the thin bridge

by Andy Jackson

Whitmore Press

ISBN 978 0 9873866 4 9
  
  
  

Reviewed by CAMERON LOWE

Andy Jackson’s chapbook The thin bridge (Whitmore Press, 2014) is preoccupied with the human body. If I counted accurately, the words ‘body’ or ‘bodies’ appear in twelve of the twenty-six poems in this slim collection, and of the fourteen other poems the body is present as subject, or part subject, in nearly all of them. If this seems like overkill, it also gives The thin bridge a powerfully unified set of thematic concerns which works effectively in the chapbook form.

If the body is central to this collection, it should also be said that in many of the poems it is a starting point for broader reflections. The book’s first poem, ‘What’s possible between us’ (and it seems important that the question mark is omitted here), introduces the reader, somewhat tangentially, to the preoccupation with the body:

I part the vertical ocean of clothes
and find you there. Spider,

it is almost terrifying to me – suspended
only by the work of your own body. (p. 1)

It is a startling and haunting image, and of course, it is not just the spider’s body that is being evoked here. Yet it is a question the poem poses prior to this—‘Who knows what we’re capable of?’—that resonates throughout The thin bridge. And who is the ‘we’ in question here? One’s initial expectation, given the poem’s title, is that this will be a poem addressing a lover, and that the ‘we’ relates to a couple. However, the poem elides this expectation, producing a destabilising effect for the reader. As with many of the poems that follow this first one, there is a curious tension between the personal and a sense that the poems are probing broader issues. It is a clever dynamic that makes you want to reread the poems, to tease out what might really be at stake.

There is a strong autobiographical element to these poems—as well as a persistent lyric ‘I’—and it is perhaps worth noting that Jackson has Marfan’s syndrome, a condition that affects the body’s connective tissue and can lead to a range of medical disorders including heart disease and spinal curvature. I raise this because on one level the poems appear to demand this sort of biographical reading; the focus on the body—its shape, its frailties, and our responses to physical form—is such an important theme of the book as a whole. Additionally, such biographical information adds a layer of poignancy to a poem such as ‘Desensitised’, where there is a cheeky metaphorical play on the spines of library books, which the poem’s speaker must ‘push…back to vertical’ (p. 10).

Jackson has a talent for striking, and at times confronting, imagery. ‘Mother’s Day’, for instance, brings to mind Barrett Reid’s agonised ‘The Absent Heart’:

They crack open the bone
gates of your chest

to rechannel the paths
your life runs. Five hours

busy around the opened
chasm – machines and

surgeons. (p. 20)

Or, in ‘A certain type of poem’—which might hint at a Charles Simic influence with its ‘immaculate walls of an abattoir’—we are presented with another haunting image:

A life support system, humming after the body is taken / away (p. 7)

‘A language I didn’t know I spoke’, the poem that provides the collection’s title—it’s not exactly a ‘title poem’—is, curiously, one of the few poems in the book that doesn’t display a preoccupation with the body. Rather, the poem appears more concerned with connections between the human and natural world, and makes reference to ‘something obscure we have in common’ (p. 24). It is an interesting poem, in which the poem’s speaker goes on a bush walk and has an unusual encounter with a bird. My initial reaction to the poem was, perhaps ungenerously, that it indulges a little too much in the mysticism of communing with nature. I say ungenerously because the poem eventually deflates any pretensions of special insight on behalf of the poem’s speaker by the remark ‘I…feel / absurdly human’ (pp. 24–25). The poem’s final image, of ‘crossing back / over the thin bridge’ (p. 25), which presumably is a literal bridge but also a metaphor for the passage between different states of being, or states of awareness, is handled with a subtlety that Jackson exhibits throughout the collection.

For all of its considerable strengths, The thin bridge is also a little uneven. The travel poems in the middle of the book, in particular, are something of a flat spot, and seem misplaced in this collection; it might have been wiser, from an editorial viewpoint, to omit them. Few poets are able to successfully write convincing poems about exploring foreign places; as a reader, or at least for this reader, it always feels like being made to look at an album of someone else’s holiday snaps. The poem ‘Reaching and leaning’, which involves a hike in the Muir Woods of California, again provokes an uncomfortable feeling of being invited to share in some kind of mystic experience for the poet:

Standing still and writing this, the voices carry,
all the voices in my head, reaching

and leaning into light, this desire
that shares something with the wood,
the sap, the fingertip seed.

I place my palm against a sapling,
leave a trace. (p. 19)

This is a minor hiccup however, and the book’s final poem, ‘The bike itself’ (p. 35), is a brilliant choice to conclude The thin bridge. There is a temptation to read the poem as an oblique summation of the collection’s preoccupation with physical form; an abandoned bike is slowly picked apart until the object no longer resembles itself, and a half-demolished house is ‘only an empty frame / surrounding a fireplace’ (p. 35). And yet, as with the book’s first poem, ‘The bike itself’ is elusive and ends the collection on a wonderful image:

…Memories not even
lavender-patterned wallpaper can hold onto
lift into the sky, like pollen or dust in reverse.

 
CAMERON LOWE lives in Geelong, Victoria. His two book-length poetry collections are Porch Music (Whitmore Press, 2010) and Circle Work (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013).

Breaking New Sky

Ouyang Yu

5 Islands Press

ISBN 978-0-7340-4824-0

Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY

For a country that crows daily of its multiculturalism, and that is in good part comprised of a long-established and growing Chinese population, it’s perhaps telling that Australia has produced few collections of contemporary poetry from China. Some of those are Otherland Literary Journal, and Vagabond Press’ Asia Pacific Poetry Series. Prolific Australian writer and translator Ouyang Yu has often spoken of his “frustration with Australia’s parochialism and insulation as well as its cultural narrow–mindedness”, and of a desire “to bring something new into this often stifling and strangling…cultural and literary environment” (23-24). Most Australian readers have had little exposure to the rich terrain of contemporary Chinese poetry; nor would they be aware of its turbulent inception in breaking from, and defining itself against both the deeply embedded traditional strictures of Classical Chinese poetry, as well as the repressive political conditions of the post-war period that “in mainland China…pressed [poetry] into the service of the state” (Lupke 1).

Breaking New Sky, a new collection of poems selected and translated by Ouyang, presents work from forty-six established and emerging Chinese (including Taiwanese) poets, born predominantly between the late 50s and 80s (though some as early as 1913 and as late as 2002). The collection’s title – a play on the Western idiom “breaking new ground” – connotes innovation, originality, and also risk. It embodies contemporary Chinese poetry’s iconoclasm, as well as Ouyang’s desire to introduce “something new” into the Australian literary landscape.

The title itself “breaks new ground” by reinventing the hackneyed metaphor. This points to the possibilities of Ouyang’s primary translation technique – “direct translation”: a process where “words or expressions” are translated “as they are in the original, not as they are matched with something roughly equivalent in the target language”. In Bias: Offensively Chinese/Australian, Ouyang writes “it is in this process that new meanings grow on the carcasses of the old stereotypes” (139). Indeed, many of the poems in Breaking New Sky gently challenge, stretch, and vivify English. We see this in off–beat, often unexpectedly beautiful, apt, or playful phrases and images, such as: “The sky is so blue / it does not allow people to be too greedy” from “The Orchard” by Hu Xian; or “Your heart… / A street, laid with black stones, towards the evening” from “A Mistake” by Cheng Chou–yu; or “an ant / fell in love with you last year” from “Possibly” by Qi Guo, to name a few. Sometimes the poems also sit oddly on the page, on the tongue, in the imagination. They ask you to question how English holds and generates ideas.

The translations’ generally plain, understated English lends cohesion to the multiplicity of voices. Though a handful of the poems might be classified as conceptual or more political in nature, most pivot around personal and domestic issues and scenes. Tone is seamlessly rendered in many to generate ambiguous or manifold implications, notably in the collection’s deceptively simple opening poem “Lamps” by Ai Hao. In “Lamps” an almost whimsical sense of urban interconnectedness is engendered when lamps light up from the bottom to top floor of a building in answer to a door “shut with a thud”. But the image soon turns on its head: no one emerges or moves between the floors, and the poem concludes, “It is just a cluster of lamps sensitive / To the sound”. Despite the poem’s clear-cut imagery, the reversal is ambiguous: is the final sentence a statement of fact or a wry metaphor? Has technology assumed the place of people in a parody of human connection and responsiveness? Or are people as isolated as pieces of technology, lacking genuine contact and relationship? The poem’s ambiguity, however, extends deeper; the omission of certain details (what type of building it is, the time of day etc.) allow for myriad permutations: perhaps it’s an office block, after hours, and a draft has blown closed the stairwell door. If one considers China’s “ghost cities” – massive (and expensive) urban developments, sitting empty, unused – the resonances of the poem morph entirely.

In her essay “On English Translation of Modern Chinese Poetry” Michelle Yeh discusses this  particular feature of modern Chinese poetry: through “syntactic ambiguity…a quick succession of images [is presented] that blur[s] the line between reality and imagination by intermingling what seem to be literal descriptions with metaphors.” Looking at the poem “Autumn Window” by Bian Zhilin, Yeh asks “Is the twilight on the gray wall like a tuberculosis patient or is it the other way around?” (281-282). Whilst we see this “intermingling” in “Lamps”, the poem presents in English as syntactically spare, clean; other poems in the collection, however, occasionally struggle to acclimate to English’s more rigid, inflected mode.

An especially intriguing aspect of this collection is the fusion of lyric and nature poetry. Often the boundaries between the human body/experience and the land become blurred. We see this in poems such as “On the Balcony” by Lu Ye, where the speaker watches the Yangtze from her balcony, which mirrors “another Yangtze that originates in [her] heart, running / through [her] body”. The repeated motif of “the sandbar in the heart of the river” reverberates in references to the speaker’s own heart, “my heart is happy, dizzy”, and implicates her experience of love in the landscape. We see the interchangeability of the land with her body when she observes: “My windows all open towards June and the viscera / of the summer exposed / The summer in my body happens to be lush with water grass”. By the end of the poem, land and body aren’t simply mirroring each other, their boundaries have become ambiguous, enmeshed: “…my heart is the origin of Mount Geladaindong / My veins meandering for 6,300 kilometres”.

The first line in “Mother the Hardest to Describe” by Bai Lianchum: “The earth is indescribable”, is echoed in the speaker’s later reflection that his “Mother” is the “hardest / to describe”. The speaker sketches the richness and cycling of natural systems:

…even a fallen leaf is thickly covered with
Seasons and roads. On a south–facing slope, there are so many
Rivers and diamonds growing, so many roses burning
Years are indescribable: dust flying. In the darkness, even grass roots
Are shining. The wind is blowing hither and thither. One moment
the sea is a city
The next a desert…

This is summed up in the following description of his mother who is “as old as young…as ugly / As beautiful and she is as poor as rich. Her / Hands and feet never stop moving”. As we realise the speaker’s mother is literally in the ground and implicated in its processes – “the only white flower she has bloomed into” – the poem acquires an elegiac poignancy. The mother’s interred body becomes the force behind the trajectory of the planet through the cosmos and the turning of the seasons: “…the earth / The years and the life always moving with her. I am also moving / with her”. The body in the ground doesn’t in fact “stop moving”, it becomes deeply integrated in vigorous, living cycles. Nonetheless, the poem recognises the complexity of grief: “To get closer to her, I bury my body. / For many times, in the face of the only white flower / She has bloomed into, I have finally learnt to hold my tears back / Although my fingers still cannot stop trembling.”

Poems in the collection also explore prescriptions of femininity and masculinity. Whilst Ouyang states in the introduction that “[t]he poetry of Chinese women poets that [he has] encountered is more lyrical than political and that is where their power lies”, adding that “in a woman poet’s hands…we detect a tenderness” – it would be reductive to dismiss the deeply political implications of Lu Ye’s poem “B–Mode Ultrasound Report, Gynecology Department”, and how it delicately unhinges stereotypical associations of “tenderness” with women and their bodies. Given the immense sociocultural pressures associated with, and the policies (worldwide) that seek to exert control over women’s bodies, any work exploring these issues is a political one.

Lu’s poem measures the weight of personal longing as well as external and internalised socio-cultural expectations to bear children, against a body that is unable to match them. In the poem, the speaker’s uterus is her singular defining feature, her “final file”, “the most vital part of a woman”. More than this, responsibility for its ability (or inability) to bear children is subtly transferred to the speaker, indicated by her gynaecology report which is like “the remarks on a student’s performance at school in the old days”, also pointing to the way women are talked down to about their own bodies. Lu destabilises the authority of the cool, “accurate and submissive” figures of the report by musing on how it would sound if it were written in “figurative language”, and goes on to describe her uterus’ shape as “closer to a torpedo / Than an opening magnolia denudata” – the image of the torpedo connoting power, as well as destructive force. Its force, ultimately, is turned in upon the speaker, as “this church of love” has become the “ruins of love”. The hyperbolic metaphor of her uterus as “this other heart” reiterates the value assigned to a woman’s reproductive capability: a person can’t live without a functioning heart, though a woman can happily continue living if she’s unable to have children. At the end, we see the way these pressures and expectations have divorced the speaker from her experience of her own body: “This other heart, an organ the most solitary and empty in the body / Ah, instead of being a house, an old garden, it often feels homeless”.

It is impossible to do justice to such a diverse collection in so short a space. To quote Afaa Michael Weaver, “Contemporary Chinese poets emerge from centuries of poetry, much of it attuned to the art of living, of observing human and natural circumstance with a singular concision in the language, of bringing eons of meaning to a single lift of a tea cup to the lips” (xii). Interpreting this richness and deftness through the technique of direct translation, Ouyang offers us a collection that at once speaks to and unsettles our familiarities, drawing us into a dialogue with contemporary Chinese voices.

WORKS CITED

Lupke, Christopher. “Introduction: Towards a Chinese Lyrical Modernity.” Ed. Christopher Lupke. New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008. 1-8.

Ouyang Yu. Bias: Offensively Chinese/Australian – A Collection of Essays on China and Australia. Kingsbury: Otherland Publishing, 2007.

Weaver, Afaa Michael. “Forward: Muddy Rivers and Canada Geese.” Ed. Christopher Lupke. New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008. ix-xv.

Yeh, Michelle. “On English Translation of Modern Chinese Poetry: A Critical Survey.” Ed. Eugene Eoyang and Lin Yao-fu. Translating Chinese Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 275-291.

Distance

by Nathanael O’Reilly

Picaro Press (2014)

ISBN 978-1-921691-76-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and a subsequent rebuilding:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suite for Percy Grainger

by Jessica L Wilkinson

Vagabond

ISBN 978-1-922181-20-6

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CITATIONS

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

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

Maze Bright

by Jaya Savige

Vagabond

Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER BROWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battarbee and Namatjira

by Martin Edmond

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922146687

Reviewed by GRACE COCHRANE                      
 
Martin Edmond is a very engaging storyteller. He involves his readers as if they are taking part in a conversation or reading from the same page in his research. He is also a well-known, award-winning writer of poetry, essays, and screenplays, as well as histories and memoirs—including biographies, so he knows what he is doing.

But there are stories and stories. Some are based solely on evidence – if it exists. Many are constructed from partly remembered or recorded information where the gaps are filled with imagined connections and interpretations. Edmond has done both, in works of fiction and non-fiction. Dark Night: Walking with McCahon (2011), for example, is a very believable but completely imagined account of an actual occasion when New Zealand artist Colin McCahon went missing in 1984 at the time of his exhibition in Sydney.

In this publication, however, using an informal literary writing style, little is imagined or interpreted. Edmond tells it as it is: bringing together the shared story of artists Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira as it has been documented from different points of view, and placing it within the changing political and cultural contexts of their time. This unusual double biography of two artists focuses not so much on their separate personal stories, but on the relationship between them as they pursued their interest in depicting aspects of the Central Australian landscape in watercolour paintings: today we recognise immediately their blue skies, distant purple hills, red rocks, ochre-yellow soil and white tree-trunks. In the 80 years of Rex Battarbee’s life from 1893-1973, and the 57 years of Albert Namatjira’s life within that time from 1902-1959, they worked together over a period of about 30 years, their professional activities ranging from exploring painting techniques to managing their marketplace. Namatjira became famous for his representation in a European watercolour genre of the land he belonged to as an Indigenous Australian, while Battarbee, lesser known at the time as an artist, was crucial as a catalyst.

Edmond not only draws deeply on major publications by scholars and historians about the artists and their work, but also on a number of archival documents in public and private collections, including some important unpublished sources: one of these is Rex Battarbee’s collection of diaries from 1928 until the mid-1950s. Many well-known writers, linguists, artists, philanthropists, prospectors, collectors, ethnographers, missionaries and historians – some associated with the building of the railway and the overland telegraph line –  who visited, or were associated with, Hermannsburg in these years, are drawn into the story. Among them are Baldwin Spencer, J.M Stuart, R.M. Williams, Carl and Ted Strehlow, Charles Mountford, Pastor Albrecht, Frank Clune, Jessie Traill and Una Teague. Within the intriguing accounts of the backgrounds, interests and professions of these many and varied people, their documented voices are extracted as quotes and collaged seamlessly, in italics, into the text. Although the sources for these segments are introduced as part of the story and identified at the end – not in a list but in another narrative that discusses their significance and sometimes, discovery – disconcerting for some readers is the absence of footnotes to the quotes that lead to those sources. But it works for me. Despite the non-academic format I was not only carried along by the story but convinced by the authority of the text.

While it is evident that Edmond visited collections and looked closely at the works of both artists that are so central to the story, it transpires that he was unable to include images of Namatjira’s paintings in the book. He found that through a complex sequence of events the copyright in Namatjira’s work was held not by his descendants but by his dealer/publisher from the 1950s. Legend Press refused permission to use images from two key collections, so Edmond’s book is illustrated only with black and white photos of the artists themselves. These too, are described in the narrative rather than through captions, though listed at the end.

There are no explanations for these formatting decisions, and neither does Edmond explain why he became interested in the topic in the first place. He is obviously closely absorbed in the story but clearly prefers to provide us with evidence rather than interpret it. Curiosity made me dig deeper and this revealed a preliminary document, Double Lives: Rex Battarbee & Albert Namatjira, which was Edmond’s doctoral submission in 2013.[1] What became the published book is the ‘creative work’ component of the thesis, and the initial abstract for the overall submission and later conclusion to the explanatory exegesis, provided the background I was seeking (and following Edmond’s example I will not refer to page numbers within it for the following extracts!). In his introduction to the exegesis he notes of his rationale:

Biography is a primary means of re-construction of the past and, when artists are the subject, that inevitably means a re-evaluation of what they made. We tend to forget how some of those whose work we take for granted these days were once ignored; and also that among those we now celebrate are some who will not later be remembered: but that is where I like to work, in the terrain between remembering and forgetting. It is here that what is lost may be found again; where what has been occluded may come back into the light; where the familiar can be made strange and the strange, familiar.

Edmond became interested during previous research for The Supply Party, his 2009 book about Ludwig Becker, the German-Australian watercolour painter who died during the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860-61. He began to wonder if Battarbee had ever seen Becker’s work, which seemed to him to prefigure that of Namatjira. He discovered that little information existed about Battarbee, and concluded that:

If Battarbee was a cipher, Namatjira … had become an icon: that is …They were both, rather than themselves, representative of notions espoused by others. Soon, a casual inquiry morphed into something more like a mission: I wanted to restore Rex Battarbee to a place in the history of his times and ours; and to retell the story of Albert Namatjira so that it could be understood, not as polemic or example or parable, but as a lived life.

And this is what he proceeds to do. Edmond makes sure readers are first conversant with the background to the story, but without interpretation, saying:

In my view such inquiries by their very nature privilege story-telling over analysis, information over speculation, practise before theory; narrative has to take precedence because without knowing what has happened, how can we begin to understand what it might mean? A deliberate refusal, in the first instance, of interpretative strategies might seem idiosyncratic, indeed impractical, but I felt that any approach that tried to deconstruct earlier versions of what Namatjira ‘meant’ would only exacerbate the problem. The important thing was to establish, as far as possible, the truth of the matter.

Edmond’s introduction takes us directly into three key contextual frameworks: that of the Arrernte people of Central Australia, of whom Namatjira was part; the Lutheran church which established the Hermannsburg mission near Alice Springs, where he was born; and the anthropologists who started to document Aboriginal life and customs, often while travelling for another purpose. This is followed by a chapter on Battarbee’s early life: born in Warrnambool, he had served in World War 1 and had received severe injuries including damaged lungs and a useless left arm with a paralysed hand. Next is a chapter documenting Namatjira’s origins from his birth at the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission into the Western Arrernte-speaking people from near Alice Springs, and where he grew up in a Western evangelical community which sought to provide sustainable living conditions for its members, while having little tolerance for the practice of indigenous traditions. From this point, further chapters cross the 1920s to the 1950s, following the interweaving paths of both artists. In talking about their work, Edmond clarifies in the abstract to the thesis that he means: ‘ … both the artefacts they made and the traditions they inherited, transformed and passed on to succeeding generations’.

After three years in hospital following the war, Battarbee studied commercial art, but then began painting landscapes, using practical and quick-drying watercolours, partly because his damaged hand was sensitive to oil and turpentine. Namatjira married young, controversially, and left the Mission for some years to work on outstations and as a camel driver. In 1928 Battarbee set out with his friend John Gardner to Queensland where they painted landscapes for later sale in an exhibition in Adelaide. In the following years they made further trips, this time to Central Australia where they met people at Hermannsburg, including, in 1932, a ‘camel-man’ who showed interest in what they were painting. This was Albert Namatjira, who was already drawing and poker-working artefacts for the Mission, and who started asking for painting supplies following another visit in 1934.

In Central Australia Battarbee evolved his own layering technique for applying coloured pigments to achieve ‘luminosity’, identified in his work as early as 1932 in a painting of Bitter Springs Gorge. In 1936 when he returned alone, eventually to stay, he began to work closely with Namatjira who had already started painting, encouraged by the example of several visiting artists, and who sought his assistance. Recognising both his interest and his talent, Battarbee agreed to teach him this plein-air style of painting, including his own technical secrets. Namatjira responded by telling Battarbee tribal stories of the lands they visited. As they worked together, and as Namatjira’s work started to sell, Battarbee became his manager as well as mentor, as they dealt with ‘the practicalities of making art in a remote area in the middle years of the twentieth century’.

The story takes us though their shared excursions into the land; Namatjira’s introduction to photography, which Battarbee used; and the development of what became known as the Hermannsburg School of painting, which continues today. As well as discussions about achieving ‘luminosity’, using ‘colour’ and ‘painting from memory’, also included are the controversies in the art world about the value or otherwise of Indigenous artists adopting or ‘aping’ this foreign style of painting, and whether or not what appeared to be conventional ‘side-on’ landscapes also carried tribal meanings or anthropomorphised representations. As Edmond notes: ‘The question of who sees what is raised every time we look at Namatjira’s painting; and especially when we consider the possibility that he encoded in his art information that not everyone could be expected to know.’

Further issues include the emergence of unscrupulous dealers and the commodification of work made by other artists, the financial expectations according to custom by Namatjira’s extended family as he became famous and well-off and the changing role of both the Mission and Battarbee during this time. Also documented are the concerns associated with government policies for assimilation, such as Namatjira’s frustration at earning money and being taxed but not being allowed to buy a car, build a house in Alice Springs because of a curfew for Aboriginal people or lease grazing land where he also wanted to paint. His much-publicised ‘citizenship’ in 1957 removed him and his wife, Rubina, but not his family, from the register of wards of the state. However, now with access to alcohol along with all the remaining contradictions in his life, including having to apply for a permit to visit his traditional lands, this frustration eventually resulted in his death, a conclusion recognised with shame and guilt by those growing critical of such conditions.

Battarbee and Namatjira is an immensely readable book, sad but celebratory. Most readers will be aware of some of the story and many of the characters, events, issues and places. But this narrative provides details and insights that I doubt can be found together elsewhere. Martin Edmond’s thesis becomes a reality, in showing that: ‘Albert Namatjira, rather than a wanderer between worlds, was a bridge; that was what he painted and that was where he was torn apart and died; and we are still contending over the bones on the bridge that he made’, and that ‘Rex Battarbee was his friend, his teacher, his guide—and his dealer; he too was torn apart and abandoned to the anonymity of a dead hero; the relationship of artist and dealer is the spine of this story.’ I think Martin Edmond has achieved what he intended. As he concludes in his thesis:

Story-telling is an ancient art and one of its primary functions, throughout its long history, has been to furnish an audience with the material out of which they can come to their own conclusions, construct their own interpretation, find their own understanding.

[1] All quotes are from: Martin Edmond, Double Lives : Rex Battarbee & Albert Namatjira, Thesis for a Doctorate of Creative Arts, The University of Western Sydney,  2013.

 
GRACE COCHRANE AM is an independent curator and writer, who has specialised in the field of contemporary crafts for over 40 years. She wrote The Crafts Movement in Australia: a History (UNSW Press 1992), and has written or contributed to a large number of other publications. A former museum curator, she has been a member of many boards and continues to examine post-graduate submissions, contribute to conferences and develop exhibitions. She has an MFA and PhD (1999) from the University of Tasmania and a D.Litt from the University of NSW (2007).

Here Come the Dogs

by Omar Musa

Penguin

ISBN 9780670077090

Reviewed by REBECCA JESSEN

In an unnamed small suburban town we follow the lives of three young men, Solomon the over-confident charmer, Jimmy his half-brother who tags along, waiting to make his mark, and Aleks who is slightly removed from the others, looking after his family and dealing with the consequences of his violent past. Each of the characters has their own story and set of problems, but the three men are united by a love of hip-hop, graffiti, violence and women.

It’s no surprise then to find out that Omar Musa is multi-talented, a poet and rapper from Queanbeyan, New South Wales. In 2008 he won the Australian Poetry Slam and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam in 2009. On top of this, Musa has also released two self-published books (The Clocks and Parang), two solo hip-hop records (World Goes To Pieces and The Massive EP) and a self-titled album with international hip-hop group, MoneyKat. Here Come The Dogs is his first full-length novel.

Here Come The Dogs is part prose, part verse novel, Musa alternates between prose and verse effortlessly. It takes a skilled writer to be able to pull off the two styles and deftly weave them together with such self-assuredness. Musa credits his style of verse to late Australian poet Dorothy Porter. Musa says, ‘I tried writing verse in different forms and I couldn’t quite get it, but after reading Monkey’s Mask it clicked and I could see how verse could paint pictures and vignettes quickly.’ (Kennedy 2014) Porter’s influence is apparent, though perhaps most evidently through Musa’s willingness to tackle the big issues with a level of fearlessness. In an interview with Melbourne Spoken Word, Musa says, ‘It’s unafraid to be unruly, and dangerous, and wild. And I like to hope that this book is a little bit fearless; that I kind of went for it.’ (Maya 2014)

Musa embraces the language of the streets in Here Come The Dogs, at times it reminded me of Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man (2013), which is set mostly in Western Sydney; the two books share similar themes and language. Growing up in Western Sydney, much of Musa’s landscape is familiar to me and there are echoes of that suffocating feeling that you’re stuck in a place you’ll never make it out of.

Here Come The Dogs opens at the dog races and the rhythm, use of language and imagery immediately sets the tone for the rest of the novel.

Where are these cunts?

Too hot, bro,
too fucken long without rain.
Two by two they troop in,
the madness of summer in the brain.

In the dying light,
the crowd looks like hundreds of bobbling balloons,
waiting to be unfastened.

Sweating tinnies and foreheads –
sadcunts and sorrowdrowners the lot of them. (5)

Musa tackles many themes throughout the novel, some more overt than others. In an interview, Musa says ‘I was interested in writing about powerlessness, about migrations, masculinity and violence in Australian society…’ (Kennedy 2014) These themes come through very strongly in the book and create many talking points. What struck me most were the connections Musa draws between masculinity and violence and how this impacts the women in the novel. I found the treatment of women throughout the novel to be particularly problematic and troubling, partly because it rings true, and partly because Musa does little to challenge stereotypes and in many scenes only works to reinforce them.

One of the main characters, Jimmy, is in the supermarket browsing the aisles and muses,

‘You’re in charge, browsing where you like, and it’s all on display for your pleasure. Take what you want.’ (102)

On reading this passage I immediately marked it on the page and would return to it again and again as I continued reading. This attitude of ownership and privilege seems indicative of how the men in Here Come The Dogs relate to and treat women. As a queer, feminist reader, I’m aware of my own set of biases when reading a text, especially a text that goes out of its way to be viewed as ‘masculine’. One look at the endorsements on the front cover (Christos Tsiolkas and Irvine Welsh) is telling of the intended audience for the book. There are many gems of truth to be found in this book, especially relating to race and racism, Musa seems on point in the sections that deal with these issues, however when it comes to portrayals of sexism and misogyny, there’s still work to be done.

At one point, Scarlett Snow, Solomon’s new fling, calls Solomon out on the fact that he has no female friends.

‘Do you have any female friends?’
‘Course.’
‘Ones you haven’t slept with?’
‘…’
‘Your group of mates is a cock forest, Solomon. Admit it.’
‘It’s not that bad. They’ve been my mates forever, what do you want me to do?’
‘Don’t you hate people who are all style over substance?’
I try to smile. ‘Ouch.’
‘I’m serious. If you don’t contribute anything, anything at all, what’s the point?’
I realise she’s for real. ‘Why do you keep seeing me, then?’
‘Because you’re a good fuck.’
‘Jesus.’ Whatever she’s doing, it’s working. I’ve never been more angry or turned on.
‘What about companionship? Don’t you think you need that?’
She laughs. ‘I don’t need anything. Least of all from you.’
I want to make her take the words back.
She’s loving it,
Suddenly self-destructive.
‘Used to getting your way, aren’t you Solomon?’
I stand up shaking.
‘See you again soon? I’ll call you,’ she says.
‘I’ll think about it.’ I want to hit her. (181)

This scene illustrates to the reader that Musa is aware of the lack of female characters, and more so, the treatment of women in the novel. However, simply pointing out an issue isn’t enough to qualify as having dealt with it. This is a key scene in terms of the intersection between notions of masculinity and violence and how these beliefs impact the female characters. When faced with being emasculated, each of the three male characters respond with violence in an attempt to regain power and control over their situation. Solomon does this on several occasions, first with girlfriend Georgie, then later with Scarlett Snow.

Throughout the novel, there is a consistent theme, women lack a voice, they have no agency. Aleks’ wife Sonya appears to be suffering from depression but we never find out exactly why. When Aleks finds out his sister Jana has a girlfriend, he reacts with violence, ultimately severing his relationship with his sister. Jimmy stalks Hailee, a travel agent who has a boyfriend and no interest in being involved with Jimmy. He follows her home from the supermarket and watches her through an open window. Later, when she embarrasses him, he goes to her house again and throws a brick through the window. Instances like these are littered throughout Here Come The Dogs, and while these views may not be consistent with the author’s, Musa fails to create any internal or external consequences for his character’s actions and treatment towards women.

The novel loses some of its fire towards the end, and rather than going out with a bang, it seems to slowly fizzle out in Part Three. While each of the three male characters are well drawn, Solomon and Jimmy lack character development as the novel progresses. Aleks seems to undergo the biggest transformation towards the end of the novel when he decides against using violence to solve a problem. In direct contrast, Jimmy starts a bushfire and Solomon lets everything slip away, rather than fighting for what he believes in.

‘Fuck the court. Fuck the kids.
And fuck Scarlett if she doesn’t wanna call back.

Maybe she’d stay if I got her pregnant …’ (294)

Jimmy is the most interesting and complex of the three male characters. It’s no coincidence that Jimmy is the one who ends up with Mercury Fire, the greyhound Solomon bought. Both Jimmy and Mercury Fire are wounded, broken underdogs that nobody expects much of.

Musa uses the verse form to great effect, combining poetry and narrative energy to thrust the reader forward, through the book. Musa’s delivery is to be admired, in parts, the writing sparkles. Imagery is at times lush and lucid, reminding the reader, even in the prose sections, there is a poet at work here.

‘I always thought that, from above,
The circle of heads
Would look like bullets loaded in a chamber,
Each MC ready with his percussive, weaponised voice.’ (24)

WORKS CITED

Kennedy, Cris. “Omar Musa’s Here Come The Dogs is trainspotted”. Sydney Morning Herald. 2014. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/omar-musas-here-come-the-dogs-is-trainspotted-20140709-zszu5.html. (Viewed 19 January 2015)

Maya, Carrie. “Interview with Omar Musa”. Melbourne Spoken Word 2014. http://melbournespokenword.com/?p=1115. (Viewed 19 January 2015)

REBECCA JESSEN is the award-winning author of verse novel Gap (UQP, 2014). Her writing has been published in The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, Stilts and Scum Mag. She blogs at becjessen.wordpress.com.

Gap

by Rebecca Jessen

UQP

ISBN 9780702253201

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

For many readers, the contemporary verse novel offers a startling reading experience; so directly, so succinctly, so urgently does the form communicate—that it compels a single-sitting reading, and is no less memorable for it.

Rebecca Jessen’s Gap is one such verse novel; with just over two hundred pages that can be read in an hour or so, its strong literary effect derives from the force of its narrative drive, its foregrounding of character action and cognition, and most particularly from its method of narration.

Jessen chose the first-person mode to convey “a voice that was urgent and unapologetic, a voice that would draw readers in” (Interview). Gap is one of increasing numbers of verse novels that ignore the mimetic convention of novel-writing implicit in the dictum: “one cannot at the same time live a story and narrate it” (Abbott). Jessen combines use of the first person with present-tense discourse. It is by virtue of this narrative technique that the protagonist of Gap, Ana, seems to narrate events—as she experiences them. For Jessen, the use of first-person present tense in Gap “allows readers to really get inside Ana’s head and (hopefully) form some kind of personal connection with her” (Interview).

Stand in front

of the fridge
forgotten what
I’d come for

rearrange the magnets
in my head
if only time
could be
so easily
manipulated

take a beer out
twist the cap open
with my shirt
watch as the fabric
recoils (52)

The benefits of this choice of narration may not seem immediately obvious. After all, why not narrate using retrospective narration, with the benefit of hindsight that it enables the narrator whose retelling, after the events, can be reflected on and revisioned at will? The answer lies in the psychological imperatives of the verse novel. With its central concerns of need and loss, the focus in Gap is on the consequences of a pivotal event in the life of the protagonist, Ana, and her subsequent unravelling, rather than on a plot-drive towards a denoument; indeed the poems reveal early on what has happened, so the remaining question throughout the narrative is why—why would the protagonist commit this crime, given her circumstances—what compelled her and how did it happen? To ensure this tension Gap withholds the reasons until thirty-five pages before the book ends.

The extenuating circumstances of the protagonist’s situation form the verse novel’s sub-plots: the damaged relationship with her mother; the close connection between Ana and her younger sister Indie—for whom she is sole carer; the troubled memories of Ana’s childhood and adolescence; and the “unfinished business” between Ana and her ex-lover, Sawyer—this being complicated by the latter’s conflict of interest as a police officer investigating the crime for which Ana is prime suspect. While each of these sub-plots has a prescribed and limited scope in the narrative, nevertheless each aggravates and confounds Ana’s situation.

No easy resolution or redemption is offered; the protagonist’s self-doubt, her fear of being left alone, of loss, and the futility of her situation are all palpable. Indeed, Gap emphasises instantial cognitive and psychological processes: logic, reason; rationalisation and compensation. The immediacy of the narration draws attention to Ana’s psychological incongruities and heightens awareness of her ethical dilemmas.

Kick around

loose gravel
waiting for
the bus home

fixated
by a magpie
on the powerlines

watch it

swoop

for its prey
with such
measured
urgency

wonder if

getting

what I want
could be
that easy
too.  (178)

Three noticeably longer poems in Gap exploit the immediacy that first person present tense narration offers. Each poem’s focus is on an unfolding and significant narrative event, and in each, Jessen’s measured delivery allows a gradual discharge of action and emotion that heightens tension. In the first example, a five page poem (183-188), Ana returns to her mother’s house and in a flashback of memory, relives her crime. The poem’s corresponding shift into historical present tense lends urgency to the telling of the fateful experience. A second poem of four pages in first person, present tense, captures the unfolding dramatic tension when Ana is interrogated at the police station (101-104). The third poem, spanning five pages (191-195), is a reckoning poem, a moment of realisation for Ana—that her life is irreparably changed; a moment when her fears about her future are suddenly amplified:

‘I don’t know,
Indie
maybe this is
what needs to happen
maybe this
is it’

Indie shakes her head
tears forming

‘Please
don’t let them
take you’

I put my arms
around her

try
to give her
a feeling
of safety

knowing
it won’t last. (195)

Gap’s complement of poetic and narrative strategies heighten character cognition, narration and narrative momentum. Jessen breaks with the convention of titled poems and instead uses bold font for the first line of each poem. Punctuation is kept to a minimum. Each poem is constructively segmented to delineate exchanges of dialogue, regulate pacing and support rhetorical emphases. A comparatively lean writing style coupled with laconic phrasing engenders the character’s idiolect. The most common use of trope is simile, accessible examples of which include ‘know tonight /will drag/ like a freight train / crossing country (95) and ‘as if this is stand-up/ and I’m the punchline/ Sawyer has missed’ (72).

A recipient of the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards for Best Emerging Author, Jessen graduated from Queensland University of Technology’s Bachelor in Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 2011. Gap won the 2012 State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award in the short story category. Further awards are conceivable: with four accessible publication formats—paperback, epub, pdf and Kindle—Gap will likely garner broad appeal from a crossover audience of readers of Adult and Young Adult fiction.

In the wake of Gap’s auspicious beginning, Jessen now finds herself reflecting on its success and contemplating her next project. Jessen, who never imagined her first book would be a verse novel, recollects “it was a complete surprise but a very welcome one” (Interview). Judging by the success of Gap, readers would welcome further ‘surprises’ from Jessen.

WORKS CITED

Jessen, Rebecca. Gap. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2014.
—. Interview by Linda Weste, 21 January 2015.
Porter Abbott, H. “Narration.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narratology, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 339-344. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

LINDA WESTE is a poet, editor and teacher of creative writing. Her latest academic research on verse novels is available in the online journals New Scholar and JASAL. She is currently writing her second verse novel.

A Vicious Example

by Michael Aiken

Grande Parade Poets

Reviewed by ALI JANE SMITH
   
 

I’ve been visiting Sydney all my life. Doing city things; museums, art galleries, parks, department stores and shops that specialise in the necessary obscurities you can now order online. There are places in Sydney that have been transformed beyond recognition since my childhood, and others that have changed so little they can put me right back there, holding an adult’s hand and looking up at the little piece of blue sky between the tall buildings.

Many of the lyric poems in A Vicious Example take city scenes, often Sydney scenes, as their subject, and the most accomplished piece in the book is a long sequence on the city of Sydney. Michael Aiken, however, is as much interested in Sydney’s car parks and loading docks as he is in golden sandstone and glittering water. While Modernist literature of the twentieth century drew on city life experiences of speed, change, disruption, proximity and mobility, both thematically and aesthetically, Aiken’s approach is very much of his own time. There are glimpses of the more familiar fast and bustling city, but at other times the pace is slow, the spaces close to empty, his attention focused on the city as peridomestic habitat as much as a site of heightened human interaction. He writes not as flâneur, but as sentinel.

According to Aiken, the best view of Sydney can only be seen through

the guard’s
compartment
at  the rear  of
a    North Shore   train
going across the bridge

and an alcove behind the, “’premier address in Sydney’” is also a convenient place for urination. Aiken sees such places – the famous bridge, the smart cbd address — not from the perspective of commuter or office worker, but from that of the guard. He watches brief scenes and interactions, observes change over time, finds the poetry in repetition.

there’s an echo here of Frank O Hara’s poem ‘Lana Turner has collapsed’, perhaps even Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase, but the key to the image is repetition, the fact that this is not a one-off experience inspiring affect, but a repeated observation that invites the reader to think further. Aiken sees the obvious but often overlooked cruelties and follies we all practice, and has a measure of vitriol to share, but can also be generous and appreciative, as in ‘Burwood Park’, where he celebrates the women who “perform their kata in the gazebo”, the operatist who “gives out an aria” and the fearless council worker in rubber gloves. This scene of community and civic life is brought into focus by the presence of a war memorial, “remembering the dead/ who were never there to realise/ we won.”

Another poem, ‘The canal’, has the canal as a kind of metronome, more accurately a water clock, filling and emptying regularly and repeatedly, the detritus of styrofoam cups and beer bottles described in the same breath as koels and cuckoos. The canal is observed overnight, and as daylight and the streetsweepers arrive, until at last the real experts on this locale, golfers “with secret knowledge of how every trap, ridge and fairway performs” arrive as the canal continues its business of filling and emptying and filling again.

Aiken does not always use the kind of care and restraint that makes this odd poem simultaneously appealing and unsettling. Included in the collection are the kinds of poems that might get an immediate reaction in a performance, for example, but don’t stand up to much re-reading or deeper consideration. There are enough poems in this book that making a few exclusions could well have resulted in a more focused collection of strong poetry. The temptation to simply let as much work as possible find an audience, or to demonstrate a variety of interests and styles might explain the inclusion of some of the pieces in this collection.

At the close of the book, Aiken includes an explanation ‘On the use of excerpts from Tim Low’s The new nature and John Birmingham’s Leviathan in Sydney: 1934 13922k1 – 1811 1682k2’. This explanation becomes a de facto statement of his poetic. Aiken discusses his use of excerpts from John Birmingham’s history of Sydney, Leviathan, and Tim Low’s The New Nature, a study that looks at the species of native birds and animals that have emerged as winners in the encounters and interactions between humans and other species, from the familiar birds we see in our backyards and parklands to bird species that have flourished as a result of the construction of sewage systems. On re-reading the poems after reading this explanation, Aiken’s selection of these two texts seems inevitable. It’s not just Birmingham’s lively, rock ‘n’ roll writing style that is likely to have appealed to Aiken, but also Birmingham’s interest in the continuities, as well as the disruptions, in Sydney’s history. The many hours this poet has logged in the security industry, working strange hours in odd places, seems to have provided an ideal opportunity for sustained observation of the less picturesque fauna of the city – there are recurring appearances by foxes, rodents, currawongs, ibis, and bats. It’s the kind of nature writing that Tim Low practices, the natural history of things as they are, rather than a reaching toward an imagined return to an idealised, pre-lapsarian wilderness.

These two texts might also be thought of as an echo of the Aiken’s use of time and space in his poetry. In this closing explanatory piece, Aiken makes it clear (though it is evident in the poems) that the pragmatic reality of his work as a security guard has revealed the life of the city at times and in places that most readers will not have experienced. It also implies the stationery gaze, the repetition of experience and observation that is so significant in this poetry, and leads to Aiken’s understanding of the city as interconnected systems, even ecosystems. It might not be everybody’s idea of ‘ecopoetry’, but Aiken’s interest in the life of the plants, animals, and birds of the city looks squarely at the way that birds and animals often framed as pests, and plants known as weeds thrive in both public and interstital spaces. It is an utterly contemporary, even urgently needed, way of looking at ideas of nature and culture. Perhaps Aiken identifies with the flying fox, hidden in plain sight in the foliage of trees in the parkland and gardens of the city.

Fixing the Broken Nightingale

Richard Allen

Flying Island Books (2013)

Reviewed by MICHELE SEMINARA

Fixing the Broken Nightingale, Richard Janes Allen’s tenth poetry collection, is a small treasure of a book – one you might pop into your bag and dip into at idle moments for bursts of inspiration, contemplation or solace. Indeed, the physical design of the book (it’s part of Flying Island’s petite Australian Pocket Poets Series) recalls a more romantic time when poetry was indeed carried and savoured in this way; while the title – evoking Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – suggests that similar themes of mortality, bliss, suffering and the power of words to save us will be explored.

Allen’s background as a yoga teacher and the influence of eastern spiritual traditions are immediately obvious in this collection, which is divided into five sections plus an epilogue and a prologue – where we are invited to ‘Step with me now’ into an ‘eternal moment’, one which paradoxically ‘cannot last forever’. The poet begins by deftly exploring the ‘insanity’ which we are ‘indigenous to’ (21) – the ‘Natural Disasters’, as the first section of the book is entitled. Here we are presented with small, humanistic disasters – spider-webs that entangle us, broken glass waiting to slash our tyres – in a series of glistening vignettes which explore how our everyday moments and actions are interrelated. In the whimsical poem ‘how many umbrellas or love letters’, the poet muses on the fate of his lost umbrellas, imagining that

                                                                                                 … these
randrom forgetfulnesses may have been the major contribution of my
life, popping up in the lives of others like the tips of islands emerging
in a world where the sea levels are actually dropping to save beautiful
but bedraggled shipwrecked wayfarers in a lost play by a man still
named Bill.

It seems that in Allen’s interconnected world there is no option of remaining separate, and what first pulls the speaker out of the illusion of himself and into the ‘connection’ he longs for is love; or perhaps, more accurately, intercourse (in the fullest sense of the word). In ‘Perils of Unfindability’, the speaker fears that if he fails to hold back his heart ‘a seismic event / of epic proportions’ may seep through ‘every corner of the eco-system of my life’. But of course, it will anyway, and in the second section, ‘Unanswered Questions’, the inside and the outside merge – ‘I was vibrating / inside / your room’ (37) – as boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ are probed:

I feel like
I have lost something
and am wondering
if I’ll find it
inside you
I am hoping
a part of me
will find it
somewhere in the waters
of you

(‘13 Acts of Unfulfilled Love’)

Here the poet, as spiritual seeker, searches for the source of eternal bliss, actualising a temporary nirvana through the union of male and female (a method reminiscent, once again, of Eastern spiritual traditions).

Moving us further into territory that is both Keatsian and Eastern in flavour, the third section of the book, ‘Occasional Truths’, explores themes of ageing, change, loss and death. The poems here focus in and out on moments in space / time that are always happening ‘now’; everything is viewed as being in a state of flux and interconnection. A standout poem, ‘Kokoda’, functions as a type of poetic ‘breathing meditation’, with Allen using the breath (as it is used in yogic practise), to yoke us to the only time, the ‘now’:

I breathe in          this moment is
the same as any other

I breathe out        beneath every action, every situation,
the sameness of the moment

The same breath, and technique, is also used to unite us to each other:

I breathe in         we are the same
my moment is your moment
your breath is my breath
my blood is your blood

I breathe out       all that separates us
is the illusion of time
the illusion of life
the illusion of death

Similarly, ‘Abiding’, the final poem in this section, resembles a classic Buddhist meditation in which one visualises oneself surrounded by all living beings (whilst cultivating a view of separation as a mere matter of perspective), in an attempt to equalise the strength of one’s feelings towards others.

It’s as if those who you knew
are in the foreground,

and those who you knew about
are in the middle ground

and those who you didn’t know
are in the background.

And that’s everywhere
you look.

For a book so concerned with the spiritual, it is interesting that not until the fourth section, ‘Flickering Enlightenment’, is the term ‘God’ explicitly used, with God’s ‘fragile’ people presented as ‘vessels / For the pouring / Of the spirit’ (81). In ‘A Poem For Other People / As I Have No Doubts Or Regrets’, one feels that the poet is experiencing his ‘dark night of the soul’, as he explores aspects of the human psyche which ‘wake you in the middle of the night’. Now, in this poetic search for ultimate meaning, the poems become less visceral, more subtle, as we head toward the ‘borders’ beyond which words cannot take us:

Here it is.                              The final gate.
When you pass this gate                  no one will know
that you’ve passed this gate             or where you’ve gone
and soon it will be forgotten                 that you ever existed.

(‘Armistace’)

As with so many of the poems in this collection, here, in ‘Armistice’, the unusual layout of the poem expresses physically what words cannot: as the words become sparser and sparser, they frame the negative space through which the poet seeks to disappear. This technique is taken even further in the disappearing poem, ‘Chimera’, where words –

like a kind of heavy water that must be
        evaporated leaving only a mist
            with no more substance
                than the wisps
                      of a

– are abandoned all together. Like a spiritual teacher attempting to point the way to liberation, the poet strives to articulate that which is beyond conception and therefore cannot be expressed through the conceptual tool of words. This is a conundrum Allen solves to great effect by manipulating the physical form of the poems on the page; perhaps his background as a dancer is also at play here.

Finally however, Allen, like Keats in ‘Nightingale’, must return from his flight of fancy to the realm of the mortal, and in the last section of the book, ‘A Scheme for Brightness’, he does so, but is left asking, in ‘The Neverness of Speech’, what is the point of speaking, striving, when:

… love
vibrates at a frequency
outside of the range

of what we
normally can hear.

The answer emerges in ‘A Scheme for Brightness’, a bird-shaped poem whose form suggests that Allen is flying on both Keats’s ‘viewless wings of Poesy’ and the dual wings of compassion and wisdom said to be necessary for reaching enlightenment. Here, the speaker, having had everything ‘stolen’, his identity stripped so that ‘It is hard to say what remains’, sits ‘on the edge of infinity’ searching for something to make him ‘believe that the / human race is worthwhile after all’. Having mentally travelled to the furthest corners of the universe, Allen now returns to his normal consciousness, his desire to connect, through words, calling him back – in the Epilogue – to the ‘Forgotten Nectar in the Sleeper’s Cave’: ‘I will wake up to poetry once more’ he proclaims, because ‘In this dark, my only candles are – the poets’(105).

This grand poetic quest for unity, for connection, now ends – as another poetic great, T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, told us it must – ‘where we started’, in a return to the union of male and female, in:

… the memory of our first kiss
that moment
when we tasted
in that wet and sparkling fuse
in that dewy firecracker
a few flashing drops
from the blazing river of the Soul

(‘Forgotten Nectar in the Sleeper’s Cave’)

While poetry cannot offer salvation, it can, Allen suggests, offer solace. The ‘Nightingale’ may be broken, yet like the poet, he still sings, and perhaps his song is all the more beautiful for being fractured.
  

MICHELE SEMINARA is a poet and yoga teacher from Sydney. Her writing has appeared in Seizure, Bluepepper, Tincture Journal, Regime and Verity La. She is managing editor for Verity La.

Madame Mephisto

by A.M. Bakalar

Stork Press

ISBN 978-0-9571326-0-3

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

If the artist is a trickster, then Polish British writer A. M. Bakalar’s debut novel Madame Mephisto (2012) shows great mastery – albeit never in an entirely gratuitous or wanton way. A.M. Bakalar belongs to a generation of writers that have embraced the triumphalist illusions of the global capitalist market, only to better subvert it in covert, subtler ways. In so doing, these writers have chosen to bypass and reject the grand narratives of modernity, about the worker’s revolution, about women’s liberation, for what they really were – yet another (dis)illusion. This may be explained by the fact that writers such as Bakalar are new players to the game, coming from so-called emerging economies and eager to partake in the trafficking of world literatures across cultures. At the same time, they depart from certain postmodern currents dominant around the 1980s-90s, for which the art of simulacrum had become an end in itself. As an illustration, a certain type of manufactured magic comes to mind. In the words of Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet: “In a continent [Latin America] that was once ultra-politicized, young, apolitical writers like myself are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences.” Fuguet defines this literature to be quite “unlike the ethereal world of Garcia Marquez’s imaginary Macondo” in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and closer to what he dubs McOndo, “a world of McDonald’s, Macintoshes and condos.”

Born and raised in Poland, the London-based narrator in Bakalar’s Madame Mephisto does not have any illusions whatsoever towards her homeland’s Communist past under Soviet rule: “Under the banners of the Polish United Workers’ Party to the victory of socialism! The Polish-Soviet friendship! Bollocks.” (4) Neither was she ever deceived by the significance of Poland joining the European Union (EU) in 2004, seen as yet another case of (western) imperialism: “Western Europe realised that the countries of the former Soviet bloc would soon become goldmines of opportunity. McDonald’s had just opened its doors and we all queued for hours to taste the West.” (5-6) All the same, Magda consciously tricks herself into believing in the fables of free-market ideology as a means to an end: leave Poland, its corruption, its ultra-nationalism and religious extremism, which for women means being treated as second-class citizens forced (for those who can afford it) to abort abroad. As Magda’s twin sister Alicja observes: “All this talk about Muslim fundamentalism in the press and television but nobody says that right in the heart of Europe, Catholic fundamentalists are quietly gaining more and more power.” (75)

Magda’s ruthless journey into the English corporate world confronts the latter with another kind of fanaticism: market fundamentalism. Her career path, from being hired to being fired and hired again elsewhere, works as a cover up for the lies we hear and like to tell ourselves: that wage labourers choose freely (read: they have no choice but) to sign and terminate a job contract; that workers in the neoliberal age need to be flexible and mobile (read: dispensable and disposable), multi-tasked (read: made more easily redundant), performant (read: profitable), competitive yet able to work as a team (read: contemptuous of other colleagues and subservient to the hierarchy), and, especially for women, amenable and smiling (read: malleable and ready to be hurled abuse at). Magda does not hold any delusions of grandeur concerning the world of men, marriage or motherhood either. A self-proclaimed single and childless young woman with few attachments, she is neoliberalism’s embodiment of the monadic/nomadic Self, for whom love consists of “on-and-off relationships” (26), and the family, a burden with which to cut off ties, except around Christmas time. As she remarks in one of her many aphoristic moments: “All relations in life are temporary. Losing your job is a given. It is only a matter of time but it will happen eventually.” (57)

Here we find a parallel between sexuality, the family and the workplace to the extent that each of these three spheres have become increasingly deterritorialised, turned into mere performatives emptied out of their content. London itself is, in some unexpected ways, a most deterritorialised city, despite having once been at the centre of the British Empire, now home to economic migrants, financial traders, multinational corporates, luxury escort girls, casual lovers and cosmopolites of all kinds, here one day, gone the other. In Bakalar’s novel, sex often comes down to to a mere bodily function to be satisfied rather than the expression of love; and the family, to an arbitrary social construct rather than the undiluted transmission of blood. For its part, the workplace looks more like a mercenary world of white-collar sharks than (allegedly) benevolent patriarchs or captains of industries. However, by manipulating and outsmarting the artificial conventions that most people around her live by and impose upon others, Magda does not so much become an empty shell as a carapace, succeeding in staying true to herself in spite of all the subterfuges she must use and the elaborate camouflages she must adorn herself with.

Magda becomes a drug dealer, not so much out of necessity but by choice, or better still, by conviction. She sincerely and quite selflessly believes that the cannabis business she sets up between Poland and England and smuggles across the Schengen Area will do infinitely more good than, say, accepting a “cover job” for an insurance company, a global finance consultancy or a diamond dealer. Speaking of her clients – an actress, a top-end prostitute, a City trader, an undercover policeman, or even “an acclaimed British writer” (149) – she says: “You see, I am very proud to be part of their creative process.” (150) An artificial paradise, marijuana represents many different things for the latter. Yet, contrary to the other illusions listed earlier (the matrimonial market; having a “normal” job; remaining part of the family and cultural nucleus one was born into and must submit to), Magda achieved her cannabis dream enterprise – and an immensely lucrative one at that! – of her own volition. As Magda understands, selling cannabis is in theory no less ethical than the commodities she used to be associated with until dealing drugs became for her a full-time occupation. To take but one example, are financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman brothers not directly accountable, through speculation, for the soaring food prices in Africa, for the United States housing bubble, or for the Eurozone debt crisis, which have left millions of people in dire straits?

For Magda, the act of caring for plants is tied in with being the mother that she is not, while the seeds she grows, with a culture (from Latin cultura ‘growing, cultivation’) she never really grew out of. Unlike other diasporic tales foregrounding the perspective of children to whose parents’ culture remains foreign, Magda knows her background all too well as she only hopes to disengage herself from it. Both perspectives, though, lay bare the fact that cultures, too, are products of our collective wills and creative imaginations. As such, they ought not to remain monocultural fortresses fixed in time and space but may instead thrive through cross-fertilising contact with other cultures, other places, despite the risks. As Magda learns at her own expense, “black spots on the roots” (174) may, when faced with the plague of entrenched racism, lead to the rot of half of her marijuana crop because of a “bad mix” between her Polish seeds and those belonging to her (unofficial) black South African boyfriend and business partner Jerome, met in London.

However, Magda is ready to pay the price of her attempts to rewrite from the margins her cultural heritage as a hybrid, always in a flux and deeply unstable. Here too, she appears to the reader as neoliberalism’s dream incarnate, someone so unreliable and untrustworthy as to be laid off easily when necessary. But she is also more than that. Her uprootedness, reflected in the novel by the destabilising juxtaposition of a first, second and third-person narratives, is however not rootless, taking stock in the metaphorical family she has planted for herself: “If my family shunned me and subjected me to forced exile from their lives, at least my illegitimate dealings did not disappoint me.” (200) One of the chief demons of German literary tradition, Mephisto alludes to the narrator’s repressed family phantoms, but also operates as a broader allegory for Poland’s many monsters within:

I blame everybody for what led to that; the school which, instead of sexual education, employed a priest who told us that life was the most precious gift from God and that sex was only about procreation; my mother who was too ashamed to talk to me about contraception; the gynaecologist who said I was too young to have sex so I did not need anything to protect myself. I blame this country, which failed me, installing backward religious teachings instead of helping me, terrorizing women and doctors into submission. (76)

To conclude, perhaps the greatest of tricks has to do with the author’s own life. First of all, Bakalar’s mastery of the English language makes us forget that the latter is not a “native” speaker. As Madga herself half-laments in the novel with a perceptible grain of complacency at being a maverick:

Here in my own country, I was stripped of my birthright, I was a cheat who left for an easier life. Every wrongly accented word, every sentence which sounded too English, was proof that I was not Polish enough, that I had forgotten who I was […] And in London, I was almost a native speaker, but not quite. (166)

In the acknowledgments section of the novel, we also learn how Bakalar wrote her debut novel on the sly while doing a PhD with a full-time job. Ultimately she confessed to “receiv[ing] nothing but support and encouragement”(219) from her colleagues and friends in academia. Magda, her main character, was never that lucky, but what saves her is a tremendous sense of humour and irony, which never falls into sarcasm or cynicism. As she retorts to her ever-pressing, worried mother’s queries about her being not married yet: “I am a human traffic accident; no children, no husband and over thirty.” (104) Besides constituting an original twist to the genre of migrant fiction, Madame Mephisto makes extensive use of the trick of laughter to lead us to believe that wit and free spiritism are not dead yet as potential antidotes against the moribund state of our contemporary world. For anyone looking for a way at pissing off their boss, or getting more than a glimpse at dirty, crunchy office politics, or for a refreshing take at marriage life, or simply to learn more about Polish culture and how to grow weed and make a hell of a lot of money from an authentic renegade – Madame Mephisto is the book.

Notes
Fuguet, Alberto. “I am not a magic realist!” Salon, 11 June 1997.
<http://www.salon.com/1997/06/11/magicalintro/> (Accessed 3 March 2015)

PAUL GIFFARD-FORET obtained a PhD in postcolonial writing from Monash University. His doctoral thesis focuses on diasporic identities in Australian women’s fiction from Southeast Asia. Paul’s academic work appears in various literary journals, and he has been a regular contributor to Mascara.

The Promise

By Tony Birch

University of Queensland Press, 2014

ISBN: 978 0 7022 4999 0

Reviewed by MARGOT McGOVERN
 
 
A father mourning his dead son spends solitary afternoons ‘raking fallen leaves and weeding the garden … on [his] knees, sifting through the rose beds with [his] bare hands’. A widower cannot rest in an empty bed, and laments that with his wife dead, ‘A good night’s sleep was hard to come by.’ A car park attendant sits alone in his kitchen where he can ‘hear the loneliness of the house’ after his girlfriend leaves, and drowns the noise with an old record his parents once danced to. Each of these characters in The Promise by Tony Birch has been brought low and exists in that moment when grief and anguish pass and hope returns. The Promise is a collection of twelve such stories of hope lost and faith restored—stories that hinge on moments of change, in which the characters do not so much encounter turning points as leave their old lives behind and begin anew.

The Promise begins with a quote from Revelation, 21:4: ‘There will be no more mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed.’ In the title story Abraham dreams of starting a church in the back room of the house he spent his life saving for. When he dies before he can gather a congregation, his grandson, Luke, promises to ‘build his church and fill it with believers,’ and though Luke develops a taste for drink, fate holds him to his word. What Birch promises through each story is a salvation of sorts. However, the redemption he offers is often hard won. Birch’s narrators are lost boys and men, weary sinners haunted by their past and by their failings. Birch beats them down, sees them unstrung and broken before pulling them from the smoking wreck of a car, an alcoholic bender, their deepest moment of heartache, and extending his small tokens of hope.

The characters move towards a homecoming, a solace. At the end of ‘China,’ the first story in the collection, ex-con Cal, who has been hopelessly seeking his high school sweetheart, finds a new guiding light, spying a radio tower beacon on the road, ‘pulsing a beam of red light across the sky’ and drives toward it ‘as if it were the star of Bethlehem itself.’ Similarly, in ‘Refuge for Sinners’ a grief-stricken man is called from a grey, Melbourne afternoon by ‘the ringing of church bells above the noise of city traffic,’ and inside the unfamiliar church finally finds a place to rest:

Feeling weary, I rested my head against the back of the pew and looked up at the timber paneling in the ceiling above the altar. The inlay of each oak panel had been finished in brightly painted gold stars on a blue background.

In ‘After Rachel’ university dropout Stephen is at a loss after his girlfriend Rachel breaks up with him ‘in a Dear John note scribbled on the back of a gas bill she hadn’t bothered paying’. While Rachel removes her possessions from the house, Stephen comes untethered from his old life, ‘walking the streets until I suddenly realised that I’d managed to get myself lost.’ He lives in an empty house, subsisting on ‘black coffee, cigarettes and toast’ until a kindly neighbour offers to pick the olives from a tree in Stephen’s backyard. She returns to his doorstep a fortnight later with the marinated fruit and a kind word: ‘Enjoy the olives. They bring peace.’ The neighbour appears as a suburban incarnation of God, The Gardener, and the olives are the biblical symbol of peace that the doves brought to Noah after he’d drifted for forty years at sea. Similarly, in ‘Distance’ Peter, a teacher from Melbourne, finds himself adrift, confiding, ‘I had no idea which way to head, but didn’t want to let on that I was lost before I had even started the search.’ He takes the train to a small town to seek his absent father. However, it is his mother’s family, relatives he has never met, who invite him to ‘Come with us. Up home.’ Through these simple moments Birch acts as preacher, singing his sinners home to the Promised Land.

However, Birch’s god is not a wholly benevolent figure. While at times the divine appears in the form of a guiding light or a jar of olives, at others it manifests in Gothic visions of sublime terror. In ‘The Ghost of Hank Williams’ a dying alcoholic is moved to make a change in his destructive lifestyle after a disturbing dream:

The sky was full of thunder and scratches of white-hot lightning. I could hear yabbering above the racket. It was two fellas chuckling. One of them was chewing on something. It was my old liver. I looked down at my belly and saw that my guts had been ripped open.

Similarly in ‘The Promise’ Luke is saved from a car wreck, and, after an eerie bush baptism, returns to town to make good on his promise to found his grandfather’s church.

I went out through the door and started walking the road, free of pain… When I reached the town, I walked straight down the middle of the street. People stopped to gawk, coming out of the stores and standing on street corners watching me. The red dust had settled on the hem of my gown and it looked as if my bottom half had been dipped in blood.

While many of the stories follow characters who move from anguish to hope, Birch also considers that ‘the old order of things has passed’ through the passage from boy to manhood. In ‘The Toecutters’ two friends egged on by one boy’s grandfather, believe a Melbourne gang have sunk a body in the river where they swim. The river is the site of a new infrastructure project and the landscape of their childhood is about to be reshaped. The menace of the gang looms large, like the bogeyman. The boys have one last summer. One last game. Similarly, in ‘Sticky Fingers’ an inter-housing estate marbles tournament is all consuming for four friends. However, as they move closer to the finals, new pleasures creep in, and the boys’ sexual awakening compromises their performance in the marbles ring. In ‘Snare’ an elderly neighbour gives a lonely, stuttering boy purpose by teaching him to trap and kill pigeons and, when he learns the boy is a victim of bullying, he shows him how to stand up for himself with a homemade pipe gun. For the boys in these stories the time has come to put away childish things and to navigate a new world of sex and violence.

Birch writes from the margins, seeking out his sinners from the overlooked places in the Victorian landscape. He veers from Melbourne’s storybook laneways to linger in cheap motels, council estates and 7-Eleven car parks at midnight. He squats in weedy backyards behind peeling weatherboards in deep suburbia, and ventures down the train line ‘through empty factories and bombing stones into the oily channel running next to the line’ until he arrives at the graffittied husk of an old bowling alley. He travels country back roads and immerses himself in the towns where tourists don’t stop. Like his narrators, his Victoria is a broken landscape, battered and dejected as its inhabitants, and ripe for resurrection.

Birch’s prose has a strong Australian accent: blunt, yet musical, fleshing out characters with a simple turn of phrase: a drug addict who’s led a ‘rock-hard and ruinous life’ who can make a guitar ‘weep like a mother who’d lost a new born’. A girl who once dined at a café with her lover is later seen heartbroken: ‘walking with her head buried in her chest carrying a sad-looking sandwich,’ and a school bully is given menacing life with ‘a wild Mohawk hairdo that he’d done himself and an ugly scar below one eye; some said from a knife fight.’

The Promise is grubby and gruff but also fragile. Reading each story is like shucking an oyster, breaking through a knobby, hardened shell to discover something tender within. While the tone is unfailingly masculine, these aren’t stories the blokey protagonists would share down the pub. Rather they are tales so strange and unlikely the characters revisit them in private moments, unsure if they happened or were just a dream. In the ‘The Money Shot’ a thug brings his baby daughter along to a blackmailing scam when he can’t find a babysitter, while in ‘Keeping Good Company’ a man and his elderly neighbour stave off loneliness by piling their pets in the car and going for chocolate ice cream in the middle of the night. Birch uses this inner tenderness and fragility to round out his characters and make them human, firmly grounding his urban fables in a real and recognisable world.

The Promise is at times ugly, violent and frightening. Birch’s characters wail and gnash their teeth, lost in deserts of grief and loneliness. But ultimately Birch’s message is one of quiet hope—a reminder that there is always someone, whether a divine being or a neighbour, watching out for us, and that even in our darkest hour we do not walk alone.

 
MARGOT McGOVERN is a freelance writer, editor and reviewer. She is also associate editor of Ride On Magazine and holds a creative writing PhD from Flinders University. For more about Margot visit www.margotmcgovern.com
 

The Secret Maker of the World

by Abbas El-Zein

University of Queensland Press, 2014

ISBN: 9780701150071

Reviewed by TESSA LUNNEY

How strange, my love. In Baghdad, death and murder fall from the sky, always faceless, known only by the trail of destruction they leave behind. In Dilwa, death and murder have a name and place of abode. (173)

Good short stories contain a life within a moment. The narrative stretches and contracts, extends to novella length then snaps back to a single page. But the central idea, the pivotal moment, holds an entire life, its purpose, its joy and its mystery.

Abbas El-Zein’s The Secret Maker of the World holds just such stories. They sit in the moment of change, a tense yet fluid place where all that used to be might disappear. Sometimes this moment is extended – the week before fleeing war, or the last month before a lover returns. In other stories, this moment is tight and contained – before the narrators reach their destination, their future will be decided.

El-Zein’s stories move from contemporary Australia to medieval Persia, from first person to third, from men to women, from young to old. This eclectic description belies a tight focus on the dialogue between the West and the Middle East, and the various ways and places this dialogue can take place. Sometimes the dialogue is clear – in Natural Justice, a Lebanese man, who now lives in New York, flies to Dubai. Sometimes this is subtle, lying beneath the surface of the text, in how the plight of 12^th century cartographer Yaqut Al Hamaoui speaks to the 21^st century reader of English. To this reader, it speaks with a bloody lyricism, a poetic turn of phrase that cannot turn away from incessant violence.

The best story in the collection is the last story, the title work The Secret Maker of the World. An interior monologue of a deaf teacher who addresses her absent lover, it is in turn sweet and brutal, funny and elegiac – and as it is written in first person, this applies to the character as well. Alia, bright and bipolar, lives in Baghdad during the most recent war. She yearns for her lover through her diary. The diary is her intermediary, an extended love letter, and our access to the way her inner and outer worlds slip, trip, and slide into each other. Her deafness and diagnosis are no more an impediment to her life than the lack of electricity, a restrictive government, or the war. They are her frame for the world, and within this frame she shows us a place of hidden rhythms and the truth just out of sight:

Isn’t speech always an expression of sanity? Isn’t everything we say and write tinged with hope, mutilated by anticipation?(162)

We see this again as she drives through the Iraqi desert to a small border town:

We drove slowly through the dead streets, scraping together what visibility we could. The windscreen was crisscrossed with fissures – every Baghdadi sitting in his car had his own visual perspective on the fault lines of the city. Slowly, the fog eased and the sun loomed behind the pink clouds, its golden colour faded, a pale imitation of its real self.

…my dread had found its home, free at last to fly into its element, slipping quietly into the vast emptiness it had always craved in the suffocating architecture of its Baghdad prison, as it bounced off concrete ceilings… I did not go to sleep: I nuzzled the underside of my consciousness. (171 – 172)

This is a voice I rarely hear, and as such, this story is necessary. I hear from people like Alia only in the news reports and soundbites, their experiences paraphrased. A personal, particular, subjective experience is either framed within another set of values or disregarded altogether. How Alia thinks about her life is her life. The material facts show little of its purpose, its mystery and its joy.

I felt the same way about the narrator in Respect. How else could I hear the voice of an itinerant Afghan worker, desperate to leave Indonesia and get home for his son’s wedding? His story may be recorded by aid agencies and NGOs, by lawyers and by company men, but if so, it is often stained with propaganda – however hard these organisations strive for objectivity, they have a purpose and mission statement to fulfil. What is the mission statement of a short story? Only, perhaps, to show a life within a moment, to help the reader understand what might happen to the desperate in the middle of the literal and metaphoric jungle:

What’s two years in an office in Sydney? Or was it Melbourne? That’s no match for an Indonesian jungle. You must have fooled them by acting tough. You don’t fool me, Mister.

Fifth gear. Do not give up on me. What’s wrong with fifth gear? Not clutching on. That’s what’s wrong. It must have gone soft like everything else in this Asian Amazon… this terrible noise the gear makes like sheep about to be slaughtered. (62)

Mohammed is not a bright, shining person like Alia, but a man forced the make the most out of almost nothing. The urgency of his journey is conveyed with taut half-sentences, and his invective towards his Australian company boss is the necessary flipside of what can usually be found in the Australian news. But it is his memories of his early life, the necessity of becoming well-travelled in order to live, that provide the story’s core. His current fear as he drives through the wet jungle reminds him of other, deeper, fear:

Fear for the past. The kind of fear that can wrench your guts out at three o’clock in the morning. The kind of fear that only mothers have for their children. I have become a mother for the child I was. (71) 

Each character has insights such as these. In His Other Cloak, a vicar in 19^th century Newcastle, NSW has been recalled to England. The time period is indicated only by the action of the story and the language the vicar uses to address himself – it could just as easily be early 20^th century, just past federation. As Father Drake’s mission in Australia closes, he thinks about the significance of skin:

He slips into his solicitous self, his other cloak, the one closer to his skin, almost inseparable from it. Inseparable all the same. All too inseparable alas!

His skin.

Sometimes he sees himself as a hierarchy of skins, of garments. The blood in his veins, the swarm of cells in the muscles, the flesh, the self, the cotton shirt, the cassock, the heavier gown. So close together, so deceivingly bound with each other, like a most delicate organ, membrane upon membrane. (81)

This understanding of skin is more than just meditation, but equal parts compulsion and resistance to the idea of self and other, of black and white:

Savvy suddenly rolled over, peeling off his own skin, making a squelching sound. He caught himself wishing his arms were as delicate as Savvy’s, his skin was as black… He censored the thought swiftly in his mind, but it left a trace, a haunting image. (94)

A slippery self can also be seen in a river man on the Yangtze, who gathers the drowned for the families to collect. The second story in the volume, Yellow River, the bereaved Wei Han continues the work of grief:

He is watched over by resentful bluffs on either side, the sky as bare as a desert – remote, turned inward as though afflicted by an abomination of which men have no inkling. He is patient with the drag, glancing occasionally at his catch. He laps at the water softly as if it can feel the tug of the wooden bat on its skin, ripples travelling in consecutive circles, like a short-lived longing for perfection. And the river talks to him and he listens because he knows that, as his father told him a long time ago, if he listens hard enough he can grow ears for the water.

No ache is permanent, no wound too deep to heal. (34-5)

Although this is not the direct address of either Mohammed or Alia, the narrator voice is so close to Wei Han that it is easy to make the narrator’s voice Wei Han’s own, only distanced to third person by sorrow.

These stories must be earned. The opening piece is distant. A story of guerilla violence in Lebanon, it is the gaps and failures of the main character’s devotion that invite the reader in. Yellow River is the second story and also creates distance, and then fills it with the lyrical rhythm of the river. By the time we meet Mohammed in the fourth story, the reader is in the centre of a world where politics, faith, love and hope collide and fight and flee. But not from the reader, and for this, it is a place worth earning. It lets us stand with Alia, and the lyrical intensity of her insight, as she declares herself to be the Secret Maker of the World.

TESSA LUNNEY completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts last year, looking at silence in contemporary Australian war fiction, and has been awarded an Australia Council ArtStart grant for 2014. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have been published in Southerly, Contrapasso, and Mascara, among others, as well as Best Australian Poems 2014. She lives in Sydney.

Foreign Soil

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Hachette Australia

Sydney, NSW, 2014

ISBN 978-0-73363242-6

Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON

Sometimes we read prose – a novel, perhaps, or a short story – and we think I bet this writer is a poet, too, and then we turn to the page that tells us of the author’s past publications and awards and, more often than not, we reward ourselves with a silent and motionless fist-pump because yes, the writer is a poet. These things we do not know; these things we can hear. And so it goes with Maxine Beneba Clarke and her collection of short stories Foreign Soil. Turns out Clarke is the author of two collections of poetry and is a spoken word artist. This, you can hear. Listen:

‘She had a shiny cherry-red frame, scooped alloy Harley handlebars and sleek
metal pedals.’  (1)

‘Harlem legs it from the job shop soon as the sour bitch pushes the button for security.’ (16)

‘The driver Mukasa had booked had gone to look for a luggage trolley and Mukasa was busy speaking in Luganda to the woman behind the customs desk, so Ange decided to go and look for a toilet.’ (60)

These are the opening sentences of three stories from Foreign Soil, a collection that gives voice to those living as Others in a world where ‘misunderstanding’ is sometimes just the easiest therefore most acceptable route to take. Clarke takes us to places as far-reaching as London, Jamaica, Uganda and Sri Lanka, while also showing us our own Melbourne neighbours. And the voices are strong. Just like the prose, they have rhythm and sass. Clarke has signed each page with true spoken word-confidence, and it’s the first thing that drew me into the collection.

Foreign Soil opens with two fast-paced, high-hitting stories: ‘David’ and ‘Harlem Jones’. Both highlight the plight of the first-generation migrant in opposition to their migrant elders. While one offers a resolution of finding, unexpectedly, a common ground, the other accentuates a dangerous anger, ingrained from centuries of racial hurt. Yes, the language is stylized and addictive in a hyper-urban sense, but if you sit with it long enough to grasp a plot, you’ll find that there’s more to appreciate in the telling than how it sounds. I found that I cared about the two women in ‘David’ firstly because I could hear them, but then because I could see them. I cared about the indignant youth in ‘Harlem Jones’ because I know him (however from afar) through the broadcast news. Luckily, I am wise enough to know that, despite old George Dubbya’s efforts at convincing me otherwise, no one is inherently evil; the ‘evil’ wrong-doer is just a normal person with a damned interesting story. It’s something I had to remind myself of when I got to the title story, ‘Foreign Soil’, where a Ugandan man living in Australia respectfully conforms to Western ideals of gender equality and class sympathy, then reverts to emotional and physical bullying of his Australian ‘wife’ and long-suffering servants once returned to his home country. I’m thinking of the old adage that ‘you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’ and I’m intrigued at Clarke’s challenge to its nursery rhyme-like meaning. The story suggests that we are not only shaped by our cultural surroundings – which leaves room for malleability and amalgamation – but informed by our cultural surroundings – pointing to a more rigid, rule-abiding conformity. In this story, as in others, there is a hero and there is a villain, and neither deserves to be heard more than the other; they both have stories to tell. Clarke is giving everything she has to make sure they’re told. I suppose here is where I point out that this collection is passionate. That might fall back on the poetry, once again, or it might fall back on the Australian author’s own Afro-Caribbean descent.

Clarke is sure to point out that anger comes in many forms, as does racism, and sometimes anger is incredibly confusing. In ‘Railton Road’, anger is not so much felt but deserved. In ‘Shu Yi’, where racism is taught through peer pressure, anger is not felt, but it is assumed, as if it is a birthright. With Foreign Soil, Clarke opens up the wounds that each of us carry inside, where racism lay either dormant or ready to attack, and we are the white fearing the black, the black fearing the white, the black fearing the black who loves the white, or the white fearing the multi-coloured state that our world is.

With ‘Gaps in the Hickory’, the author goes beyond race, beyond ethnicity, and moves toward gender. What if the person caught in ‘foreign soil’ is a woman in a man’s body? The inclusion of this story in the collection is an important one as it presents different concepts of ‘alien’ and ‘Other’, though I wasn’t entirely convinced of the narrative voice. The black Louisiana-born Ella speaks the same as the white Mississippi-born Delores. True, they are both from the Delta in the Deep South, but there are nuances between white and black races that make the language different. The tenses, for instance: both might say ‘He done gone to heaven,’ but it is unlikely that a white character speak in the same way her black neighbour does when saying, ‘He the one who left.’ And Ella is ‘six going on seventy’, so Clark does try to explain her precociousness, but no six year old I’ve come across has the capacity to think, let alone talk, in the same way as this one does. If I am going on too much about minor points it is because there are very few minor points to go on about and I’m going to focus on them while I can. So I will also say that the longer, fifty-page stories in the collection meander quite a bit compared to the more succinct under-twenty page stories. I hope this is rectified in due time as I would like to be one of the first readers to buy Clarke’s debut novel (fingers crossed there will be one) and I would like to slam it down after finishing it with a triumphant ‘fuck yeah,’ which is a fitting hyper-urban term, and one of which I think the author would approve.

I must mention two stories: ‘Hope’ and ‘Big Islun’, which are embedded in Jamaica and do not venture outside Jamaica, making them anomalies to the collection. Both reach toward Anglo-lands, such as England and Australia, as idyllic dreams rather than geographical realities, and the final punch is that we, as readers, have by this point read enough of the collection to know that the characters should certainly not migrate. ‘Big Islun’, written in a severely challenging vernacular, tells the story of a discontented Nathanial, who sees a photograph of famous cricketers in a magazine and thinks perhaps he should seek a new life in a new land:

Long beach is stretch out behind de cricket team, waves breakin gainst de juttin rocks, like dem could easy-easy swallow up de roof ov de two-storey buildin Nathanial now sittin in. It nyah look like de same sea dat Nathanial pass every day. Look rough, an wild, an capable ov anytin. Look exciting, dat sea, an like it a different body ov water altogether. Nathanial survey de faces ov de cricketers. Look like dem in paradise, dem so delirious-happy.

            ‘Wat country dis, dat offah such reception te black West Indian man. Treat us like we kings!’ im whisper citedly te imself.  (189)

It is Australia, and Clarke so deftly decided to place the story of a Sri Lankan boy in an Australian detention centre directly after it.

The final story is a journey into meta-fiction, as the author positions herself as the main character: single mother struggling to meet the financial needs of her family with an emerging writer’s freelance income. Next to her computer is a printed-out email referring to the story ‘Harlem Jones’:

We are enamoured of your writing. Your prose is startling poetic. We have not seen work like this for quite some time.
Please could you send some more of your writing, maybe on a different theme….something you’ve written that deals
with more everyday themes. Work that has an uplifting quality….Think book club material….Unfortunately, we feel
Australian readers are just not ready for characters like these.  (257)

Australian readers are characters like these, so well done to Hachette Australia for recognising this; well done to the judges of the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award for recognising this; well done to Maxine Beneba Clarke for proving the ‘fictionalised’ letter-writer wrong. This is an important work, where anger is lyricized and racism is tested and, not only that, it sounds fantastic.

HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON is a US-born, Adelaide-based poet, critic and novelist.

The Last Candles of the Night

by Ian Bedford

Lacunar Publishing

ISBN: 9781922198129

Reviewed by SUBHASH JAIRETH

The Last Candles of the Night opens with two epigraphs. The first in Persian: two lines of a verse by Ali Sher Nava’i of Heart. The second comes from an Urdu poem by Zaheer Kashmiri, which has the words, ‘… the last candles of the night.’  These words also become the title of the book, as well as of a crucial chapter in the first section. The book ends with two glossaries. One of them lists Indian names and the other provides translation of Indian words (Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Telugu and Urdu). Thus, translation, as a mode of being, seems to be one of the major thematic anxieties of the novel.

In a round-table on translation, collected in his book, The Ear of the Other, Derrida underlines the double bind, which every act of translation is faced with. ‘Translate me,’ he notes, ‘and what is more don’t translate me. I desire that you translate me, that you translate the name I impose on you; and at the same time whatever you do, don’t translate me, you will not be able to translate it.’ Although in the above citation, Derrida is more concerned about the special status of a proper name, of its translatability and untranslatability, it seems a similar anxiety permeates our global culture, in which words and languages travel faster than people who speak and hear them, write and read them, act and be acted upon by them.

There are several narrative tensions, which drive the narrative in The Last Candles of the Night, but the one that seems most significant to me is the untranslatability; not only of words and languages, but also of the lived life and its memories; and of the world, which we find ourselves thrown into, of our own will or just by accident. In ‘real’ life, accidents can remain unexplained, uncomprehended, and even misunderstood but in a novel their occurrence has to be justified. Accidents and coincidences are potent narrative devices. Their real import is clear to a writer from the beginning simply because she is the author, but a reader requires persuasion and inducement. Like a stubborn child she needs to be coaxed to swallow a bitter pill or to endure the sharp prick of a needle.

It is perhaps a mere coincidence, or an act of fate, that Phillip Chalk, a young Australian teacher from Sydney finds himself teaching in a one-teacher school in Warangal, a small town in the princely state of Hyderabad. The year is 1948 and the army of an Independent India is ready to invade the Nizam’s Hyderabad. In Warangal he meets Anand, a member of the Congress Party, and Ragini, the communist daughter of a music-loving landlord. The love-triangle that develops between the three will leave indelible marks on their lives. This constitutes the past time of the story casting its shadow on the present time, which unfolds in Sydney, where a seventy-year old Phillip has returned to make some sense of his past. The Australia he has returned to is John Howard’s ‘Tampa’-time Australia.

In Sydney Phillip finds refuge in his childhood house where many years earlier he had left his wife Jenny, who he had brought from India. But return isn’t easy. He can’t escape the hostility of his daughter Nora, who wants to know why Phillip had abandoned the family, and returned to India.  She also blames him for the death of her sister, Tilley. For Jenny, the question is irrelevant. She has reconciled. However, a little residue of bitterness still remains. ‘After all,’ she tells Phillip, ‘I have to thank you for very little. For rescuing me once. For a mission of rescue. For a proposal of marriage. For seeing what was wrong. For bringing me to Australia, which as it’s turned out is a kind of blessing. For deserting me here.’ Phillip is aware of the pain he has caused and is keen to explain. ‘All that long absence,’ he says to Jenny, ‘I imposed on your life – it was all on your account, yours and Anand’s.’ He is clever, isn’t he?

The past is recounted in flashbacks; the recounting both embellished and corrupted by the capriciousness of memory. Although flashback as a device allows easy traverses between present and past times, it can lead to pitfalls.  It isn’t enough to declare how unreliable or made-up the memory is. The skill resides in representing its tricky fickleness. Not many novels achieve this with grace and facility. The most common and simple device they use is to recount the same event from two different viewpoints, either of the same protagonist or of different protagonists. The Last Candles of the Night opts for the second option, and achieves the objective deftly. The two sections of the novel, entitled Phillip and Jenny, represent two different vantage points. Strangely, the viewpoint of Anand remains unspoken and unheard. I would have loved to read his account of the turbulent events.

The blurb describes the novel as ‘… lyrical and moving …’ Moving, it surely is, but lyrical elements only appear in the second section, shorter and crisper than the first. The novel shows its best writing in the final few pages. It is a fitting finale of a good story, imagined with care and told with graceful skill.

As I mentioned earlier, the title of the book comes from the verse of an Urdu poem, which forms the second epigraph. Zaheer Kashmiri is a wonderful Pakistani poet, who has remained largely untranslated into English. I hope the epigraph persuades the readers to find out more about him and his poetry.  His phrase,  “Hamen khabr hai ke ham hain chiraagh-e-aakhir-e shab,” has been translated as, “We have heard that we are the last candles of the night.” I like the translation. It reads and sounds well. However, my translation will be slightly different. It will read like this:  “I know that I am the last candle of the night.” In my version I have replaced the first person plural ‘Hamen’ in the original with first person singular ‘I’. This is because in Urdu poetry, poets often use first person plural when they refer to themselves. The second translation, I readily acknowledge, sounds dull. More importantly, it doesn’t sound in consonance with the thematic rhythms of the novel. Because the last ‘candles of the night,’ in this intriguing novel are three: Ragini, Anand and Phillip.

 
 
SUBHASH JAIRETH was born in India, spent nine years in Moscow and moved to Canberra in 1986. He has published poetry, fiction and nonfiction in Hindi, Russian and English. His book To Silence: Three Autobiographies was published in 2011. Two plays adapted from the book were performed at Canberra’s Street Theatre in 2012. His novel After Love was published by Transit Lounge.
 

Transactions of Belonging

by Jaya Padmanabhan

Leadstart Publishing

ISBN-13: 978-9383562275

Reviewed by JESSICA FALEIRO

The word ‘belonging’ evokes a strong feeling of connection to place, person, thing or feeling.  In her debut collection of short stories, Jaya Padmanabhan explores these facets of belonging to whom, to what and to where, by making us wonder about their cost.

Each story is a meditation on different types of belonging, as promised in the title, and connects with one’s own personal sense of that word.  Padmanabhan’s stories bear witness to what lengths and compromises people will go to in order to belong to a person, a state of being or a place.  Manu, in ‘The Fly Swatter’, is attached to his powerful status as a politician, a husband and a father, which leaves no place in his life for his attraction to men or for human compassion.  In ‘His Curls’, a mother moves from trusting in the fact that her son belongs to her, to watching him outgrow the only physical characteristic that links the two of them together – the curls in his hair, at which point she believes that he has become far removed from the person she dreamed he would be and has turned into a terrorist.

In ‘The Blue Arc’, Shona, who comes from a cultured family background, ends up as a prostitute in a brothel due to tragic circumstances.  She holds on to her past in the form of a family photograph and a diary, and is only able to accept her fate after her madam burns these things. She then looks to gain a sense of belonging through her friendship with a brothel tenant named Shiva.  In ‘The Little Matter of Fresh Meadows Feces’, we see how three generations of an Indian family cope with different forms of dislocation as the grandparents visit their daughter and her family in America, all the while missing their neighbourhood back in Bangalore.  Meanwhile, their daughter and son-in-law are immigrants struggling to make a world for themselves in the United States and their grand-daughter is stuck in between a way of life she is expected to adopt and one that no one in her family has ever experienced before.  She rejects her Indian culture as a coping mechanism, as she tries to carve out a new, unknown path for herself in America.

Each of the twelve short stories in this collection is an emotionally charged vignette that captures the universality of human nature, even as it relates to the Indian context.  Padmanabhan’s simple style is revealing; the force of each sculpted word hitting the reader with more punch than its diluted flowery counterpart would.

Padmanabhan is experimental with form, presenting ‘The Little Matter of Fresh Meadows Feces’ as an epistolary story and ‘Indian Summer’ as a one-act play.  These departures appear to be just that, explorations by the author in flexing her writing muscle, as the form changes re-enforce the individuality of the stories and do not add anything to bring the collection more closely together.

While some will connect with the word; more likely others will discover new meanings of their own understanding of belonging.  There are some exquisite lines delivered with a practiced hand such as,  ‘He is at home most of the time.  He wakes up mid-afternoon and eats through mountains of food.  Then he puts on his outside clothes and walks out of the house.  He comes back late in the evening and demands food again.  I spend my time waiting for his disappearance and reappearance and dreading both’ (‘His Curls’, 87). With just three words, ‘…and dreading both’, we are pulled into the dynamics of a mother-son relationship straining at the seams.  In another example: ‘Then he leaned forward and poured that first pink plastic mug of water over his body.  It was bitterly cold.  Despite bracing for the water, the cold knife like chill of the water made him shiver involuntarily.  The second mugful was always the hardest.  There was absolute certainty in the second pour’ (‘Strapped for Time’, 61).  The attention to detail reveals a subtle beauty in mundane acts and the author takes care to reveal such acts in all the stories, colouring them with an eerie presence that alerts one to something dark and violent just around the corner.

Even more interesting is how each story is tinged with violence, portrayed as a fact of life and presented in myriad forms, some more subtle than others.  ‘In a dirty minute, he’s reached for his own box of matches and lit one of them.  While the live bird sits within his grip, he applies the match to the splint.  The bird goes up in flames.  “There, I’ve solved your problem!”’ (‘Curtains Drawn’, 79). Here we see the capacity for cruelty in a father towards his son by killing an injured bird that the son cares for.  We are witnesses to every form of violence from an MP’s cynical dismissal of a poor child’s death by paying off the family with a colour TV in ‘The Fly Swatter’, the burning of a prostitute’s treasured personal possessions by her madam in ‘The Blue Arc’ and the spousal abuse behind closed doors in ‘Curtains Drawn’, to the more subtle violence caused by hurtful words, gestures and behaviours between family members in ‘Indian Summer’ and ‘The Little Matter of Fresh Meadows Feces.’

While we’re on the subject, ‘The Little Matter of Fresh Meadows Feces’ was a refreshing story that depicted the author’s playfulness at large.  Her deft weaving of food and feces into this short story is something that not only takes vivid imagination and a steady hand to deliver but creates a story that will not easily be forgotten.  In one instance, the granddaughter refers to her grandmother’s dish of ‘pongal’ as something that smells and looks like shit.  The mention of feces in the letter exchange between neighbours at ‘Fresh Meadows’ represents the corruption of Indian politicians who promise cleaner, greener, safer neighbourhoods in order to gain votes and then don’t change anything for the better once they are in government.  Food and feces become a writing device of contrasting symbols that are part of the same unifying life process, bringing together the generations and class distinctions portrayed in this story.  It is food that unifies a grandmother’s pongal receipe with the salad that her granddaughter prefers to consume, and shit that unifies the residential colony of ‘Fresh Meadows’ across continents, even as the middle class residents complain of their ‘slum neighbours’ depositing their shit on the edges of the apartment colony.

The author is not afraid to lead us steadily into those dark places that haunt many and her stories pique our interest enough that we go willingly, to uncover what’s ahead. Everything is given meaning – the curling wisps on a baby’s forehead grow into the estrangement between a mother and her son, the drawn curtains of a house taken on an ominous meaning especially when one discovers the abuse occurring behind them.  Even the memory of a dead mother becomes a dangerous thing.  The stories take you down a path where you know there’s something unexpected coming up ahead, but you’re still surprised by the force of what arrives.   In bringing together beauty in the mundane things of life and drawing out the violence simmering underneath, the stories reveal how both are part and parcel of life.

I admit that I was left confused at the vague endings of some of the stories, though this may have been the author’s intention.  By leaving the stories open-ended, readers are left to imagine what happens next and about the emotional landscape of the characters.  The author gives us a detailed look at their inner lives and leaves us curious, which is evidence of the poignant, evocative and emotionally absorbing stories Padmanabhan has created in this collection.
 
 
JESSICA FALEIRO is the author of Afterlife: Ghost stories from Goa, and has an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston University, UK.  She has also published fiction and non-fiction in Muse India and tambdimati.com, written travel pieces for the Times of India and op-ed articles for other newspapers.  For more, see: http://jessicafaleiro.wordpress.com/about/
 

Stone Postcard

by Paul Magee

ISBN 9780980852394

John Leonard Press

Reviewed by BONNY CASSIDY

A short poem, “Swimming in Minus”, lies at the centre of Paul Magee’s Stone Postcard. Positioned here, it makes a statement about the collection; the kind of poem that a more predictable writer might have placed at the book’s opening:

Still dark at seven in the morning,
Melbourne winter, and the St Kilda ocean
separates me from my skin-wrapped bones.
Like Descartes, who refused
to believe his body
his own.
The thinking words in his mind were him.
Deserving the property title that is cogito.
If I can think then I’m still alive.

Indeed, the poem is an opening of sorts, as it begins the second of the book’s halves. Perversely, Magee delays this little song of survival until we have completed the first part: a series of unflinching, expositional poems on the birth of a son, separation from a partner, and death of a father.

Magee’s poetry has never shied from trauma, nor from reconciliation with mortality; in fact, both his first collection, Cube Root of Book (2006), and Stone Postcard seem to thrive upon traditional relationships between poetic expression and kinds of loss. He worries at loss and losing with a tough, philosophical morbidity. In this sense, Stone Postcard continues the elegiac mode and pensive tone of Cube Root of Book. Now, however, the notes of his poetry are less constrained by the minor scale: Magee’s poetic line is lifted by brevity, and his droll optimism peppers this collection, particularly characterising its second part.

Whereas “Swimming in Minus” takes a reflective perspective on experience, the very first poem in the book tries to represent it proleptically. As its title suggests, “Later” is haunted by knowledge – represented by ominous “shadows” – of events that are to arrive in the following poems. Magee pushes this knowledge to the poem’s unfinished periphery, its form and imagery insisting instead upon the naivety of a baby and the dazed wonder of a new parent:

Our shadows lengthen.
Rupert is four now,
in days, though to him here and there
must seem quite the same.
Day and night will come later, then years, and
metaphors for the new, immense visions for the eyes to see by.

Empty shoes on the floor mark places where their
owners stopped
stepping, then slept.
The house is a map of last movements,
books put down on page three-three-four,
flowers, a balloon,
‘It’s a boy!’

The book’s first part chronicles how the simplicity of the child’s consciousness is gradually paralleled by the complicated break-up of his parents. Magee represents that duality simply through the sequencing of his poems. After a suite of emotionally earnest poems such as “Song”, “Break” and “Ten Houses”, Magee will insert the fleeting and pointless fun of child’s play as exemplified in “Lions in the Beach”. Consider the tonal contrast between these lines:

Just broke up,
in point of fact.
Four years from sudden love.
I’ve lost a life
which was hers. (“Ten Houses”)
Rupert punches policemen in dreams, then blinks
at the beach,
out of sleep leaping and spinning
around in his underpants […] (“Lions in the Beach”)

Magee avoids artificially reconciling or framing such tension, instead dwelling in its awkwardness. Through these stark tonal shifts he is performing the dissonance of beginnings and endings, of course, but this sequencing is also a technique to heighten awareness of light and dark separately.

It’s also an essential relief from poems in which emotionally earnest can become cloyingly confessional. This mode expresses itself in some hyperbolic metaphors: “like kissing/on New Year’s Day over No Man’s Land./Perhaps this truce could last./ […] A trench is no place to be letting go” (“Song”); “Broken homes are what we try to house” (“Break”). In the title sequence, lyrical flourishes are traded for a more urgent voice. The effect reads as stylised therapy:

Here’s your fucking rock, my actions said
to the psychotherapist who had requested
from my six months’ travel in Tierra del Fuego
I bring him back one […]
Actually I was crying a mouth full of grief
an earshot of anger
saying people in glass houses
are obliged to throw stones (“Stone Postcard”)

Magee seems to be deliberately working confessionalism into a poetics of authenticity; as just two comparisons, John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan have also pursued this approach, albeit to different thematic purposes. Giving oneself over to this style will be more or less challenging depending upon Magee’s reader. For me, Magee’s poems deal most memorably with emotional difficulty when it is distilled into imagery: “the distantly approaching,/her face severely/then a smile that melts” (“Red Square”). The epigram “Thought & Fort” contains another example of this:

train of thought
light of thought
carriage of thought
thought conductor
view out
rest
take off armour

A few other, discursive poems in the book’s first part also have this quality. They are not witty in the sense of glinting wordplay or fancy rhetorical footwork but, rather, they have an airy, sketchy quality. Poems like “Here and Now”, “Painting’s Flatness” and “Tautology” see Magee practice quite a different poetics to his expositional mode; often, they are no less sad than his chatty, head-on approaches to pain and rage, but they are less ponderous. They leave space to bring us in:

Rosella bursts out of the tree like a flower.
I want to live in that time spiral.

These jasmines overhead, flying by
and everything else
is black. Behind the sky. (“Here and Now”)

Given the dark path that Magee treads in the book’s first part, it is no coincidence that Virgil appears repeatedly throughout Stone Postcard. He hovers; not only in literal form as a translated voice, but also as a guiding device which functions to illumine Magee’s thematic concerns. In the first part, Magee concentrates on Virgil in pastoral mode. His translated excerpts from the Georgics bring a voice of comfort, a lullaby in which mythic order and practical wisdom make a reassuring pattern:

The instant old Deucalion’s hurled stones
hit the earth and turned into snarling men,
who flung at life remain a stone-hard race,
Nature imposed law on the land. Up then,
turn earth, start early in the year so that
the many suns of Summer ripening
to full force can bake the dusty soil.

In contrast to Magee’s confessional poems, his translations of Virgil represent a relationship outside of personality, a realm tangential from immediate experience and yet rich with feeling. Virgil’s command, above, signals a turn in the book’s focus – from the world within the self, to the self within the world. This shift characterises its second part. If the first half is a brave descent, the second is a hopeful climb. There is still turmoil and grief in the second part of the book, but these are treated as studies; politicised and essayed, they see Magee experiment with a satirical and free-wheeling poetic voice.

Observing the world as a stranger – visitor, traveller, fish out of water – Magee is frequently astounded at the weirdness of daily encounters. His responses range from outrage to bemusement. A run of tart didactic poems, for example, echo the political barbs of Catullus and Ovid. A highlight is “Payable Thinking”, an embittered but concise opinion-poem about academic research pressures:

This would be a pampered little gripe,
but universities are a common house for a while
to four in ten of our children.

While Magee is careful to preserve musicality in his translations, elsewhere he values directness of voice over rhythm. While this tendency marks weaker points in the book’s first part, Magee’s loose line and plain diction are used to good effect in a set of impressionistic poems stretching from America to Australia. In one, “Coney Island”, an occasional ode to a hotdog eating contest, he echoes the din of the coliseum (“This is life and death”). Elsewhere, a series of suburban Australian scenes include a Salvos employment workshop (“… ployment, Inemployment, Unumploymnt”) and a misconceived church group display of fruit, “gayer than Satan’s butt” (“Brisbane Royal Exhibition”).

In this second half of Stone Postcard, social satire creates a cumulative sense that civilisation is founded on chaos; history on forgetting. This is particularly clear in Magee’s juxtaposition of his poem, “Smudged Newspaper Photo”, with a final translation from Virgil – this time from his jingoistic mode in the Aeneid – which Magee titles “Turnus Decides”. In “Smudged Newspaper Photo”, Magee contemplates a news report so horrific his speaker does “not know how to read”; Virgil, however, shows him how war can be aestheticised, as well as familiarised, through poetry:

Like huge brands of flame thrown into a woods
– the laurels in there crack as they catch light –
or seething rivers, which suddenly flood
smashing out from the sheer mountains to charge
the fields and plains, Aeneas and Turnus
devastated everything in their path.

Magee’s translation seems to relish the particularly bloody and cinematic nature of this passage, which acts as a climax to the book’s progression through trauma, as Turnus resolves: “The battle is mine/ to win or lose” (“Turnus Decides”). This war cry, which leads skillfully into one final, peaceful poem by Magee, stands far away from the wan voice that opens the book.

A “stone postcard” could mean a number of things. The image of writing in stone is commonly meant to indicate permanence, an indelible action. These are themes in Magee’s book, to be sure: the undoable mark of death upon the living; the hurting memory of a failed partnership. In the title poem it’s a literal rock brought home as a souvenir, as well as a metaphorical rock of anger to peg at somebody, anybody. In light of other poems in the book, it might also be understood as the weight of life that is lovingly transferred from a father to the son (tabula rasa) who is repeatedly addressed in the book’s first part; or, it could refer to Virgil’s epitaph, which Magee translates (“Over Virgil’s Grave”).

Considering the collection as a whole, however, the stone postcard comes to signify paradox: it is both heavy and light, anchored and moveable. The stony harshness of pain is leavened by a sense of the ridiculous; the poet declares himself, but does so with an informal poetic line and the great palimpsest of translation. The book’s two parts represent two faces, but if Magee’s voice can be characterized by one feature, it’s intensity – a word also used in the book’s cover blurb. Magee’s poetry is intense because he refuses to entertain the falsity of synthesis. A stone postcard is the tension between memory and freedom, between experience and the poetry that briefly contains it.
BONNY CASSIDY‘s second poetry collection, Final Theory, was published in July by Giramondo. She teaches creative writing at RMIT University and is feature reviews editor for Cordite Poetry Journal. This year she is a guest of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, and the Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland.

Lens Flare

By Benedict Andrews

Pitt Street Poetry

ISBN 978-1-922080-34-9

Peony

By Eileen Chong

Pitt Street Poetry.

ISBN 978-1-922080-28-8

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

It is often difficult when writers change from one literary genre to another. Reviewers — and writers in the encroached-upon form — are quick to “guard their own turf”. Benedict Andrews, in his first poetry collection, Lens Flare, arrives with a strong reputation as a theatre writer and director, both here and overseas. His first collection of plays is due out later this year.

As a first collection of poetry, Lens Flare is, in some ways, not unlike other poetry debuts. It exhibits a considerable range of concerns and techniques — and varies, perhaps inevitably, in quality. At the centre is a truly remarkable sequence of poems called “The Rooms”, of which more shortly. Bookending this are two sections which are decidedly more uneven. The first centres around (but is not confined to) Iceland, which has recently become Andrews’ main place of residence. The poems here range from the graphically erotic love sonnet, “Teufelsberg” to much more tentative poems such as “Rás 1” which starts out with the somewhat prosaic short lines: “Driving around / in the rain / listening to / scratchy jazz / on the radio // Magga says, / it’s getting dark / earlier and earlier …” “Scratchy jazz” is an evocative phrase but there’s not a lot, other than simple exposition, happening in the rest of the sentence.

The closing “bookend” of Lens Flare starts with the ten-part sequence, “Kodachrome City”. It varies considerably in techniques and degree of accessibility but is probably more consistent than the book’s opening section. In “Operaen”, a later poem, we have a good example of what some readers will see as a highly original image and others may see as spuriously melodramatic. “The sky, that well-fucked whore, sheds her sequin dress. / Lipstick smeared, petrol wet, / she strikes a match.”

As mentioned earlier, what truly distinguishes Lens Flare is its central, 35-page sequence, “The Rooms”. With two ten-line poems per page, we are given a powerful, almost encylopaedic rendering of the guests (and their activities) in a contemporary, relatively upmarket hotel. It could be anywhere in the developed world (though some details suggest a tropical location) and has a similar comprehensiveness to the “Prologue” of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, more than six hundred years earlier. Like Chaucer, Andrews casts a mordant but compassionate eye on what is happening in his particular microcosm.

Sexuality plays a big role, of course, but the situations of Andrews’ protagonists are various — from illicit ecstasy to acute loneliness. The profound superficiality of much of our contemporary culture, sexual and otherwise, is sometimes hinted at — and sometimes shockingly embodied. “Room 104” is a typical example. Its last eight lines are suggestive of quite a few other poems in the sequence and yet Andrews avoids any inadvertent repetition: “Soon there’ll be a ring from reception, / a man will knock, kiss her twice and step in. / Sipping champagne, they’ll watch fruit bats mass / above the gardens, they’ll tongue each other, / strip, make the room stink of wine and musk. / They’ll hack into each other like cannibals. / They’ll fuck until they can’t think any more. / So she reckons, rearranging her reflection.”

One can sense Andrews’ theatrical experience at work here — the way it’s all set in the near future (a common dramatic device these days), the detail of the fruit bats and so on. Each of the ten line poems is a kind of mini-play — or mini-masque — but their cumulative impact is hardly short of overwhelming.

In “The Rooms” there are many things we need to know about the sadness and delusions of our contemporary culture — and other things we would probably prefer not to hear. There are numerous, very telling couplets scattered throughout. One from “Room 203” is an example. “Jesus, money evaporates. On the fresh sheets, / his wife’s caressing limbs scratch like twigs.” Again, Andrews’ theatrical experience comes through when he writes of an actor: “Faces upon faces are laid on his. / A palimpsest of worn out masks. Truer lies.”

“The Rooms” is a very convincing presentation of  how much we differ and how much we are the same. It’s also a disconcerting look at where we stand at the moment — and where we might be headed. If the whole of Lens Flare were at this very high standard it would be one of this country’s most compelling first collections in the last few years.

***

Eileen Chong’s second collection, Peony, has many virtues, an almost accidental one of which is to remind us of how far we’ve come, multiculturally. There was a time, say the 1950s, when the typical Chong poem would have been unbearably exotic. As readers, we would have demanded footnotes and glossaries and resented being pressed too hard. Now, in 2014, we are at ease with most of her references; we feel (perhaps wrongly) that we half-know what she’s talking about already.

Peony falls neatly into four sections, only the first of which is “hard core” Chinese. Here we are treated to the Chinese feelings for food, family (children and grandparents, in particular), revered ancestors and the long history of the Middle Kingdom. Some of the poems are recipes in disguise (and this is not a criticism). The first few poems, mainly about Chong’s grandmother, remind us how quickly things have changed not only in mainland China but throughout the Chinese diaspora. “My grandmother cannot read / the words dancing across the screen, / lighting up in time with the music. // She sings from memory, / in the dialect of her youth …” (“Chinese Singing”). The poems here also remind us of the persistence of Chinese customs, a few of which we have come to know about or have even partly assimilated.

The remaining three sections (excepting the book’s final poem) are, for the most part, more “mainstream” but the Chinese dimension persists even though the contexts (overseas travel, domestic life etc) are different. Chong’s poetry, for the most part, has a plain-speaking aspect to it — and a delicacy which we can recognise as Chinese, even if such qualities are not unique to that culture and not all Chinese embody them.

It needs to be insisted upon, however, that Chong’s ambitions range well beyond mere acceptance as a “multicultural” poet. In Part II, for instance, there are several love poems which have a compelling, low-key eroticism, often in the context of a more general sensuality.  The poem,“When in Rome”, has Chong recalling how: “In the darkness of the providore / we stood and breathed in / the brine of the meats, the ripeness / of olives. We learnt the true names / of prosciutto. We tasted the warm / oil. The man behind the counter / asked where we were from. Paradise. / You should visit one day. He shook his head.”

As well as the celebration of the sensuous here, there is also a jokey understatedness which many of us like to think of as Australian. The one-word description of Australia as “Paradise” is a joke in itself — which the Italian shopkeeper may or may not have understood. The whole episode has a nice ambivalence — and artistic sophistication.

Another sign of this range and complexity is Chong’s political and social awareness. “Freeman’s Lobotomy” is a graphic rendition of an outdated, rougher-and-readier treatment for mental illness than the more subtle ones we have today (which remain less precise than we might wish). Chong has her surgeon’s monologue ending with: “All done. Withdraw the pick / and wipe it clean. Thank you nurse. / The patient will need nothing / but a pair of dark glasses. Tomorrow / we shall see how much better she is”.

Peony is a highly accessible and often moving collection which deserves, and may well obtain, a wide readership.

GEOFF PAGE is a Canberra-based poet and critic and the editor of The Best Australian Poems, 2014. His New and Selected is published by Puncher and Wattmann.  

Weekend’s end

by Tim Wright

bulky news press

Reviewed by CHRIS BROWN

Late last year I received in the mail a copy of Tim Wright’s poetry chapbook, Weekend’s end. I’d been in occasional correspondence with Wright for a few years and but for this, might never have seen (or reviewed) the book, which was made by the author and his Melbourne peers and never intended for commercial release.

While the roughed-up cardboard cover, stenciled with a gold stroke at a forward lean (and without names or titles) marks the venture as non-commercial, Wright hasn’t made this book writing against conventional (commercial) book design and production, but outside of it, the effect of which is to give precedence to the poetics of the cover, above any intended political function.

The inside cover introduces the title, Weekend’s end, inviting questions as to the relationship between the title and the single graphic feature, a gold line, almost a forward slash, of the cover. Weekend’s end, might suggest, for example, a division between work and recreation, a space between opposing  contexts – the forward slash suggesting an either/or of constructed time. I doubt that this was Wright’s intention, though it does foreshadow the questions of unity, continuity, and disjunction that come to characterize the poems of the collection. More relevantly perhaps, the title directs us quite literally to the ‘end’ element of ‘weekend’, a gesture closer to Wright’s interests I believe, for Wright’s poems gather energy around the elemental and particulate aspects of their composition; a point more observable as the book proceeds and grammatical continuities of the earlier imagery give way to the abstracted continuity of the closing poem, “course”.

Weekend’s end asks questions of the way a poem might negotiate the natural discontinuities of daily life and thought, as is made clear in the first poem of the book, “notes.”

the bamboo
bending

distracted

a feathered sky

The widening line-break suggests the diminishing connection between successive lines. The last two lines, “communist desire as a collective desire for collectitivity…, quote jodi dean and have nothing and perhaps everything to do with the five lines I quote above; they are related in their un-relatedness, as notes, which are not to be taken here as “just notes” but poetry, the first thought.

If “notes”, for its raw form, resembles a found poem, “accidental collage with Laurie Duggan and word processor”, works in a similar way. Procedures of early writing or drafting are given primacy; the means are here the end. The first three lines read:

Light spills through a gutter a certain

moment of tHe skirts the base of affirmative discourse on which

resemblance calmly reposeshe day, then…

This poem isn’t without its quotidian treats, as the first line expresses, but what’s important is the  question of the accidental itself. This poem embodies the aleatory, the poem is its actual and accidental procedure. Wright is writing a ph.d on Duggan so it’s no great accident that this intersection occurs, nor that the poem itself speaks through its chance arrangement to the relation of the critical to the poetic.

These two poems are as informal as the collection gets. From here on each piece seems a more measured synthesis of its often shifting imagery. Wright appears constantly to be testing language against itself, seeking and sounding out, finally intuited combinations of language, that hold, despite an apparent elemental disparity.

The passage here,

                whales
rose to the surface to
be doted on patted it’s what
we expect they expected
and came here for corner
ing glasses of coopers
extra stout staring
at it won’t do
you any favours the gin scent
still motes the catwalk

from “ugh boat”, left me asking where does one begin to quote and where end? A question itself that attests to the flow Wright achieves through and against the varied elements of the poem-compound. It’s not so much the lack of punctuation (the reader can look after that?) but more the repetition and enjambment, as well as an adept aural sense, that create a sense of movement, which is at once reflective and forward facing. It’s the kind of poem that makes it churlish to congratulate the single line or isolated thought, but there are bursts of semantic delight, as well as humour: “…glasses of…extra stout staring/at it won’t do/you any favours the gin scent…”. Whose shout was it? but as is common of Wright’s poetry, something else is at work here, and in the reflexive sense, I imagine the poet to be asking questions about making the work happen (“staring at it won’t do”. Fittingly then Wright makes his own book to accommodate the poems of his making.

“west end pastoral”, probably my favourite, is a gem; it’s more contextualized than anything else in the collection; though to which west end does Wright refer? I found myself thinking Brisbane (pastoral here ironized); or Newcastle? Wright is originally from Western Australia. Whatever the case, a strong social and political sense comes through here in a poem that quietly approaches the disposability common to contemporary suburban culture. This is the poem in full:

the couch and the dog
are out the front with the D-lock
docked like broken ferries
someone left their porch out overnight
chewing over a block of wood
in a blanket of cut grass
fumigating the bus stop café.

Questions of economy and restraint assert themselves in Wright’s poems. In a review of the recent outcrop anthology for cordite, James Stuart called Wright’s poems “reticent” but didn’t go on to give any examples to clarify the point. Certainly, there are few pronouns in Wright’s work; “I” barely rates a mention, though at the same time, the point of view’s often implied, at times, in the most apt manner: “this music is meant to/permeate certain emotions” (“weekend’s end”). Why not subtract the first person singular from such an equation?

Wright’s varied imagery gives space and light to the daily life recorded in his poems. “a camera”, for example, questions a framed, subjective reality, but in opening itself to a range of reference, undermines its own expression of a point of view characterized by limitation:

repetitions
on a sand dune
the limited selection
admitted by a window
things have changed

Each of the poems collected here present a vitalized discourse on the making of a poem, its roots and final composition. Like his earlier REDACTIONS (I-XII), 2011, Tim Wright’s Weekend’s end works brightly out from its own spirited objectives and resolve, establishing itself as a firm example of the wealth on offer in the gift economy of d.i.y publishing. Put it on your reading list, if you can find it.

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

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.

Backyard Lemon

Wendy Fleming

Melbourne Poets Union Series

ISBN 978-0-9925020-0-3

Reviewed/Launched by KEVIN BROPHY

 
The first thing we might say is that the backyard lemon tree is an iconic fixture in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, as heraldic as the Hills Hoist clothes line is for the rest of Australia’s backyards. The lemon is a humble icon, usually hard working, long living, and it packs loads of zing. Those who know Wendy Fleming, and that is most of us here today, know that she is a Melbourne icon, she is hard working, she has endurance, and she packs considerable zing. I have never been able to say no to her.

It is worth noting that Wendy took particular care to choose the lemon on the front cover photo. It had to be a lemon that showed signs of being battered by the weather, knocked around by insects, blemished by life. So, you can take the lemon as a kind of self-portrait of Wendy.

This is Wendy’s first book, after 25 years of writing poetry, and even longer reading poetry. In fact, the first piece of writing Wendy had published was in Going Down Swinging, when Myron and I were the editors, a short story called ‘The Mission’, featuring a nurse caring for a woman who had killed her baby, a very going down swinging story. The nurse was no accidental character because, as you know, Wendy spent most of her working life as a nurse and nurse educator, beginning at St Vincent’s where she trained and lived with a group of 15 other young women, most of whom are still in touch with each other. In fact, the recent deaths of two of these almost lifelong friends and comrades form the material for poems of grief in her chapbook.

Wendy began writing poetry in earnest by going to a workshop at the Victorian Writers Centre when it was located in George Street in Fitzroy. That is where she met Connie Barber (who seemed to be in charge of the group), Charles D’Anastasi, Leon Shann and Marietta Elliott Kleerkoper. It was from this group, and with this group’s support that she found her way to her pivotal place in the Melbourne Poets Union. Wendy knows how to work with people.

Her acknowledgements page impresses on us the fact that she is part of a family she has long loved, and she is at the centre of a wide community of poets. Even though writing is a solitary vocation, we poets know that there is a deeply felt communal, even tribal element to our particular kind of writing. The scratch of the pen is balanced by the buzz of the spoken word for poets. We cannot help but come together to speak our poems to each other, and eventually form committees and workshop groups and fund raising events of one kind or another. Wendy has been part of this activity for a long time, and all of us want her to keep doing it.

She has also been away by herself with her keyboard and pen, doing what poets must do when they are left to themselves: write poems.

Wendy’s book presents 21 poems to its reader. Each one of them is as real, as pungent, as marked by weather, time and experience as any lemon worth its juice hopes to be. The first phrase in the first poem is one that might fill the head of every lemon that ever lived: ‘The morning sun’.

Titled, ‘The New Order’, and beginning as it does with a breakfast scene, it promises to be a domestic poem, an aubade perhaps, welcoming reader and sunlight to a new beginning. But it is a far darker affair than that, and more complicated, because it is about, as it turns out, how to start a new day alone, suddenly, after thirty years of marriage, family and companionship. The beauty of the poem is in its spareness, its brittle sparseness, combined with a vivid sense of line and image. Wendy uses the ten-syllable, five-beat line neatly and persuasively with ‘The garden beds soak up the recent rain’—a line that also makes music with the chiming of garden with recent, and the alliteration in ‘recent rain’. Similarly, she knows how to use the spondee, in the strong phrase of one-syllable words: ‘full buds ripe’ a couple of lines down. What I am wanting to point out here, is that at the level of the word, phrase and line this poetry has been attended to with care, with clippers, with a no-nonsense attitude towards shows of fussiness in language. I can’t resist bringing your attention to Wendy’s sly humour too in the construction of her lines. The second poem in the book, ‘Changing’, begins with the line ‘I’m good at getting into my clothes’, a wonderfully curious and eccentric observation, making me want to go on with that poem. This is an artfulness that makes an art of speaking plainly, of bringing art out of the galleries and academies, and into the streets, onto the trams, into the homes, airports and change rooms of our ordinary lives.

I want to say more about this form of artfulness in a moment, but first, I want to step back a little further to see what kind of stories, what kinds of thinking and feeling are going on in these poems. They seem to be so smoothly accomplished, so sure in themselves of their range of diction and voice that you don’t expect them to be coming up against the difficult themes that do emerge.

That first poem deals with imposed change, including the losses that time and aging must bring, and the second poem too, contrasting two women in a public change room, one older and the other so young that ‘in a T-shirt neck to thigh/her two new bumps barely move the cloth’, brings us up against the knowledge that life imposes change upon us. There is the frightening poem, ‘Hannah’, a glimpse of the holocaust juxtaposed with the images of cleaner and nurse. Her poem, ‘Beijing Airport 1998’ might be the one that brings to the fore a line of thinking running through the book: a series of reflections and observations on the way we ‘follow the coloured lines to Go’. She writes of her experience:

[I] go through x-rays, checks and gates,
point at the pictures in my passport,
(not a good likeness). No one cares.
Take directions from Mao-jacketed

Women, unsmiling, wordless ….

What I find here is a detached voice, an observing woman acutely aware of the way time and life impose themselves upon us. ‘I stand bereft on this side of the eternal flow,’ Wendy writes. When I told Wendy that I found the voice and stance of her poetry a steady, detached one, she agreed and had two comments to make. Firstly, she said that through her nursing training she has become an accomplished diagnostician. She is always working out what is wrong with the people she knows and meets — medically wrong. I couldn’t help it, I asked her what was wrong with me. ‘I’m not telling you,’ she said. So there. The second comment she made was that her detachment is part of her being a third child. The third child has to please everyone, she said. The third child cannot take up too much emotional space in a family, and must become self-reliant. Wendy has perfected this stance of the diagnostic outsider. This stance of detachment is not all there is to the book in the way of themes and emotions (The final poem, ‘Letter to my Husband’ is as powerful a love poem as you could ever wish to read: in fact there are a series of poems that are love poems to her husband).

To return to the theme of change imposed upon us, ‘Sylvan’, makes the point most starkly: her companion tells her, ‘There is no five year plan.’ Indeed, there is no plan without that plan’s helplessness in the face of both the unpredictable and the predictable ends and impositions we face. The paradox here is partly the perfection of the poems as they speak so tellingly of helplessness, and also the sense of indestructible force in the voice of each poem as it tells us of the mist spraying over us, silent and insidious, obliterating us. Even the lemon tree, in its poem, is the scenery for a photo shoot featuring her friend, ‘elegantly gaunt’ after treatment for cancer. The speaker in the poem, asks, ‘Grant me a moment to complain’, but of course that moment does not arrive, because these are no poems of complaint in this book, the poems are something else, something more difficult to pin down and sum up.

Perhaps, all across this book, like a mist weaving though it, is that feeling we call grief, and for Wendy, it is the loss of her husband in stages to absence, illness and death, and the recent loss of good friends. The poems that detail these experiences are not strictly autobiographical. They are in fact calmly, delicately, unswervingly observed. The poetry is committed always to what images, scenes and sense experience might show us. The poem, ‘The Message of Flowers’, is one of these, superb in its attention to detail, and both tough and poignant in its approach to the relation of language to feeling. Her repetition, of ‘blooming, blooming; blooming not dying’ in the final line of this poem takes up an echo of the grief expressed in Tennyson’s most famous poem, ‘Break, break, break,/On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!’

It is utterly fitting that in the centre of her book there is a poem on Ron Mueck’s sculpture exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2010. Ron Mueck’s is an art without art. When Marcel Duchamp upturned a urinal in 1917 and presented it as an art object, it was art because he found it, he chose it, and he recognized its possible strange doubleness as urinal and fountain, as hardware and art. Ron Mueck has made his utterly real sculptures art through isolating them as figures for us to inspect. This is not the realism of a Vermeer or Rembrandt because technique is not the point. Making vivid, for once, or once again, what has always been in front of our eyes is the point. When Wendy writes,

Each sculpture is a masterpiece of detail
Very lifelike, every hair, skin pore, crease
Of thigh, arms, chest, tits, and vulva
Reproduced in fiberglass. Silicone. Epoxy resin

And ends with, ‘It is very real and it doesn’t feel like art’, we know she has found a way of describing what she does herself in her own poetry. In the repetition of that word ‘very’ I hear her voice too.

And is it art or is it simply documenting the world? Wendy Fleming is working in this highly contemporary documentary tradition, perhaps most spectacularly exemplified by the English artist Damien Hirst, and also she works in the now hundred-year-old tradition of William Carlos Williams and the imagists that followed him. The historian of modern poetry, David Perkins, made the observation that William Carlos Williams’ ‘naturalness and ease involved a lowered pressure or intensity and for his followers made poetry easier to write’ (p 254 A History of Modern Poetry Vol 2). It might have seemed that this new poetry of plain speaking was not artful, or not artful enough. It can seem spontaneous at times, and at other times it might seem merely simple. But I hope that you can understand by now through my comments that this mode of poetry in fact activates reflection, and provides for the reader what Williams called ‘a fresh beginning’—and by that he meant each moment we live must in some sense un-do, must subvert the previous moment. He wanted poetry to ‘breathe the air of the present-day’ (Perkins p 263).

In his uncompromising poem, ‘Credences of Summer’, Wallace Stevens declared,

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.

By keeping her poems clear, uncluttered and unscattered, by allowing the nuances of speech and thought to work on us if we are attentive enough to the attentiveness of her poetry, Wendy Fleming achieves a fine fire of sight, burning everything to ash that need not be there. Admiring her spare poetry immensely, I asked her if she might, after publishing this book, move to a more expansive mode of poetry. She told me that sometimes you workshop the poems and people cut things out, then they cut more things out. I know what she is talking about. She confessed that there are some poems in this book where she has not in fact cut out as much as her workshop group wanted her to. Strangely enough, her editor for this book, Garth Madsen, urged her to be more expansive sometimes.

All of which brings us again to the community that surrounds Wendy. A book of poetry is not produced in isolation, and during those final months of preparation, poets often lean upon friends and editors. In this case, Garth Madsen has been the critical eye and the strong support the poet needed to get through to the end and to find the book that was always there in potential. Wendy and Garth have made a great little chapbook. The chapbook does carry the shadow of a poem that Wendy wanted to put in because, she said, ‘People love it,’ though her editor didn’t, and her editor’s judgment won the day. All poetry books carry the shadows of poems that almost made it in but didn’t, and this is the mark of books that have been brought to us with love for poetry and respect for the reader who wants only the juiciest, most pockmarked, and character-filled lemons between the covers. Buy it. Taste it. Enjoy it.
 
KEVIN BROPHY is the author of thirteen books of poetry, fiction and essays. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is Walking,: New and Selected Poems (John Leonard Press, 2013)
 

The Swan Book

by Alexis Wright

Giramondo, 2013

ISBN 978-1922146-41-0

Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL

The hallmark of a great writer is the capacity to renew and reinvent their creative vision which Alexis Wright achieves with startling virtuosity, sureness, wit and political astuteness in The Swan Book. This is an eclectic fiction, mythopoetic, a meta-narrative epic that takes Wright’s invigorated representations of Indigenous and wilderness mythologies to new levels. Her third novel, it follows on from the internationally-acclaimed Miles Franklin, award-winning Carpentaria, turning its focus to the future, to environmental crises as much as Indigenous crusades. But The Swan Book goes further. It places Wright’s work in a rich, transcultural literary tradition, its verbal pyrotechnics reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s fiction and James Joyce’s Ulysses; its unflinching forecast written with the potency of Cormac McCarthy or George Orwell, it weaves outback realism with remixed Dreaming, classical references with political allegory, post-colonial and postmodern tropes.

The Swan Book tells the story Oblivia Ethyl(ene), a girl who never speaks after being raped by a gang of petrol-sniffing youths. She is dug out and rescued from the bowels of an ancient story-telling river gum by Bella Donna of the Champions, a European gypsy refugee from climate change wars who arrives on the coast of Australia and makes her way to Swan Lake. The lake has become silted into a swamp, a sand mountain littered with rusted craft, overseen by a white Army. It’s a dystopian future where the policies of intervention remain widespread; where the current wave of conservative thinking is used ‘to control the will, mind and soul of the Aboriginal people.’ The themes of belief, sovereignty of the mind and ancestral voice which were heroically rendered in Carpentaria, find a pessimistic and cleansing register in The Swan Book. Nothing is spared; Wright turns her acerbic lens to illuminate an encompassing scope of Australian political and cultural life, while the land, topography, birds and mutant wildlife flow sinuously in spates and epidemics through the braiding of the narrative.  Some passages are written with penetrating zeal:

This was the place where the mind of the nation practised warfare and fought nightly for supremacy, by exercising its power over another people’s land ─the night-world of the multi-nationals, the money-makers and players of big business, the asserters of sovereignty, who governed the strip called Desperado; men with hands glued to the wheel charging through the dust in howling road trains packed with brown cattle with terrified eyes, mobile warehouses, fuel tankers, heavy haulage steel and chrome arsenals named Bulk Haul, Outback, Down Under, Century, The Isa, The Curry, Tanami Lassie, metal workhorses for carrying a mountain of mining equipment and the country’s ore…   (165)

There is a sense of the journey of storytelling running through the book, tracing Oblivia’s passage from scribe, whose fingers trace the ghost language of dead trees into Swan maiden, from First Lady wedded to Aboriginal PM, Warren Finch and living in urban sanction to a widow returning to the swamp as guardian of a myth-making swan. Along this winding odyssey through dust storms, floods and cyclones that exist outside of linear time, Oblivia witnesses and internally records the plight of refugees, illegal crossings, the homeless hordes, the aberrant reptiles and displaced birds. One senses that Wright herself gives over to the textual process, surrendering to its detours, its meteorology, absorbing and weaving whatever arises along the way. Her dialectical suppleness and impressive knowledge makes for an innovative, politically-engaged Australian and translocal vision.

The centrality of language is signalled in the remarkable opening prelude, Ignus Fatuus, (meaning ‘illusion’, or ‘phosphorescent light over the swampy ground’) in which the narrator embodies the creative voice as a cut snake virus replicating ideas and firing serological missiles at intruders. It’s a perfect metaphor for the sceptical, chaotically mistrusting tone and establishes voice as an internal harbinger of environmental destruction. Ventriloquisms and shavings of literary allusions combine with popular cultural references ranging from Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song to hybrid motifs such as an ‘Aboriginal tinkerbell fairy.’

Reading the opening chapters I almost felt assaulted by the insistent catalogue of swans: swans of all languages and lyrics are interpolated. The black swan in a Central Australian swamp is an unsettling symbol of Indigenity in its figurative miscegenation with the white swan of Bella Donna’s European folklore. But the brilliance of this excess is to intentionally fetishize the naming and discursive power of language so that the reader experiences language as invasion, as appropriation, as indoctrination, just as Bella Donna herself invades the swamp country of the Northern Territory like ‘an old raggedy Viking’ bringing stories of floating disasters, of refugees from zero geography. After she dies, the swamp people who had once rejected her stories begin to speak Latin in their conversation, becoming ‘Latino Aboriginals’. Wright subversively takes irony and parody to extremes as a way of destabilising not merely language but concepts of nation, deconstructing the colonial currency:

It appeared that the old ghost had colonised the minds of the swamp people so completely with the laws of Latin, it terminated their ability to speak good English anymore, and to teach their children to speak English properly so that the gap could finally be closed between Aboriginal people and Australia. (80)

In making this claim, the hyperbole exceeds stylistic effect and becomes predictive, a potent rehabilitation of colonial assumptions of control. Allusions to the European and White Australian lyric tradition of swans create ambivalence as they parody and place under pressure the authority and superiority of prevailing narratives. Instead, the omnipresent variety of storytelling is eclectic, transcultural and global, invoking inter-racial beliefs of future, past and present. Not only are all kinds of swans admitted into the way that stories are told, the characters are genetically diverse, or like Warren Finch’s minders, ‘inter-racially bred’. Half Life, the mild-mannered camel man who guides Oblivia during her Ghost walk tells her:

We are Aboriginal herds-people with bloodlines in us from all over the world, he added, and dreamily listed all the world’s continents that he could remember being related to these days, Arabian, African, Asian, Indian, European all sorts, pure Pacific Islander ─ anywhere else I didn’t mention? Well! That as well! Wherever! Even if I haven’t heard of it! No matter ─ we got em right here inside my blood. I am thick with the spirits from all over the world that I know nothing about. (315)

Wright’s work is reconstructive, seeking to operate outside of colonial paradigms and boundaries, refusing to be contained. She is able to seamlessly shift gears from third person narrator to interior monologue, from Warren to Oblivia’s point of view. Sections of the novel that contain more conventional dramatic prose such as those that describe Warren Finch meeting with the Aboriginal caucus are skilfully juxtaposed to provide relief from denser periphrastic prose. A descendent of the Waanyi people, Wright’s vast experience of activism, of policy-making bureaucrats and small-town, outback corruption is evidenced.  One could argue that the meta-fictional structure of the novel feels somewhat contrived with a prologue and an epilogue used to frame a less self-conscious tension between the polyphonic narrator and the narration however the unevenness is intentional; Wright asserts herself as a highly skilful, erudite yet relaxed storyteller, warping the conventions to compromise aesthetic purity for the benefit of interrogation. The humour is eclectic, switching wavelengths and vernaculars arbitrarily so that languages and styles are remixed and mashed up.

Aside from its sheer literary brilliance, I find the strengths of this novel to be its refusal to seek order or resolution and the way it replicates so much diversity: indeed,   as the narrator suggests, ‘How bold to mix the Dreamings.’ In her essay “On Writing Carpentaria” Wright speaks of memory and trauma, asserting that

When faced with too much bad reality, the mind will try to survive by creating alternative narra-tives and places to visit from time to time, or live in, or believe in, if given the space. Carpentaria imagines the cultural mind as sovereign and in control, while freely navigating through the known country of colonialism to explore the possibilities of other worlds. (1)

In The Swan Book she writes a mythopoesis of swan ghosting, of environmental havoc and (un) heroic Indigenity where the sovereign mind and colonial repression are in schism. If there is a swan song it is madness, but the many registers of Oblivia’s silence reinscribe themselves as a timeless Dreaming. This is a self-reflexive book, refusing paternalistic narrative conventions endemic to our literature. Wright compels us to read actively; to reconsider the violence that brutalises Aboriginal Australia and to deconstruct the assumptions and complacencies which fabricate our ideals of nature and nation.

NOTES

1. Wright, Alexis “On Writing Carpentaria” HEAT, 2007

MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry and fiction. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Southerly, Westerly, Jacket, Poetry International Web and forthcoming in Wasafiri. She was the CAL/UOW Fellow at Kingston University. With Boey Kim Cheng and Adam Aitken she co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets.

Too Afraid to Cry

by Ali Cobby Eckermann

Ilura Press

Reviewed by SOPHIA BARNES

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s elegant, confident and distinctive memoir is a slim volume for all that it contains. If a reader has the leisure to read it all in one sitting (as I did) the impact of its interwoven vignettes, interspersed with poetry, will be heightened. It is a book which rewards complete engagement and a willingness to follow the sometimes unanticipated shifts in rhythm of its fragmented form. Following the success of several collections of poetry and two verse novels, Too Afraid to Cry brings Cobby Eckermann’s ear for the cadences of memory to sharp, crisp, at times even blunt prose.

Each chapter, identified only by number, is short (the longest only stretch to three or four pages) and these chapters are frequently separated by brief, titled poems. This combination — a kind of verse novel (or verse memoir) in itself — serves to give a reader the sense that they are taking a series of interrupted glances at a tumultuous, changeable and rich life. Cobby Eckermann moves across stretches of time confidently, zooming in on moments of encounter, epiphany or conflict in such a way that we feel irresistibly pulled along with her, piecing together the intervening time through poetry whose loaded imagery is beautifully interwoven with narrative events. Occasionally the poems foreshadow, occasionally they meditate on what has passed (though never in an explicit or heavy-handed way), and together they underpin the rhythmic power which makes this memoir such compelling and affecting read.

Too Afraid to Cry opens with ‘Elfin’, a spare yet lyrical poem whose motifs of song and growth, of flight and emergence, are juxtaposed quite shockingly, but very effectively, with the almost uncannily abrupt scene of child sexual abuse which begins on the page opposite. As readers we know immediately that the territory of this memoir will not be comfortable or easy for us to traverse; yet what I found striking was that even as this horror of violation is bluntly introduced, we hear the young Ali’s voice, loud and clear. ‘Fat chance!’ she thinks, as she endures her Uncle’s fumbling. She may have experienced adult betrayal in the worst imaginable way, yet this young girl is no victim — that much is clear from the very opening, and it’s an impression which only becomes more concrete throughout.

Ali Cobby Eckermann grew up as in indigenous child in an adoptive family. There is real, if often unspoken, love between mother, father and adopted daughter; nonetheless, as Ali grows up she comes to feel more and more an outlier. The abuse to which she is subjected in her school years brings her to consciousness of her difference, and it is a realisation from which she cannot retreat. The tragic irony of the pressure under which she is put to adopt out her own child brings home to the reader the scope of an inter-generational story of dispossession and loss, as well as sacrifice. Along with her ‘Big Brother’, Cobby Eckermann shares the experience of being both familiar and foreign, in indigenous and white Australian society.

Too Afraid to Cry narrates fitful travels through the outback, from town to town, taken in the years of Cobby Eckermann’s early adulthood, and it does so with unswerving honesty — the choices made or not made, the relationships begun and ended, the jobs gained and abandoned. This account of her movement through space, from job to job and finally through rehab to a place of family, creativity and healing is always counterweighted by the timelessness (it is undoubtedly a cliché, yet I can’t help finding it to be true here) which her poetry seems to evoke, or to capture — at the very least, to speak to.

There is the confronting clarity and bluntness of ‘I Tell You True’: I can’t stop drinking, I tell you true / since I watched my daughter perish […] Since I found my sister dead […] Since my mother passed away. Then there is the irresistibly continuity, the extending time of ‘Bird Song’: Life is Extinct / Without bird song / Dream Birds / Arrive at dawn / Message birds / Tap Windows / Guardian birds / Circle the sky / Watcher birds / Sit nearby / Fill my ears / With bird song / I will survive. Cobby Eckermann balances the unadorned prose in which she recounts her memories and her journey without apology or bravado, with the rhythmic undercurrent of her poetry.

As we become more aware of the myriad experiences of dispossession and of broken families which have so defined our colonial history in Australia we might risk a sense of being overwhelmed, of feeling as if we had heard ‘too many’ stories, of being unable to step back and to see afresh the scale of what was done, and to listen to the accounts of those to whom it was done. Ali Cobby Eckermann offers a fresh, unflinching and uncompromising iteration of a search for identity undertaken by multiple generations of adopted and adoptive indigenous children and parents. Yet she does not just tell her story to add to the existing record; she weaves a compelling narrative whose lingering emotion, for this reader, was a vital and entirely beguiling strength. A continued and unashamed pleasure in life, a love for colour and voice and land, sensation, interaction and perhaps above all, language, radiated from this memoir, and I think that stray lines of Cobby Eckermann’s poems will continue to surface in my resting mind for weeks to come.

SOPHIA BARNES is a Postgraduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, where her Ph.D has recently been conferred. She has published academic work internationally, and has had creative writing published in WetInk Magazine. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the WetInk / CAL Short Story Prize for the second year running.

When My Brother was an Aztec

By Natalie Diaz

Copper Canyon Press

ISBN 9781556593833

Reviewed by AIMEE A. NORTON
 

Natalie Diaz’s debut collection is a book about appetites.  It contains raw, narrative poems that pivot on her brother’s meth addiction.  Lyric surrealism is interspersed throughout and serves both as a welcome reprieve from the brutality of the narrative, but also expertly explores the universal hunger that brings people to their own personal tables of conflict and gluttony.  The setting is the Mojave Indian Reservation where Diaz grew up and where she currently works with the last fluent speakers of Mojave to save the severely endangered language.

Diaz’s poems grind with a savagery that doesn’t often make it onto the page.  The Aztecs are a culture known for ritualized violence and a theater of terror epitomized by state-organized human sacrifice.  Diaz does well to sew the Aztecs together with drug culture in the Southwestern US which is an area saturated with narcotics related violence.  Addiction itself is shown as a ritualized self-violence. The title poem ‘When My Brother Was an Aztec’ begins hauntingly.

    He lived in our basement and sacrificed my parents
Every morning.  It was awful.  Unforgivable.  But they kept coming
back for more.  They loved him, was all they could say.

The poem ends just as hauntingly when Diaz describes her parents searching for their missing limbs, looking for their fingers…

        To pry, to climb out of whatever dark belly my brother, the Aztec
their son, had fed them to.

Readers witness the violence of meth addiction, see the blackened spoons and the sores on her brother’s lips, hear the tribal cops outside on the lawn, understand from the poem titled ‘As a Consequence of My Brother Stealing All the Light Bulbs’ that her parents live without light.  The tone is unapologetic and fierce.  It is unblinking on a topic that breaks many families.  Yet a close read reveals unmistakable joy in the writing.  Diaz celebrates that language can express these truths, even if they are hard truths.  The poems are alive on the page, delivered with a skill that often hides underneath the intensity of the material.

The characters devour, feed, starve, gorge, thirst and more.  In the poem ‘Cloud Watching’, Diaz writes “So, when the cavalry came, / we ate their horses.  Then, unfortunately, our bellies were filled  / with bullet holes.”  In ‘Soiree Fantastique’, her brother sets a table for a party attended by Houdini, Jesus, Antigone and others.  It ends when the poet explains to a distressed Antigone “We aren’t here to eat, we are being eaten. / Come, pretty girl, let us devour our lives.”   The effect of all this devouring on the reader is that it makes one insatiable for more of Diaz’s poems.

There are three parts to the book.  The first section serves as an introduction to life on the reservation.  We meet ‘A Woman with No Legs’ who “curses in Mojave some mornings  Prays in English most nights  Told me to keep my eyes open for the white man named Diabetes who is out there somewhere carrying her legs in red biohazard bags”.  We visit a jalopy bar called ‘The Injun That Could’.   We learn of a literal dismantling of the Hopi culture when a road is cut through Arizona in ‘The Facts of Art’.  This section feels more historical and cultural than personal.  For the lovers of form, Diaz scatters a Ghazal, a Pantoum, an Abcedarian, a list poem and prose poems throughout the collection.

The third section contains a handful of love and lust poems such as Monday Aubade:

    to shut my eyes one more night
On the delta of shadows
between your shoulder blades –
mysterious wings tethered inside
the pale cage of your body – run through
by Lorca’s horn of moonlight,
strange unicorn loose along the dim streets
separating our skins;

The surrealism persists in the love poems.  Often, the act of loving is portrayed as a kind of sacrifice.  The answer to the poem titled ‘When the Beloved Asks, ‘What Would You Do if you Woke Up and I Was a Shark?’ ‘ is clear:   “I’d place my head onto that dark alter of jaws” and “it would be no different from what I do each day – voyaging the salt-sharp sea of your body”.   It’s obvious that Lorca has been a substantial influence on Diaz.  She places a passionate poem titled ‘Lorca’s Red Dresses’ smack in the middle of the third section as well as mentioning him in ‘Monday Aubade’ and other poems.

The engine of the book is the second section.  These poems cast and recast the brother as various characters:  a Judas effigy, an Aztec, a Gethsemane, a bad king, a lost fucked-up Magus, a zoo of imaginary beings, a Huitzilopochtli (a half-man half-hummingbird god) and various characters from myth.  The theme of the book is being present in the face of a powerful destroyer, or living through an encounter with the destroyer, witnessing the wreckage and not turning away.  Ruin is wrought by her brother’s meth addiction.  There’s a reach to her talent that challenges the importance of her work being limited by identity.  I read a few of her poems to Plath’s ghost saying, “Look here, you aren’t the only one that can plate up mouthwatering, award-winning anger for male relatives”.

Destruction of Native American culture by Europeans settlers and the continued, historical bigotry is featured in the poems.  Ships appear throughout the book as harmful things.  Take the wonderfully-titled poem ‘If Eve Side-Stealer & Mary Busted-Chest Ruled the World’ which is an alternative retelling of first people and creation, the last stanza reads:

What if the world was an Indian
whose head & back were flat from being strapped
to a cradleboard as a baby & when she slept
she had nightmares lit up by yellow-haired men & ships
scraping anchors in her throat?  What if she wailed
all night while great waves rose up carrying the fleets
across her flat back, over the edge of the flat world?

I struggled with the question in this poem:  what if?  Diaz refuses to answer it.  The mind still asks:  What if we erase just this one chapter where the Hopi’s burial sites are dug up for a new road?  Or, what if a daughter is not stoned to death?  What if Diaz’s brother had not gone to war and had not crawled into bed with death?  Diaz knows this can not be.  It is as likely as the world being flat.  Her answer is a refusal to see anything other than the violent, beautiful world we have that is full of lightning.  This is a brave approach.  Yes, destruction is also generative.  If there was an end to violence, then nothing new could be born.

Still, I wonder whether the perspective and tone in When My Brother Was an Aztec, which is in part the powerful backstory of Diaz’s life, will shift now that this fearless narrative is spoken.  I predict that the book breaks open a future to be found in Diaz’s not-yet-written poems to show what a world would look like if she were the boss goddess.  One truth is:  the future exists.  Another truth is:  we get to help shape it.   I confess that I read utopian science-fiction, so I know that Diaz has exactly the kind of brutally honest mind that should broker destiny by introducing a few options and answering that question:  what if Eve Side-Stealer and Mary Busted-Chest ruled the world?  I still want to know.  I’m hoping her second book tells me.  Diaz signed my copy of this book with “sumach ahotk” which is Mojave for “dream well”.  Yes, let’s dream well.

In my opinion, this book will have a powerful effect on American poetry.  By adding her forceful voice to the spectrum of next generation Native American poets such as Esther Belin and Orlando White, she’s already earned much recognition.   Diaz has received the Lannan Literary Fellowship, Balcones Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and made the shortlist for a 2014 PEN/Open Book Award.   The collection ends as it began – with hunger – when a lion devours a man.  The lion protests he “didn’t want to eat the man like a piece of fruit”.  The man “had earned his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion’s cage”. The book has earned its deliciousness by ringing, too.  My recommendation is to set the table and let the feasting begin.

AIMEE A NORTON is a research astronomer at Stanford University. Her research has appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, Solar Physics, and National Geographic News among other places. She is also an emerging poet who has published in Mascara Literary Review, Rabbit, Softblow, Many Mountains Moving, Paper Wasp, The Drunken Boat, Byline and Literature in North Queensland (LiNQ).

 Toyo

By Lily Chan

Black Inc

ISBN: 9781863955737

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

In the Folds of Making: A Review of Toyo by Lily Chan

Upon a close reading of Melbourne-based, Japanese-Australian author Lily Chan’s debut novel and memoir Toyo, a word cannot fail to strike our attention, returning like a litany throughout. It is the word “fold”: fold of the body as legs gently repose on the tatami in traditional Japanese fashion (183) or as the skin becomes wrinkled (240) and twisted (236) with old age; animal/vegetal folds as one coils in reaction “like an abandoned dog” (103) or curls back inwards like the petals of a flower (14); artfully folding and unfolding fans (52); folded cloths following the lines of a kimono (50, 60, 168), a pair of pants (80) or a shirt (136) or a string of tissues hidden in sleeves (232, 243 and 245); paper folds, yen notes appearing and disappearing magically (60), an old photo stuck in-between the curves of a curtain (63), hastily scribbled messages stuffed in someone else’s clothes (236), or the folds of the origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into decorative shapes and figures (10, 214).

    A fold is neither a wrap nor a box. If the latter simultaneously conceal and reveal, the former possesses an “elastic” quality working at “the extremity of the line” between closure and disclosure. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze commented in his work on Leibniz and the Baroque, “the unfold is thus not the opposite of the fold, but follows one fold until the next” (1991: 231), in the manner of origami. As suggested by, and as opposed to, the French idiomatic phrases “cela ne fait pas un pli” (there’s no doubt about it, literally meaning “it does not fold”) and “c’est un pli à prendre” (it’s something you’ve got to get used to), Deleuze traces here the contours of a subject whose form and content are neither straightforward nor linear, neither the one nor the other, but instead tortuous and tortured, and imbued with the prospect of limitless, multiple selves: “[This] labyrinth of continuity is not a line which would dissolve into independent points, like sand flowing in grains, but is like a piece of fabric or a sheet of paper which divides into an infinite number of folds or disintegrates into curved movements” (231).  

    Toyo narrates the story of a woman whose life as an exile would involve many detours. Toyo was first exiled from her origins and in particular her father, whom she met only twice, being the fruit of an illegitimate relationship needing concealment; exiled again from the safety of home in the face of war, poverty and the horrors of the atomic bomb, or the sexual abuse coming from various predatory men taking advantage of the situation – American soldiers but also a family doctor. In the event of her mother’s death, Toyo is compelled to attach herself to a new family and husband. This man is Ryu, who himself must face daily estrangement for being doubly crippled. A lame person posited within the diasporic folds of the Chinese community in Japan, Ryu struggles through discrimination with a level of strength and determination only those struck by proportionate ill fortune seem to possess: “They [the Chinese] were excluded from the healthcare schemes and prohibited from working in the public service; they had to register their businesses with the government department regulating alien residents.” (83)

    Upon marrying Ryu, Toyo is asked to give up her Japanese citizenship. A new identity pass and a new name, Dong Yang Zhang, are issued to her, so that “she felt as if her body had been crossed out, as if she no longer existed” (88). Against all odds, Ryu succeeds in setting up coin-operated Laundromats across the entire city of Osaka, where none had existed hitherto, in a post-war, fast-modernising Japan ripe with hope and renewed opportunities. However, Ryu’s baroque eccentricities brought upon by wealth, his public gambling, drinking and flirting in particular, as well as the fatigue that hard work necessarily entails, makes him neglect his inner health in turn, only to die too soon of a simple kidney infection. As Deleuze has argued, “baroque architecture can be defined by that scission of the façade and the inside, of the interior and the exterior, the autonomy of the interior and the independence of the exterior effected in such a way that each one sets off the other.” (234) It is this precarious equilibrium, in-between “the coils (replis) of matter” and “the folds (plis) of the soul”, that Toyo, following a series of deaths within the Zhang family, will seek to achieve in her new life in Western Australia and her adoption of Eastern Indian spirituality – a balance sought out by Chan herself within the very skeleton of her memoir.

    While the first part of the novel is chiefly concerned with replis, which as Deleuze’s translator explained, “evokes the movements of a reptile…the idea of folding in on oneself” (227), the second part of the novel set in Perth and in the country town of Narrogin, where Chan grew up, deals instead with the multifarious plis that migrant resilience and pliability imply. The reader may scoff at Toyo’s and her son Yoshio’s New Ageism, from nomadic trips to India to meet with Indian Guru Sai Baba, to the building of a communal ashram in the middle of the West Australian wheat belt. However, we must remind ourselves how personal questing through the teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism had proved extremely popular across the West back in the 1970s and 80s when we can infer the action to take place, this despite the elusiveness with which the historical fresco of Toyo’s life is depicted (one of the memoir’s chief limitations according to Alison Broinowski). The state of Western Australia’s sheer magnitude and Perth especially, one of the most remote cities on earth, have in literature often taken on an added religious dimension, as is the case in Toyo: “In Perth the temple seemed to be everywhere; the sky was a vast blue rooftop covering the entire city.” (180)

    Perhaps the best way of grasping Chan’s insistence on Eastern spirituality is by looking at the corresponding thematic centrality of old age in the last sections of the book. Descriptions of an ageing, Alzheimer-struck Toyo following her return to Osaka after many years away, “where she felt like a tourist in her own city” (228), have given way in my view to the most interesting, most moving passages in the memoir. Here, the reader comes to understand how Chan’s book is, beyond being a memoir, primarily a fictional account of her grandmother’s “own hallucinations, dreams and fragmented recollections” (252). For a literature routinely plagued by discourses of cultural/historical authenticity/veracity, “how to break the mould of diasporic fiction and offer readers something unique is the challenge Lily Chan faces in her first book” (Broinowski 2012). Keeping this in mind, Broinowski’s subsequent criticism of the book’s ahistoricism feels strange, and her assertion that “most memoirs are of people who in some way were public figures or agents of change [while] Toyo is neither”, seems not only misplaced but factually wrong.

    In effect, the genre of the memoir has more often than not been a prime vehicle for the emergence of erased stories by minorities – women, Blacks, indigenous peoples, as well as “ordinary” citizens of all kinds. These “micro-narratives” however deserve to be universalized due to the fact that matter “offers a texture that is infinitely porous, that is spongy or cavernous without empty parts, since there is always a cavern in the cavern: each body, however small it may be, contains a world insofar as it is perforated by uneven passageways” (Deleuze 1991: 230). The trans-generational nature of the memoir allows for a form of historicity that is neither fully personal nor “cosmological”, residing instead in the interstitial play of signs, the subterranean or subconscious “cave of making” (Bhabha 2009) that is at the origin of discourse. A dying, speechless Toyo will thus seek in her youngest grandchild a mirror to her own existence and a means of communication as she felt the irrepressible urge to speak to him, for “[she] saw, suddenly, that he was part of the constellation, that his very soul was flaring and bursting, and in the trajectory of his life, she could see her own intersect with his, the tenuous point of connection flickering like a sparked wire, yet to come into being” (258).

    A word must be said here on the allegorical, poetic prose of Chan’s writing, before I return to the problematic of the fold as a matter of conclusion. As Delia Falconer has argued, “it’s a shame Chan’s overrefined prose stifles their [Chan’s characters’] “lifeness”…as she strives too often to pin them to artful similes.” This is missing the fact that, mentioned several times throughout the memoir, the art of kabuki has provided the cultural and formalistic framework through which Chan was able to give life and resonance to each one of her characters. A kabuki is “a form of traditional Japanese drama with highly stylized song, mime, and dance…using exaggerated gestures and body movements to express emotions, and including historical plays, domestic dramas, and dance pieces.” Style being another aspect of diasporic fiction by which the literary establishment regularly condemns or relegates the latter to the dusty archives of life-writing, it is not surprising to find, yet again, reluctance in the face of the fact that,

“it is the way in which matter [content] folds that constitute its texture [form]…defined less by its heterogeneous and genuinely distinct parts than by the manner in which, by virtue of particular folds, these parts become inseparable. From that one gets the concept of Mannerism in its operatory relation to the Baroque” (Deleuze 1991: 245).

    The end of the book reverts in a roundabout way to Toyo’s illegitimate birth, but, unlike the image of a dog endlessly chasing its own tail/tale, Toyo at the dusk of life and for the first time felt fulfilled. As Deleuze again wrote, “the perfect harmony of the scission, or the resolution of tension, is effected by the distribution of two stories, which both belong to one and the same world (the line of the universe). The matter-façade tends downwards while the soul-chamber rises. The infinite fold thus passes between two stories.” (243) There would be quite a lot to say about Toyo’s stereotypical view of Australia, or her Orientalist (if not at times racist) appraisal of India – “India was dirty. Brown. Hot” (198) – or yet still, her complete ignorance of Aboriginal spirituality, but eventually, Chan’s writerly gift is to have shown us a life with multiple entries and folds, which is what distinguishes a rounded from a flat character.

    If Chan chooses to leave the reader with a sense of plenitude, it is because Toyo, unlike her mother, born in a small farming village and who due to unforeseen circumstances was never able to realise her dream of becoming a nurse, has been given the opportunity to travel, be mobile while reinventing herself and grow old to share her knowledge and experience with others, which is no small feat. Altogether, quite a baroque life indeed:

Toyo taught her grandchildren origami…She carried boxes of coloured paper squares to the three primary schools in Narrogin and taught them how to fold samurai hats, boats, masks, jumping frogs. The children watched her fold the coloured paper and gasped in wonder when she held the finished pieces up. She liked to wander around the classrooms and examine the children’s bent heads, their industrious fingers folding and unfolding…Children ran to their parents at the bell, brandishing their boats and birds and frogs and sumo wrestlers. She felt complete. (214)

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. 2009. “In the Cave of Making: Thoughts on Third Space.” Communicating in the Third Space (Karin Ikas & Gerhard Wagner eds.): IX-XIV. New York: Routledge.

Broinowski, Alison. 2012. “Rare Asian Family Study.” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 29.

<http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/rare-asian-family-study-20121228-2byac.html> (Accessed 13 Sept. 13).

Chan, Lily. 2012. Toyo. Melbourne: Black Inc.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. “The Fold.” Yale French Studies 80: 227-247.

Falconer, Delia. 2012. “Homing in on an Extraordinary Life.” The Australian, October 20.

<http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/homing-in-on-an-extraordinary-life/story-fn9n8gph-1226498574907> (Accessed 13 Sept. 13).

No Author. 2010. “Kabuki: a definition”. New Oxford American Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PAUL GIIFFARD-FORET  completed a PhD at Monash University. His work appears in Westerly, Transnational Literature and Mascara.
He teaches in Paris.

Transactions

By Ali Alizadeh

University of Queensland Press

ISBN 9780702249785

Reviewed by ELIZABETH BRYER

Ali Alizadeh’s Transactions is a panoramic cycle of vignettes that depict characters in a globalised world on the margins of Western and, most particularly, capitalist society. A vast array of characters jostle within its pages: assassins, prostitutes, poets, protesters and Oz-Exploitation directors, to name a few. Indeed, much of the delight to be had on reading the collection is in unravelling exactly how these people, all from diverse corners of the globe, are connected within the world of the book. Transactions is also a scathing critique of a system that exploits the most vulnerable, carefully laying out for scrutiny, as it does, moments, decisions and interactions that demonstrate the insidiousness of rampant capitalism and the questionable morals that it champions.

Because of the nature of the vignettes, the particular stories they tell are not so much stories as disparate moments, separated from each other in space but not so much in time, and revolving around a single interaction or conundrum. They are necessarily focussed and partial. While occasionally this can mean that some plot developments feel hastily resolved, or that characters can come across as types, this same feature also creates an intricate, interweaving architecture, much as if one were to find oneself in a building with many rooms, and through exploring these might happen upon hidden passages leading to spaces of a particular character—chambers, inglenooks, boudoirs—and staircases and doorways opening onto others. Indeed, the most successful moments are when the plot stretches across and through vignettes, sometimes skipping some only to reappear in others, and it is in this steady accumulation of connections and layering of experiences that the tone of the work, as well as its entwined themes, is best appreciated.

The title of the collection operates on a number of levels, encompassing more than just the usual context of business and exchange: in the world of this book, most things, even relationships and interactions, even the concepts of familial duty and mutual obligation, boil down to an economic imperative, and each of the transactions depicted is an occasion on which, in one way or another, one person is likely to give and the other, to gain. That the transaction is between unequals, all of whom must engage in the exchange while equipped with different levels of freedom of choice and with more or less to lose, is almost always the case. What is not often apparent—what is cause for much of the tension—is who will, ultimately, benefit. One avenging angel sees it as her duty to give those who have consistently profited through swindling another, whether through cruelty and maltreatment, a lack of recognition of the other’s humanity or uncompassionate policies, their comeuppance, to put it mildly.

Nothing, it seems, is free of the market, or of the pressures and fissures that this market places on and between people. And on one point the narrator is very clear: the corruption that the global system breeds does not just lead to wealth disparity, but to individuals both becoming expendable commodities, as when mining protesters are massacred and poor Liberian women are trafficked to Europe, and treating others as if they were, as when a would-be-author asks his co-author to sleep with a publisher to ensure their book’s publication. Those doing the exploiting, then, dehumanise the exploited, but in doing so they necessarily dehumanise themselves. But the narrator is careful to point to the potential dangers of all hierarchical systems, not just the capitalist one: one of the vignettes, whose protagonists recurs throughout the collection, shadows its protagonist as she comes to terms with the truth of her scientist father’s actions, or lack thereof, at the Chernobyl disaster. ‘He wanted to please the party. He knew there was something wrong with the control rods, Mama. But he didn’t say anything’ (p. 92).

Perhaps inevitably, given the subject matter, a strong sense of moralising at times comes to the fore. The poor are trapped in the position of bearing the system, and others, having risen through its ranks by way of economic or social capital, become a kind of embodiment of evil: there is Samia, the disease of affluence incarnate, in whose figure boredom and entitlement foster cruelty and sadism; there are Danish missionaries in Libya who use their women’s shelter as a means of trafficking women for the European sex trade; and there is a British magnate who has built her empire ‘upon the misery of others’ and yet sees herself ‘as truly innocent’ (18). Hypocrisy and corruption are rampant among the upper echelons, and are portrayed as unforgivable.

It is no mean feat to present such a geographically and culturally broad vision of humanity without falling into stereotypes, but Transactions navigates this carefully. Sometimes the fictional world created stretches credulity, such as when a character who has been poisoned continues to punch out words into her computer, the sentences becoming more fragmented, the words, more spaced. At other times, there are moments of confusion in the narrative logic that can prove distracting, such as when a mentally ill man stabs himself to death then self-immolates. But there is great delight in language, which is wielded with verve, and a playfulness and dexterity with form: some vignettes are epistolary, others are dialogue, others are poems and yet others are confessional. There are almost as many voices and registers as there are vignettes, here, without the forms ever proving distracting or perfunctory.

After the prologue, each of the vignettes carries the title of a tarot card from the Marseille deck, with one, ‘The Fool’, repeated—this is the title of both the first and last stories. Interestingly, the character to whom the title refers in the first story reappears in the last, though not, in the latter case, as the titular character, but as the one who proves the protagonist to be deserving of the designation. The circularity that this creates is effective, as is the astute choice to title the stories like so. Through the titles, the narrator suggests not just that world is thus ordered, but also frames the stories as, like tarot cards, tools with which we can attempt to comprehend the confounding nature of the system we humans have created for ourselves. Transactions offers us an assortment of stories that don’t just order the world, but help us understand it.

Parang

by Omar Musa

Blast! Publishing, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-646-59463-7

Reviewed by ANGELA STRETCH

It takes time to have a heart, to suffer, to feel the weight of things. The heart is alive precisely through its capacity for fellow-feeling.

Like the posthumous soul in Malaysian thought, memory disperses as if it is no longer attached to something tangible.  To keep the soul from disintegrating Omar Musa consistently evokes it, bringing it back into direct contact with the living world. In this second collection Musa negotiates the heart of Malay traditions and rituals comprising of family, people, objects and interactions.  It provides the living with structured occasions to refresh memories of the dead through symbolic communication, historical knowledge that transmit moral principles, gleaming rectification in order to strengthen relationships.

Dream specifications for Musa’s amorous relations: a prospect of limitless power whose miraculous condescension or grace it is to single out for special tenderness the minute grain of sand or crystal it anyway contains.  The contrasts between infinite ocean and finite pebble, between the fluidity of the saline medium and the attendant still of its denizens, between grandiose nominatives and familiarities, between absolute freedom and absolute dependency, such are the polarisations between the preservation of family memories and echoes of grand monumentality and unadorned ordinariness.  

The book begins with an evocation of terrible alienation, a nomadship only terminated by self-destruction: a lost soul surviving precariously in a memory.  

I stopped to bathe
and time tipped over the lip of a jug.
Just then I heard the echo of an ancestor,
wild and wise as a hart
[i].

The young man responds. Musa conceives of himself becoming a sort of teller, a people’s poet.  The same drive toward simplification and abstraction can be found in the book’s title. Parang, a self-made dagger with many uses as whetted in The Parang and the Keris.[ii]

But this commonplace parang?
I know how to use it –
to clear a lane through jungle,
to tap rubber from a tree
or with swish calligraphic
take a head
clean
off.    

Expressing stubbornness and tenacity that unfolds various meanings, Parang is almost a tale of a young man’s mortal frailty. The simple contact of intimate associations of those primary family members in a journey to Kuala Lumpar quietly affirms a bond stretching via memory beyond a grave.

The site of Musa’s discoveries through writing his own fragmented memoir, are chaptered in three presences; Parang, family and identity; Lost Planet, immigration and Dark Streets, environmentalism.

The nature of these voices are quickly revealed in stages of basic affective positions, inner attitudes towards life, “disembodied’ utterances that precipitate out of his contemplated experience.  The movement of feeling and imaginative personifications exist in the reflection of our complex and difficult times, saturated with human and artistic experiences. In Amsterdam:

A couple parted
to cross the road.
As they stepped off the curb,
their hands unfastened
and the asphalt
leapt open between them
like a grin
or a grave.

ANGELA STRETCH is a language artist whose work has been exhibited and published nationally, and internationally.  She is the coordinator of the Sydney Poetry program at the Brett Whiteley Studio and is on the National Advisory Board for Australian PoetryLtd.  She is the co-director of Talking Through Your Arts, and writes an arts column of the same name for Alternative Media.

Boom

by Liam Ferney

Grande Parade Poets

ISBN 978-0-9871291-4-7

Reviewed by MELINDA BUFTON

Liam Ferney’s Boom (Grand Parade Poets, 2013) is a much-anticipated collection of tightly-knit poetry, threaded with the things he has seen and the spaces he’s occupied, cast with a sardonic glance and the flick of a metaphoric burnt-down cigarette. It is the Steve McQueen of poetry collections, to my mind.  Or perhaps, even more accurately, it is a smart, enthusiastic 30-something guy at a party describing what it is about Steve McQueen that matters.  In really articulate tones, and with tie askew, because he’s come from work.  We get potency and we get the sublime, with a lot of grit all around the edges.  Intriguingly, the grit comes in the form of elegant sentences that surprise, their content seemingly slipped in under the radar of form.  I wouldn’t say this is the aim; just that the music of the lines takes your senses first, and then come the beautiful clusters of pop disintegration, fuzzy images of the right brand of cynicism, a professional eye on the world’s seams.  In an early poem within the collection, ‘Expecting Turbulence’, we get this:

First chance I get I’m SoCo mofo
backdrop a drained out montage, colours
of a nunsploitation print abandoned in a can.

(p 19)

In ‘that thin mercury sound’ (below) we get some more; pleasing rhythm with a certain amount of give, encompassing some event that could have been a bad day in the office or an international relations nightmare (Ferney is a poet who often mentions his work in public relations and politics, and we have this in the satisfyingly detailed bio included at the back of the book). We don’t know; it doesn’t matter.  What matters is he’s buried it in here for us to have, and that is an absolution that cleanses much more than a top-marks performance review or a constitutional crisis averted (am I right, day-jobbers?).

lost in a hard drive somewhere between
formats and a nasty Trojan horse the length
of an absence stretches like a hair band
co-opted into service as a lock a galleon

(p 47)

In addition to the poems with a fast, chopping sensibility, there are also more narrative inclusions.  A stand-out of the collection is a poem which takes us into the story of a relationship and a trip, ‘The September Project’ (below).  It has a litany of living that situates our minds eye into a maybe-Bukowski landscape (without the domestic violence), or somewhere past in a collage that feels both American and Australian, but may include Korea, as many of the poems do. He gives her Converse to ‘scuff at the mudguard’, and they wash dishes for bad pay and write.  The poem has pace, and an expansive sense of possibility that grows even while the relationship falters, as we know it will (It’s that kind of poem).  It’s the most lovely example of written melancholy, seen to particular effect towards the end:

in winter she was cold she was starting to remember
as he was learning to forget and they could not
sit still the September project through mountains
in boats across the vortex a continent as vast as hope
and that September they had the strangest dreams
while the wind stilled in the middle of the early dark
in a city where they had no currency and the tea
tastes metallic they watched sharks arcing through the ocean

(p 44)

At the conclusion, Ferney ends with a line that ‘the September project was never submitted’.  It’s this, in combination with an earlier moment in the poem ‘the September project was something/they could use in creative writing seminars/for all time..’ that makes us smile because we know this little hook, and that it saves us all – Ferney, and his readers – from too much sentimentality. 

Once we would have just called that postmodern, that the self-reflexive was a smart attribute with which to back away from content that dealt in the romantic.  Now, like late-model masculinity, we can treat it as an extra ingredient to the sentimental.  It is the dash of bitters in the sweet lemon and lime.  (And no, I’m not going to move on any time soon from this imagery.  How could I waste such an opportunity, when Ferney has a poem in here called ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’?  And given that his first collection was entitled Popular Mechanics?  I’m in good company.)

‘Millenium Lite Redux’ is a dense poem that skates us through place via questions.  It is typical of the many compact poems within the collection, and displays more of the fluidity that calls to mind John Forbes, but with the multi-faceted knowing that comes from having occupied so many roles and places already.  That is, a Liam Ferney poem about the dole is not a poem that assumes the role of poet first and foremost.  It’s a poem that says, quite rightly, how do I work these angles to get to the next place I need to be.  It’s a poem that says ‘the diary is a newstart fraud de art’ and ‘if you don’t have the ingredients don’t try to cook’, and then, in the close of the second stanza ‘and I think I understand the saints/stranded so far from home’.

Boom is poetry without swagger and with plenty of humility, yet the sum of this is a kind of roar and a knowledge of social and cultural lexicons laid out like samples for us to buy.  It reminds us, even within the lines, not to be a wanker;  ‘us’ being the nexus of the poet, the work, the readers. 

                                                                                                                          & that’s how
You get suckerpunched:
                                                 Using bigger &
                                                                Bigger words
As if somebody had tattooed
A scrabble player’s aesthetic                     
                                                                Over poetry’s flexed bicep.

(‘Crumpled Elegance’ p 15)

Despite its range of poems, it hangs together well due to the assuredness of voice (assured, even when it’s asking questions of itself).  It asks us to come inside the poems and take those parts we want, and while we’re there, to have a look at those parts that have been laid in via code, and to not flip out if they don’t give themselves up to us immediately (or ever).  It’s a text-y feast and there’s plenty to be had.  Dial room service and say ‘Bring me some man poetry of the modern day’, and you’ll get Boom.  Tucked in a white paper bag, like white toast in a Bathurst motel; exactly what you want.

MELINDA BUFTON is a Melbourne poet and reviewer,   Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Cordite, Rabbit, The Age and translated in Chinese poetry journal Du Shi.  Her debut collection is forthcoming from Inken Publisch (www.inkenpublisch.com).

My Funeral Gondola

by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Mãnoa Books / El Léon Literary Arts, 2013

ISBN: 978-0983391982

Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO

Where does life reside? Where does the spirit live? Where is the substance of the self? In Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s second poetry collection, My Funeral Gondola, ponderous wonderings become lighter than air, flying and perching like inquisitive birds, melancholy, merry, gentle, and sly. Inviting us to step through a prefatory poem that signals our passage into a world ‘No more black and white’, the poet guides us through the realms of liminality, and with her we experience the afterlives of herself and others, the reverberations of past dreams and memories, and the scattering of consciousness through time and space.      

In the first suite of poems, we witness the death of the author, and it would seem that demise is the beginning of new life: an all too vivid one in ‘Notes from My Funeral’ where the poet’s passing occasions an eclectic gathering of culinary, religious, and musical incongruities: dragon fruit next to salmon maki and baked apricots; African odes, Tibetan chants, and a Catholic priest. The funeral is not a last rite, but a rite of passage, and to the accompaniment of Liszt mixed with Dylan, the poet undertakes not final rest, but resettlement: ‘From one state of gratitude/ to another province’. The eponymous poem ‘My Funeral Gondola’ too bears its quarry with no fixed destination in sight. Rather

it positions itself
midway in a strait—so that shadows
by the woods
by the sun
travel over it….

Humans have souls, but so do words, we find out in ‘When the Title Took Its Life’. And they too yearn for escape from bodily confines:

    My saddest lines
    wish to know how they left
this pen
and why I imprison them
in corridors
along margins. Abbreviated
but exhausted from labour.

‘Erase me’, they insist. ‘Here is not life.’ Suicide by one name is liberation by another, and a playful rumination on words taking (their own) life becomes both a meditation on the nature of human existence (Is bodily incarnation life or is it an incarceration, a negation of life?) and a reflection on the failure inherent in the poet’s desire to capture life when life can only blossom beyond the artifice of the written word.

Scattering like ashes, the dispersal of life, of self, of soul continues through the second section, ‘Odd Spirits’. A puppet-master of ‘Javanese Wayang’ ‘steals/ away from his body’ and transmigrates into shadow: ‘Watch the shadows, not/ the puppets.’ The spirits of ‘François Dead’ and ‘Cremating Maestro’ reverse this journey: the material traces the departed leave behind become more than merely physical: they have a weight and heft that anchors the soul in the world of the living. François’s lodgings are packed away and cleaned, but ‘A musty hardcover/ of ancient elegies/ loosely translated from the Japanese’ brings him back into the room they have cleared out: ‘François said he stole it.’ An origami boat brings closer intimacy with the classical Chinese poet Li Po than ever achieved by contemplating his poetry and its subject matter: ‘Sixteen, I folded a paper boat for you,/ imagining it once carried Li Po, imagining/ it was his body….’ In the intertwining of the flesh and spirit, material and immaterial, substantial and insubstantial, all distinctions melt away.

In the final section, the poet’s life is broken across countries, addresses, experiences, and encounters: ‘Not Thinking About the Past’ (also the section’s title) takes us from 117 West 75th Street in New York to St. Albert’s Trail in Canada, to Block 33, Jalan Bahagia in Singapore, to 16 rue Séguier in Paris. Through the other poems, we visit a first night in Shanghai, a music lesson with Martha at the age of nine, 1980 in London, a pretentious academic symposium in Germany. Masterful is the closing ‘Return to Self’—a desultory series of beautiful, funny, and puzzling observations, recountings, statements—that somehow hangs together by imperceptible threads to give rise to a portrait of individual being.

The bigger your mole looks in the mirror, the more your body parts with ofty ideas. This is why Granny claims moles are temples. When I practice calligraphy, each splotch reminds me of a deformed atom.

With a diploma in healing orchids, I invent the way of healing her.
To quote a French humorist, God is absent, but the concierge will return.
We like the dirty goats approaching our bus-stop. Our bus is late, so are they.

Across time and space, death and life, solidity and abstraction, we are. Inexplicably so. At the coaxing of a lesser craftswoman, the finished piece could not hold. In the hands of Sze-Lorrain, breaking apart and holding together become one and the same, suspended, but not motionless.    

 TIFFANY TSAO is a lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle

The Book of Ethel

by Jordie Albiston

Puncher and Wattmann

ISBN: 9781922186263

Reviewed by DAN DISNEY

Jordie Albiston’s new book is the formal equivalent of an exclamation mark. These first-person narrative poems call from the ether of memory/invention, and in The Book of Ethel Albiston ventriloquizes her maternal great-grandmother’s voice to recount Ethel’s quest to locate (an always-capitalized) Home. Each stanza in this meticulously compressed collection has seven lines, and each line seven syllables; Albiston’s stylized shorthand is partly a codifying device, and partly a matter of form enabling a voice to be heard, clear and strange amid the fractured syntax. These songs, or fragments/fractions of song, are a kind of paean or colonial ancestor worship which tell a particular Newly Australian migrant’s tale: The Book of Ethel explores how intimacy and family happen in an Unheimlich dwelling, to explore (the so often migratory) patterns of identity and belonging.

In previous collections, Albiston has focused on history (in her accounts of the often-brutal colony: Botany Bay Document and The Hanging of Jean Lee) and genealogy (in her award-winning the sonnet according to m, written for her grandmother). In The Book of Ethel, Albiston once more voices a matrilineal tongue, moving backward through time to prise open origins. Ethel’s voice is both fabular and everyday, epic and romantic as she moves across a version of the world where supper-bells ring (9), measles are a mortal danger (16), and – imagine it! – women get to vote (23). Leaving Cornwall and boarding a ‘good ship out-bound for Melbourne’ (18), Ethel muses –

    em-i-grate     I am told it

    means ‘to go’     but will there be

    kerrek & croft     karn & quoit

    where we ‘go’?     will New Home have

    field & valley?     zawn?     wall?

    will friends be waiting for me?

    em-i-grate     emigrate     so

    (16)

Ethel traverses zones temporal, psychic, and linguistic, her voice burred with an outsider’s lexicon; the unrecognizable Cornish terms (helpfully explained in a glossary at the back of the book) heighten the sense that this narrator is abandoning an imaginative order. Thrice repeating the term (emigration-as-incantation?), Albiston wants her readers fully aware that –

a name may some-how     make     mark

(23)

which is, perhaps, epiphenomenal: like all of us, Albiston’s past is particularly inscribed (for another exploration of this, Les Murray’s interview in The Paris Review is illuminating). By including words that have neither currency nor cachet among contemporary readers, Albiston foregrounds Ethel’s life as one spent marking out new semantic boundary lines, and hyphenating ‘emigrate’ emphasises the job ahead: close readers will roll the word slowly in their minds too, to better understand how Ethel must (literally) come to terms with the great, grating reality of emigration.

    Albiston borrows from tropes biblical and demotic, parochial and rushing at us (largely) unpunctuated; the book’s title suggests an Old Testament-style testimony in which Ethel journeys to a promised land (‘Australia     finally!’ 21) to then marry her ordained Mister/Minister (‘Husband-Husband     wedded     Twice’ 25) and raise a family. But rather than some colloquial rites-of-passage, this book is a formally innovative tour-de-force; studded with verbal puns, Albiston’s language-as-material is split, spliced, broken, rendered and, persistently, urgently repurposed. The quirky style is announced from the outset –

so Life!     we meet once more     you

& I     in concert     concord

happy agreement to do

until done     my act     your stage

make     lie in it     this! my bit-

part     play     World     with me aboard

a Speck!     & then     gigantic

(7).

These lines-as-snapped-ligatures writhe with implication (I am reminded of Bob Perelman’s ‘Chronic Meanings’), and the poem’s stage is traipsed breathlessly by half-thoughts left as near-resemblances (‘do until done’ suggests do you take this person to be your lawful and etc) and absent echoes (‘make’ your bed and ‘lie in it’). These snapshots of an exiled life replicate a mind scanning, fitfully and non-editorially: we are inside Ethel’s mind, watching while new Homes propagate with children –

    Number

    5 still safe inside     coming

    soon     awaited waifs imbue

    such Love     Wave!     then say Adieu

    (31)

and, as the family swells, these songs come to speak gradually of Homeliness as intimate and relational: an abstract accommodation.

These, then, are ballads to love: that affect in which even exiles can find solace. Of course there is yearning (which love isn’t sharpened by craving) and Ethel is often inside the poems alone –

I simply wait & sit wait-

ing     he     Mister     gone off to

camp in the hills

(45)

and her solitariness is reflected in the Mallarméan <<blancs>>, which act as internal line breaks: sometimes scanning as comma-like caesurae, sometimes as semantic fractures, the spacing creates a glitching and staccato rhythm which tonally agrees with Albiston’s objective: Ethel’s homing is never hubristic, and never wholly comfortable. At many lines’ end, the enjambments take on particular significatory force –

daughter     daughter     daughter     daught-

er     son     & one inside     Home

(32)

A wry wit is at work here: in breaking at the seventh syllable, ‘daught-’, the new line conveys a fourth daughter and then, err (surprise), a son. The many intentionally widowed half-words (butcher-/y, vi-/olence, fun-/nels, any-/how, love-/ly) make Albiston’s lines strangely interlinear, contingent as the eye roves and returns, never quite sure what complexities lie just ahead, or indeed what might have been too-quickly parsed – much, I imagine, like Ethel, careful but not completely surefooted in her relocated life.

The ballad is familiar territory for Albiston, but these texts are as much pseudo-triolets (minus one line, and minus one syllable per line) as they are attempts at balladeering. What rhetorical gestures are at work in these ‘half-fourteener’ lines of seven syllables apiece? According to the Princetons –

When a pair of fourteeners are broken by hemistichs to form a quatrain of lines stressed 4-3-4-3 and rhyming abab, they become the familiar ‘eight-and-six’ form of ballad meter called common meter or common measure. (The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: 504)

In his launch speech, Alex Skovron speculates delightfully on the possible significance the number seven has for this text; performing revelrous calculations to compute numerological sense into style, Skovron notices –

both Jordie’s name and the book’s title contain 14 letters each – that is, 2 x 7. But that’s just for starters. Now listen. As I’ve explained, there are 7 syllables to each 7-line stanza; 7 x 7 = 49. Ethel died in 1949, and she was 77 years old! Interesting? She was born in 1872, and Jordie was born in 1961; adding 72 to 61 gives you 133; add those three digits together (1 + 3 + 3) and you get – 7!

My own sense is that there is no explicit explanation for the form, nor none required (I suspect Skovron may agree): Albiston fulfills her rhetorical structure sixty times over, and there is a synthetic weight to the bulk of her exactly-repeated shapes. The poet has afforded enough self-devised space for a gamut of affect (fear, yearning, loneliness, courage, humility, tolerance, joy) to occupy these texts. As Ethel states, arriving in the first of her many Homes –

          I must

muster Home     the rest over

time     the new me     century

aligned     1900 stand-

ing     sentinel-straight     straight     white

(27)

and these songs of survival and perseverance (straight and white) are also ultimately songs of homage: Albiston’s excavation of an origin speaks of Ethel’s hard-won belonging, a lifelong pursuit undertaken in tandem with the co-progenitorial Mister.

On the blurb of Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, Michael Braun describes the Danish poet as ‘no apologist for blind, rapturous singing, but probably the most form-conscious and reflective writer of poetry in Europe today.’ Jordie Albiston’s dance with form is a sophisticated yet radical gambol: these poems move decisively, sensuous and surefooted. In an interview with The Paris Review, August Kleinzahler speaks of the difficulty for contemporary poets to locate ‘a coherent, interesting structure’ and goes on to suggest that many ‘simply avoid the problem or take refuge in some rote “avant-garde” gesture like fridge-magnet indeterminism i.e. spilling the language all over the floor and stomping on it like a three-year-old child.’ Not so Jordie Albiston: The Book of Ethel is, as with Albiston’s other recent books, an astonishing confluence of formal constraint and authentic music. This is not the first Ethel to arrive on the Australian literary landscape, but Albiston’s character seems destined to be more than peripheral; The Book of Ethel comes from a poet at the top of their game, and Albiston is more than an Antipodean Christensen. She is making weird, intelligent arias, which we need listen to, again and then again to understand, at least partly, the fragments of our recent past: our provenance and inheritance. With this book, which more than confirms her talent, one senses Albiston starting to take up her place in a future version of how we will come to recognize Australian poetry.

WORKS CITED

Kleinzahler, A. interviewed by William Corbett for the ‘The Art of Poetry’ interview series (#93, The Paris Review), www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5789/the-art-of-poetry-no-93-august-kleinzahler site accessed 31.08.2013

Greene, R. et al 2012 The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th edition) Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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. He co-edited New Directions in Australian Poetry with Matthew Hall and was awarded the 2022 Kenneth Slessor Prize.

Hotel Hyperion

By Lisa Gorton

Giramondo, May 2013, 50pp

ISBN 9781922146274

In her second collection of poems, Hotel Hyperion, Lisa Gorton shows us how memory is “a place less like place than like memory itself” (“Dreams and Artefacts”): a surface, which we may see through but not penetrate. These poems are concerned with the melancholy experience of spatial and temporal distances, and how these reflect the distance between one life—one self—and another.

It’s a concern that Gorton established in her first collection, Press Release, and that she has critically explored in her work on John Donne. In her award-winning essay, “John Donne’s Use of Space”, Gorton describes the metaphysical poet’s selection of “a master-image upon which he maps many, various, and sometimes contradictory ideas.” It’s useful to consider to what extent this is also a description of Gorton’s poetics, particularly the way they are plotted and polished in Hotel Hyperion.

The “master-image” of Hotel Hyperion takes multiple shapes—telescope, diorama, Snow Dome, spacesuit, crystal, house—which the poet treats as one type, “things closed in glass” (“Room and Bell”). Upon these, Gorton maps her

essay on memory. Her imagery tingles with the chill of synthetic and airtight spaces, their bloodless particles and unearthly quiet:

Patiently, ticket by ticket, a soft-stepped crowd
advances into the mimic ships hull half-
sailed out of the foyer wall, as if advancing into
somebody else’s dream —
the interior, windowless, where perspex cases bear,
each to its single light, small relics —

(“Dreams and Artefacts”)

We imagine the speaker’s voice ringing in sparse rooms, between echoing footsteps; and always through this book, the muffled white noise of rain outside:

long rain breaking itself onto the footpath,
breaking easily into the surface of itself
like a dream without emblems, an in-drawn shine.
Overhead, clouds build and ruin imaginary cities,
slo-mo historical epics with the sound down,
        playing to no one.

(“Dreams and Artefacts”)

A host of speakers—visitors, mothers, children, guardians—inhabits these spaces in Hotel Hyperion. The book’s few domestic scenarios are a red herring, as even homely settings become uncanny. For example, In the sequence “Room and Bell” (which might be the book’s finest section), Gorton gradually makes the comforting imagery of a childhood bedroom transparent: revealed as the deep memory of an adult speaker who, as a child, was already haunted in this very space by a spectre of her grown self. This revelation is amplified to disturbing proportions in the poem “Screen, Memory”, in which the speaker, who has come to accept the sealed interior of a space ship as home, miscalls a memory of bushwalking. In fact, she has received the “memory” from images screened onboard the ship.

In examining memory, Gorton is not simply concerned with the act of remembrance; she is interested in how memory reveals the very quality of being. In “Room and Bell”, experience is haunted or doubled by the shadow of our own consciousness. In “Screen, Memory”, as in all of the poems in Hotel Hyperion, the speaker is a witness and collector of reality—that is to say, the speaker is memory itself—for whom experience is refracted through the glass of other lives, other beings.

Beneath her book’s master-images, Gorton extends metaphors of intricacy and reversion. These become self-generating through the poet’s structural techniques of repetition, reiteration and variation. Perhaps the book’s most striking instance of such technique is its reprise of “Press Release”, the titular poem of Gorton’s previous collection: here reprinted as the seed of a new titular sequence, “The Hotel Hyperion”. As well as the rain already mentioned, lesser examples of returning meta-images include: moving clouds; a miniaturised ship (through a telescope, in a bottle, in a Snow Dome); displayed relics; and Mantegna’s The Triumph of Caesar. Their return mimics mild amnesia, once again reflecting memory’s fallibility; and, at the same time their presence reminds us that coincidence is the poet’s deliberate and provocative art.

At the level of line and sequence, Hotel Hyperion itself becomes the prismatic object it describes. In this book Gorton has claimed the long line with a determination and consistency unprecedented in her work. It allows her to extend whole corridors of thought without pause:

In a Storm Glass crystals
with the exactness peculiar to foreboding make neural
flare shapes: ultrasound-
coloured threads cross-stitched with blank, as of sensation
excised and, here, preserved in light.

(“A Description of the Storm Glass and Brief Guide to its Use in Forecasting Weather”)

This new affect of breathlessness contrasts Gorton’s essayistic register and typically rhetorical tone. This disconcerting tension adds urgency and pitch to these poems, signaling their linkages whilst pulling the reader by the arm, down the cold and glassy passages of their imagery. Amplifying the long lines, multiplying those corridors into networks of association, Gorton makes extravagant use of parataxis. This effect is most notably built through her liberal use of the dash, which creates the appearance of delayed conclusion:

A solution of camphor sealed in glass, they mass,
weather by weather, crystalline forms that vary
with electric change in air, and make a trophy of their
ruin —
so the clear spirit, which held all yesterday grey-
shadowed light,
this morning raises its more precise hallucination —
Jamesian
treasury of scruples, or that more formal vaulting of
remorse —

(“A Description of the Storm Glass and Brief Guide to its Use in Forecasting Weather”)

The shape of these lines flirts with prose, but Gorton’s style is steeped in lyricism; even the prose paragraphs of “Room and Bell” are sprung with musical punctuation, pace and sound effect. In the above lines, Gorton interrupts the long breath with abrupt enjambment. Frequently, line breaks hang on words that might conventionally be considered weak hinges: “of their” and “vaulting of”, for instance. However, Gorton’s reasoning of these breaks is formally precise, bringing attention not so much to the end-word as to the one hung beneath. Those words take the weight of a whole line. They are like a tolling bell or a heart sinking: ruin, remorse.

These micro-structures are more broadly reproduced by the arrangement of the book’s contents. Read as a lyric essay, each of its five parts contains a sequence or suite. Each sequence or suite forms images realised in the next. In “The Hotel Hyperion”, this structure reflects the sequence’s narrative of human generations, its poems ordered episodically to represent the reliance of one life and civilization upon another. The book’s final section, an ekphrastic sequence about Mantegna’s painting, The Triumph of Caesar, culminates this structure: framed by a contemporary viewer, looking into to Mantegna’s Renaissance viewpoint, which looks into to the Roman—and so we have Western tradition seen down the barrel of art’s telescope.

It’s a structural conceit that echoes Gorton’s own reading of Donne, specifically her focus on how his:

… one image of a circle and its centre, and the arrangement of relations that it represents in spatial terms… takes its shape and meaning from the shape and meaning of space in the ‘closed cosmos,’ where space is arranged in concentric circles. Donne describes the cosmic arrangement as ‘natures nest of boxes: the heavens contain the earth; the earth, cities; cities, men. And all these are concentric…’ and contained by ‘all the vaults and circles of the severall spheres of heaven’ [sic].

Whereas Donne views the experience of “men” as being ultimately situated within the circle of God, Gorton’s focus turns in the opposite direction. In her poems, we see—briefly, behind us—cities; but her focus is on the human sphere; and, within its circle, the mind; and within that, art. In “The Triumph of Caesar” Gorton seems to be telling us that art’s quality is the same as memory. But, like Donne’s idea of space, her idea of art is not totally Platonic. She suggests that art’s mediated quality does not mean that it fails truth; rather, art makes a true extension of human being. Like the way the mind captures and stores experience, art represents intricately nested perspectives with blurry, scrubbed-out peripheries:

        The picture is mostly of legs —
it shows the Triumph from a child’s viewpoint.
Soldiers and horses — so many, they crowd
perspective out. Only a few figures stand entire
at the boundary of the picture as if they would step
the next instant into that vast which is not there —

(“The Triumph of Caesar”)

This “mapping” of one horizon upon another is more complex than the single-point perspective claimed by Renaissance art. Indeed, according to Gorton’s viewer, the single-point perspective is already fallacious in Mantegna’s painting:

The pattern their legs make repeats
the pattern of lances, angles drawn against the clouds
like a working out of every possibility. Captured arms,
bulls crowned for sacrifice, prisoners, victories and
loads of coin, spears and catapults, colossal statues, elephants —
sights that replace each other, new and again
new, the way I remember highways from the back seat
of my parents’ car — fields stacked with light
which did not pass but poured through me —

(“The Triumph of Caesar”)

In another instance of return, this childhood anecdote is also the subject of a nearby poem, “Freeways”. As well as return or reversion, this gesture reveals a palimpsestic quality in Gorton’s writing, which draws our attention back to the act of making (poesis). In this way, she points to her own art of language and asks that we consider how we have inhabited the space of this book; how we have entered into its fictions and “perspective by perspective, into that vanishing point” (“The Triumph of Caesar”).

As an ekphrasis poem, “The Triumph of Caesar” isn’t particularly challenging—it largely follows the tradition of descriptive viewing (but for that lively intervention by the persona, above). Its reason for being is larger than itself, informed by and containing the conceit of the entire book. The poem performs this role capably enough—but then, as part of that conceit, it must.

Its absolute answerability to the intricate structure of the book might cause some readers to itch for escape. If Hotel Hyperion not only represents but resembles a “thing closed in glass”, does it cast light outwards, beyond its own bounds; or does it infinitely recede, “so self-consistent / its corridors turned into themselves” (“Screen, Memory”)? Do we, as in “A Description of the Storm Glass”, find ourselves posed by Gorton as “a reader, like the picture of a reader”?

The brevity (50pp) and self-contained unity of Hotel Hyperion resemble a chapbook. Unlike a longer and more various collection of poems, it may be read in one sitting, allowing intense engagement with its plotted images and structural dimensions. If Gorton’s poetic design locks out something, it might be the aberrant image; the unanswered question. Yearning for a flaw in its gorgeous glass layers, I feel the reader’s experience may be constrained by the poet’s fixed fidelity to one idea, so fully explored.

Gorton has observed of Donne that his “image of concentric circles” hosts not only complimentary ideas but also contradictions. Gorton comprehends her work so deeply and thoughtfully as a poet of ideas and as an editor, one wonders whether her mapping and re-mapping of this book’s idea has erased the possibility of contradiction; if there is any corner of this “house of images / where nothing is lost” (“Dreams and Artefacts”) that she has not fully remembered.

Clear Brightness

by Kim Cheng Boey

Puncher & Wattmann, 2012

ISBN 978 1 92145 094 5

Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER POLLNITZ

It was Coleridge who prescribed for Wordsworth what seems a superhuman task, that the poet who wishes to be considered original must “create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” — or rather, as Coleridge’s dictum is first recorded, “the taste by which he is to be relished.”  Since emigrating to Sydney from Singapore in 1997, Kim Cheng Boey appears to have taken on a similar project, for rather than ingratiate himself to the Australian readers, by adopting Australian themes refigured with some performative ethnicity, Boey has continued to write as a Chinese poet whose chosen language is English, but whose sensibility is Asian.  To put it more accurately, Boey is a Singaporean and international poet.  The tone or address of his work makes few concessions to Australian expectations; rather, he wants the Australian reader to enter international space, to make the passage at least part way to his perspective.  Four of his works over the past decade – the New section of After the Fire: New and Selected Poems (2006); a memoir of his literary formation and world travels which is also an essayistic yet beautiful prose poem, Between Stations (2009); the four-poem selection from his work he included in the dazzling new anthology, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2012), which he has helped to edit; and Clear Brightness itself, the first collection of his poems to come out since After the Fire – all help mark out the course he has taken as an émigré Chinese poet writing in Australia for a wider-than-Australian readership.                                                                                

It is an individual path, neither stridently postcolonial nor postmodern.  In one of the four prefaces to the Asian Australian anthology, Adam Aitken writes of poets who have chosen a “theory-oriented” path, eschewing identity narrative and politics; Boey eschews all three of these paths.  In his own preface, Boey describes a writer’s cultural migration as a process with no endpoint, “of negotiation, shuttling back and forth between places, between past and present, and between lives and narratives.”  To see such a perspective in practice in a poem, one can turn to “Stamp Collecting” from After the Fire, a poem which Boey also chooses to represent his work in the anthology.  The gift to a daughter of the father’s now fragmentary stamp album elicits a stream of intelligent, difficult questions: “Is Australia our home? / What is this country?  Why doesn’t it exist / anymore?  Why is the Queen’s face / on the stamps of so many nations?”  From first to last, none of the questions is fully answerable, but the daughter completes her own re-ordering of the album, picking “the last of a Singapore series / when it was still part of Malaya, / fingers the face of a youthful Elizabeth / pendant over a Chinese junk, / and slips it home.”  The poem avoids identity narrative, or what Boey’s beloved Keats described as the Wordsworthian “egotistical sublime”, by deflecting attention to another family member’s negotiation with an ethnic past and present national identity. 

In one poem from Clear Brightness, “The Causeway”, Boey does explicitly lament Singapore’s 1965 break from the Malayan mainland.    In “Stamp Collecting”, by contrast, the specific political implications of the Chinese and Commonwealth emblems on the stamp which the young collector “slips . . . home” are left suspended, and the invitation is to read them rather as symbols of personal and historical change.  The Queen and her former empire, like the Chinese sailing vessel, are no longer young.  The “junk” and the stamp itself are somewhat dated means of international communication and passage, back and forth.  Rather than a localised realism focussed on a spot of time, the poem opens out into an interrogatory, migratory exploration of a many-layered past and present.  If a poem like “Stamp Collecting” marks the point Boey’s Singaporean-internationalist poetry had arrived at in 2006, what new directions has he taken in Clear Brightness?

The volume’s title poem represents a pastoral or suburban-pastoral scenario of Australian life.  A December bushfire, licking the edges of a northern Sydney suburb, drives a father to make a midnight dash for safety through the “papery / ash . . . my son / bewildered in my arms, his sister bright-eyed, /exclaiming, It’s snowing, Christmas just weeks away.”  The father’s memory flicks, not to the northern hemisphere and the brilliant whiteness of a European Christmas, but to Singapore and the Chinese Qing Ming.  This spring festival of the dead translates as “clear brightness” but, transplanted to Singapore’s equatorial climate, is remembered as a feast of heat and ashes.  Qing Ming’s ashes were thrown up by the burning of paper money, “valid only in afterlife.”  The purpose of the offering, Boey drily observes, was  “to replenish the ancestors’ underworld credit.”  This quaint piety has now itself been disposed of – “the cemeteries dug up, razed” and the “bodies unhoused, ashed” – to make way for development.  “Grandma and Dad” avoided this ignominy by turning Catholic and going “straight into the fire” of a crematorium.  When the father returns to the “new life” he is making Australia, he finds it adrift with “ash, flakes falling like memory.”  Memory has its pangs, but the succession of erasures that Qing Ming has undergone has buried the particularity of the festival and its ceremony of mourning under a placeless “snowdrift of forgetting.”

Mortality and commemoration of the dead are not new themes for Boey, but they have new prominence in Clear Brightness.  The grandmother is again commemorated in “Soup” as the matriarch who, having lost family and friends to the atrocities of the Japanese Occupation, crafted the staple dish that served to hold together, if not the restless generation which followed hers, the generation of her grandchildren.  The preparation of the soup is music and dance and painting, and its savours, which come from the grandmother’s griefs and loves, joy and patience, make up “the whole/ that we chewed, sucked and slurped / To make us whole.”  The hymn to the hearth is itself a potage of dictions, of sensuous imagery and ekphrastic symbolism, of historical testimony and personal statement, and of witty instances – “the harmony of five flavours a corrective / to the imbalance around and in us.”  Set as the grandmother’s daily heroism is against the nightmare of history, her soup-making might also recall the phrase Yeats applied to Keats’s championing of physical pleasure, “deliberate happiness.”  This is what her ritual chooses, despite knowledge of what else has befallen and what awaits.

Elsewhere, in a series of poems about time and tempi – “Lost Time”, “Marking Time” and “Take Five on the F3” – the dailiness of experience and the making of art are further opposed and synthesised with unexpected results.  A rueful wit that diversifies and lightens the “grave news” gives these poems their prevailing tone.  Hearing Brubeck’s jazz number on the radio during the long shuttle to and from work, the commuter’s mind shuttles back to troop movements in World War II and forward to the articulated lorries sweeping past on the freeway, “from the darkened gums and paddocks dissolving to / rolling miles of oil palms and rubber trees.”  The jokey, jerky rhymes and rhythms here flatten into eternal recurrence, there take up an optimistic upbeat, but whatever the destination and whatever the moment’s mood “you just have to keep the pedal down.”  The paradoxes of experience, transformed into the contraries of art, make themselves felt in every poem and across the collection as a whole.

Clear Brightness is replete with series and sequences, the most impressive of which is a sonnet cycle, “To Markets.”  The Sydney market which comes first in this sequence might be the one just across the road from Gleebooks, and from there the cycle roams on nomadically, through “a queue of bazaars, Xian, Cairo, Marrakesh . . . ”  For me, Xian’s is the most tempting of the markets.  Formerly called Chang’an, the city was the gateway to the Silk Road and the barbarian West during the Tang Dynasty, and the birthplace of printing.  In stalls that peddle everything from “Mao watches” to “fake imperial coins”, you can still find “name seals in rose quartz”, and in “the street of calligraphers” see “a goateed old man trail his bamboo brush / across stretched rice-paper”, recreating “Wang Wei’s ‘Seeing Off Yuan / the Second on a Mission to Anxi’.”  This last is the one really coveted item from all the markets for which Boey prepares his fourteen-line catalogues.  It is the one memento he would he would like to keep with him, for “west of Yang Pass”, as the Tang Dynasty poet put it in the eighth century, “there will be no friends.”  And west of Xian, the market-goer of another millennium sees “the long caravan train / of memory and desire fading into the endless sands.”

“To Markets” is not only a cycle, but a corona, crown or wreath of sonnets, an Italian form best known in English as John Donne realised it, in the seven-sonnet prologue to his Holy Sonnets.  The precise formal requirements of the corona, met by Donne, are loosened, adapted and extended in ways that interrogate as well as underscore the conceptual content of Boey’s cycle.  The overlapping of the last line of each sonnet with the first of the next is calculated, less to show what local markets in a global conspectus have in common, than to probe what common urge impels us to join acquisitive queues, whether these lead into period-rich and culturally diverse bazaars, or into monstrous Western shopping centres, or into those fetes and fairs that sell secondhand wares, craft items and farm produce, and have sprung up in opposition to chain supermarkets.  The cyclical form allows Boey to ponder why it is we desire “to be desiring”, what spiritual lack or “want” it is that stirs “the want to want.”  “To Markets” poses Buddhist questions: do we want to be bound forever on the wheel of desiring more and more possessions?  Do we want to break out, eternally, if to cease from appetitive desires is to cease being fully human and alive, to “end here at this stall”?

“Memory and desire” – one of several conscious quotations or fully assimilated borrowings from T. S. Eliot in Clear Brightness – might be used to show how effortlessly Boey moves between a modernist line descending from Donne to Eliot, or from Keats to Yeats and Lawrence.  But to read the poems Boey has written in Australia solely by the light of these English traditions is to read him through the limited preoccupations of this reviewer.  Boey does indeed write with a “historical sense” of “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer”, and within that the whole of English literature, “in his bones”, but to that should be added his interest in later twentieth-century American poets who have made passages to India differing from Eliot’s idealist, Harvard-filtered approach to the Sanskrit scriptures.  No doubt Eliot’s concern for a poetry that registered the tempo of the modernist period and its cities, but remained stateless and timeless, has been a durable influence on Boey’s poetic.  Yet, coming from a Chinese perspective to Buddhist and other Eastern contemplative traditions, Boey refreshes what Eliot’s puritanical instincts made of desire and memory.  Eliot’s idealist purging of the love and fear of the beginning and the end has different outcomes to Boey’s musings, in “La Mian in Melbourne”, on the beginnings and endings of his plate of noodles.  If one turns back the clock a little over a millennium, to the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu’s “In Abbot Zan’s Room at Dayun Temple” – “Sanskrit sometimes flows out of the temple, / The lingering bells still echo round my bed. / Tomorrow morning in the fertile paddock, / Bitterly I’ll behold the yellow dirt” – it’s here one finds affective paradoxes and complexities in key with those of Clear Brightness.  Boey’s is a less detached, less idealist Buddhism than Eliot’s – so it seems to this Australian reviewer – but to slurp a Boey poem as an emotional whole, we must allow him to create in us a relish for his kinds of wholeness.

CHRISTOPHER POLLNITZ  has written criticism of Judith Wright, Les Murray, Alan Wearne and John Scott, as well as D. H. Lawrence, and has been a reviewer for Notes and Queries and Scripsi, as well as The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald.  His edition of The Poems for the Cambridge University Press series of Lawrence’s Works appeared in 2013.

Eldershaw

by Stephen Edgar

Black Pepper Press, 2012

ISBN 9781876044787

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

Publishers are not usually champions of narrative verse: it is not sufficient that writers of poetic narratives have literary history on their side. None would deny the pre-eminence of literary antecedent: the verse narratives that arose in each period — be it antiquity, the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance, the Victorian era, or modern times — are exemplars essential to the canon and remain in readership.

Small presses as a rule, are more willing to include contemporary verse narratives among their titles. Any style of narrative poetry may seek a place, but in a discerning literary market, a collection of the calibre of Stephen Edgar’s Eldershaw, by virtue of its formal accomplishment, asserts that prerogative, and is vouchsafed a welcome reception.

Edgar is conversant with the narrative poems valorised in western literature long before prose novels became an institutionalised genre. The technical elements of poetry accumulated over centuries are at his disposal, and he employs them with grace and ease. The process by which a poetic narrative emerges, unique, from each poet’s individualised treatment of elements and themes always inspires a sense of awe, and Edgar’s poems are distinctive; resolute in the contemporaneity of their storytelling, and full of references to the natural world, a feature for which his poetry is widely regarded.

Eldershaw comprises three long interlinked narrative poems spanning seventy-three pages in Part I, and a further sixteen single page lyric poems in Part II which in some measure link to the larger narrative. Part I has three sections: the first shares the volume’s title ‘Eldershaw’ and comprises nine segments set in the years 1941-1965; these have a non linear order that begins with 1955 and ends with 1961. The events in this story pertain to vicissitudes in the lives of twelve discernible characters, but focus in particular on the high and low moments of the central character Helen, who, twelve years after meeting Martin in London, finds herself unhappily married, with two daughters. Martin is attracted to men, and Helen’s affair with Lex over a period of years attracts detriment in Martin’s lawsuit; she loses both house and custody. In the later years, from 1961-65, after Lex has an affair with Vera, Helen lives alone in a Sydney flat, and the events of this period include a trip to Greece.

The second section of the verse narrative has a further seventeen pages in seven subsections with titles such as ‘April 1945. Evan. Fire’ and ‘November 2000. Isabel. Water.’ This cycle of poems, thematically framed by the title, The Fifth Element, conjures space, heaven, void, aether, quintessence- words used to describe ‘heavenly’ phenomena like stars or other supposedly unknowable, unchangeable, or incorruptible entities. ‘Character is destiny’- Edgar cites George Eliot citing Novalis, in the preface to the book, and we are drawn to what is vital about life, about energy, that is manifest in the fabric of these characters’ lives.

The third section, titled ‘The Pool’ provides a physical and emotional locus from which Luke [with whom the older Helen has had an affair]contemplates life, following Helen’s death. These poems draw attention to the miscellany of lives lived. ‘The Tapes’ recounts a drunken recording found among Helen’s possessions, and ‘The Papers’ refers to the documentation that gathers over a lifetime, and which stands in for Helen’s physical absence. Materiality is prominent, too, in ‘The Annexe’, one of sixteen shorter poems in Part II. The poem pans cinematically over the furnishings in a room: an Afghan rug, a television, a sofa and window blinds; nondescript, commonplace, generic, their qualities do not matter; they are objects that outlast us. What remains? The narrator of ‘Vertigo’ asks (105) ‘Are not your own/Made of the same and failing elements?’ (105)

Indeed the book makes much of material remains. In references to a Minoan comb, a crushed fossil, the detritus of millenia, Edgar’s narrative poems connect present to past. Edgar’s study of Classics finds synthesis in a host of classical allusions such as ‘Some drowned god drags your foot off Sounion’ (107) that imbue line, stanza, and narrative with mythical and allegorical constructions  of place – the magnificent Cape Sounion of now with its temple dedicated to Poseidon, and the cliffs from whence Aegus leapt to his death, a narrative event in Homer’s Odyssey.

‘A Hansel and Gretel pathway’ (7) — an intertextual, thematic construction of place — leads to the site of Helen’s historic family home, Eldershaw; a distinctively Australian bush setting with its ‘embassy of possums’ (8). In ‘Lost World’ (108) Edgar maps loss onto place as he describes, without sentimentality, fire’s devastation of a home that could be Eldershaw: the roar of bushfire ‘dragged by the vacuum it creates,/ Swarms up the slope into the sky’s/Exhausted limit, where a cottage waits./ …Trees thrash and, one by one, volatize./Paint bubbles from the walls. The rooms explode./ Fragments of melted window strafe/The lawn like wept and frozen tears’ (108).

In an age inclined to posit verse narratives as anachronistic, to produce a work such as Eldershaw takes resolve. Only painstaking refinement enables contemporaneous words such as ‘tweezers’, ‘bureaucratic business’, ‘garage’, ‘home-made Florentines’, ‘truck’, ‘curtain’ and ‘landlady’ to perch comfortably at the ends of metrical lines- a good many of which contain the requisite number of syllables and feet for iambic pentameter, while occasional lines accommodate a triple foot with an extra syllable at the end. The rhythmic momentum of blank verse brings buoyancy to unfolding events in the verse narrative, and complements Edgar’s accomplished application of metre.

Reading verse narratives can take resolve too, if one prefers prose, but narrative verse in English is not inherently harder to read than narrative prose. One challenge with Eldershaw may be to keep track of the inter-generational characters across the entirety of the narrative. Faced with its non-linear discourse some readers may reconstitute the chronological sequence, while others will enjoy the free association and fusion of time-planes in memory, and the corresponding emphasis on existential and psychological concerns.

An earlier and shorter version of Eldershaw attracted funding assistance from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and was published in HEAT 13 under the title ‘The Deppites’. Stephen Edgar has been awarded the 2013 Inaugural Australian Catholic University Literature Prize for his poem ‘The Dancer’. This adds to several other significant poetry prizes in Edgar’s credit, including the 2003 Grace Levin Poetry Prize, the 2006 Philip Hodgkins Memorial Medal for Literature, and the 2011 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize.

‘What compels writers to produce a verse narrative?’ Edgar once mused. [1] Now he has contributed to the longest tradition in literature in English. Eldershaw, constructed with great complexity, economy, and clarity, serves to demonstrate the staying power of verse narratives, despite contemporary preferences.

Works cited

1. Edgar, Stephen (2006) Book Launch: Geoff Page Lawrie and Shirley: the final cadenza. <http://www.stephenedgar.com.au/prose/BookLaunchGeoffPage.html> accessed 20 November 2013

LINDA WESTE is a poet, editor and teacher of Creative Writing whose research examines poetic and narrative interplay.