Porch Music

by Cameron Lowe

Whitmore Press

December 2010

ISBN 978 0 9757762 7 8

REVIEWED BY ANNA RYAN-PUNCH

Cameron Lowe’s first book of poetry, Porch Music, showcases his ability to deftly navigate both the natural and the surreal in this striking collection.

The book is divided into two sections. The first, Balloon Days, is a series of sometimes intensely personal poems, and highlights Lowe’s admirable talent for elevating the domestic to the unheimlich. These pared-back pieces are deceptively accessible, but can alter our gaze with a single word; push our perspective from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Easy is perhaps the most minimalist example of this. The poem opens with a very simple image, depicted monosyllabically: ‘You wake with her hand/on your back’. The following two couplets continue in this vein, but the final three lines transform this pure image: ‘her hand is a thing known/without turning,/a thing, a small easy thing.’ Great import is brought to a small moment, without the need to add further images.

Sardines takes disparate images and weaves them together in a unexpected and complementary fashion. It throws us from the abstract notion of an economics of emotion to the oddly olfactory image of sardines, and back again:

and let’s call that love
following a free market model

in which emotions float deregulated
like a tin of sardines in brine,

always ready on the counter
for a quick and easy sale, or

a sudden move in interest rates
that leaves us hopeless in denial.

The poem forms a neat, hard whole, juxtaposing ordinary images to create profound strangeness.

Counting is a more narrative poem than many in the collection. The initial taciturnity of the poem’s subject will be familiar to anyone with a reticent father or grandfather:

There were things learnt and taught of course,
outside things; to turn a sheep for crutching
and an ease with dogs, an understanding
that much in life is better left unsaid.

But the final stanza moves the poem into another realm:

…speaking of things left unspoken,
the shrill screaming of shells
in the jungle and the warm
welling blood, or our need,
deep in the night, to love.

There is admirable delicacy in this exploration of what lies behind stoicism; moving us as readers from comprehension to true understanding.

While Lowe’s skills in traversing the romantic and beautiful are a highlight, there is also a sly humour and practicality that curls through these poems. Lowe’s level-headed attitude locks onto the absurdity of the ordinary, and plaits humour and romance into something that is often as moving as it is funny.

Summer is perhaps my favourite example of this. It is essentially a love poem to summer channelled through that humble Australian symbol of the season – the barbequed snag: ‘The smell of sausage on the wind/from a distant backyard brings you erect’. We are displaced as readers by the evocative commercial images:

…wetsuits slide like quicksilvers
towards the waiting water, which viewed
through a screen is as beautiful as a bottle
of Coke and just as sweet.

The successful marriage of absurdity and truth in the final lines gives “Summer” a lovely tension between humour and beauty:

…As the day’s
heat softens into an evening there’s that
sausage again, adrift on the hot breeze,
whispering: it’s summer, it’s summer.

“Self-portrait” also displays Lowe’s trademark dry humour. But in this poem, it is less explicit; captured in surrealism (one of several poems that nicely anticipates the pieces in the second part of the book):

Note how my hairstyle resembles the 3rd Apostle
at Port Campbell – see
through heavy fog –
and how the moth circling the lamp becomes a dog
chewing an old bone then the telephone rings:
it’s you
and I turn into a postcard,
my mouth shaped like a tourist’s smile
a sort of distant, disremembered quote.

The notions of appearance and façade in this poem are intriguingly rendered – a hairstyle appears as a rock formation; a spinning moth throws up an image of teeth gnawing; a fake grin becomes cardboard. The ordinary is once again extrapolated into the strange and new.

Like the title of the first section of the book, Lowe’s poems often rise like balloons. His brief pieces are imagistic in nature, filled with the ‘clear edges’ that Pound advocated. But Lowe’s touch is with the soft, rather than ‘hard light’ of imagism. The nature of light itself threads throughout the poems, as do images/landscapes associated with it: sea, summer, mirrors. While this lightness of touch accentuates the quiet power of the more successful pieces, it leaves others (eg. A Sunday, Another Sunday, Paling Fence) feeling a little slight. They remain as ‘images presented’: evocative, but stopping short of the full transformative exploration that characterises the better poems.

The first half of Porch Music is, admittedly, the ‘easier’ half. The second section, The Corrosive Littoral, is a series of poems based on paintings by Australian surrealist James Gleeson. While they stand alone as poems in their own right, I found it more revealing to look up each painting, and read the painting and poem in tandem, with the book held next to the screen. To flick our gaze back and forth creates a dialogue between painting and poem, a language which locates each within the other. The Corrosive Littoral poems are mostly prose poems; dense, highly imagistic and often playful. On occasion they read too much as a pure descriptive of the painting (eg. Spain); they can feel like a walk around the story of the canvas without elevating response into interpretation:

…And you, her lover
stood above her as she lay there, stood and walked and
passed her by. And leading you on, to distant
mountains shaped like a sleeping man, were the hooded
ones…

But the more successful poems in the Corrosive Littoral section are among the most striking in Porch Music. We inhabit the corrosive littoral throws up images reminiscent of From Here To Eternity:

Practice love on this beach in the old-fashioned way:
they’ll make a movie if the price is just right…

The painting is thus made familiar to us, and then Lowe makes it natural:

Under extremes, he
explains with clouds in his brain, the algebraic sum of
all things: in a cyclical process the answer returned is
always something or none. Even so, she whispers, we’re
falling apart.

Making the surreal into something personal is the achievement of this part of the book, and one that Lowe’s down-to-earth style is made for. In a way, The Corrosive Littoral is the reverse of the Balloon Days section of the book – the second half takes the unheimlich and makes it heimlich.

A standout poem in the second section is “Congratulations on the maintenance of an identity” (a play on Gleeson’s painting titled “Coagulations on the maintenance of an identity”). Notions of father, son, woman and child interplay throughout the poem to create an effect that not only leads us through the painting, but lifts it into something that raises goosebumps:

…For the
man there is a dream of blue sand and even though
long dead there the child still stands, holding a string to
the deep-diving moon that does not stop. Don’t cry Dad,
I said, seeing in his face my face and feeling the shame
of a father’s tears and the shame of having cause those
tears. Dad the moon doesn’t stop…

The notions of confusion between child and adult, woman and man, the ‘maintenance of identity’ in both are delicately layered in this poem.

Porch Music is a quietly complex collection – a book that understands the humorous divide between city and country, the oddity of domestic turning to exotic, and the easy slide from the organic to the strange. It is a book that is by turns accessible and difficult – a collection of consistency and contradiction.

ANNA RYAN-PUNCH is a Melbourne poet and reviewer. Her previous publications include poetry in Overland, Westerly, Island, The Age, Quadrant and Wet Ink.

Cow

by Susan Hawthorne

Spinifex Press

ISBN: 9781876756888

Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON

Let us begin with the cover: Cow could be framed and hung on a wall. It’s intricate and delicate depictions of cows set amid tapestries of bright and pale pinks, purples and blues attempt to prepare us for what’s inside – namely beautiful and intricate weavings of bovine tales – but one can never be prepared for something so encompassing, so bold and sensuous as this.

With ancient Greek and Sanskrit traditions as inspiration, Susan Hawthorne indulges in the cow. The cow is at once mother of the calf and mother of the Milky Way. This gives Hawthorne a lot to work with and, owing to an obvious large amount of research and an apparent immersion into the cultures’ spirituality, she delivers a most comprehensive and emotive ode to the gentle and stoic beast we, in the Western world, too often think of as commodities.

 There are four ‘strings’ (or sections) to the book: ‘the philosophy cow’, ‘what the philosophers say’, ‘what the lovers say’ and ‘what Queenie says about the philosophy cow’. Some of the strings are further subdivided into the likes of ‘Queenie’s dilly bag’, ‘Queenie’s tongue’ and ‘Queenie’s loves’. Each segment balances out the last so succinctly and sets us up for the next so unassumingly that, as a whole, the structure is continual; it tells a story. Stirred by the Tamil Sangam tradition of akam, we are ultimately faced with a series of poetic monologues with titles like ‘what cows and calves say’, ‘what Sita says’, ‘what Io says,’ ‘what she says about tongues’, ‘what the linguist says’ , and so on. By circumnavigating the world and fusing the many names and places, and their stories, into one cow-philosophy, Hawthorne gives us an amalgamated mythology, and it comes off so clearly. There is love and there is language. There is longing and sensation. There is domesticity, history, land, and body. Each of these certainties flow beautifully not from one to the other, but from one into the other. One should not attempt this collection over a long period of random readings, as can be done with most books of poetry, but rather as one would attempt a novel: continuously.

In presenting her readers with a highly logical structure to an extremely wide-ranging collection of the history of the cow, Hawthorn thus gives us a history of the world:

I’m grazing near a human encampment
time has rolled in
on a day the length of all time
I give birth to the folding universe
my milk flows away through the night sky
galaxies spin and twirl form and unform
as the dance of creation and decreation proceeds

small creatures have come to look at me
they watch the white liquid spill on the ground
it flows like a river forming stars
my calf the size of the earth drinks and grows
stumps and stumbles testing new-found legs
kicks and kicks and the earth wobbles
in that kick she has found power.

The above is taken from the poem ‘what Queenie says’ and it not only exemplifies the importance of creation stories to Hawthorne’s work, but it also sets us up for a feminist perspective (‘in that kick she has found power’). I can’t imagine reading Hawthorne from anything other than a feminist perspective after my introduction to her in 2005 with The Butterfly Effect. That collection opened my eyes to academia in poetry, as Hawthorne successfully made excessive use of footnotes so that her research would not be swept away in a cursory reading. I still count the book among my favourites but Cow has mastered something that Butterfly could not. In Cow Hawthorne has taken the academic feminist out of the spotlight and put her in a less focused glow. In doing so I feel the academic feminist is now much stronger in the work because she can be found in the roots of the poetry, in the unseen foundations of the verse.

In ‘what Queenie says about the Catalogue of Cows’, for instance, one feels the intensity of sister-power:

this is how it begins
the poet says we roamed arcadia
spread out over the hills
and across the plains
wherever feed was plentiful
we travelled with our daughters
close by our side
the bullocks we sent off after a time
their existence more solitary

…

we were oracles
our pronouncements not to be messed with
our names were listed
Nicothoe Aellopus Ocypete
Harpys and Ocypus
Propontis Echinades Storphades
we were the turning ones
you can see it in our tracks across the land

Unlike in Butterfly, any notes on references to names, places and stories are found in the back of the book, rather than in footnotes at the bottom of each page. This takes away any urge to interrupt the reading of a poem to make full sense of the poem. For the above, the

notes section points out that ‘these names are listed in Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women’. So we’re learning something here about feminist folklore (the academic shines through) but what makes this poetry feel less forced as both academic and feminist is that the significant women of antiquity are not human; they are cows. In this Hawthorne has traversed the realm of the cerebral and captured something much more fleshy, albeit magical. The mother-cow as mother-earth as every-fabled-female-deity gives this spiritual journey complete grounding. If I am confused at any given point I think cow and female and I am back on track, because in this colourful world Susan Hawthorne has created, cow and female are everything.

Not only does she draw from Sanskrit and Greek mythology, but there are references to Australia, America, Spain and Lithuania, to name but a few. All traditions fit surprisingly organically into the totality of the story of the cow; however the abruptness of the sound of the German language caught me off guard in every use. Fortunately I don’t doubt Hawthorne’s need to include anything German (I wondered if she, herself, was German). It did, after all, give her a chance to address the Holocaust in the ‘history of the cow / history of the universe’ context, and even that connection is unsoiled: think genocide, think beef. My point is that Hawthorne shows no fear in her spiritual depiction of the cow as universal and essential. Yes, they are in Germany as well as in India as well as in Greece. They are on land as well as in water (Australia’s own dugong) as well as in the heavens. And, through her use of personification, they are us. I for one will never look at a cow the same (what more could the poet ask for?) Cow is so monumental in so many ways I’d be shocked if it doesn’t win at least one major poetry award for 2011.

The Domestic Sublime

by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

River Road Press

Audio CD Nov 2009

Reviewed by ANDREW CARRUTHERS

George Orwell’s defense of broadcasted poetry in his essay “Poetry and the Microphone” (1945) was, amongst the efforts of Marinetti and Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh (founders of Zaum), one of the more impassioned cases for shifting the balance from printed to oral forms in poetry in the first half of the Twentieth Century. In this convincing essay, Orwell was not claiming that the movement from literacy to orality was a backwards movement — some kind of necessary step back into a primitive world before literacy in order to solve its problems — but simply that the advantages of broadcast at that moment were too alluring to be dismissed. For Orwell: “By being set down at a microphone, especially if this happens at all regularly, the poet is brought into a new relationship with his work, not otherwise attainable in our time and country.” Given the circumstances (particularly the trials and fortunes of his BBC program Voice) Orwell’s radical argument in favour of spoken word poetry was not to view print as doomed or inferior, nor did he want to risk again mounting the “phonotext” (to use Garrett Stewart’s terminology) on the tyrant’s pedestal (he cites Doctor Goebbels as one lasting impediment to public approval of broadcasted poetry). Rather, sounded poetry sets up a paradox concerning the listener and broadcaster: “In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of ONE. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually.” On the paradoxical nature of the one and the many in broadcasting Orwell could not have been more percipient: spoken-word poetry brings to the relationship between the listener and the word a certain intimacy, an intimacy perhaps unmatched by print.

The River Road Press, started up by Carol Jenkins in 2007, is responsible for a series of releases of contemporary Australian recorded poetry, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s CD of recorded works The Domestic Sublime (River Road Press, 2009) is another in the series. Wallace-Crabbe has recorded his poetry before, and collaborated with composer Damien Ricketson (A Line Has Two, 2004). In The Domestic Sublime, the cadences of his voice move with measured rhythms and a becalming timbre, revealing a new intimacy to known words. Though we are not strictly in the domain of broadcasting here, the nature of the Compact Disc format is no different to other recorded/microphonic artefacts in that the conjectural audience is an audience of both many and one, and in this sense both a “domestic” and a “sublime” audience.

The disc’s title poem “The Domestic Sublime” (a suite of five poems) is in a way a coating as much as centrepiece. Neither at the extremes of psychopathology nor critique, the form everyday objects take here seem closest to that which the last line of Philip Larkin’s poem “Home Is So Sad” exhibits with regard to the poet’s deictic placement: “The music in the piano stool. That vase.” (Collected Poems, Faber, 2003). In Larkin’s line, the object speaks for the word, or like an object, the word stays still while the poet’s eye/ear is cast from object to object: the said deixis of the that. Similarly, in the suite “The Domestic Sublime,” the sound poem “Saucer” (and you will recognise it as a generic “sound poem” once you hear it) is littered with like-objects, whose chordal arrangement of “cup”/“mug,” and “plate”/”saucer” (spliced with “slip,” “splash,” “drip,” “slop” “tip” and other deictic/domestic indices) resembles a Wittgensteinian language-game. “Sad without a cup,” as the last line sounds, leaves the word trailing behind its object, the saucer without its cup, reading-out the meaning from the language that holds and contains it, turning the word from its object. If the cup and saucer can be transposed to the binary of word and sound, what we witness here is a turning and tuning of the word and its domestic object-associations to its pure, “sublime” sound. “Who first spotted the lack,” the slip between cup and lip, a slippage of meaning (or the lack in signification itself) is the kind of first line that almost has to be heard to be understood.

What of the reading itself? To varying degrees the text remains a base for interpretation, a score to be read. A recording by a poet is still an interpretation of the text. In “Wanting to be a Sculptor”, the last line is modified (or de-gentrified) from “that would be the shot” (as it appeared in Whirling [1998]), to “that’d be the shot”, and the effect is that the shift to the colloquial recasts the lines retroactively set before it. Before, there was the call:

to invent a ceramic language
to encourage silver and brass to dance
articulating air

As a kind of material/iconic optics of desire, these lines are recast in the sense that the possibility of (mis)hearing the emphasis as “that would be the shot,” is eliminated, rendering the idiom more consciously vernacular than privately desirous of a material, ceramic language. Is such distanciation any surprise when one is being scrupulously listened to? Or is this a curiosity peculiar to subjectivity itself? Similarly, the last line of “The Bush” (originally in For Crying Out Loud [1990] “fluted with scalloping surf/and every step a joke.”) finds its variant where “joke” is replaced by “quip”, again foregrounding the vernacular, the spoken, and in particular retaining the plosive consonance of step/quip. Modifying last lines is not sacrosanct in Wallace-Crabbe’s book.    My personal favourite is Wallace-Crabbe’s reading of “An Die Musik”. The rhotic trill of “vib[r]ating” brings to the word a sonic immediacy. A sonic immediacy especially given that the word’s referential circuit onomatopoeically draws the listener into the world of the “phonotext” as if it were something not reducible to inscription (or that, if it was, the immediacy as such of the performed word outdid its predecessor in the stakes of performance). With the line “There’s always pathos to our comedy” Wallace-Crabbe voices an audible, knowing smile. It is worth reprinting the last stanza:

Listen. A texture delicate as lace
Repeats the long-gone master’s melody.
These ringing notes are all we know of grace
But repetition has its lovely place.

Tact, texture, text. Texture, here, is afflated, exhaled, delivered in refrain. An echo of death is audible too, recalling the line that read “riding the breath of death” from “The Speech of Birds” fifteen tracks earlier. Qualified earlier by the line “You can’t get back to the lawns of infancy”, repeating the wise advice of psychotheoretical systems, Wallace-Crabbe delivers tact by reassuring us in the refrain that to resist going “back to the lawns of infancy” ought not stricto sensu cancel out the place of repetition in poetry. For poetry’s relation to repetition — and in particular the psychoanalytic resonances of that relation — reflexively enter Crabbe’s poetic  thinking. Thinking in the purest sense, for in a curious reversal of ekphrastic trajectory, what “one is often tempted to say” (from “Mozart On The Road”) enters the frame of its own saying. “Travel narrows the mind, one is often tempted to say,” as the phrase goes, thinks its phraseology. Or, the problem of the self, of subjectivity — surely familiar and yet always foreign territory to Wallace-Crabbe — are here conjured up as poetic sound-bites that put thinking and saying/poeticity together, while simultaneously drawing them apart. Indeed the issue of subjectivity, as Wallace-Crabbe puts it in his book Falling into Language (1990), involves an estrangement from self, an attempt to get outside the self to look at it:

One rides within oneself. Sometimes, too, one stands outside for a while, leans aside or flies aloft, trying to get a look at that self (112).

Intimacy for Wallace-Crabbe, then, is double-sided. To be “oneself” is to look at that self from outside, from the standpoint of the other, as in a mirror, to be at once inside and outside. Meaning, rather than being something that one finds ‘within oneself’ is, in the poem “We Being Ghosts Cannot Catch Hold Of Things”, personified as a “blind god/who limps through the actual world/seeking any attachment,/looking for good company.” Meaning resembles an outsider seeking contact, contract, company. And in “Stardust”:

Meaning is only a bundle of signs
That parallel and light the real,
But would they then be in the real?

                            […]

Then signs are double wise at once,
Being inside and outside what they picture

If one follows the line that the real is that which cannot be symbolized, signified, assigned meaning, then the relation between meaning and the real is one of both insolubility and dependability. Reduced to a bundle of signs, meaning is both external and internal, of the real and external to the real. Considering the audition of words, meaning is both external and internal to the sounds words make. Transliteration would be the word. Elsewhere there is the sense that landscape, what lies outside the domestic, is something of an echo of the transliteration occurring between speech-act and sign, sound and sense. Such echoes can be heard in “Grasses,” where the Whitmanian trope of leaves (or Shelleyan apropos of “Ode to the West Wind”) makes its appearance alongside the “common urban transliteration of landscape” which, read within this context of recorded voice, puts the playing of language into a broadly metonymical embodiment of landscape as the text waiting to be sounded, read out, broadcast:

Sternly avoiding the asphalt, treading on grass
I pick my pernickety way across
this common urban transliteration of landscape,
the oddly broadcast parks and median-strips,
saluting the god of grass with the rub of my feet

What Wallace-Crabbe calls the “thought-voice” in “Mozart On The Road” may be something like an “inner voice,” the voice privy to the self, but also the voice of the other, the stranger who is writing, perhaps waiting to broadcast the self. Being before a microphone, being set down, prepared, perhaps even with the lines of a text-score set out before the poet, is to speak to or towards another archive of recordings. Another archive of course in the sense that the double bind of written and spoken literature, a bind that goes way back, perhaps before the self (“Before the self fully was, there were texts” [Falling into Language]), may reveal the self’s origins in writing. As the pre-symbolic subject speaks to an imaginary audience of one, and enters the world of spoken texts via a transliteration of sorts, as the poet broadcasts the parks and median-strips of an urban sublime, the Whitmanian troping of grass touches, as it were, Wallace-Crabbe’s poetic feet.     To broadcast one’s voice out as a poet is to draw words, language, in toward a sonic immediacy, and as a consequence toward poetic intimacy. However “oddly broadcast” poetic space becomes under the jurisdiction of voice, certainly there is a case for taking up Orwell’s challenge to the poets — to open up their voices to a listening public — without inhibition. With projects like PennSound putting the sound back into poetry, the field is open for more poets to do the same. Correspondingly, the River Road Poetry Series is a copacetic venture that will give more listeners more of the voices in Australian poetry.

ANDREW CARRUTHERS is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney, his research area includes poetics, sound, rhetoric, and recording in American poetry from William Carlos Williams to David Antin.

New and Rediscovered

by Vicki Viidikas

Transit Lounge

May 2010

ISBN: 9780980571769

REVIEWED BY MARTIN EDMOND

That Incorrigible Weapon: Vicki Viidikas, New and Rediscovered

A few years ago a friend who lives in Queensland asked me if I would mind having a look around the second hand bookshops in Sydney for the only one of Vicki Viidikas’ four books he didn’t own a copy of: Knabel, her third, published by Wild & Woolley in 1978. One very hot January day I stopped in at Gould’s in King Street, Newtown and spent an irritable half hour or so looking through the poetry section for a book I felt sure was there but could not find; I remember the black dust from the street that coats all the books on the lower shelves sticking to my sweating hands like a contagion. Some weeks later, on a whim, I called in again and this time found a copy in a matter of minutes.

When I took it to the desk to pay Bob Gould, sitting up on his high seat, began to reminisce. Such a fine writer, he said. So sad. Do you know, she came in here just a few weeks before she died, to sell some books? She was getting rid of her library in stages in order to finance her drug addiction … as he spoke, incongruously, he began taking rolls of banknotes from his pockets, presumably the day’s takings, and handing them up to a young acolyte standing at his shoulder. It seemed an apt illustration of the relationship between writers, books and money.

At this point I had not read any of Viidikas’ work and didn’t really look at Knabel either; just parcelled it up and sent it off to Rockhampton. I was however aware of a flavour, indeed an aura, around her memory—several older writers I knew, my Queensland friend among them, sometimes spoke of her, always with an oddly wistful tone in their voice. It wasn’t like they were recalling a companion or lover of their youth; rather it was if something unique and irreplaceable had gone out of the world when Viidikas died, aged fifty, in 1998. Now, a dozen or so years later, we have a selection of her work edited by Barry Scott and published in a handsome edition by Transit Lounge. And so it is possible to approach the question of what kind of writer she was.

The selection is substantial and includes material from all her books as well as about twenty previously uncollected pieces. It consists of poetry and prose and is ordered roughly chronologically (some pieces are clearly out of sequence), without making any particular distinction between her two main modes of writing: that is, free form poems and prose pieces which are usually short, even compressed, and at times resemble prose poems. There are also eight colour plates of naïve drawings and excerpts from two longer works: an unpublished novel called Kali and the Dung Beetle and a sequence entitled Prisoner Poems. The selection works well and the book can be read, as I read it, straight through from start to finish as if it were a kind of autobiography.

A peculiar sort of autobiography, however. Viidikas is not primarily interested in herself as much as in things seen and done; she is neither analytical or theoretical and nor is she disposed towards the drawing of conclusions—or, god forbid, morals. She instead sends despatches from the frontiers of experience, with the emphasis always upon the nature of the experience rather than the nature of the self who experiences. That is to say, she is an instinctive writer who is driven to write down things that happened to her, or that she made happen, as they happened. Many of the short prose pieces, for instance, are really character sketches of people she has known and some among them are unforgettable: individuals you will not meet anywhere else in Australian writing though you might still come across them in the street.

The poems, which seem rather more extempore, like the prose usually bear a strong trace of their occasion and those occasions are frequently, though not always, traumatic. The focus upon experience rather than self makes of these apparently confessional pieces something more like reportage; yet it is reportage that does not deny the full participation of the self: an analogy might perhaps be found in the work of Herbert Huncke, who also put himself in the way of extreme situations and then wrote up the results. Like Huncke, Viidikas casts a cold eye on life, on death and the complications that ensue in the passage from one to the other; and if the lack of self pity, even of self regard, is both bracing and disconcerting, it has also the paradoxical effect of making us feel we know what it was like to be her without a concomitant sense of knowing what it would have been like to know her.

This entails, I think, another paradox: the self that negotiates these experiences, this brave, reckless, honest, insouciant, hyper-aware voyager, discloses herself primarily as wound or, less surely, scar. Self as wound is not the intent of the writer but a consequence of her writing; and because she is not analytical, the effect is of a vulnerability that is pure, intense and unannealed. Therefore it is not a surprise to find her, in the latter stages of the book, describing the country of addiction from the point of view of an insider, a long-term resident, and ultimately someone who will find it impossible to leave. There are many kinds of addict and many reasons why people become addicted; one, certainly, is that heroin is a great salve of mental pain.

Viidikas seems gradually have fallen silent; her last book, India Ink, came out in 1984, fourteen years before her death, and she did not publish much in magazines in those later years either. However, it would be a mistake to let that encroaching silence shadow the earlier work: she is one of those rare writers whose every utterance is worthy of attention; or, to put it another way, she did not write unless she had something to say. Her major themes—they way or ways in which men and women relate, especially sexually; the nature of religious or other kinds of rhapsodic experience; the exotic as it appears to the committed traveller—do not date and hence her dispatches from the frontiers she explored or transgressed remain vivid and contemporary.

Her longish story of an affair with a young Cretan man, for instance, told with unflinching honesty, could stand as a paradigm of all such encounters and includes, at its climax, a haunting insight into the effect the violence of men has upon the affections of women. Similarly, her hair-raising account of a night out in the environs of Bangkok, trying to buy marijuana, is a narrative which could easily have ended in a murder—her own—and thus gives insight into encounters that may not have finished so well. Her Indian experiences, which were extensive, have a dynamic that oscillates between revelation and disenchantment and I wondered if the unpublished Kali and the Dung Beetle, which must on the evidence of the extract given here shed more light on this aspect of her consciousness, will ever come out in full.

Of course certain kinds of religious experience do also bring the pilgrim to a place of silence, a nirvana that might bear some superficial resemblance to the muted trance of the addict; in both states the fealty to experience that leaves such a strong trace through Viidikas’ writing is replaced by something that may not require a witness or indeed witnessing. Even as skilled and committed writer as Viidikas might long for a cessation of the effort of composition as well as an end to the necessity of wrenching from the world material that may then be composed. The last poem in the book, Lust, written just two months before her death, is a kind of renunciation of the sexual adventuring anatomised in the rest of the book; when she writes Who will bring back the beauty / the ecstasy, the mystery / of creation? you know that she (the last spinster) no longer considers that a task she can fulfil.

I did wonder what the books were that Vicki Viidikas sold to Gould’s around the time of the composition of Lust; but, having told me the bare bones of the anecdote, the bookseller would not say any more. He took my dollars, handed them up to the young fellow at his elbow and turned his mind to other things. Kerry Leves, in the introduction to this selection, does list some favourite writers, mostly European: Akhmatova, Djuna Barnes, Baudelaire, Beckett, Cavafy, Cendrars, Éluard, Grass, Herbert, Holub, Popa, Prévert . . . but not Rilke and not Rimbaud either. Nevertheless Viidikas’ densely compacted, highly allusive, linguistically inventive prose poems do sometimes recall Illuminations; as her courage, her despair and her silence echo the doomed Rimbaldian trajectory.

Letter to an Unknown Prisoner, a late piece (1990), begins: Today was almost impossible to begin, with no sleep, all night tossing like bunkers on a great ship, far out on the Arabian Ocean . . . ; and ends: Freedom, to unlock denial; freedom, that incorrigible weapon. A weapon that she seems to have used, both in writing and in life, in every possible manner she could devise; and then with great generosity reported openly, skilfully, truthfully and beautifully upon the results.

MARTIN EDMOND is an author, poet, screenwriter and fiction editor for Mascara Literary Review. His awards include the Jessie Mackay Award and the Montana Book Award. He lives in Sydney.

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work

by Edwidge Danticat

Princeton University Press, 2010

ISBN 9780691140186

Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL

What does it mean to create dangerously and what compels the immigrant writer to abandon the reflections of a poetic or fictional imagination to risk arrest, failure, deportment, death, or at the very least being isolated and ignored by the literary mainstream? In a lecture given by Albert Camus, from which Edwidge Danticat borrows the title of her recent collection of essays, the Algerian-born writer/philosopher addresses the ethical and aesthetic considerations imposed by frontiers of all kinds, and by the “crudest implications of history.” It’s hard for us in the comfort zone of the antipodes to imagine a country of such humanitarian oppression as Haiti with its history of Spanish and French colonists, slave rebellion, US interventions and enforced dictators, its natural and biological disasters. What was once the ‘Pearl of the Antilles,’ one of the richest outposts of French colonialism bears a history of complex social, political and economic mutilations, which for decades writers and artists of differing persuasions have attempted to reframe. In this slim volume, Danticat upholds and celebrates this tradition of revolt against silence by readers and writers of littérature engagée, to quote Sartre’s term, and she does this with understated elegance moving between radical history, anthropology, memoir, philosophy, moving with subtlety between the real and the surreal.

As an immigrant writer, I’m intrigued by the concept of writing as an act of risk, playing out the impossibility of contact with its subject through the slippages between fiction and non-fiction in the fractured topography of diasporic narratives. If I came to Danticat’s book for further knowledge and for inspiration, I was captivated from the opening essay with its themes of urgency and sacrifice. A chilling account follows of the public execution of Marcel Nouma and Louis Drouin in Port au Prince on November 12, 1964. Both men were writers, political activists and members of Jeune Haiti, a group attempting to overthrow “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Rather than burdening the reader with literary reportage of the officially recorded scene, Danticat focuses her lens, filtering the perspective into the present tense. Her emphasis on simple detail creates an immediate and vulnerable portrait of the assassinated patriots:

Numa, the taller and thinner of the two, stands erect, in perfect profile, barely leaning against the square piece of wood behind him. Drouin, who wears brow-line eyeglasses, looks down into the film camera that is taping the final moments. Drouin looks as though he is fighting back tears as he stands there, strapped to the pole, slightly slanted. Drouin’s arms are shorter that Numa’s and the rope appears looser on Drouin.

(3)

A choice between exile and execution existed for these renegades, both of whom, being from middle-class Haitian families had begun comfortable and successful lives in the US. This kind of alternative between separation, silence and activism, is familiar to Danticat. She describes it aptly as one of her creation myths, a moment captured in history, which her father’s generation extolled as political martyrdom.

Such a symbolic act of defiance resonates long after the firing squad have completed their task. In the poetically titled essay, “Acheiropoietos,” we learn how an adolescent Daniel Morel witnessed the event. After walking past a photographic studio near his father’s bakery the following morning, Morel noticed enlargements of Drouin’s and Numa’s corpses. Morel, now an acclaimed photojournalist, cites the event as being the causal influence behind his work.

“I’d immediately wanted to be a photographer so that I could document Haitian history,” he’d said that day….”

(139)

Like many artist émigrés, Morel has suffered both in his homeland and abroad for making visible the subaltern face of Haiti’s dispossessed. Sensitive to this precarious balance, Danticat weaves poetry and philosophical meditations with biographical details of the photographer’s personal tragedies. She turns her lens to the artist as subject, while probing a more universal fear of how it might feel to be misread, mis-seen (missing?) or misunderstood. Danticat has been exposed to censure from family as well as from the wider Haitian communities for using the singularity of a narrator’s voice to dissect private afflictions or to make emblematic a nation’s complex cultural and political grievances. In her work she shares the almost-parasitic experience of those who leave a country-in-crisis for better prospects. While she returns to memorialise, to make sense of the past, others, like her uncle Joseph and her Tante Ilyana, stay behind, to document the atrocities, to maintain the physical legacy of their ancestral home.

A sense of torn loyalties and survivor-guilt becomes apparent in many of these essays as they sketch a family tree of deceased relatives: uncles and cousins brutally imprisoned or deported by the US Department of Homeland Security. Precise and metaphoric prose infuses with the beautiful and the courageous, the guapa of Creole and Vodou beliefs. Danticat explores the divisions that arise when one is cast lòt bò dlo, across the seas, or anba dlo, under the water, where the spirits are reborn. The skilful restraint she exercises never permits a tone of self-pity or sentimentality to enter the writing so that the impact of the book is all the more potent. A cultural memory in which killings, death, and disease are so mundane, so ignored by the outside world, transcends the conservative status of realism in Danticat’s capable hands.

The reader begins, ever so palpably, to perceive the spirit of the dead, undying, as living hope for the future of this beleaguered nation. Danticat acknowledges the cultural influence of Marxist–surrealist and Negritude writers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Camus in the underground staging of plays, and in clandestine book clubs, which formed a literature of resistance during the Duvalier regime. Yet what she describes as the pleasures and dangers of reading or writing could not be compared to the fear of being tortured, killed, or living in a time or place when that could happen.

Elements of amnesia as well as cultural anamnesis are shown to characterise the “dyaspora” experience. Forgetting can be an anaesthetic, a way of protecting a country from its past horrors, its internal corruptions, Danticat suggests in “Daughters of Memory,” but the immigrant writer, is twice removed from home and past.

It is as if we had been forced to step under the notorious forgetting trees, the sabliyes, that our slave ancestors were told would remove their past from their heads and dull their desire to return home. We know we must pass under the trees, but we hold our breath and cross our fingers and toes and hope that the forgetting will not penetrate too deeply into our brains.

(65)

For Danticat’s generation the erasures of language and enforced Francophone education had effectively suppressed Haitian literature, yet she suggests, there exists a memory of amnesia in the public and private executions of the Tontons Macoutes. Many of the essays broach deeply disturbing topics with remarkable tact, a kind of seduction by which we are convinced. In the essay which commemorates Haiti’s Bicentennial, Danticat makes seamless if necessary comparisons between overthrown president Aristide and revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, between the speeches of Negro liberty and the contradictions of Thomas Jefferson’s racist declarations, which could not “reconcile dealing with one group of Africans as leaders and another as chattel.”(98) Danticat’s prose seems informed by Sartre’s notions of there being an engagement between writing and society:

One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is threatened, the other is too. And it is not enough to defend them with the pen. A day comes when the pen is forced to stop and the writer must then take up arms. Thus however you might have come to it, whatever the opinions you might have professed, literature throws you into battle.

(What is Literature)

Resisting historical reality, Danticat writes as if for the freedom of sight, her voice unburdened by modernist agendas. The Vodou ceremony of Independence marked by machetes and pig blood, and Jefferson’s crude claim of “cannibalism,” appear as bizarre historical facts. As butter is made from water, what “we have come to know as magical realism, lives and thrives in past and present Haiti,” (103) Danticat asserts, reminding us of Alejo Carpentier’s discovery of the real maravilloso during his trip to the island. I am reminded, too, of the French poet and Antillean anthropologist, Michel Leiris, whose writing explores the function of danger in subjectivity through tauromachic tropes. For Leiris the bullfight, represents not merely personal mutilations but the agonies of the Spanish Civil War. This dance between the shadow of the bull’s horn and the shadow of recovery from its psychological wounds is akin to a transition Danticat negotiates from fiction to essay and memoir in her two most recent books, Create Dangerously and Brother I’m Dying.

Risks are taken in the poetic motifs, which segue her prose, the flow of tropes resisting a dominant discourse. Danticat speaks in near-whispers of writing against hope, as if one is summoned or driven by acheiropoietos; she cites the artist being briefly possessed by a trance as if he or she were merely a vessel for the chwal, the Vodou horseman. She evokes alternative spatial experiences but the writing remains grounded in unbiased descriptions of personal tragedies and injustice. A cultural memory is intuited to the ghost of the Brooklyn-born, Haitian-Peurto-Rican artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of an overdose. Through his story, Danticat fictionalises the seldom-voiced identity of a mixed-ancestry migrant, by re-imagining his syncretic origins, his complex threads of cultural and artistic heritage. Yet she returns to Alèrte Bélance, a victim of the 1991 terror gangs, her own tortured words. She refrains from any summary or interpretation of what the mutilated amputee speaks. I found this chapter, “I Speak Out” to be the most harrowing prose I have read in a long time.

Danticat questions her authority to speak about the Haiti earthquake. The essay, “Our Guernica” embodies her experience of returning home to engage a self that is compelled to glance, albeit briefly, beyond the grave. She writes with a humanistic responsibility to record and reframe disastrous historical realities. Her anguish, her guilt, the self-exploitation of her writing are clearly evoked for the reader. But in this chapter she describes being gripped by the sudden fear of death. Perspective shifts are finely attuned, averting any lapse into sensational or spectator reportage. In Port-au-Prince, the muse has altered. On visiting her cousin Maxo’s grave, in the rubble of a half-collapsing church she becomes aware of the hazard to herself. Panicked, she forgets her intention to leave behind a favourite book, Genet’s Les Nègres. These subjective confessions describe fragmentation and fear yet they read as unclouded. Danticat farewells her country with fragile hope, flying back to the safety of Miami but what is experienced and described is an intimate suspension between living and dying; between the fear of dying and the fear of not being able to die.

Danticat’s essays and her memoir are highly finessed and subtle. She breaches the vertiginous fault lines between the real and the surreal, between writing and archeiropoietos, between lòt bò dlo, and anba dlo. Create Dangerously celebrates love, physical beauty, painting, music and literature of a country that defies its economic oppression and invisibility, its manipulation by media stereotypes. It asks us to consider art and literature as vehicles for authenticity and self-expression, however dangerous that might be. This achievement is effortless and utterly compelling, with not one syllable or sentiment below guapa. Under the radar of humanitarian organisations the US deportations to Haiti and the death toll from cholera, with its high infant mortality, continue to rise. Danticat brings this torn world closer to our own as she questions: “How is the world reflected in a dead man’s eyes?”

WORKS CITED

Camus, Albert. Create Dangerously, a lecture delivered at the University of Uppsala, 1957, reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (New York: Vintage International, 1995)

Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, What is Literature? (New York, Philosophical Society, 1949) p 65

MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her work appears in Southerly, Jacket and Pennsylvania Literary Journal. She serves as editor for Mascara Literary Review. Vishvarūpa is her forthcoming collection of poetry.

The Mary Smokes Boys

by Patick Holland

Transit Lounge, 2010

ISBN 9780980571790

Reviewed by PETER MATHEWS

Patrick Holland’s second novel The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Lounge, 2010) has received almost unequivocal praise so far from other reviewers. While Holland does have the potential to become an important writer in the future, it must also be acknowledged that this development is still very much a work in process. One striking feature of this book, as other reviewers have pointed out, is Holland’s intimate knowledge of its geographical setting, which is reflected in his ability to write in poetic detail about the landscape of rural Queensland. This skill derives from the longstanding insight that authors write best about subjects that fall within their range of experience, and Holland, hailing from this part of the country, is able to draw dexterously from his first-hand knowledge of the places he depicts. In employing this strategy, Holland places his work in the recognizable domain of Gothic literature – the blurb on the back of the book compares this novel to Emily Brontë’s nineteenth-century classic Wuthering Heights – a genre that has found an influential new life in contemporary fiction in both American (Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy) and Australian literature, as represented by such established luminaries as Rodney Hall and Tim Winton.

Like other reviewers, I found Holland to be at his best when he is describing the beauty and rawness of the landscape. Particularly admirable are the scenes in which he attempts to convey the desolate nature of his setting, especially its utter indifference to its human occupants. In these passages there is a strange sense of sublime peace that pervades the otherwise anxious protagonist, Grey North:

Grey was alone. He swam upstream and sank into the pool beneath the cradling spotted gum root and rested his arms and let the water crash over him. He laughed to himself at this inconsequential, late-night-creek-swimming small-town life. At such times all thoughts of leaving or anything else belong to that still-distant place called the future left him alone. The world still moved slowly at Mary Smokes Creek. At the creek you took in the infinite and nameless changes in the hours, and moving at the same speed as the earth there was not that whiplash of time and the death feeling that came with hours lost unwittingly in degrees of waking sleep. At Mary Smokes Creek there was time for everything, and no desire to do anything at all. (69)

There is a pristine, existential yearning in these passages that feels both authentic and emotionally moving. Here, Grey swims upstream – symbolizing his broader struggles in life – but in his solitude he finds peace and rest. It is in these moments that the reader catches a passing glimpse of Holland’s greater potential.

Unfortunately, The Mary Smokes Boys does not fully live up to this promise, and its flaws are due, in large part, to the weakness of its characters. The novel is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman in which we see the development of its protagonist, Grey North, from a young boy who has just lost his mother to a young man trying to cope with the reality of life in a small town. It has become a staple of postmodern fiction to depict characters that are incapable of transcendence, from Bret Easton Ellis’s grotesquely irredeemable Patrick Bateman in American Psycho to the incorrigibly flawed cast of characters that appear in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. But there is a qualitative difference between these other novels, which satirize the hypocrisy behind the social rhetoric of self-improvement, and the deadly seriousness of Holland’s story, in which Grey repeatedly bemoans the misery of life in Mary Smokes without taking a single genuine step to escape or improve it. For a character imbued by the author with such emotional sensitivity, Grey’s capacity for insight and maturity is strangely limited.

While the inability of Grey to take greater hold of his destiny may be interpreted as a strategic decision on Holland’s part, a deliberate means of exploring the regressive psychology that restricts Grey’s growth into a well-balanced adult, there is no getting around the fact that one of the novel’s most glaring problems is Holland’s failure to invent characters that change and develop in the course of the story. Too often his characters strike a single, uncomplicated note that leaves no room for surprise or reversal. The major characters in the novel are painted in stark, black and white tones, especially Grey’s mother, who is portrayed as a remarkable woman, superbly talented at everything she puts her hand to:

Her father had taught her to speak Irish. She would have amazed her old aunts in that distant country she would never see. She played Bach’s fugues and sang the canticles of Hildegard von Bingen. An Ursuline nun who trained in music at the Brisbane Conservatorium had taught her. Sister Marie Hauswald said no one in Mary Smokes knew how well the girl’s voice carried the great prayers. (25)

The problem with this portrayal is not that she is a good woman, but the way in which Holland overplays these good qualities – Irene North not only learns Irish, but is fluent enough to amaze her Irish relatives were she ever to meet them; she is not only musically gifted, she is the greatest singer in Mary Smokes; her compassion, knowing no bounds, extends to caring selflessly for “Ook” Eccleston, the troubled offspring of an affair between the North’s former neighbor and an indigenous woman; she displays her unrelenting devotion to her children, which culminates in her death while giving birth to her daughter, who is also named Irene in her memory. Simply put, Grey’s mother is depicted as being so saintly that she is not believable as a real human being. This impression is reinforced by her husband, Bill North, Grey’s father, a worthless alcoholic who, in a mirror image of his wife’s fine qualities, fails to possess a single redeeming feature. The novel desperately needs a point of contrast to the predictability of its characters, and it is Grey’s failure to step into this role, even when his instincts tell him that effective action needs to be taken, that made his behavior throughout the novel seem childish and unsympathetic to me.

Such one-dimensional characters also hamstring the plot of The Mary Smokes Boys, which moves from one minor crisis to the next in an episodic manner. Because of the novel’s lack of character development, Holland has to rely primarily on external events to drive the narrative forward. Thus, the novel opens with the death of Grey’s mother while giving birth to his sister, Irene, then meanders through Grey’s wayward youth, the foolish gambling of Bill North that lands the family into trouble, and the fleecing of Grey’s nemesis August Tanner, bringing the narrative through a full circle of revenge and heartbreak. There is nothing organic about the story’s construction, and it is because of this artificiality that the reader is left with no real deep sense of tragedy, only pathos.

For all these shortcomings, there is undoubtedly a germ of potential in Holland’s writing, but for it to flower it must be tempered by an emotional restraint that mirrors the economy of his prose. While there is certainly room for a Hardy-esque reexamination of life in rural Australia in contemporary literature, the tone of disavowed sentimentality that characterizes so much of this story left me feeling cold and disconnected from the characters. What the novel sorely needed was a larger moment, if not of transcendence, then at least of genuine self-awareness on the part of its protagonist that he is trapped in a pattern of psychic regression, a note of contrast to the relentless nihilism that surrounds him on all sides. Without that moment, all the novel’s impressively lyrical passages about the universe’s sublime purposelessness, rather than providing a profound meditation on the brevity of human life, ring somewhat hollow.

PETER MATHEWS is an Assistant Professor of English at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea.