching inside libraries for a living), the angst nonetheless remains unresolved, and this pattern of affectivity ripples through Brophy’s section of Radar. One of the most striking departures between these two exploratory poets is that while one seems intent on weaving clarity into the disparity of flawed foundations through unified and resolved lyric texts, the other is inventing crazy-seeming vignettes from disquietude that is left unresolved. This latter section, then, is an exercise and introduction to the grammars of affectivity; Brophy wishes for us to learn the language well.

When I first read Radar I reached for Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, thinking of the six speculative models that the theorist maps in order to speculate an Oedipal swerve between generations of poets. But no such swerve exists in Radar: this is a book which can be read as either (the lesser object of) two discrete voices, or as a gestalt of weird and compelling questions asked in styles, forms, and modes which are mutually complementary and which extend each other. Buy this book for its novel, innovative connections; re-read it for two different explorations into humanizing, expressivist, learned terrains.

DAN DISNEY is a poet and essayist. He teaches twentieth century poetry and poetics at Sogang University, and divides his time between Seoul, Turin, and Melbourne.

The Sunlit Zone

Lisa Jacobson

5 Islands Press, Melbourne, AUS 2012

ISBN 9780734047465

Pb 165pp

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

In each verse novel, the unique relationship of poetic and narrative elements leads to a dynamic duality of design. Lisa Jacobson’s verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, illustrates how productive this interplay of narrative and poetic elements can be, with its compelling narrative, and its meticulous, yet deceptively natural poetic rhythm, honed painstakingly by Jacobson, over several years.

The initial idea for the verse novel came courtesy of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship to Israel, where Jacobson, scuba diving in the Red Sea, was struck by the ethereality of being underwater. Jacobson produced a two-page poem after the experience; the poem extended into a series of reflective monologues; and in time the project became bigger than either poem or short story and developed into a speculative verse novel.

The Sunlit Zone is set in a future Melbourne, circa 2050. The main character, North, is a genetic scientist working with mutated creatures, the products of environmental problems. In this speculative world of dream-genes, skinfones, cyberdrugs, thought-coding, and genetically modified species, North must come to terms with loss, and reconcile past and present in her relationships with friends, lovers and family.

The focus on loss and grief is carried by the verse novel’s metaphor of the ocean’s layers, which in layman’s terms are known as the sunlit zone, the twilight zone and the midnight zone. The latter, the depths, are associated with North’s past; through resolving loss she returns to the sunlit zone.

The Sunlit Zone is replete with ocean and sea imagery; marine conservation is central in its themes; yet the impact of the ocean on the work arguably extends to its free verse form and fluid storytelling — the sense of the ocean’s rhythm in the ebb and flow of the narrative — and its influence on character, most obviously that of Finn, North’s twin sister with gills who is obsessed with water.

The Sunlit Zone illustrates the capacity of the verse novel form to be as diverse and innovative as the prose novel. Nevertheless, the verse novel, by virtue of its constitutive and inherent doubleness, is a narrative poem; a category it shares with epic; narrative autobiography in verse; Medieval and Renaissance verse romances; mock epic poems; and ballads and their literary imitations. The Sunlit Zone changed Jacobson’s view of the verse novel as a ‘hybrid’ form: “It’s not a hybrid, it has its own form, and its own history over hundreds of years,” she maintains.

Jacobson read quite a lot of verse novels during the writing of The Sunlit Zone including Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and young adult verse novels by Catherine Bateson and Steven Herrick. Some of the verse novels in metered form that Jacobson read felt relentless; “prison-house-ish”: in contrast, Jacobson “wanted to open form up: the ocean was flowing” (Interview). The search for poetic models that could enable such fluidity led Jacobson to the sound word echoes in W H Auden’s poem about Icarus falling, “Musée des Beaux Arts”, which has rhyme, “but spaced out within the poem unpredictably, for instance, in lines two and seven. Such poetry is actually carefully wrought although it looks completely free; it’s not metrical but it has a rigorous application of sound” (Interview).

To ensure that form followed theme in The Sunlit Zone, Jacobson devised a free verse form comprising 313 poetry ‘passages’ — one is inclined to refer to passages rather than stanzas when they vary in line length and their number of lines — and of these, only a few passages have as many as twenty-three lines, while most have between eight and fifteen. In each passage, the syntax preserves the natural stresses found in speech. There is no template by which all stresses are replicated and gain uniformity or regularity in an imposed pattern, nevertheless a close analysis of the passages reveals their coherence and rhythmic integrity.

Each passage is meticulously patterned with rhyme. At the line level, most obvious to readers are the infrequent end-stopped rhymes. Most commonly deployed, however, are the rhymes that fall mid-line, the predominant assonant vowel rhymes and occasional final consonant rhymes, as well as rhymes of root-words with endings. The “sea” theme not only offers up a bountiful lexicon; it also gives the verse novel buoyancy at a phonemic level, at the smallest unit of sound. Its digraph “ea” recurs plentifully in passage after passage, for instance, in “meat” and “cease”, enabling a plethora of rhyme as diverse as: “secretes”, “Waverley”, “ropey”, “everything”, “empties”, “recedes”. Jacobson employs light rhyme, rhyming words with syllables stressed in speech, for instance, “chill”, “smell”, “tell”, “expelling”, “all”, “still”, “pulled” with words with secondary or unstressed syllable, such as “sorrowful” and “exhalations”. The syllable rhyme in “exhalations” produces a further ‘chime’ when brought together with one or two syllable long “a” rhymes (“whale”, “bait”, “grey”, “fray”, “lake”, “waves”, “opaqueness”) in the following passage of The Sunlit Zone:

The whale’s vast flank feels smooth
and chill as long-life meat. The skin
secretes a fishy smell that’s just a bit
too strong, like bait in buckets
stewing on the pier. It’s just a clone,
I tell myself again. Waverley strokes
its big grey head, the spout expelling
ropey exhalations that diminish,
fray and thin. Then, nothing.
The whale’s eye, dark as a lake
and sorrowful. Everything stops.
Even the waves cease muttering
and all is still. The eye empties
as if a plug’s been pulled.
We watch as it recedes
into opaqueness. (14)

To foreground fluidity in The Sunlit Zone, Jacobson preserves the natural stresses found in speech with the combined aid of typography — which introduces directly quoted dialogue with ‘em dashes’, as is common in prose fiction — and by breaking lines of dialogue midway through the syntactic unit, be it phrase, clause or sentence. Protracted dialogue is commonly longer than a line, and enjambs from one line to the next, or over several. Jacobson controls the pace or speed with which sentences enjamb, modifying syntax to accelerate or decelerate the narrative.

The interplay of poetic and narrative elements is instrumental in managing this tension, or “tugging” (Kinzie 470). While Jacobson renders less emphasis on artificial techniques such as alliteration, these do not recede completely; rather they are modified. When alliteration is given a caesural pause, for instance, its impact on diction is muted: “Volunteers stream/in like diaspora, dissipate” (11); “Bonsais stand in pots; poised, balletic” (33). Jacobson varies the frequency and complexity of trope — simile and metaphor —from passage to passage, to intensify, or conversely, to delimit meaning. Personification imbues the abstract or inanimate with psychological motivation or embodied gesture, and enlivens or dramatises the material world of the narrative. Jacobson’s considered attention to syntax, word choice, and placement creates rhetorical effects, such as when line breaks end with modifiers that help passages convey aporia by expressing doubt or uncertainty.

Jacobson also has a facility for varying speech to nuance each character’s idiolect, and to convey the English syntactical approximations of Raoul, whose mother tongue is French: “Excuse us please/but Cello insists she be in her own skin” (77); “Thank you. Now go, he says, /and find some sleep. You lovely/lady. You’re good, you know, /to stay. She’s difficult, no?” (103).

Perhaps the only disjuncture to form following theme in The Sunlit Zone is the uniformity in its collective arrangement of passages: free verse it may be, but the poetry remains conscious of its placement on the page. The passages are aligned down the middle, surrounded by ample white space. The passage breaks are generous and exacting, and each passage is consecutively numbered, its lineation compact.

The Sunlit Zone was Jacobson’s first foray into writing a novel-length project, and she was mindful that it needed to have the qualities of strong fiction. Initially Jacobson considered publishing The Sunlit Zone as a young adult verse novel, “but some parts of the story weren’t suitable for younger adolescents” (Interview). Instead she decided it had more potential as a crossover novel; that is, a novel for adults that older teenagers could also read. Jacobson stands by her choice to write The Sunlit Zone as a verse novel. One of the joys of the verse novel for Jacobson is the white space, signifying “things unspoken, yet part of the poem itself” (Interview).

Jacobson remembers wrestling over phrases, over lines: “the fiction wants to gallop on and the poetry reins it back” (Interview). Yet Jacobson doesn’t view the relationship between poetic and narrative strategies as ‘competing urges’; rather, she considers there’s a playful natural interaction between the two forms: “One only becomes subsidiary to the other if you neglect to do both things at once; that is, to be a poet and a novelist” (Interview).  But given the relationship of poetic and narrative strategies in each verse novel is unique, she acknowledges, notions of how verse novels achieve stylistic tension could be less circumscribed.

Well regarded as a poet, Jacobson has been awarded the 2011 Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize and the HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Prize. The Sunlit Zone was shortlisted for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Since publication, The Sunlit Zone has been selected for the set reading list for Victoria University’s Studying Poetry and Poetics course and Bendigo TAFE’s Professional Writing and Editing course. It has also been short-listed for the prestigious Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry 2012 and has just been listed as one out of twelve contenders for the Stella Prize 2013, a new major literary award for Australian Women’s Writing.

Jacobson has gathered some ideas for another verse novel in the future. In the meantime she has just completed a new collection of poetry, South in the World, as the recipient of a 2012 Australia Council Grant.

Jacobson likes the idea of verse novels making poetry more accessible. The Sunlit Zone, with its compelling narrative and meticulous poetic rhythm, offers a timely reassurance to publishers of the concentrated power of the verse novel form.

Works Cited

Jacobson, Lisa. Interview by Linda Weste, 2 February 2011.
—. The Sunlit Zone. Melbourne: Five Islands Press, 2012.
Kinzie, Mary. A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 199 

LINDA WESTE is a poet, editor and teacher of Creative Writing. Her PhD, completed at The University of Melbourne, researched late-20^th and early-21^st-century verse novels. Her first verse novel fictionalised the late Roman Republic; the experiences of German Australians in 1940s Melbourne are the subject of the second, in progress.

Fairweather’s Raft

by Dael Allison

Walleah Press, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-877010-21-7

Reviewed by GILLIAN TELFORD

On the cover of Fairweather’s Raft a toy-like sailing vessel is adrift on a glassy ocean, its sail reflected as a shadow beneath the surface – and beneath the surface is where the reader is led by Dael Allison in this fine collection. Based on extensive research and a strongly empathic response to her subject Allison guides with skilful passion through a key period in the obsessive, turbulent and estranged life of Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) ‘one of Australia’s most iconic and enigmatic artists.’ (i)

Allison’s poems centre around the trope of a perilous journey, specifically the perilous journey made by a sixty year old Fairweather between Darwin and Timor in 1952 on a flimsy, self-made raft. Given up for dead by searchers, he made landfall after sixteen days on Roti, Timor’s most western island. He was then deported to England but made his way back to Australia – Bribie Island, Queensland – where he finally abandoned his peripatetic existence and spent his last two decades, ‘the most stable and productive period of his life.’ (p. 80)

Allison provides a summary of Fairweather’s biography and development as an artist at the end of the collection. This essay warrants inclusion and is likely to be of interest to both informed readers and others not familiar with Fairweather’s life or work. We learn of his abandonment by family during the first ten years of his life, his troubled years in UK, his time as a prisoner of war, and his determination to pursue his art despite family opposition. We are introduced to his years of wandering through Asia, the strong influences of his time in China and of his arrival in Melbourne in the 1930s. After this time he spent increasing periods in Australia ‘but he remained a loner, living rough between Melbourne and far north Queensland. Escape became a primary motif whenever dissatisfaction manifested:’ (p.78) Allison also outlines information about her research which, in addition to the written sources and personal contacts listed, took her to Bribie Island, to Darwin, and to Kettle’s Yard at Cambridge University, UK in her ‘quest to understand his work and his life’ (p.82)

The first half of Allison’s book portrays Fairweather’s life in Darwin – the two years preceding his raft journey, while the second half relates to the voyage itself. Fairweather’s Raft opens with a poem in three parts, ‘Three paintings found discarded in the mud’ This is a powerful introduction to place, to the artist and his driven, isolated existence. The imagery is vivid, always congruent, and leads to the artwork, to colour and subjects:

2. ‘(No title)’ ….

the painter’s rough marks/ draw black ink into muscle/ trapped faces/ opaque eyes/ storm-edge of a shoulder/ conch of a thigh’

Part 3 is again entitled ‘(No title)’ This untitled convention was a common feature of Fairweather’s paintings. The poems’s line ‘one body two heads/ hauling away from each other’ also rehearses a favourite subject of Fairweather’s – the body with two heads. Here the reader is alerted to the enduring Fairweather trope of the conflicted inner life of the artist

The immersion in the physical world continues as Allison portrays fruitful images of where and how the artist lived ‘Each step into the light’- ‘Frances Bay’s stink of mangroves,// the build-up air viscid as green mud./ Above him nimbus thugs shoulder-butt the sun’ His home, the half-demolished supply boat ‘The Kuru’ is starkly outlined, ‘Stars thrash through the fraying nets/that drape its severed deck.// In the chart room the painter fumbles for a match, lights and pumps the Tilley. Gas flares, darkness scuttles to the vault. …’

We learn of Fairweather’s struggle for artist’s materials in ‘Fugitive colours’ ‘and i need red./ what does this place want of me,/ my blood?’ We learn of how he felt increasingly marginalised by local society in ‘The Rear Admiral’. ‘In the parlance of 1952, wit is trickier/ than bum-man, queer or pansy./Darwin locals snicker,/ “Not in front of the ladies … eh Nancy!”’

Poverty, discomfort, overwhelming memories, tumultuous weather – the pressures build up. ‘In his mind he sails an ocean’ creates ironically indelible pictures of the artist in the wet season, struggling to save his paintings from destruction ‘He stacks them on the table// and climbs up, roosting/ like a broody hen to save them// from the flow. i have to go,/ before this damn town drowns me.// Horizons tremble/ in tin cans and bamboo cups.’ Allison’s research is used with strong effect throughout. Specific details of  Fairweather’s early life and alienation from family are woven into reflections and memories that not only add to the biological narrative but take us into dark and brooding mindscapes. Of these, four powerful poems are included in the prelude to the raft journey, ‘Remembering the grey house’, ‘Family’, ‘Schoolboys’, ‘Demobbed’.

Similarly, lighter memories of previous travels and some highly imaginative pieces by Allison are used effectively for mood and pace changes and further increase the drama of the narrative. One that particularly appealed to this writer is the prose poem ‘Dreaming poets dreaming’ which presents a fabulous scenario, written with enormous energy and skill: ‘what if a raft were to loom from the dark with an old/ man at the bow, his hand firm on the helm? what if they/ stepped on, the two poets from another world?’

Preparations for the journey continue until the poem ‘Cast away’ is reached: ‘silver cracks my eyes apart, empty days—/ the painter and his raft have gone.’

Also interspersed through the book are ekphrastic poems where specific paintings, works and quotations by Fairweather are named and dated beneath poem titles. These dates range from 1936 to 1965, but Fairweather was an artist who painted from memory, revisiting incidents or earlier paintings many years later. With little recorded in writing, it is mainly through his later paintings that the personal experience of the raft journey can be envisaged. It takes artistic knowledge as well as courage to explore these works and Allison has achieved an outstanding success in her role as an explorative poet. One such painting is ‘Lights, Darwin Harbour 1957’ considered by Allison in a finely nuanced prose poem ‘Nightburst’. Here she assumes the defiant, triumphant and somewhat apprehensive voice of the artist as he leaves Darwin Harbour in the raft, at night. Like the painting’s bold, tight strokes, Allison’s words evoke the colour and drama of this night, the lights and shadows, the brimming marine life, the mounting tension ‘released from land’s tether into rising weather.’ Similarly, the poem ‘Monsoon on four panels’ relates to Fairweather’s major work Monsoon 1961-2. Written as a prose poem in four parts, which mimic the size ratio of the four panels of the painting, it is a compelling meditation. Another poem ‘Lacuna’ from the work Roti, 1957 celebrates the exhausted arrival of Fairweather as he is rescued from the beach on the island bearing the same name. He has survived. And we feel we have accompanied him, survived with him through the images Allison has created of the mountainous seas, the physical ordeals, the hallucinations, the accompanying seabirds, the always present sharks.

The raft journey was an epiphany in Fairweather’s life – it ‘made Fairweather famous’ and it ‘also transformed Fairweather as an artist….after 1952 his paintings became more reflective and profound’ (p.80). Some subjects were revisited over many years and the poem ‘Roi Soleil’ after the painting ‘Roi Soleil 1956-7’ reflects the artists’s blissful memories of Bali – a theme often explored.

In this collection, for the most part, the sequencing of poems works well, particularly once the function of memory processes is grasped. The one poem that draws undue attention to itself is ‘Crocodylus’. Whilst clever and enjoyable to read, it didn’t seem to belong to this collection in time or mood.

Allison has crafted her poems, she knows and revels in the language of the wild places she takes us to and the poems are full of musicality, adept sound play and good doses of humour. Free verse is the most common form used but she has added some diverting variations, such as snatches of familiar song or verse, interspersed with dialogue or quoted texts – an effective ploy in presenting the wandering, hallucinating mind of the artist. There is also the final poem in the Coda ‘Raftbedraft’ Lit Bateau 1957 which is one of two written as adapted pantoums and takes the work to a powerful conclusion ‘Sleep collaborates with motion/ and the moon’s a lemon mockery,/ your bed drifts on the swelling lung of water—/ this ocean is not the last ocean.’

In Fairweather’s Raft Allison has created a complex, multi-layered work that reveals new depths on every reading. and will have you returning, as I did, to stand before a Fairweather painting and be fascinated by how much more I could see beneath the surface.

NOTES

(i)  Handout Ian Fairweather, Dael Allison – Panel Discussion, salt on the tongue, Goolwa Poetry Festival, April 2010

GILLIAN TELFORD is a Central Coast, NSW poet.

Snowline

by Jo Langdon

Whitmore Press Poetry, 2012

ISBN 978 0 9757762 9 2

Reviewed by CHARLES MANIS

Snowline, the debut chapbook by Jo Langdon, is both elegant and powerful. The lyric poems in this volume operate primarily in couplets and tercets, and out of the white space come teeth and airplanes and fragments of narrative with the strategic force of well-timed jabs.

The sparseness of the page allows Langdon to bring home images that appeal to our senses in often surprising ways.  In particular, Langdon has a knack for taking the common experience and presenting it in such fresh ways that it becomes visceral. Take, for example, the poem “Nausea,” in which the speaker recalls to the addressee:

Once, through the paper wall,
we heard your housemate’s skull collide
with toilet porcelain. 

The wet barking of her sickness,
and then nothing. 

(9)

In “Falling back to sleep,” the description of an experience so often rendered in terms of vision—light and darkness, clarity and haze—becomes voluminous:

This dream fills your mouth
like a sentence. 

          (10)

Between these moments of sensory arrival, Snowline glides. Few poems firmly establish narrative context, so even when Langdon treads into the familiar territory of the family poem, the approach is distinctly lyrical. The poem “After” never provides a family history, nor even any particular developed set of symbols that might stand in for a longer, firmer narrative. For that reason, the artifacts within the poem stand out much more: “an emptied coffee mug forgotten / on the verandah; a ring of sticky // whiskey on the bench”, and the box of matches, burned out and closed up, that concludes the poem (15). In “Dusk Street,” the speaker guides us like a sort of psychopomp from urban topography into a child’s dreams of “velveteen / ears” with an effortless transition that minds neither wall nor mode of experience (20). Similarly, a young girl in the final few lines of “Stratosphere” intercedes between the speaker and the addressee, shifting from a mid-air lightning strike to the ease of childish affections. Between poems, too, the transitions are fluid. “Shape” ends with light through a window transformed by bodily processes, and “Stratosphere” opens on the next page in a new location with, potentially, a new set of characters, but also with hands acting out their heat upon glass.

This lightness of movement is especially important in a collection of poems spoken almost exclusively from the first-person point of view. Almost every poem takes an extended experience (or set of experiences) and crystallizes it into a few concise lines. Even in a chapbook, a continuous series of first-person lyrics can become wearisome if not dealt with delicately. But Snowline manages the first-person lyric all the better through its disavowal of boundaries. Walls disappear, one consciousness enters another, and language makes space for its own shapes and value, as in “The Shape”:

            Hands and wrists can be too intimate,
            & I’m reminded of other words,

            beautiful perhaps
            for their vowel sounds
            (love, moon, breath, pulse).

            Tonight we’ll sleep on our sides
            to watch the sky occupy
            the bedroom window,

            dimming away its stars to turn
           a blue that belongs to ceiling shadows
           or skyscrapers or gas-stove flames.

                     (5)

At its best, Snowline finds room for both the punchy, visceral image and for the ethereal play of light and shadow. And between these poles, the first-person speaker can move sometimes as what resembles a sort of spirit and sometimes as a fully embodied being. The collection is often preoccupied with images of flight that might fail at any time—planes threaten to crash, and birds fall dead. Yet, the poems often pull off their airiness with remarkable grace.

Many of these poems are spoken about or from within Vienna, and the whole of the collection has a somewhat European flavor. In “Stadtpark,” the speaker meets with her addressee surrounded by images of a Viennese spring, and the poem effectively conveys a sense of suspension, with its frozen scenery possible preceding a thaw. The speaker of these poems finds herself in an intermediary position, somewhere between tourism and familiarity. In the poem “In Wien,” the speaker notes:

            These mountains don’t belong to my
             horizons

            (22)

Frequently, these moments of discomfort open the speaker and the reader to the unexpected. In “Little creatures,” a classroom lesson in French involving a dead sparrow gives way to another meditation on death and flight:

            Il est mort? The boy asks, tilting his head
            towards his mother’s.

            The story is supposed to demonstrate
            something French,

            but instead we focus on this small thing
            the sky can no longer hold.

            (16)

“Little creatures,” though not necessarily set in a foreign country, brings with it multiple instances of that which is slightly alien and yet at the same time home-like, in the sense of the uncanny.

As a collection, Snowline reads like a constellation; its lyrics are held together by only the most delicate threads of light. At any time the poems seem they could drift apart. Yet, Langdon manages the elliptical, fragmentary, and sparse with incredible sensitivity. Even “Nausea,” perhaps my favorite poem in the chapbook, despite an image of skull striking porcelain demonstrates a lightness of touch that provides the reader enough space within familiar subject matter to see something new. Snowline, though littered with mouths, teeth, airplanes, machines, and metal, turns out a sort of ballet. Jo Langdon’s poetic balance and poise are striking in this debut volume.

Snowline was awarded the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize.

CHARLES MANIS is a Philadelphia-based poet and he is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature at Temple University. His work has recently appeared in RATTLE, Fifth Wednesday, and Spillway Magazine.

Looking for Bullin Bullin

by Brenda Saunders

Hybrid Publishers, 2012

ISBN 1921665904

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

Embracing her Aboriginality has given Brenda Saunders both a focus and a purpose in her recent poetry collection, Looking for Bullin Bullin. Writing over the last decade, Saunders has, as she herself says, “a lot to say about the urban Aboriginal experience.”

The poems in Looking for Bullin Bullin are organised into four sections, reflecting aspects of post-1788 Aboriginal history: Stolen, Caring for Country, Living Blak, and Drawing the Landscape. A number of poems overlap several categories, but an underlying chronological movement is also at work. Stolen encapsulates the loss of country (“Terra Nullius”, “Un-titled”), of lifestyle, culture and heritage:

The stolen child lives her life ‘in service’

      Her stories sit tight
      in her apron pocket
      Each loss pencilled-in
      Her lists of defeats
      fade with time
     − hopes scratched out
      after years of waiting                                                 
      (“The telling,” p.15)

Wry humour makes its point in “Sydney Real Estate: FOR SALE“:

Bennelong:
Vogue
Penthouse suite
World
address! 

corroboree
below 

Kirribilli:
High Rise
Harbour life
A Must!

…………………

bora rings
circle round 

Maroubra:
Lots
Prime

Virgin land
A Steal!                                                                            
(pp.12-13)

Caring for Country concerns itself with the continuing and increasing damage to the Australian environment, in the name of ‘progress.’ In “Toyota Dreaming,” the views of old and young Aboriginal people are opposed, the old ones not understanding the need for change, the young compliant, seeking a perhaps illusory recompense for what has been lost:

The tribes can see the value, the power
in red shale; they sift their Country’s losses
against solid gains. Working for the Company 

lured by the shine of a crystal trinket harder
than stone. Buried treasure of the River Spirit
gleams forever in the white man’s dreams                      
(p.22) 

Significantly, from the time of poet Kevin Gilbert, the Toyota has become an objective correlative in Aboriginal-authored verse for feelings aroused by government control. (See also Melissa Lucashenko’s “You are the Fringes,” amongst others.) In this regard, one might contrast the different viewpoints expressed in Saunders’ poem with the progressive stance of indigenous Boyer Lecturer Marcia Langton:

        My first visit to the Kimberley’s Argyle Diamond Mine − the world’s largest producer
        of diamonds, owned by Rio Tinto − was in early 2000. At that time, there were four
        Aboriginal employees. Two of them were gardeners. Two years later, there were many
        more…..[Brendan] Hammond revolutionised the culture of the Argyle mine, and today
        the rate of Aboriginal employment at that mine stands at 25 percent of the total workforce.
                 Many of the significant changes in the Aboriginal world are due in some part to the
        changes in the mining industry, which offers employment and contracting opportunities
        as an alternative to welfare transfers upon which many remote and regional Aboriginal
        communities depend. 

                 (“On the cusp of a new dawn,” News Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, Nov.17-18, 2012.)

In “Pay-back in ’78,” the narrator arrives in Brewarrina as an outsider, to hear of wild Blacks pitted against town-dwellers (as in the early days), and find the town itself an anachronism:

Someone had burned the station one night
They’d already torched the only pub
Hotel swings from the Liquor Outlet now
a no-frills affair: roller-doors down at ten 

And we’d heard talk of wild kids, good with fire
living on the edge of the next failing town

…………………………………………………………….

Dodge City‘s on the edge of nowhere. Off-limits
to finger-pointing tourists or ‘blow-ins’ like us

This painted landscape is already too old
or too new for change. Shaped
by late-model cars

− white goods rolled in dust
Useless inclusions in houses
that never had power or water                                        
(pp.25-6)

“Jaandoo” depicts the relationship of artist Rover Thomas with his country, described through close observation of technique:

Rover carries his country under the skin
follows his Wild Dog song
roaming the sand

…………………………………..

Rover tracks each sacred meeting
marks his Dreaming on painted boards
set in a line of dots                                                          
(pp.28-9)

As an artist herself, Saunders is well-placed to utilise artistic technique as a metaphor for feelings and emotions. Other poems similarly explore the work and inner landscapes of Ginger Riley, Emily Kngwarreye and Kathleen Petyarre.

The anonymous poem “Tanimi” reminds us poignantly of the loss of many Aboriginal languages and the need to recover and preserve them:

Without our language
we will have nothing to say
Have to close our mouths
No song, no story
when the words
want to come…                                                                
(p.33)

In Living blak, the reader is confronted with aspects of the urban Aboriginal experience, scenes of largely unmitigated conflict, homelessness and hopelessness. “Blak-out” pulls no punches, depicting the outcome of social and cultural breakdown whereby the protagonist is both victim and perpetrator. 

Gimme a dolla’
Pay the rent
whitey guilt
easy street      

…………………

tradin’ for cuz
speedy in the fast lane
live for the day 

ridin’ trains
singin’ up Country
Dreamin’s free                                                                
(pp.48-9)

“Blak boys” rejects any form of overt stereotyping, but a similar bleak future unites the different personae of the poem:

He’s everywhere and nowhere, he’s that shadow doing time

     slipping out of focus
     in the world outside                                                   
     (p.52)

This section of the book employs a racy, spare style, utilising urban Aboriginal idiom and taut lines that give credence to the subject matter. A number of the poems appear at first to be merely descriptive, but their message is conveyed through dialogue and circumstance. 

“Looking for Bullin Bullin,” the title poem and arguably the best poem in the collection, works to pull all sections together, and the cover image (Saunders’ own) reflects this relationship. “Got any change?”  asks the Aboriginal girl in this chance encounter, but, unlike the protagonist of “Blak-out,” her questions soon deepen to take in cultural loss, suppression of place-names and language, and white ignorance of  Caring for Country. The chopped-up map, with Bora rings at centre, becomes a metaphor for all these losses, and Bullin Bullin the symbol of a stolen heritage:

I’ve searched on early maps
Find only new names for
ancient places. Land Titles
staked out. Station holdings
Towns with strange rhythms
Sounds from another world                                           
(p.62)

In light of this white-out of history, the current move to restore Aboriginal place-names to sacred sites and landmarks can only be applauded.    

 A recurrent approach emerges, played out in the final section of the book, Drawing the Landscape, with descriptions and interpretations of artworks by Russell Drysdale with Aboriginal subject-matter. Drysdale first became interested in Aboriginal people while visiting North Queensland to attend board meetings of his father’s sugar mills. In particular, he was concerned by indigenous dispossession during the early ’50s, when Australia tried to solve what they called the ‘Aboriginal problem’ by integrating them with white society. His drawing Shopping day, 1953 shows how badly and sadly that identity sat upon their shoulders. Other drawings likewise lend themselves to a contrast between “a distant time/ when the tribe roamed freely” and the imposition of “the white man’s gaze” (p.69).

Looking for Bullin Bullin stands as a requiem for Jack Davis’s “dark proud race” (“The First-born,” ca.1970). Whether we choose to see it that way, or to take hope for a future “in unity” remains with the reader.

MARGARET BRADSTOCK has five published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (awarded the Wesley Michel Wright Prize),  Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). Her sixth collection, Barnacle Rock, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in April 2013. Margaret recently edited Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white poetic responses to “settlement” (Phoenix, 2011).  

Rawshock

by Toby Fitch

Puncher and Wattmann, 2012

ISBN 9781921450617

Reviewed by FIONA HILE

Luminosities

The few lines of biography on the back cover of Toby Fitch’s first full-length collection of poems, Rawshock, remind us that he was ‘born in London and raised in Sydney’ whilst a recommendation gleaned from the launch speech given by the poet, novelist and academic, David Brooks, describes Fitch as the ‘Apollinaire of Avalon’ and the ‘Lorca of the Inner West’. There would be nothing more to say about these sketchy empiricisms if it weren’t for the many ways in which the poems that comprise the collection take up origins, mobilities and the impossibility of presence as their themes.

The poems that most fiercely and vibrantly perform these ideas occupy the twenty-page sequence, Rawshock, the title of which constitutes the phonetic rendering of the famous Rorschach test, a series of inkblots devised by the Swiss psychologist, Hermann Rorschach, and deployed by ingenuous psychologists during the 1960s as a means of detecting underlying thought disorders, ‘especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly.’ You don’t need to be Michel Foucault to feel hyper-invigilated by the idea of one of your fellow humans falling back on interpretation as a diagnostic tool. Or need a Graduate Certificate in Bakhtinian formalism to recognise the symptoms of ‘thought disorder’ – alogia, echolalia, derailment, semantic paraphasia, to name a few – as the stock-in-trade of the poet, the novelist, the playwright. Precisely what it is that constitutes a thought disorder is, these days, mercifully up for debate and it seems to be agreed that such phenomena can be indicative of, for example, ‘incomplete yet potentially fruitful thought processes’. Fitch’s ingenious move is to have ‘married’ the out-of-copyright inkblots with one of the most enduring myths of Western aesthetics. This unlikely coupling has produced a series of poems that re-stages the fates of Eurydice and her estranged husband, Orpheus.

The book’s epigraph, drawn from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland alerts us to what will be at stake in this operation. As Carroll writes, ‘The queen had only one way of settling difficulties, great or small’. Fitch’s decision to include the queen’s command comes to be read not only as the strategic management of the difficult matter of the reader’s entrance into the text but also as the highly ceremonial if somewhat macabre celebration of this initiation. As Derrida wrote of Mallarmé, the name marks ‘the production and annihilation of the thing’ (116). In the poems that follow, Fitch stages a reconsecration of ‘the Mallarméan doctrine of suggestion, of undecided allusion’ (120) so that the atmosphere of the book – from the typographical bonfire of Matthew Holt’s front cover to the final poem in which the day is ‘uncorked like a bottle rocket (“nightcap”) – is ‘alive with evaporating sparks.’ (“Blackout” 27)

The book is divided into three sections – Everyday Static (poems previously published in the form of a chapbook by Vagabond Press), the Rawshock sequence, and Oscillations. It is commonplace to think of the poet as working out philosophy through the poem. More accurately, as the philosopher Alain Badiou has it, ‘philosophical poeticizing’ is best left to the philosophers, leaving the poem free to consist in ‘these two thoughts … the presence of the present in the transfixion of realities; and the name of the event in a leap outside of calculable interests.’ (42) The propensity of the poems collected here to work in these modes is evidenced throughout, not least in the accumulation of influences and ideas that structure the book. Although recent reviews of Rawshock have noted the influence of Rimbaud and Apollinaire – and Fitch has noted [1] also William Carlos Williams, Auden, Ashbery and Baudelaire – most insistently in evidence is the influence of Mallarmé, in the emphasis on the poem as an object ‘made of words and not of what words are used to produce’ and in the typographical and mechanical construction of the book, wholly constituted in the white space of the letter.[2] This influence is most in evidence in the Rawshock sequence, where OU ‘doubles’ the form of one of the Rorschach images:

O U
Can collide
With a bus “in error”,
hold shrapnel and rocks aloft on your way
((   down to Erebus. You can seduce the   ))
(    ferryman, queen Persephone, have     )
(  the fatty-fat, serpent-backed            )
Cerberus melt in your palm,
caress his moth-eaten earlobes
as the Furies   snivel   at your feet,
stop Sisyphus   in his tracks,   Ixion’s wheel,
Nyx     and the Styx     as stoned     as onyx.  You       caN
Collude    with Chaos   all you like,   but you can’t   waive
The fact like     my father     Apollo did:
E don’t     need to     follow
t h e  s u n

Mallarmé famously wrote that a throw of the dice will never abolish chance. More specifically, he wrote that ‘Out of a number of words, poetry fashions a single new word which is total in itself and foreign to the language [langue] … Thus the desired isolation of language [parole] is achieved; and chance (which might still have governed these elements, despite their artful and alternating renewal in meaning and sound) is thereby instantly abolished.’[3]

Badiou nominates Mallarmé’s method as one of ‘subtraction and isolation’ and what this method achieves is the poetic inscription of ‘the absence or hush’. Perhaps this yearning for the concomitant ‘production and annihilation of the thing’ in some way accounts for the snake’s lament in the second poem of the Rawshock sequence

            I want my sssshh                                             ssshhadow back:

Towards the end of the poem the poet has achieved something of a Mallarméan disappearance as ‘the ocean ebbs away’. Still, the hint of a 21^st Century sequel – ‘C  you in the  sHades’ beauty’ –  suggests that these days ‘the hush’ doesn’t always come so easily.

The first sequence of the book – Everyday Static – provides an account of why this might be the case. It can be broadly cast as the identification of the ethics and pitfalls of the Postmodern. The situation is immediately revealed to be one in which a poet or a poem ‘could almost crack open the night’ and drink (“On the Slink” my italics) if only there weren’t all of these tangential moonbeams to deal with, batting their eyelids at bull-bars and generally ‘tearing the chest muscles of … any man with a memory’ (“Tangents”). “Beelines” calls to mind Francis Webb’s ‘a thousand warm humming stinging virtues’ (“Poet”) and Baudrillard’s ululating Simulacra and Simulation in which ‘the world is hardly compatible with the concept of the real that we impose upon it’. This identification of and with the loss of the real triggers the self-imposed ‘fatal strategy’ by which Baudrillard hopes ‘not to reconcile, but on the contrary, to seduce, to wrest things from their condition’. Thus, for Fitch:

the blue car makes a beeline
for a lamppost, the traffic light

goes gridlock-orange, a bullet train
is trapped on never-green tracks, 

and jets fall out of a marooned sky;
why, on waking today, my vision stings 

and my face is puffy: dreaming

is forced to move along paths
that are too well-paved. 

I’ll sleep with my eyes open,
stop my shadow running away. 

Inevitably, there are salves, balms and antidotes, all administered with varying degrees of efficacy. In “Twirl”, ‘we were, we were’ becomes ‘we whirr, we whirr’; still, the foxy light catches up with us and we can’t escape the smell of someone else on our skin (“Aubade”). An aubade is strictly speaking ‘a song from a door or window to a sleeping woman’ and Fitch here and relentlessly elsewhere demonstrates the propensity for an ‘achieved anxiety’ that can be said to permeate the book as a whole. If, as the epigraph to the second sequence drawn from Blanchot’s ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’ suggests, art arises out of Orpheus’ botched attempt to retrieve Eurydice, this first sequence hints that it is not only the distancing of doors and windows that produces poetry but the inescapable scent of proximity.

Some of the poems in the second sequence, then, seem riven with the desire for severance – ‘Skull the ether! Cut me out o this / chrysalis    so I can sing   of asterisms  winking / & dice rolling,  so I can wing it thru buildings / like a lunar scythe.’ That the poems achieve their particular identity by replicating the shape of the Rorschach images seems of some assistance. Two poems later,

                                    Ni                                                        ght

                                     is                                                         so

                                 bri                                                           ttle

The use of Mallarméan espacement, then, astutely oscillates the flow rate of Eurydice’s proximity. As Attridge, writing on Mallarmé, points out, all language ‘can be understood in terms of “writing”: the marks and white spaces on the page are only one realization of the articulations and systems of difference upon which the operations of signification rely, and which at the same time prevent signification from ever closing on itself or on the world.’ (110-11)

But Eurydice, perhaps spurred on by the preponderance of the image, can’t seem to keep away – ‘It was then that E walked up beside you’. (8) What follows is an almost Shakespearean summary of the kind of infernal mess lovers are so adept at getting themselves into: ‘I told you / ou          not to look at me.      ou/ o        Not because              u / I didn’t want to go back / but  because  E  thought that was / what   you   wanted.’ All of which provokes the question ‘Who is ’E, anyway?’ The often invoked but rarely seen ‘feminine’ or just another romantic homme o’ nym(ph)?

Ultimately what this sequence reveals – for this reviewer at least – is that hell might be a place where hermeneuts go to cook up stodgy readings of poems that, like Eurydice, hide under a veil and constitute ‘the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend.’ (171) In “Orpheus’ Gaze”, Blanchot suggests that ‘turning away is the only way [looking at the center of night in the night] can be approached.’ (171) In the third sequence, then, Fitch’s strategy is ‘to bring Eurydice into the daylight, to make the daylight more luminous through the visibility of Eurydice’ (Bruns 70). To do this, the poem is going to have to look away, to give up, as Blanchot has it, on ‘the movement of desire that shatters the song’s destiny’ (176).

The visual similarity of the first sequence, Everyday Static, to the third, Oscillations, suggests that despite everything nothing has changed. These are attractive poems with titles that evoke their subject and deal with it. Occasionally, they are moved to wind themselves across the page cloyingly as with “Emotion Sickness”. Sometimes they use the demarcations of the book to more ingenious effect as with “Nightcap” which spreads its title across two pages and starts ‘The only way to cap / off the night / is to decapitate yourself.’ (84-5) The poem fans itself across the facing pages Hermes-like in the form of a pair of elegant wings and for many weeks I only registered the right-side poem which I’m embarrassed (but also amused and in a weird way, proud) to say I thought was called “tcap”. The eventfulness of the middle sequence, then, produces a ‘tiny displacement’ so that, as Agamben wrote in The Coming Community, ‘everything will be as it is now, just a little different.’ (51) Agamben calls this ‘supplement added to perfection’ the halo. For Agamben, the halo signals ‘a paradoxical individuation by indetermination.’ (53) What we thought was finished and perfect is rewarded with a supplementary glow – ‘The being that has reached its end … thus receives as a gift a supplemental possibility.’ (55) This measured yet brightly glimmering end gives the reader something to think about. Perhaps Lacan was right about the inarticulable supplementary jouissance of the feminine and that when woman speaks of love she does not know what she is saying, even if Lacan does. Or, perhaps, as Fitch seems to be arguing, woman knows very well what she is saying and it is only man who hears the voice of Eurydice as if from the ‘red-carpeted jaws of hell-bending doublespeak’ (Dry, Mainly Sunny).

Works Cited

Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Alain Badiou. Conditions. London: Continuum, 2008.
Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Gerald L. Bruns. Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1974.
Jacques Derrida. “Mallarmé” Trans. Christine Roulston. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Toby Fitch. Rawshock. Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2012.