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Michelle Cahill reviews “Surface to Air” by Jaya Savige

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Surface to Air

by Jaya Savige

University of Queensland Press, 2011

ISBN 9780702239137

Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL

 

There is a dazzling quality about Jaya Savige’s second collection, Surface to Air, though if the poems are rapid and rippled in their dialectic, their wit is matched by complexity. Savige’s virtuosity accommodates an impressive range of poetic forms, from the lyric to the narrative, from the sonnet to the visual and the elegy. His subject matter shifts from real to hyperreal, from technologies of the personal to the political in scenes refracted through the lens of historical and mythic relativities. This said, the ethical intention of Surface to Air seems more probing than in Latecomers. Despite the supreme assurances of tradition, logic and erudition, there are undercurrents of cultural doubt and disembodiment fragmenting the identity of speaker-subject to the point of vulnerability. It is at such thresholds that Savige’s most convincing poetry performs.

The parabolic argument in Surface to Air is evidenced by the structure of its sections. There’s a movement from the organic contingencies of physical existence in “Snorkelling Lessons” to the transcriptive poems of “Circular Breathing,” the ballistic, reflexive tropes of “A Brief History of Risk,” to the final sequence “Memory Card” in which nostalgia and rhetoric, reason and progress are mediated. It’s an ambitious arc informed by awareness of the uncontrolled relativism of postmodern challenges to the body, to coherence, temporality and space. That the self is in crisis is sensed from the opening poem, “Sand Island”, which evokes, with anatomical precision, the perceptual disruptions of leaving and clinging, mystery and experience. In the search for “common knowledge”, even the sea must be sundered:

What cleaves each muscle of wave
from its bone of ocean?

            Hear the snap
of its ligaments
Listen to the severing tendons.

(3)

The poem seems intentionally to echo the opening poem of Latecomers with the poet being in “two minds”, though now the sense of a distant destination lies beyond an antipodean or utopian reach. It is not merely home or the body that the poet is called to renounce, but language and its tradition. Savige effortlessly melds the diction of geek-speak with various lyric forms throughout the collection, yet he seems most at home in the natural world, as this poem shows in its evocation of themes:

This morning a stingray
seeking a poem
of its own

strayed into the estuary
of this one.

Crestfallen, it turned
at my dismissive gesture.

            (5)

The phrasing is flawless, truncated; the personification creates pathos. There are undercurrents of regret in this and other poems. “Circular Breathing” describes a scene in which the poet expatriate, hearing the didgeridoo being played in a Rome piazza, is faced with his own neglect and disconnectedness from home:

I want to bolt up the stairs of the fountain
and claim that sound as the sound of my home—
but stop when I recall how rarely I slow to hear
the truer player busking in King George Square.
Memory kinks my measured walk into a lurch.
My stomach fills with fire. Far above cold stars wheel
around the spire of Rome’s oldest Christian church.

(25)

Despite the free verse stanzas the plain, unaffected tone of this poem strengthens its authenticity, providing a human face to a more general theme of colonial inheritance. This sensitivity is appealing to the reader. We encounter it in poems like “Elegy for an Old School Friend” and in the dramatic climax of “Riverfire.” Vulnerabilities are exposed as the poet questions class privilege and cultural assumptions and yet there are distinct sources of conservatism in Savige’s lyrics. His rhymes and puns can be reductive, his registers at times are anachronistic, though they exercise humour as they parody and invoke Elizabethan rhetoric. The repetition of “hum,” “sum, “fun and Om” in the penultimate stanza of “Circular Breathing” strives for a wholeness, that is undone by the closing stanza’s paradox of psychological incompletion.

Juxtapositions arise in tone and image, between the conventional and the new, creating complexity and richness. Savige is the consummate metaphysician, armed with a volley of conceits ranging from gaming, astronomy, love, speed.  Space for the poet is a cyber field, where language implodes on the physical surface. Many poems reference the culture of technology, its frames and tropes suitably materialized in a cosmos where “spry grandmothers compose text messages”, where Raphael’s Galatea is a 16th century Paris Hilton, “statuesque on a jetski” with her “skimpy cosi slipping from her hips” and where, according to Wikipedia, the Iliad is an e-book device. “The Iliad” is a witty reflection on the derivative intertextuality of late capitalism which trashes history, dumbing down the Homerian epic to an attractive product. At the same time, it’s a response to the crisis in print. The poet takes up the gauntlet, reversing the assault on language with sweet revenge. It’s an art to extract lyric essence from cultural jargon and I admire his success in poems such as this. Another of my favourites is the sexy, savvy “Disconnect ” with its

Pale wireless mermaid
washed up on the shore
by bright pixeltide.

(43)

Here, the conventionally addressed lady of courtly lyrics is busy booking cheap flights, surfing the net, persuaded by the poet to come to bed, to “close down windows.” and “zip the file.” Reminiscent of Donne or Marvell, Savige renews convention with agile associations of thought, with clarity of image. His variations in rhythm and tone are pleasing. Other poems like “First Person Shooter” are more protracted in their technique, and more contrived theoretically.

There’s no doubt that eschatological concerns run as a sinister theme through the collection, as it questions the auguries of innocence and experience. I found strange Blakean echoes in the poem “Crisis”:

Once I was entrusted with a planet
I was a child in a sweltering house.
All the world’s peace was up to me,
Quiet, cross-legged before the mouse.

(33)

The seemingly naïve child-subject playing a Nintendo PlayStation or Atari game is solely responsible for the planet’s “cinereous grey”, its missiles and “coughing creatures.” Disturbingly, the child’s passive absorption of violence, is imbued with Cold War psychology and the militarisation of space. The emergence of this virtual consciousness, implied by the book’s title, seems informed by experience as much as by theory. It brings to mind Baudrillard’s social philosophies, particularly those concerned with the West’s technological and political global expansion, the way in which the simulacra are seductive. We hear echoes too, of Foucault’s technologies of the self, connecting the microrelations of the subject in space and time with the macrologic of power.

Savige argues that in blurring the distinctions between self and technology, the simulacra have social consequences. In “Missile”, the player will ride to the Pleiades in search of blue jewels, with the trick being

to avert your vision, look off
to one side, allow a less abused
section of the retina to drink
in the distant emanation.

Alterations in tone from awe to nihilism in these shorter lyric pieces create an impact sometimes lacking in the longer poems. While the syntax is conventionally ordered, the diction is restless, the language layered with adjectives and nouns used as verbs as in “zip”, “swing”, “sticky”, “spark”, “out-yoga”, “bail”, “jink”. This action invigorates poems that might otherwise be burdened with logos, jargon or social theory. A recycling of poetic personas and their personal dramas is refreshing in poems like “26 Piazza di Spagna” (Keats’ death place) or the translation of ‘La notte bella” by Ungaretti. “The Minutes” rarefies Auden’s separation of poetry from the world of finance, with the poet recast as fiscal secretary, taking the minutes in the business of illumination. It’s a humourous, though somewhat flat description, symptomatic of the poet’s audacity to address any subject he chooses.

For me, some of the most beautiful poems in this collection are those in which one senses not speed but stillness, when the moment is distilled and thought, emotion and experience are entwined. “Summer Fig” for instance, captures a brief reprieve from “the impossible/puzzle of light, cut by hot oscilloscopes.’ If nature abounds, the simulacra of a crow’s silhouette awaits the poet’s attention, while technology’s shadow is perilously cast by the ‘giant fig,/downloading gigs of shade onto the fresh, cut grass.”

Personal crisis is constantly present, beautifully evoked amidst the civic in “Public Execution”. In “Desuetude” the poet, overwhelmed by life’s economic demands has “fallen outside of the habit.” Yet, constraint is obliquely resisted in the scatological “Posture.” Its edgy rhythms and attitude liberate the poet from political correctness:

“Your voice is so handcuffed

is how it looks to me, every
tremulous bubble frisked

for sense.”

(68)

And in the shapely “Stingray” the marine creature is like a “thought” barbed in the “sea’s mind” “patrolling the palimpsest” where paradise is the antithesis of clarity.

For a second collection it’s an ambitious constellation, which yokes together disparate images and tropes. The poems are layered, skilful, postured and probing. Their permutations operate in versed and free verse forms. Personal crisis is juxtaposed with historical and social contingencies, and yet the collection turns a full circle by its closing poem, “Riverfire”. By taking the statue of Oxley, a 19th century Queensland explorer, down from his pedestal and imbuing him with diverse cultural elements, by giving voice in his last stanzas to a Murri woman who has witnessed a shooting star, Savige turns his gaze from our colonial past to the future. Certainly he has the capacity for such manoeuvres. Savige is a privileged tenant of the “eternal city” whose conservative values are wholeness, resolution and tradition. In Surface to Air he strafes the frontiers of language where power and consciousness are at odds; where risk is mediated.

 

MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry, fiction and essays and serves as editor for Mascara Literary Review. Vishvarupa is her most recent collection of poems.

Carol Chan reviews “Seven Studies for a Self Portrait” by Jee Leong Koh

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Seven Studies for a Self Portrait    

by Jee Leong Koh

Bench Press

Reviewed by CAROL CHAN

 

 Poetry is worth something, but there are more important things. In his essay ‘Art vs Laundry’#, the American literary critic Stephen Burt challenges poets and readers to confront the tension between feeling that poetry is inconsequential, and that it is the main thing– i.e. poems “matter” and can change the world. This unaddressed tension haunts Koh Jee Leong’s second anthology, ‘Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait’.

Aptly titled, this is an obsessively curated volume of free verse poems, riddles, sonnet sequences and ghazals; it comprises seven sections of seven poems each, save for the divan of forty-nine ghazals. Each section interrogates the self through a different mirror: through responses to art, the third person narrative, riddles, abstractions, translations of the Other, emotional landscapes, conversations with the self and appeals to a lover. Perhaps due to the ambition of its premise and intended scope, this anthology unfolds like a series of scientific experiments that don’t quite take off, save for a few and the rewarding title section ‘Seven Studies’.

In search of answers to the limits of language and words, Koh turns to seven artists renowned for their self-portraits (‘Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait’). Arguably the more ‘difficult’ of his poems, these seven Studies are among the most illuminating and rewarding of the anthology. Here, Koh succinctly invokes artists and deftly recreates their art in ten lines; Koh the poet and artist simultaneously unfolding as the poems develop. Where idea and execution do not meet in the other parts of the book, Koh’s precision in words and imagery here carries the tried-and-tested conceit through. For example, with a well-placed line break, Koh evokes van Gogh’s struggle with the Church in the same breath as he skillfully introduces the physical and psychological themes of the artist’s work:

God sank a mineshaft into me for a reason
I could not see in the coalmining district.
Coal dust ate the baby potatoes and beer.

(‘Study #3, After Vincent van Gogh’)

Not a word is out of place- the gravity and bleakness of much of van Gogh’s work immediately translates onto the page with the apt word (“sank”) and vague, ubiquitous detail (“coal dust”).

Koh’s ear for image is pitch-perfect in these poems; the reader unfamiliar with these artists would still be able to appreciate the desperation and restlessness of “Skinny arms kink round my back/ but can’t kill the screeching itch./ The hand can’t scratch its bones” (‘Study #4: After Egon Schiele’), or the energy, wit and irony in Study #2 and #6 (‘After Rembradnt van Rijn’, ‘After Andy Warhol’).

The poems in this collection reveal a critic or academic at work; however, for the most part, this translates into the suppression of poetic instinct behind the lines. Koh’s ‘head suspicious of the heart’ (‘A’), he frequently makes the wrong bet, falling in love with the idea of a poem, the idea of art. And ideas do not a poem make, take for example, ‘Bulb’:

When we unbutton
our skin, our whole
body slips through

and leaves behind
more fleshy skin
for unbuttoning,

and skinnier body
for slipping through
the shrinking hole.

The rounded life.
An onion. A mouth.

‘Bud’, ‘Leaf’, ‘Stem’, ‘Tuber’, ‘Root’ and ‘Fruit’ accompany ‘Bulb’ in the section ‘What We Call Vegetables’. This extract can be read and interpreted several ways. Even if we put aside the issue of what the poem is about, and who these poems are for, the images are weak and awkward, the execution clumsy. This is verse that resembles a poem- it looks like a poem, it sounds like a poem (yes, the sibilances, consonances and assonances recreate aurally the acts of ‘slipping’, ‘unbuttoning’); the rhythm and narrative seem to be leading us to an epiphany or conclusion the reader is expected to be surprised by. The reason ‘Bulb’ exists is that it accompanies an idea, is part of an experiment- the section ‘What We Call Vegetables’ apparently explores/presents explicitly the relation of parts to a whole, etc. But I’m not quite convinced there is any substance here, in the sense that A.C. Bradley employs the term in his 1901 lecture, ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’#.

Bradley argues that the poetic is that which satisfies the reader’s contemplative imagination. A poem convinces the reader of a particular world or moment it inhabits; both substance and form work together seamlessly to develop the poem’s meaning, creating that poetic experience. What frustrates me about Koh’s poems is that there is subject, there is form, but the moments where both dance together in this collection are few and far between. In ‘I Am My Names’ and ‘A Lover’s Recourse’, for example, the form distracts from the subject and my engagement with it. I think I could imagine the rationale behind his choice of the ghazal in his meditations of unrequited/lost love, and the riddle to explore responsibilities and definitions of the self- but I only understand these decisions intellectually. Visually, and read aloud, the riddle only almost works- the declarative answer at the end of each poem (“My name is Mystery. I am a homosexual.”; “My name is Double. I am a lover.”) hints at pretension in the poet’s claim to universality, such as in ‘A’:

Each day revises the day before,
The riddle begun by baby talk,
The walk advanced by toddling aims.

The hands grow quicker than the eyes,
the head suspicious of the heart,
the body’s ardor into age.

My name is Anon. I am a father.

Putting aside the fact that this conjures parodies of Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult film ‘Princess Bride’, this is not a bad poem, only that it is an adequate knock-off of many who have come before him, who have explored ageing, change and rebirth in more sophisticated, surprising ways. I quote this as an example of Koh’s hubris- his inclination towards the cerebral, literary. While his love of form and structure serve him well when there’s something inhabiting the space, so to speak, his intellect is also the source of his carelessness and complacency.

And so, exceptional lines are hidden within the forty nine ghazals, another example of Koh selling himself short for a neat idea (of symmetry- forty-nine being the seventh multiple of seven). Here, as in elsewhere, one gets the sense that Koh is writing for the sake of writing, because he has to fill up the pages, with throwaway lines (“Time is a river. That is if you are a fish./ If you are a sunflower, time is a fire”) and ghazals. ‘The square root of minus money is a movie’, ‘He has not called or written for more than a week’, ‘I see I am the last man drinking in the bar’, ‘The body drives so deeply in desire’s cave’ are some that might be better left out of the collection, filled with clichés (think caves, windows, train stations), dull prose or awkward imagery (door as apple’s skin?).

All of this creating and striving, however, is the result of Koh’s attempt to continually marry his identities as poet, lover, queer, son, to find a new way of expressing love through the physical/sexual or ‘obscene’ in the same breath as the emotional, the pure:

Stop making a big scene about your broken heart.
Put it back in your pants, the soft and weepy heart.

…

The obscene is a view Jee finds congenital.
Between a poem’s legs is found a poet’s heart.

(‘A Lover’s Recourse’)

This risky, admirable attempt to find a new language for poets works best in ‘You smell your fault as readily as you hear a bell’. In each couplet, the bell is variously a metaphor for the poet’s ego, conscience, sexual desire, poetic voice and critic. The bell is presented via a different voice- a command, a musing, an irritation, an action, an effect. These voices and situations work with the central image to develop the complex tensions in desire, thought and action, rendering the abstract ‘bell’ in the final couplet all the more meaningful and powerful in light of the lines before:

The fading is a fault but silence is an itch.
Most unendurable, Jee, is the unrelenting bell.

(‘A Lover’s Recourse’)

However, Koh is best when he speaks the language of frustration, fear and despair. His thoughtful sentiments frequently lapse into cliché, and his efforts at poeticizing ‘cock’ doesn’t always translate on the page. Hence ‘Translations of a Mexican Poet’ and ‘Bull Eclogues’ stood out for me in this collection, reminding me why I looked forward to ‘Seven Portraits’ when I first received it, assuring me this was the same voice behind the modestly confident Equal to the Earth (2009):

At home it makes a smaller sound, the grief.
The click of a light switch. No mercy
in the darkness or the light the house repeats,

but hiding for a time, however brief,
in me, as in my den, I hear the plea
of an unfired bullet in the drawer firing.

(‘The Cave’)

In these lines Koh takes us through a raw psychological landscape in his take on the eclogue. Here, the poem presents to us “in its own way, something which we meet in another form in nature or life”#. Koh’s specific shade of grief is “the click of a light switch”, startling, acute, blinding, immediately omnipresent; this is poetry- an experience composed of but cannot be reduced to that purée of sound, image, rhythm, substance. Confronted with the impossibility of escape, of existing purely on its own, the self that imagines the plea of the “unfired bullet” experiences itself not just as criminal and judge, but simultaneously both: pure crime and punishment.

A relief! Here is a poet that means, not a Poet that much of the anthology presents us. I’d hoped to encounter a Jee that confronted his demons instead of ignoring them; despite the evident musicality in his writing, clumsy lines (“an empty noose that hanged straight by its weight”, “a bus handrail is sticking in my uterus like a huge thumbtack”), unrefined metaphors and images, bad puns (leaves, speed) still puzzlingly appear in this book more frequently than in Equal to the Earth. In his risk and reach for the ‘bigger picture’ (meta-narrative and intellectual coherence of the collection), it seems that Koh has not quite come to terms with the value of poetry (as Burt reminds us) – what poetry is for, why we write.

But here is a poet clearly earnest about challenging himself, pushing the limits of contemporary poetry, willing to take risks, even if not all of them pay off. For all of my unease and disappointment with this collection, Koh has taken a worthy risk with ‘Seven Portraits’, in context of the Singapore poetry scene. Perhaps this book can be read as his response to “politeness/ or fear or disbelief”; his irreverence, versatility with form and voice, and willingness to experiment thoughtfully creates new spaces for discussion in a maturing literary community. Koh writes, “I hope perfection does not lie in quietness”. I believe so, and find myself hoping for more beauty among the ruins in his future work.

 

Ipsita Sengupta reviews David Walker’s “Not Dark Yet”

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Not Dark Yet

by David Walker

Giramondo Press, 2011

ISBN 9781920882655

Reviewed by IPSITA SENGUPTA

 

Despite its humour and ebullience, Not Dark Yet has a Beowulf frame of loss, death and violence. Shadows of the author’s memory, his sight and familial love are played out in a mediterranean climate. Not all of the eighteen chapters of this “personal history” are located in Adelaide or other South Australian settlements, though David Walker hails from that state, from where he explores his ancestry. Family anecdotes seamlessly blend into the macro-history of Australian nation and nationalism. Allusions to the British Vanguard and American culture rehearse traditional Antipodean links, which define the sense of self at personal and national levels.

Yet Asia is a recurrent presence, from the opening line’s reference to Frederic Prokosch’s The Asiatics: A Novel, to David Walker’s charisma as the Israeli Ambassador in a Canberra-based film which redefines Australians as “We Asians”. Asia models various roles, both intimate and atrocious throughout Not Dark Yet.

Luke Day is an affectionate Chinese father to his adopted British daughter, Molly Day. A relative, and Colonel William Light who planned the layout of Adelaide had a Malay mother. For Walker, Japan remains a complex memory resisting easy classification. The Japanese had brutally murdered his uncle Laurie during the Second World War. Yet Japanese culture remains the source of exquisite hobbies like bonsai and dry arrangements for his family. His ancestors source their imports from Japan, along with Europe. In his travels, Walker encounters an exquisite Japan of geishas and tourist-enthusiast schoolgirls; he’d already fallen for the complex, elegant and mannered Japan discovered in translated novels.

The book does not domesticate or arrange Australian responses to a looming Asia; they are presented as tangled contradictions. While The Advertiser describes intruders like rabbits or Chinamen as ready targets for annihilation if White Australians aspire to keep the continent to themselves, Sir Phillip McBride succeeds in securing for Luke Day an old-age pension.

Travel remains the other leitmotif through the text. If Asians, as forbidden outsiders, have trickled into the Australian land and national psyche, how could the new settlers remain home forever? The World War disperses Australians in all directions across the globe. Walker’s relatives translocate between continents during the war. Laurie is posted at Darwin and Ambon in the Netherlands East Indies, Alan at Canada, the UK and Europe, Eric at Tobruk in Libya, New Guinea and Borneo. Walker’s quiet and respectable parents became Frommer-inspired independent world-travellers, journeying through Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Cairo, Athens and Italy. Though ready to admire and record in travel diaries and photo slides the unfamiliar territory of their oriental destinations, unease and danger await them. Bewildered by the chaos of Hong Kong, they take refuge in tours. In Cairo they are troubled by hostility and the fear of contamination of ‘flea-bitten & moth-eaten’ guides and thugs. On a smaller scale, but no less pioneer style, are the interstate family travels.

Blindness and memory are described as cultural as well as personal. The troubled journey into darkness of an Alzheimer’s patient eludes the reach of her family. Walker, an Australian historian, had resisted family history before turning to this genre, when macular degeneration blurs the distinctions in reading, writing, seeing:

“When I became legally blind, I had to rethink the kind of history I was able to write. I had to find another, more personal voice and another way of writing. The mix of the historical and the personal seemed promising.” (124)

Not Dark Yet is a quiet discourse on Australian nation and history, its fears and myths, like that of the Lasseter’s Lost Reef, a mighty gold deposit which had eluded early explorers. The author engages with Vance Palmer’s model of nationalist literature with its affiliation to bush-honed brawn; historians of Australia like J.A. La Nauze and Keith Hancock are characters in his story. He engages with various national obsessions in the early decades of the century, such as physical culture and the mission to breed a fit race as custodians of a continent.

War and its impact, civic and private, are structurally central to the book. Walker devotes several chapters recasting the horror of the taboo death of Laurie and narrating disturbed or distant responses to war, by his two surviving uncles. This parallels representations of Australian war strategies on a broader canvas during the Second World War, while reinstating Laha as an Australian war-shrine inexplicably neglected. Violence and derangement seethe in episodic undercurrents. Oswald strikes his wife, when he is unhinged by the confirmation of his son’s beheading. The Olympic water-polo semi-final between Hungary and the Soviet Union erupts into wild riots of Cold War hatred.

The book is a shrine and museum, not merely of innocence, but of an era to which his elusive, polite, hat-wearing father is “an enigmatic visitor”. It seeks to salvage what Walker’s memory and vision permit from the chronicle of his losses. His father’s horticultural pursuits are lost, as are the Burra of his ancestors, Cadell and Freeling of his childhood, his mother’s self and his world of books. Many buried links are unearthed, some accidentally, like Alan’s long-lost fiancée from Wales or Laurie’s comrade and friend from Ambon. Among the buried links in this history of nation and family, the author succeeds in confining himself to a role of Shakespeare’s fool, omniscient of the plot yet reluctant to narrate the self.

That a veteran historian like David Walker should conquer his reluctance for a personal genre and narrate some very difficult stories makes this a remarkable book. It is national history from a fresh perspective of family documents, photographs and remembered quirks. And it seems to be a profoundly ironic, though finally accepting vision, of the dominant version of this history. War is accorded a pivotal position and it is indeed the crux of these stories. Walker’s father may never have been ‘the red-blooded Australian male that Palmer sought to mythologise’, but he is surely no deviant with his rabbit-shooting skills and the heart of a country boy.

Tiresias was blind, a metaphor for the searing vision that enabled him to know and speak the unspeakable crime and guilt of innocent Oedipus. Certain versions of Shiva with his eyes almost closed and the third eye open re-play that metaphor of access to depth dimensions. Though macular degeneration is a loss beyond words for a scholar like Walker, devoted to books and writing, his outwardly shrinking universe and timeless solitude permit this erudite and disturbingly intimate comic elegy.

 
 
IPSITA SENGUPTA is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at South Calcutta Girls’ College, Calcutta University and a PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, researching Australian encounters with India during the colonial period. She was awarded the Australia-India Council Fellowship in the 2009 round. She has published nationally and internationally on Australia-India connections, most recently on the Indian Mollie Skinner in Southerly (2011).

Ed Wright reviews “The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems” Ed Michael Byrne

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The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems

Ed Michael Byrne

Ginninderra Press

ISBN 978 1 74027 650 4

Reviewed by ED WRIGHT

 

The  American poet Charles Simic once commented in Verse magazine that “Writing a prose poem is a bit like trying to catch a fly in a dark room. The fly probably isn’t even there, the fly is inside your head, still, you keep tripping over and bumping into things in hot pursuit. The prose poem is a burst of language following a collision with a large piece of furniture.” Having emerged through the rebellious anti-formalism of late-nineteenth century French poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the prose poem has maintained a sense of the unconventional, and of the enigmatic given that it exists in the slippery spaces around what might be poetry and what might more aptly be described as prose.
An anthology of Australian Prose Poems is a neat idea, so power to Michael Byrne for getting this one together. There are some tremendous poems here; ones that have eschewed the lines of verse in favour of the sentence and paragraph, but still manage to shift the readers’ angles of thought as all good poetry should.

Stand-outs include Joanne Burns’s dramatic monologues, most notably ‘marble surfaces,’ which takes us into the inner world of a butcher; John Scott’s extracts from the longer work, ‘Slippages,’ and Peter Boyle’s fragments of fantastic logic, such as ‘Philosophers and Other World Leaders.” Other big guns of Australia’s poetry are to be found here too. The poems by John Forbes and John Tranter are great, as is Tom Shapcott’s ‘Concert Arias.’ Poems of lesser known poets such as Tatjana Lukic’s ‘Sleepless in Canberra, or George Huitker’s ‘The Soccer Coach Gets Philosophical’ are also worth discovering.

While Byrne brings to our attention some great poems unfortunately, as an anthology, this collection is something of a letdown.  The great problem is its sheer unrepresentativeness. There are far too many baby boomer poets, and too many works from lesser practitioners within this set. A gender division doesn’t seem apparent since gender division since Ania Walwicz, Vicki Viidikas and Anna Couani are all included in the volume, but of the 43 poets represented, 36 are boomers. Of course the new Australian poetry of the late sixties is known for its championing of the form. However, even if Gary Catalano was the sixties poet known specifically for his prose poetry, he is not a strong enough poet (despite Les Murray’s panegyric) to warrant ten outings in this rather slim 150 page volume.

Worse still is that some of the included here read more like misplaced paragraphs than prose poems.  Deprived of the space created by verse lines, some become afflicted by a dense banality. Tim Metcalf’s ‘The Airman Rolls’ away begins for instance:

‘I have always found conversation a little stifled when wiping clean the papery skin of the incontinent. First my potential partner in conversation is rolled away with their back to me; and second trying to hold my breath disrupts the natural flow of words and the pauses in between them. So I say little, mouth breathe to avoid the smell, and ask myself the same question over and over again: ‘where is the poem in this?’

Others are reduced to reading like  . . .  regular prose. There are stray travel observations that resonate little.  Geoff Page’s “Cathedral in Castile,” for example, or Gary Catalano’s ‘Theatre,’ which is set in Paris. Perhaps the problem here is that these poems are anchored in an era when travel retained its rarity. When to name such places cast an aura and granted their invokers absolution from a still extant cultural cringe.  However, other poems based on travel reminiscence, notably Phillip Hammial’s ‘Pygmies’, with its witty self-awareness, and Judith Beveridge’s ‘Flower of Flowers’ with its sheer sensuality transcend their localities and linger in the mind.

Some of the weaker poems in this anthology are cute but ultimately throwaway thought pieces. Catalano’s ‘Books’ is one example. It starts off “Books must prefer their own company to those of human beings, who rarely use them in the proper or appropriate way.’ The cuteness of the idea comes a cropper in the execution of it, particularly through the clunkiness of using both “proper” and “appropriate,” and in the extension of a small idea into a conceit.

If Byrne had cast his net a little wider, he could easily have found more memorable stuff, more variety of it, and this anthology would have been much improved. Given he is not a babyboomer himself, it’s hard to understand why he hasn’t done this.

Another problem with this concentration is that it denies the Australian prose poem a sense of its own narrative or development. The only pre-boomer poet included here is Bruce Beaver, and while this reflects the emergence of the genre in the sixties, Byrnes’s selections give little idea of how this sub-genre may have developed in the almost fifty years since this seminal cultural moment. Placing the poems in an obvious chronological order may have helped the idea of such a narrative, especially as the included work of younger poets feels scattered and arbitrary.
Alternatively, Byrne might have narrowed his criteria and restricted the anthology to the sixties poets. Then it would have worked as a particular distillation of a generation. But to present this as “the (Indigo) Book of Australian Prose Poems” is to infer limits that don’t exist. While he must be commended for retrieving so many excellent poems and putting them together in the context of their genre, it’s hard to be satisfied as a reader when you are left thinking that this anthology could have been so much more.

 

Brook Emery reviews “warming the core of things” by Nora Krouk

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warming the core of things

by Nora Krouk

Hybrid Publishers

ISBN: 978192166543

Reviewed by BROOK EMERY

 

 

 

Over the last few months, while all the wise futurists have been forecasting the decline of the book and the ascension of the virtual word, I’ve been thinking about why I’m so attracted to books, specifically to poetry BOOKS, to collections of poetry. I’m not much good at reading poems on the web and I often feel dissatisfied when I read single poems by various authors in journals and anthologies, even in hard copy, even in canon-making anthologies such as The Norton. To me, in these formats poems seem to be isolated, un-contextualised, orphans. I find myself reading one poem after another subconsciously saying things like ‘Oh, that’s not bad’, ‘Yeah, I quite like that one’, ‘There’s not much in this one, is there?’ and flipping (or scrolling) to the next one without really engaging with the poems or feeling involved. I find myself hanging out for a book of poems by the one author so I can get some sense of narrative and coherence, a feeling that the poems speak to each other and enrich each other, a sense of the voice, and personality, and world experience behind the poems.

These considerations came back to me strongly as I was reading Nora’s warming the core of things for the first time. This is a book which invites you to enter and share a life. It is a book which, poem by poem, builds into a unified and challenging consideration of what has been observed and experienced over many years. It is a book in which the overwhelming feeling is ‘warmth’, literally and metaphorically. Such warmth is doubly attractive and welcoming at a time when a lot of poetry is cool, detached, clever, and sometimes seems to have lost touch with that really basic responsibility of poetry to reach out, to connect, and to explore what it is like to be human in our thoughts and feelings.

Warming the core of things is a book which is intimate, confessional (if you like). It celebrates the personal, the familial, and the emotional, it concerns itself with the relationships between people over time. It makes me think of lines from Jack Gilbert’s poem, ‘Highlights and Interstices’ where he writes ‘… our lives happen between / the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual / breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about / her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.’ Like Gilbert, but in a very different way, Nora raises the everyday to moments of insight and appreciation. And like Gilbert, despite what he says about himself, Nora does remember both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Two of the things she and Gilbert remember and feel acutely are love and loss.

The first section of Nora’s collection is titled ‘In Memoriam’ and begins with a delicate poem to her husband Efim who died in 2008. The poem ends with the simple, dignified statement, ‘I miss you’ but this section is no simple, romanticised portrait of a long marriage and the death of a partner. It is clear-eyed, emotionally honest and vivid in its realism. It notes the tensions and ironies and ordinariness in lines such as, ‘she hates to leave him alone / yet itches to step outside’ (‘They are together most days’), in the white chair that waits ‘brazen with coloured cushions’ (‘Slumped in a chair’), in the ‘bare bottoms and other bits’ and the ‘inmates with anguished eyes / [who] search for themselves / [and] stumble over the shards’ (‘Ward 15’). The section expands to take in other deaths, other inevitabilities, and below the surface of them all are the perennial human questions, ‘Why?’ and ‘Couldn’t it have been different?’ Usually the questions are implied but sometimes they are explicitly stated as at the end of the poem ‘Blue Doona’ when Nora asks, ‘Couldn’t you just live?’ It is worth remembering that question from an early poem when you come to the last poem in the book. I’ll say something about this later because it reveals a great deal about Nora’s vision. These poems, these wishes, are moving, touching, but Nora doesn’t live in fantasy, she knows that what happened has happened and nothing can change it or take away the grief because, as she writes in ‘Birthday’, ‘Love is the most pitiless feeling of all’. To really understand the import of this statement, to unpick the relationship between ‘pity’, ‘pitiless’ and ‘love’, you not only have to read the whole poem but the whole collection. Only then will you appreciate the wisdom and emotional intelligence of this collection. Nora is a participant in these poems but she is also the thoughtful observer and interpreter. These are poems in which the border between life and art is more porous than is often the case. It takes courage, assurance and depth to be able to write, ‘My dearest dearest difficult / husband            My love’ (‘What should I do’).

The capacity for love leads to an indignity at injustice, especially the injustice done to the individual by the impersonal forces of history. It is there explicitly in some poems and is the context in which the personal happens. Nora has lived a memorable life and she remembers and can see, at this distance, things as they were, that ‘The good times in Shanghai / [were] a 20th century masquerade / as the world burned’. Nora also sees, for example in the poem ‘For Leon K’, how the effects of not knowing – ‘What did they do / before his boots were filling with blood’ – can reverberate through the decades and continue to hurt, even cripple. Nora is witness and rememberer of a father who had to break with his Polish past, of a mother ‘buried in Chinese soil / without a headstone / during the Cultural / Revolution’ (‘A short visit’), of massacres in China, experiments on humans in Harbin, of atrocities committed in war. That the personal is the political is a bit of a silly phrase but Nora’s poetry reminds us that we are all part of events that seem to have happened ‘over there’ or ‘back then’ or to ‘someone else’. Reading these poems we are reminded that no man (no woman) is an island.

Warming the core of things changes gears somewhat in the second section which is called ‘Renewals’. Here the warmth and love which were manifest within the sadness and grief are expressed in a sensual joy in beauty and in a determination to appreciate the bounty of nature. Here the poems are overflowing with wisteria, lavender, roses, gardenias, asters, food, friends, and the warmth of the sun. In the first poem ‘A smile is hovering over our street’ (‘A young woman’), in another ‘this day is / a glob / of honey / a pouring warmth’ (‘Dust on the silver chimes’), in another ‘ Like that butterfly / drunk / on sun / I claim it all: My sun!’ (‘Like that butterfly’), in another Nora is ‘… grateful to Fate / for landing in the sun’. (‘Memory’), and in ‘Shanghai Sydney’ Nora is ‘moving through an amazing puzzle / picking a piece / here            on my palm / wishing I knew a psalm / or a prayer of thanks // For everything’ (‘Shanghai Sydney). This section of Nora’s book transforms as well as renews.

If warmth and wisdom are the two dominant qualities of this book, it is the voice of the poems which makes them so attractive. Nora often jokes that her Russian typewriter mischievously makes syntactical or idiomatic mistakes in her poems or, perhaps, even writes the poems without her intervention. I don’t quite believe her because I hear her voice in so many of the poems, in little statements and questions, especially questions. I constantly hear Nora asking herself what she knows, what she has learnt, what she then believed and now believes, what she can do about fate, the inevitable. This is most notable in the third section of the book, ‘Transitions’ in which Nora has a number of conversations with God, humorously wonders about chaos theory and deals with a number of more or less philosophical issues. So many of these poems have a quality of consideration and reconsideration which is made explicit, appropriately near the end of the book, in the poem ‘Once I could plan or act’. This is not dogmatic poetry but the book does grope towards tentative, provisional answers. This testing of ideas can be seen, for example, in Nora’s identification with the sasanqua in ‘Sasanqua in May’

 

Gold tipped unblinking lashes
in floral faces
focus determination
to bloom            to hang on
through alternating currents
of chill air
tucked in the permanence
of green leaves
over the strewn wax petals
trampled to death
they cling to relevance
to celebration of
Here and Now
without blinking.
I know the feeling.


A similar hard-won understanding or, at least, acceptance occurs in the poem, ‘Discussions about God’ where she writes ‘My slender beautiful / jacaranda comes / into bloom slowly / It blooms and sheds / sheds and blooms // Is this the answer?

For me, a baby boomer born and raised safely in Sydney who has not known depression, revolution, war, dislocation, internment, expatriation or, on the other hand, the high, fashionable life, who has taught history but didn’t live it, these poems make me realise how little I know, how little I understand, how little I have experienced.

Here is where you have to remember that early poem.The last word in Nora’s book is ‘live’ with an exclamation mark and that feels appropriate and significant to me. As does the epigraph to the last section of the book, a Ukranian saying, ‘Wishing you good health, warm bread, and peaceful skies’. In its entirety, warming the core of things is full of life; it endorses and celebrates that Ukranian saying.

 

Andy Jackson reviews “Out to Lunch” by Andy Kissane

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Out to Lunch

by Andy Kissane

Puncher and Wattmann

ISBN:9781921450204

Reviewed by ANDY JACKSON

 

 

Among other things, Andy Kissane’s poetry in Out to Lunch focusses on suburbia, public transport, family, television, the beach and sausages.  So, why am I surprised to be moved?  And, not only moved, but challenged?

That the visceral, emotional experience of this collection is accompanied by such a sense of surprise is to me a reminder of how much I have still unconsciously bought into the myth of novelty and obscurity.  Kissane writes accessible, unpretentious, often humourous, subtly thoughtful poems.  They use language that isn’t a long way from the vernacular, what you might overhear at the food court or the pub, eavesdropping.  But it is a language carefully calibrated to heighten the sense of the momentous within the everyday.  Not to eclipse the everyday, but to attend to it – something like  the effect of a film slowing down, heightening the meaning of small gestures, glances and events.  It is a deliberate effect, sure, but it’s entirely unforced and natural – as in “Visiting Melbourne”, these are poems seemingly “sung / by lungs that never pause to think of breathing”.

This comes out intriguingly in “The Earlwood-Bardwell Park Song Cycle”, his ambitious and accomplished response to Les Murray’s “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” (which Kissane rightly reminds us is itself a response to the Wonguri-Mandjigai Song-Cycle of the Moon Bone).  Whereas Murray’s poem is an attempt to fuse Aboriginal storytelling with a European-Australian attachment to country attuned through annual holiday-making, Kissane takes a more modest and respectful tack.  It contains something of the same grammatical structure and heightened attention to place, but it maintains Kissane’s characteristic clarity and light touch.  His “Song Cycle” is the Australian suburban world as it is lived day to day.  It begins “the long holiday is over”, and flows through all the regular movements of traffic, work, home, shopping, crime, birdlife, the small epiphanies gained and missed.  Near its climax, the poem speaks “of the people who gave Gumbramorra Swamp / its name, the Gwiyagal people, who were here first and are still / here, who fished and lived and moved in this place, here”.  In this, it is not only a revision but a critique of Murray’s epic reach, baulking at a presumptuous appropriation of an indigenous worldview.

Most of the poems in Out to Lunch are structured in a taut and concentrated casual way, reminiscent of Robert Hass or Billy Collins, yet arguably even more deceptively casual.  I say ‘deceptively’ because very often the sensation of a Kissane poem is of someone sitting beside you to tell you what has happened to them, and just as you’ve entered into that familiar world, something twists or jolts you into somewhere exhilaratingly unexpected, though on second glance intuitively connected.  For instance, “Falling through the Hoop” contains a string of scenes and memories that touch on the life of “Heinz”.  It moves from an image of skinny-dipping at Elwood beach, to “a suspension bridge across a ravine”, then to Heinz’s sudden suicide.  At this point, Kissane, as he often does at moments like this in his poems, recedes into an admission of ignorance – “some moments / resist, no matter how you worry / at them, or pound them, they will not / answer, they will not come back”, aware that the reader will understand that these “moments” are also the people who he has lost.

To me, this is one of the most intriguing aspects of Out to Lunch.  Many of its best poems, while rooted in autobiographical specifics and a familiar suburban milieu, grapple honestly with the suffering of others, and with the limitations of that grappling.  The poet is clearly aware of, and uncomfortable with, global inequalities, and acutely aware of the great distance between his own life and the lives of others.  His poems apprehend  political complexities through the very intimate lens of empathy and imagination.  The very real dilemma of attempting to integrate global realities with daily routine is vividly evoked in “The Colour of Starvation”.  Here, Kissane remembers watching as a teenager a documentary set “somewhere in Africa or India, where many people / were poor and starving” and his subsequent anger at his family’s material comfort, acknowledging how easily an awareness of the other slides into self-consciousness.  The poem weaves this story into a meditation on William Morris, 19th century artist, textile designer and socialist; the poet’s desire to write about sweat-shop labour from the comfort of his desk; and the pleasures of food, beautiful objects and sunlight.  The poem leads us towards a familiar, uncomfortable compassion and refuses to provide solutions.  As these juxtapositions build through the course of the book, as a reader, I begin to want the poet to attempt some leap towards resolution or provocation, but Kissane eschews definitive answers in favour of the clarity of the poem’s evocation of reality.  Or, to put it another way, he overtly recognises the relative impotence of the poem to directly affect injustice – thereby allowing it to have impact in the affective field.

Throughout Out to Lunch there are small, concentrated statements of poetics, either implied or in the case of “Joy and a Fibro Shack” overt.  The poem begins with an exploration of poetry as “like the difficulty of building a house / without a plan, a wood, a hammer”, moving further into the metaphor, until the deliberately prosaic lines “Is a poem a palace or a humpy? / I prefer humpies, furnished from a daggy couch / reclaimed from the council clean-up”.  If this was the extent of the poem, it may feel underwhelming, but it shifts gear, as Kissane often does, through memory into a secondary metaphor that is just as clear and subtle, while also refusing resolution.  It ends with the poet “up at 3am, / walking the kitchen, walking the hallway, walking / the lounge room, holding a baby / who would not stop, would not stop, / just would not stop crying”.  We know that the poet is in control of this poem, but at its closure, we are left also with his awe at the wildness and hunger of poetry.

The question is, what holds this collection together?  How could it be said that these poems are out to lunch?  This is perhaps my only serious qualm with the book – the title.  The suggestion of daydreaming in Out to Lunch certainly alludes to the shifts and leaps which provide much of the energy and surprise of the collection.  And it also hints at the “Meat Matters” series of poems, where meat in its various cuts and recipes is given centre stage (which is sometimes quite funny and memorable, but also left this vegetarian a little cold) .  But the idiom to me is too much rooted in the negative or apologetic, bringing to mind someone who instinctively wants to escape from the everyday with their imagination, someone unconcerned with the world as it is and their responsibility to it.  This is not Kissane.

This, of course, is a minor issue.  Kissane is a great craftsman, the writing finely shaped yet always fluid and naturalistic. Out to Lunch was deservedly shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize – the poems are warm, subtly complex and humane.  Its peculiar and ongoing resonance comes from its full immersion in reality and memory, where moments of detail remind us of the constructed and limited nature of the poem, moments that foreground ignorance, that imply that life goes on through not knowing.

Leaving Home is to my mind perhaps the highlight of the collection.  It epitomises Kissane’s ability to fuse the quotidian with surprise and understated emotion.  From a domestic family scene where –

The oven door was permanently ajar,
hanging by its last hinge, when my mother
crossed the kitchen and planted a kiss
on my father’s bristly cheek…

to a magical, yet matter-of-factly stated transformation –

‘At last’, she said to herself, ‘I have managed
to get my priorities right’ – and with that
the feathers sprouted from her scapula
and her dentures dropped, orphan-like,
from her lips…

 

ANDY JACKSON’s collection, Among the Regulars (papertiger media, 2010) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.  In late 2011, he will be an Asialink resident at Chennai, India.  He blogs at amongtheregulars.wordpress.com

 

 

Ivy Ireland reviews amphora by joanne burns

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 amphora

by joanne burns                                                         

Giramondo Publishing, 2011

ISBN 9781920882631

Reviewed by IVY IRELAND

 

 

 

 

quadrillions of singing atoms: joanne burns’ amphora

joanne burns’ most recent collection, amphora, could almost be a gold-bound book of saints, if it weren’t for the utterly human myths also seeping through its pages.  The collection’s amphorae are filled to brimming with hagiography, angelology and quite a bit of effortless nostalgia.  In fact, burns’ well-loved quirks and smarts flood out of this collection, unable to be contained by the ancient vessels of the title.  Dipping into the overflowing liquids of the ceramic jars, the reader discovers not only the holy waters of poignant scientific enquiry, but also the pink lemonade of PopThink.  There is a great sense of questing after the divine threading throughout these poems, even if it is the divine discovered in such suburban tasks as trimming the unruly Bougainvillea or sucking on lifesavers during rosary.

What strikes me most when reading burns’ work is her tenacious grasp on the humble quotidian, her understanding of the layers beneath the hours and her willingness to unravel the cosmos into quarks and photons without losing her grasp on self and home.  “streamers”, burns’ collection of koans, koannes, give the most intimate examples of this:

weigh the rice before you boil it
how else can you catch up
with yourself

“rung” is, to my thinking, the stand-out poetry sequence of the collection.  The ladder is the subject of this humble, yet unrelenting, enquiry into what goes up and what comes down.  Jacob, Yeats and Miro feature here, of course, but it’s burns’ own nostalgic reflections that contain the best clue to the importance of this everyday tool:

great thorny branches of bouganvillia leap and lurch
towards the sky; junglegreen and purple riot in the air.
i try to prune them. cut them back into some kind of
order no topiary, after my father dies; his ladder is my
ladder now

And yet every lofty, perhaps enlightened buzz-moment, such as:

yeats knew the disloyalty of ladders
the vanishing of rungs in the windy spaces
of old minds; who end up after all those heady
moments back down on hands and knees across
familiar rubbled ground, small hearts picking through
the rags and bones of diminished time;

is craftily snatched away again by simple memories from the human psyche box:

but me. i look for an easier solution. enough of biblical
endurance and ordealism. i climb down the ladder
of memory.

Throughout amphora, burns tackles even the most typical Christian icons, such as saints and angels, with her witty, playful antennae intact.  The opening poem (from the aptly named “angles not angels” section) of the collection, “pitch,” claims:

… i don’t want an angel with huge wings
that rustle, i need someone quiet who likes to dust and shop and
vacuum while i recline and dream up poems and skim through
dictionaries and roget’s there is something about the sight
and thought of those angel wings in most religious art
that makes me shudder

suggesting that it is the typical domestic joys that truly keep the divine (and the poet) afloat in this sea of the extraordinary.  And this book of poems is awash with the extraordinary, simply packed to the brim with mini-insights that eek out of the “pleroma” and into the mind of the sage sensitive enough to capture them and distil them down for the everyday reader.  Even the almost-accidental, scattered and observational poems of the final section of the collection, “this week next week the week after” contain snippets of insight that can only be described as near-mythological or Zen-instructive:

you can’t rely on the sky
to help you sort it out it just hangs
there like a lout sucking on a milk
shake and letting it all happen the burning years

and again:

the poems are running
running away running from
that dread of having to explain
themselves, those lists of
food ingredients they’veread on the back of packets
instant noodles for example;

The blurb on the back of burn’s book states that “from… common things, from familiar words and phrases… burns draws attitudes that define a way of living – gladness, openness, curiosity, acceptance and above all sensual delight.”  Indeed there is a delightful gladness skipping throughout the pages of amphora, even in the midst of the most sardonic observations.  Yet I would add that, even through all of this all-consuming openness, there’s a sense of mocking the openness, as through nothing is sacred because everything is.  Everything is, thus, worthy of the air-knives of burns’ observational skills because the simple holiness contained within these mocked saints and abjured louts will act as their own necessary shields.
amphora is a mini-world of quarks and paradox, dissecting gods and saints alongside the contents of a school lunchbox.  And the variations in theme are almost equivalent to the variations in form.  burns’ trademark prose poems are still to be found here, yet she seems to play a lot with lineation in this collection also, as evident in “raft”:

i dream of the Gnostic pleroma
before the light and dark fissure,
the superstitious rifting: eternal hymn

Throughout amphora, however, nothing remains in stasis.  It is a book of changes: mercurial, honest, undoing itself at every turn.  Even the glorious realisations contained in these stanzas of undulating internal rhythms and rhymes are undone in the next instant:

                                                        …pleroma,
foremost world of fullness; did the gnostics eat
grated carrot?

Reading through amphora repeatedly (and consider yourself warned: this collection will need second and third reading), I discover that, for me, it’s not the vast, eclectic field burns is plucking her poetics from that packs the most punch (though I must say I am wowed even by the neologisms).  Instead, the true magic lies in the intimate realisations, in the nostalgic, expounded memory-shards that unfold from these poems.  These snippets of insight into the specific journey of one human psyche, such as this image from “relief,” truly sing:

the smell of that old school chalk.  how time slips
away but the smell doesn’t. smell of your teenage
slip singeing after you wrapped it around your
bedlamp late at night on a school day, anxious to
conceal your awakeness from your mother while
you devour ‘the picture of dorian grey’. giving the
gods of reading lust the slip as a burnt offering.

I feel certain that the great gods of reading lust will accept joanne burns’ latest offering with all the zest it deserves.

 

IVY IRELAND is a part-time cabaret performer, creative writing tutor, harpist, magician’s assistant and Ph.D candidate.  Ivy was awarded the 2007 Australian Young Poet Fellowship, and has had her poems published in various literary magazines and anthologies.  Ivy’s first solo poetry publication came out in 2007 and is entitled Incidental Complications.

 

Susan Fealy reviews “Colombine” by Jennifer Harrison

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Colombine, New & Selected Poems

by Jennifer Harrison

ISBN 9781876044657

Black Pepper Press

 

Reviewed by SUSAN FEALY

 

 

For Jennifer Harrison, discovery occurs through play with language and in Colombine, New & Selected Poems we see a dialectic stance to her investigations.
The tensions of mind/body, freedom/constraint and the lyric ‘I’ /modern awareness of its language medium appear in a variety of metaphoric guises.

In ‘The Wheel’, from her first collection, Michelangelo’s Prisoners, the poem introduces us to a body that has been impinged upon by medical science:

Under the tongue, after meals
the little pill melts. A mongrel dog
infects an embryo with its indolent lick.

We can bear it we say. Look now
at the human genome, a shiny new ship
emerging from the dock.

The body has been infiltrated by a mind that is ‘ambitious’ and seeking ‘a perfect pot’ but which, in its very certainty, may change what is inherently a soft, organic substance. It is tempting to see this as metaphor for Harrison’s poetic. Her erudite interest in the mind’s processes and in language (the medium of her perceptions) conflicts with a sense of being that is fluid and disrupted by such investigation. How the creative process mediates the two is seen in her work. As a psychiatrist, she is attuned not only to her mind’s processes, but to those of others. She gives us many languages by speaking through the lens of others; languages wrought by a rare attunement to the multiplicities of perception.

‘Aus-lan’ is a poem of intimate encounter with the mind of another. It is also a celebration of a transmission of mind that seems to reduce the gap between mind and body experience more so than spoken language:

I hear a quiet voice in my hands
in the silence when I am speaking 

and foam, rubber, snow and glycerine
seem softer in the fingering span

than spoken words falling short of what they name.

This poem’s celebration of the mind’s different ways of knowing is also a comment about how direct in-the-moment experience through the senses is attenuated and distanced by language. Yet, in the same poem, with a magician’s hand, she offers us in words a child’s pre-language experience:

I once saw a baby catching sunlight in his hands—
everywhere the child touched
he laughed at what he could not touch

until language wheeled his pram away
and he learned that silhouettes and sun
were called chair and where.

Different languages for suffering, how it is shaped and wrought by the mind and body, are explored with astute and compassionate insight in Michelangelo’s Prisoners. We see in ‘Hysterical Blindness’ a code for surviving trauma where:

Her eyes punch back memory
as though what has happened

happens only if you look.

This is contrasted on the next page with ‘Amok-runner’s Mother’, a monologue of a mother perplexed by the violent gaze of the media and by its images of the victim’s female relatives. She survives the distress of her son’s killing spree by making him and his victims the ceaseless subject of painful rumination while protecting herself from the full, violent separation of his loss:

…No solace
and still I call his murders—mine.
I leave sound on
for emptiness, too, is a violent companion.

In ‘Cancer Poem’, language’s multiplicities and apparent freedom offer solace from the painful bondage to a body scarred by breast cancer:

Need no one. Need words that are
shuffled for comfort, meanings that multiply
defying the rudderless air.

A refusal to be pinned by male aesthetic portrayals of women, and investing in the creative process and its constant movement seem means of resilience in ‘Michelangelo’s Prisoners’:

She will look her father in the eye
a clear gaze which travels into his
so that he remembers Florence
where Michelangelo
left his prisoners unfinished
to state with impossible perfection\
that it is not the anguish of the chiselled stone
which matters.
It is the standing-still which kills.

Poems selected from Cabramatta/Cudmirrah take the reader on a road journey where Harrison is uneasily distant from, and somewhat repelled by a return to her childhood suburb of Cabramatta where ‘furry dice swing’, ‘my grandmother serves tea on a plastic cloth’, and ‘ceramic ducks fly by trifecta on the wall/ the plastic roses smell of tripe’.

The road shapes this sequence; we are moved through the rub of the real as Harrison revisits the suburb where as a teenager she breathed roadie culture. Memory fragments of men and adolescent boys are charged with danger and animal physicality: ‘I saw a man decapitated by the guard-rail and from the corner of my eye I watched/ a bikie gang called the rats, each a silver-studded/dirty-jeaned, black booted grizzly/ gulping beer as they lounged over petrol tanks/like they were shiny young bulls’.

The road also conveys the flattening predictability of suburbs where ‘your car’s a burrow’ and where ‘this road flattens/sterilizes everything—an efficient /movement of cartilage, stretch of vocal cord/even the wind can’t alter the pitch of its voice’. The road as metaphor allows the poet’s engine–mind to become the subject of its own travel:

travelling now for years
without arriving at the place you left
you can’t arrive because it’s gone
and possibly did not exist…

Towards the end of the poem, the poet finds an uneasy identification with the ignition of the engine, the attention-seeking car and the rhythm of the ride. All seem akin to the journey of making a poem. The final repetition of the jingle underlines her control as driver–poet as she evokes, yet drives away from, a world where little has changed:

the minute you put a key
in the ignition
a word on a page
you feel the engine strip down…

…

and the rhythm of your words
finds you pronouncing what you know:
it’s King John here calling for a copy
you flick I’ll switch
go down Brother Butch
go down Brother Butch
go sweet

Harrison is literally closer to her childhood in the selection from Cudmirrah: up close and intimate, as opposed to distant and travelling through. She stays to investigate the subtle detail in the micro-world of rockpools, examines sea creatures and her memories of foraging in the sea. In its formlessness and random offering of tiny treasures the sea seems a metaphor for the unconscious mind. All this is the opposite of the predictable and crass she finds in the suburbs, as is her intimate memories of childhood conversations with her grandmother, and Moss Wickham, a childhood mentor and gypsy of sorts. Her investigations often include her fascination with adult perception and memory. In ‘Rockpools Referred To and Illustrated’ she nestles in the lull of rockpools:

I lie between backshore
and foreshore (as though between
the pages of a scarcely remembered
oceanography book)

The shells of her childhood are recalled through a culturally referenced lens that is afloat with her adult love of language such that words, like shells, become celebrated things of fascination:

And tapestry cockles
with vestments of Florence
(oceanic scribbled faces
anti waistcoats from Portugal
lips from a brothel…

Her stream of consciousness leads to the insight that the rockpools ‘are boring now’. The poem ends with the somewhat clichéd ‘It depends what you see when you look’.

An investigation into how her childhood imagination (with its story making and language play) is its own fecund journey away from, yet also representing, the primitive world of the body is found in ‘Electra’:

      …I dream
flat on my back, as an animal does, and
hundreds of kingfish swim in fertile pairs
gliding over wrecks where gold coins
dance in the fists of statues

Poems selected from Dear B, her third collection, comprise a long sequence titled ‘Boston Poems’, likely written sometime prior to the publication of her first collection. These poems are often memoir fragments, accessible and immediately affecting. For example, in ‘Diary, Boston, October 1190–June 1991’:

I ask questions
but more arrive
later when I’m at home
alone in the dark with my cells

There is also a long sequence of ‘poems as letters’ each titled ‘Dear B.’ This collection has been named by some reviewers as her weakest, yet Dear B was short listed in the poetry category for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, the ACT Book of the Year Award and The Age Book of the Year Award. The loose narrative coherence around the themes of suffering and survival, the particularity of place, and the raw pain of the cancer poems likely made it distinctive.

Sometimes poets find the perfect container to hold the content of their poem and sometimes, even more rarely, a perfect container across a whole collection is found. Folly & Grief is a dazzling example of the latter. Its blurb describes the collection as ‘beauty under pressure’, a descriptor that captures something of what good poetry is: distilled emotion and tensions held by the precision of word-music, line and form. The definition acknowledges that effort is exerted to effect this balance.

The street performer motif is perfect for Harrison in so many ways: it showcases her strengths of mental agility and capacity for acute, humane observation of other people. It is also a rich way to explore her ‘looking over her own shoulder’ self-awareness. As poet, she is observer/mirror/audience and performer. The street performer motif allows examination of language as the purveyor of human truths and its slippery, shiny, fabulous capacity for play, artifice and disguise.

This selection from Folly & Grief omits the longer, more meditative poems. We are treated to an exotic, glittering, array of lively characters and beautiful artefacts presented with precise, imagist language and occasional flashes into the surreal. The poems are in free verse and almost all of those included have the precision of a regular stanza structure. Harrison’s cultural erudition, her considerable experience as world traveller and her interest in how language’s multiplicities offer freedom, inner travel and play all come together within the street performer motif. The success of this collection lies in the way that the poems’ polish, energy and agility match that of their subjects.

‘Funambulist’, the first poem contains in microcosm many of elements of this collection. Harrison seems closely identified with this tightrope walker, whose task is not to touch for pleasure, but rather to locate the performer within a structure and design: ‘we have touched only the details of maps’. It is a place of work, and perhaps of self-prescribed healing. The funambulist carries:

a black cat, a peacock, a box of rain,
a streak of lightning,

a ladder, a pipe, a coffin, a fan,
a pumpkin, a skull, a book of law.

The list of words evokes the sensual quality of real objects, as well as their symbolic, mythic, magical properties. Harrison’s list focuses on language’s mutability; on its capacity to carry the weight of our mortality and its magical ability to transcend it. As this poem progresses its sings increasingly within each line with alliteration and assonance, taps with end rhyme, and momentum carries like a roll call into battle:

and a globe, a bag of nails, a carton of crème,
a rolypoly of doves.
I carry the city, the cleft mirror,
the faked fight of the fist on the drum.

The final, resonant ‘the faked fight of the fist on the drum’, evokes the control and tension of art’s balance between violent inner impulses and order.

In ‘Hand, Chainsaw And Head’, Harrison balances mothering her soon-bored children with her entrancement in a juggler’s ‘steady touch’ of ‘ a macabre salad’ of ‘chainsaw, a rubber hand and plastic head’. Then, like the performing artists, she too is travelling (driving her children home). She observes, with consummate skill as poet, how nature is both a quiet performer (‘A star drags the ceiling of a cloud’) and an observer: ‘Wanting to be entertained, the landscape leans in—watching’. As the juggler–driver, she is alert to how close safety is to menace as laden lorries ‘sweep past like mescaline thunder’ and inner demons may lurk inside ‘The gossip of a child asleep’. This poem’s long-lined tercets balance the quiet tensions, the three things juggled and the three main players (Unfortunately, due to editorial problems, the effect is a little marred by one stanza losing its three-line structure.)

It is no great surprise to see that Harrison’s tighter lines and regular stanza structures in Folly & Grief progress to even greater use of form in her new collection. Nor does it come as a surprise that there are two long themed sequences; they appear in her earlier collections Dear B and Cabramatta/ Cudmirrah. The second sequence, ‘Colombine’ centres on the major female character from Commedia Dell Arte. She is the wife of Pierrot and the lover of Harlequin.

Colombine’s story is structured, almost mannered, by twelve–line poems divided into three quatrains. Each poem is linked with the next; a phrase from the proceeding poem becomes the title of each successive poem. The container melds with the cultural artifice of Colombine herself and is the starting point to investigate her. How do you understand someone who is both a mask and a woman? You have to inhabit her form and contours: you have to inhabit her bones.

In the first poem, Colombine tells us ‘ I’m a body/frost-stilled to the form of twig, eyelash, grass—all is outline’. Harrison explores how it is possible to be a woman yet also be all artifice, all mask, all a purveyor of the culture she travels through, yet reflecting some the deepest desires of her audience: this is the role of the performance artist.

Colombine’s raison d’etre is disguise, artifice and vagrancy: she lives outside of any community, yet she is also defined by her roles of wife and lover. This love triangle seems represented in the three-stanza structure.

Colombine is not bound to any community or place: she is always moving through. Thus, the Colombine lens refracts via contrast something about how human identity is woven to person, place and community. It is an ambitious, complex work: at times obscure, often achingly beautiful and often moving, because Colombine is a woman; she is replete with desire. She experiences longing, and deep distressing loss as she lives some of the myths and stories from history. They are reborn in her.

Colombine’s story starts with her birth and progresses linearly through time; story fragments are lived and suffered, but over the years, just as a mask and glitter are hard, she also hardens. Colombine’s curlicue and ornate language of artifice (what else could it be?) is replete with metaphor and symbol, and often tied to historica, mythic fragments. We learn of her husband Pierrot’s aesthetic purity: ‘He sleeps immaculately in the dark, bathed in glow/like winter branches under snow’. He is ‘the shadow who wastes between the shroud and the angel’ and ‘In him, there is too much whiteness—too much absence’. She accepts his gift of a Chinese bowl: sensuous, erotically charged, elegant, fragile: cracked yet still whole:

Long-tailed birds wash their feathers against
the bowl’s celadon hip. It has washed against me
like a cuttlefish; like the precious amethyst of a bishop’s ring.
It’s cut my heart with its shimmer, its flaws of skin—

…

I am sunk into the drowned flower of its sex,
hurt by the crack, licked by the lip; the rim copper bound.

The apparent cost of drinking from it, is to suckle and then lose her infant daughter to the plague. Named ‘Genevieve, /‘white wave’’, she becomes, like the child’s father, out of the reach of Colombine’s desire. With a shocking, self-empowering action she severs her breast ‘the sense I loved best: its tickle/ beneath Pierrot’s thumb—its milky amaranth’. This action and its consequences evoke the self-blinding of Oedipus, and the singing of Orpheus. She ‘fashions a new breast from wool’ and embroiders it with scenes from her porcelain bowl. Unlike freer Orphic singing, her destiny is to harden progressively: ‘she is gravel collected’.

Colombine remains elusive, but as a performer of stories she carries the possibilities for her rebirth and survival. As Colombine exits, Harrison as story teller returns something of the private woman behind the mask:

…She tells a story already told.
Elsewhere she might be whole. In her story. Not here.

Poems encountered in any new and selected invite a measuring of each against the others: some as stand-alone are obscure and lean towards prose. Yet, ‘Colombine’ as a sequence is a remarkable, original achievement and is worthy of being extended and published as a single volume. When ‘Colombine’ stands alone her resistance to easy meanings can be better understood on her own terms.

Harrison’s poetic concerns are somewhat encapsulated in ‘Fugue’ a sequence of seven pantoums (within the larger section titled ‘Fugue’). The form of the pantoum seems organic yet integrates an ancient cultural heritage. It provides a kind of endless recurrence, waves that both bring in and take out, and so the form is ideally suited to elegy and memory. The repeated lines bring greater musicality. The greater constraint, and perhaps the organic form of the pantoum, give rise here to simpler language which is at times unusually outspoken. Comment about asylum seekers, and sexual relationships among some male prisoners in Changi are found here. There are also pantoums in which colour and symbol drift memories of emotionally complex nuance from her childhood.

Her recurring interest in place is found in the ‘Fugue’ section. Harrison is located within her family while journeying locally and abroad. These poems seem confident, at ease, closely observed, playful, at times even humorous. The rubber hand juggled in Folly & Grief and perhaps a mannered Colombine are re-found with softer edges in ‘Busker And Chihuahua, Chapel Street’:

and his white Chihuahua elegantly avoiding all eyes—
disdainful as a mannequin to out-mannequin God.

The poem ends on the image of the busker’s glove ‘tossed on a pale blue blanket/like a hand begging all alone on the sea’.

In Colombine, New & Selected Poems, themes and characters recur and within some new poems, lines repeat as part of the form. In its entirety, this volume is somewhat like the sea itself. Where will Harrison travel next? Perhaps her process will be like that of the roadside potter, ‘pushing each cup to the point of destruction’—with all the grit and glitter of Colombine herself.

 

SUSAN FEALY is a writer and clinical psychologist who lives in Melbourne. She is the winner of the 2010 Henry Kendall Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared  The Best Australian Poems 2009 and The Best Australian Poems 2010.

 

Phillip Ellis reviews “Swallow” by Claire Potter

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Click Here to Buy - Swallow

Swallow

by Claire Potter

5 Islands Press

ISBN 978-0-7340-4159-3

Reviewed by PHILLIP ELLIS

 

 

There is a thing called midnight, within which we may awaken and listen to the sounds of the night that are heightened by the darkness. And we may remember that one of the functions of poetry is to heighten, not so much the sounds but other aspects of our lives and world through sound, to the point that they seem not only unfamiliar but new. This is the sort of effect that Claire Potter’s Swallow has for me, as it develops itself from the opening piece, “La Haine des Fleurs” to its last, “A While”. And this is an effect that is, for me at least, welcome and worth understanding further. So that the awakening to the world which happens, as a result, and when it happens, is understood and prepared for. And the whole is an orchestrated awakening of our insight into the world, through a set of images that appear, disappear, and reappear through the poem: swallows, bees, and so forth. I say poem, rather than poems, because Swallow is a livre composé, the book of poems whose whole comprises a single poem, that formed created by the Symbolists and introduced into Australian poetry with Christopher Brennan’s Poems. So it helps to dip into Swallow, keeping that point in our awareness, and to understand something of its pleasures, and its need for a wider audience.

H. P. Lovecraft defined art as an “elegant amusement.” By this he meant the role that pleasure plays in the effects of a piece of art or poetry. Swallow, like all great poetry, delivers much. The following lines, from the second section of “La Haine des Fleurs”, are immensely pleasurable

and stars
and storm lightning
and a stranger who opines neither to stay nor to leave
but squat inside an acorn tree within the gravity
of a feathered cape

Likewise, the opening line of “Glass Bead Meadow”, “Into a curved field of grass,” is also immensely pleasurable; the whole of Swallow is marked by these flashes and passages where pleasure is invoked and made memorable.

Yet the rest of the poem is not measurably weaker: the whole of Swallow is of a uniform standard, with no pieces being real failures. There is no sense, as there is with Brennan’s Poems, of a piece having been written solely to find a place in some predetermined scheme. There are, that is, no poems forced into place; everything reads as if it fits naturally and easily into the whole, and the design of the whole poem diffuses to a point of almost transparency. This is testament to the skill and ability of Claire Potter, both technically, and in terms of the wider sense of the poem’s ethos and narrative lines. And the end result is a poem that is unmistakably an almost perfect poem; for example, the first strophe of “Highest Tree” reads:

she fell
from the sable carton box
into which she had been
wrapped

The weakest line of this strophe, and of this piece, is that fourth line — “wrapped” — which remains a strong line despite that. The weak ending of the previous line, with the almost sour note with the break between the auxiliary verbs, and the adjective on the following line, is actually strengthened through the firm sounds of the consonants in “wrapped” in a word that essentially puns on “rapt” as well, widening the effect of the lines. The result, that is, is no bum note. The effects of lines and passages like these, as a result, involve risk, risk in language and risk in technique. Claire Potter takes those risks, and, as a result of her strong editorial work on the poems, she succeeds.

Yet I wrote that Swallow was an “almost perfect poem:” there is no real chiaroscuro among the poems. The register of “A While”, the last piece of the poem, is essentially identical to “La Haine des Fleurs”, and all of the other poems between. And it is this lack of contrasts in the tone of Swallow that effectively prevents it from being perfect: in this aspect, the fact that this is Claire Potter’s first full-length collection becomes apparent, so that, while there is much to commend the poem for, there is still an area where work needs to be done, and where improvement can be made. While it may be said that the uniformity of tone does strengthen the poem, helping to lend to it a strong sense of unity, it does, rather, lend a uniformity that effectively prevents Swallow from exploring more than a narrow register of emotions.

That said, having read Swallow no less than five times, and having dipped into individual pieces, I can say with certainty that it rewards rereading. The poem, like all great texts, is capable of being found to be richer each time we return to it, and this is a clear mark that this is great poetry. Each time I have read it, I have found my understanding of the poem’s meanings and structure becoming fuller, so that what I experience each time is a poem that means more to me, and that means more through me as well. I cannot read the opening lines of “Ladies of the Canon” —

Far from where antique cycads sleep
I wonder about nests in a circular park
wonder how the downy baskets creep
through vines and weedy bulrushes
wonder how a nest might float
carrying five speckled pledges under midnight’s coat
 wonder how a bird might cheat
and drink its music from the canon

— without experiencing the same sort of frisson that I receive from great music. The effects of the rhymes and the departures from them, at the start of this poem, is part of that, and it magnifies the pleasure to be found in these lines and in the piece as a whole.

While my emphasis, here, has been on pleasure, there is more than just this aspect to Claire Potter’s poem. Swallow is pleasurable, yes — we can see it in such lines and passages as “fire-flies and other insects webb-wagged from the air” (from “As Regarding Rhythm”) or “a pear takes shape” from “Promethean Fruit”, or the following passage from “A Truth in Lilies”

              We mark our descent
from the secretly divine to the scarcely arrived
              with lashings of pollen

But there is more than just pleasure to this poem. There is a very strong, and very real, engagement with the outer world, whether it be the world of cycads and parks, as cycads and parks, that we find in “Ladies of the Canon”, or the world of language, as in the poems of Judith Wright that also underlie this same piece. When we are aware of the allusions, whether they be covert or overt (for example, in the “drunken boats” of “An Asra Bird”, or the Asra bird of the piece’s title, for example), we can read the poem’s relations to other texts. And in this way it is no different from other poems. The whole, in a sense, alludes to the wider worlds around it, in such a way that, once read, a change has been effected, and we look at the world and ourselves in new ways. It is not that the wider world has been changed, but our perception of it has, and this is one of the major functions of great art.

There are many things which should give us pleasure: poetry is one of them. And the poetry of Claire Potter, in Swallow gives quite a large degree of pleasure. This is in large part due to the uniformity of excellence among the pieces. As stated, there are no real failures among the pieces, and the end result of this is a poem that does not fail as a result, or which is less of a qualified success than other, similar poems. Yet there is no real sense of breadth of tone among the pieces; this is, accordingly, the only major weakness of the poem as a whole, and I hope that it will be remedied as Ms Potter progresses as a poet. In addition, the fact that Swallow rewards repeated readings, and that it also changes our perceptions of the worlds that it engages with, enables us to argue that Swallow is not only a strongly pleasurable poem, but that it deserves a wide circle of readers, because its insights and pleasures are both strong and lasting. My poetic world, as a result, has become wider and richer, and I hope that Ms Potter will develop into a strong and important part of the Australian poetry scene, even if I judge solely from several readings of Swallow alone. There is much to commend here, and there is much that is worthy of both praise and our time. Let us then remember Swallow, and allow it to remain a strong and essential part of our poetry reading, lest we become impoverished as a result of neglecting its clear and present pleasures.

 

Rae Dee Jones reviews “The Circus” by Ken Bolton

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The Circus

by Ken Bolton

Wakefield Press

2010

ISBN: 9781862546899

REVIEWED BY RAE DEE JONES

 

For thirty years Ken Bolton has shown tenacious dedication to his chosen art. Apart from producing a series of volumes of poetry of unusual consistency, he also edited the magazine Magic Sam. When I read this recent volume after browsing through some of his earlier poetry I was struck by the remarkable invisible evolution in tone and content.

Take the typical first poem from his first volume, Blonde & French (Island Press, 1978):

Living brilliantly: outside –
the green/   so blue, & the green
is so bright  & the wall it is clinging to
is totally in shadow   but only just
because the 3 small horizontal lines   /of
louvres/ have caught the midday sun,
though they jut out only a little, & shine
a brilliant white   a painterly tour de force like
3 single white strokes of a loaded brush ….

Already there is the precision and ‘objectivity’ of language, while the verse is permeated with flat, po-faced irony. The poem hints at humour, but is too severe to allow it through. The images are light and deft while the tone advises the reader that there is much to be taken seriously. Even when describing desire:

I want an insanity
to enclose me   :a quote/ from Robbe-Grillet’s
The House of Assignation: Lady Eva  “he will
be driven mad   if she continues to give in
to his phantasies”   I want that – that particular
arse    slowly

 

The quote from Robbe –Grillet effectively distances the reader, and perhaps the author, from comic (or romantic, or lustful) intensity.

Now read forward thirty two years to Circus, where we find a single long poem constructed seamlessly as a novel, with themes and characters acting independently of the person (but not the manner) of the author. While the blurb acknowledges his debt to Robbe-Grillet, the imagery is much less detached. A major link throughout the poem is the search by the Assistant Foreman of a small and rather seedy travelling circus for the forever missing last tent peg. There is always this missing peg! In the last verse, he succeeds. While the search goes on, there is a lot of character development and action, much of it hilarious. My favourite character is the thoughtful elephant, who is introduced while searching for a hypodermic in his body while contemplating the possibility of having AIDS:

He hums the great Dion di Mucci tune.
The Wanderer,
Thinks of Christopher Brennan, a man killed by a tram on his way home.
Rummages in his straw.

He raises his foot,
Looks for the syringe,
But cannot find it.
Good.

The singing elephant is a wonderful comic creation who ambles about, glumly addressing the big questions of …:

When I read that doggone letter, I
Sat right down and cried: She said now daddy I hate to leave you
But I’m in love with another guy –
Da-doot-doot doot,da doot-doot doot!

The elephant is a wonderful comic creation, who reminds me more of the cockroach Archie in the Don Marquis classic Archie and Mehitabel than Robbe-Grillet. Sexual activity is presented differently:

In the dancer’s caravan Regina Xo is naked astride a man. It is Giorgio Verzotti,
Olivia’s fiancé
Should this be happening?! Moments later Olivia comes in.
Giorgio! She is glad to see him and soon is in the same position. See, she laughs,
Mine are much bigger than Regina’s. Regina smiles – she is making a pot of tea.

The humour is robust throughout, especially in the scenes where the strong man, Ulysse, dives into a water tank from great height:

He lived for danger, Andrea told Gina and Tomaz.
That modified tank, … Giorgio began. His dream
Was to dive in and disappear. It needed an awful lot of plumbing.
–         Secret passages, side tanks …

Once he dived and much of the water had leaked away,
It took a long time to come out.
We thought the trick had worked
And he would ride up on his motorbike, smiling.

He was concussed. Julie Lautone looked in
And he was floating about on top.
Children were impressed.
Man of strength- Man of wonder.

Two characters are watching daytime television (which the elephant is also observing through a window, between their heads), a movie which could afford a wonderful opportunity for serious and slightly portentious observation. An old movie, featuring Gilbert Roland, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, about a circus. The conversation is as follows:

“One of Beckett’s favourite actors,” Attila remarks.
“Brecht, I think,” says Tomaz.
It is too stupid and they turn it off. Gina reads the men their star signs.

The elephant looks at a mouse near the caravan’s tyre.
But he does not really see it. He is thinking about Peter Lorre’s lines in   Casablanca–
“Rick, Rick, you’ve got to save me!”
Then he laughs …

Ken Bolton’s poetry has evolved to the point where he has written a fine verse novel with strong absurdist elements and tight control over character, dialogue and timing. There are not many books of poetry that I could imagine being turned into a film. This is one. And it is definitely poetry.