Dark Bright Doors                                                                            

by Jill Jones

Wakefield Press

ISBN 9781862548817

Reviewed by  KERI GLASTONBURY

The titles of Jill Jones’ most recent full-length collections, Broken/Open (Salt Publishing, 2005) and her latest, Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), have the contrariness of koans. There is something deliberately ‘puzzlingly poetic’ about them, and as in Jones’ poetry language is deployed as a decoy. Part of me resists this residual idea of the poet as a kind of sage, with the reader positioned as an initiate who must work for cathexis, yet I am also conscious that the experience of reading Jill Jones’ work is an active one. The act of reading becomes a participatory force, necessary to re-energise the detritus of language once the poet has left it. If the nervous system is the body’s communication network, then rather than ethereal disembodiment perhaps Jones allows for the synaptic relationship of poet and reader, from one nervous system to another.

A quietly prolific poet in many respects, Jones does seem to embrace poetry as an everyday ‘practice’. In her review of Dark Bright Doors (ABR, June 2010) Gig Ryan refers to the book’s ‘repetitive vocabulary’, and she isolates two distinct poetic modes that Jones employs: one relying on a form of phenomenological gesture and the other more ‘grounded in the everyday’. I think Jones’ poems work best and are at their most experiential when these two elements are combined, realising the chiaroscuro of the title’s Dark Bright Doors and most effectively capturing the duel sense of ‘being-in-the-worldness’ that the poet strives for. Some of the shorter gestural poems read more like philosophical exercises and I preferred the poems that also contain cultural—as much as natural—weathering, or poems where the transcendental image is usurped by a pithy turn of phrase: ‘gulls riding / what’s left of the air’ (High Wind At Kekerengu). While still predominantly a poet of city and suburb any dichotomy between nature and culture is a false economy in Jones’ poetry, with Jones positioning herself as an intermediatry (not afraid to invoke birds and clouds and flowers). It’s as if she won’t allow the so-called ‘school of quietitude’ to have a monopoly over the metaphysical (as is foregrounded in the somewhat cliché choice of quote on the front cover: ‘poetry of unsettling mystery and beauty’).

Last year Jill Jones co-edited with Michael Farrell Out of the Box: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher & Wattman, 2009) which was notable for its post-identity poetic. I can’t help but read Jones as part of a lineage that would see her partly inheriting and partly resisting the poetry of, say, Pam Brown and Joanne Burns (the poem ‘Esplanade Blues’, for example, could have just as easily have been written by either). Overall, however, I find Jones writes with Burns psychic radar, but less ironic distance and Brown’s interest in the contemporary moment, sans the critical personism. Perhaps the link is as much that all three poets seem to have been recently widely published, with the inevitable risk of establishing individual orthodoxies. That said, of the three, it is Jones who has taken her work into the ‘realm of the senses’ and somewhat changed ‘camps’. Where Burns and Brown remain sceptical, Jones’ work absorbs a recent turn to the language of imagination and ecology. Jones’ resistance to the traditional lyric ‘I’ seems more broadly linked to post-humanist philosophies. This may also have come out of her Doctorate of Creative Arts at UTS with Martin Harrison, another Out of the Box poet whose influence I can read in Jones’ recent poetics, along with the American Objectivists in poems like ‘The Thought Of an Autobiographical Poem Troubles & Eludes Me’:

So I’ve been leaning against

the names of things

not just walls but the very air

the rug, the pen

the silver garbage bin.

and even William Carlos Williams (in poems such as ‘Sorry I’m Late’).

Fittingly for a book published by Wakefield Press (considering Jones now lives in Adelaide) it is possible to read some autobiographical trajectories into Dark Bright Doors, particularly in the poems that refer to Adelaide (however obliquely), New Zealand, Sydney and Paris. It’s a book about movement and distances, but refuses to indulge in direct declamation, as Scott Patrick Mitchell writes in his review of the book: ‘It tetters on the edge of things with a sensual energy’ (Out in Perth). Sometimes I find Jones’ obfuscations too ponderous and in this era of climate change her references to the weather akin to dressing up old poetic tropes as contemporary geosophy. The many shorter poems in this collection, however, build a pressure system much like a weather map with lows and highs, often coming together exquisitely in the more dense poems such as ‘O Fortuna’.

                                                            …Surely

the end is nigh and it’s a faith squeeze, when to be

heterodox, when to hold the line, which comes at you

up front and always, always leaves you past, belated,

but still humid with life at the turnstyles pushing

another weekly into the slot, watching it burst

up again. While folding your damp umbrella

into these sharp hectic hours, you keep appearing.

Jones’ poems are the Dark Bright Doors of perception of the title. This collection continues an experimental tradition in contemporary poetry that refuses some of post-modernism’s past binaries and opens up poetry’s radar as a par exemplar for registering life’s and language’s atmospherics, ensuring (to borrow from another book title) that everything is illuminated.

KERI GLASTONBURY is a lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Newcastle, her poetry collection ‘grit salute’ will be published by SOI3 in 2011.

Symptoms of Homesickness

by Nathanael O’Reilly

Picaro Press, 2010

ISBN 9781920957896

Reviewed by EA GLEESON

With dedications to Conlon and Quigley and geographical cues such as Yambuk, The Lady Bay Hotel and The Moyne, the nomenclature of Symptoms of Homesickness orientates us towards the Irish Australian Diaspora and particularly as it is lived out in Victoria’s South West. Closer reading reveals a wider geographical terrain but the real landscape of this poetry is the cultural and emotional territory explored through childhood, teenage years and young adulthood.

O’Reilly has paid attention to experience and brings it to the reader in a poetry that is descriptive. The opening poem in ‘Deep Water’ places the reader in a childhood place many might choose not to remember.

                On winter mornings, the State
                Put children to the test
                …
                While teeth chattered,
                Swimming caps squashed
                Ears, testicles retreated.

More enticing to those who thrive on nostalgia might be O’Reilly’s description of ‘Stopping for Fish and Chips’.

                the sweaty package
                Of butcher’s paper and grabbed hot
                Handfuls. Escaping steam fogged-up
                The windows. We gripped sleeves
                In our fists and wiped windows clear.

                                    … 

More of the poems have to do with burgeoning sexuality, friendship and risk taking.

I enjoy the way O’Reilly plays a situation to transform a seemingly ordinary activity such as waiting in the library for the protagonist’s dad to collect him, into a chance to explore some of the adult magazines housed in the library.

                 I could not
                 Imagine the flat chested, uniformed girls
                 In my class with ribbons, baubles and pig-tails
                 In their hair developing such adornments,
                 Shamelessly spreading themselves on car bonnets.
                                             (“Afternoons Waiting in Libraries”)

O’ Reilly’s approach is to tell. This is reflected in titles such as ‘Folk LPs and No TV’, ‘Stopping for Fish and Chips’ and as cited above, ‘Afternoons Waiting in Libraries’. Events are reported in detail.

                 Evenings were spent at home
                 Drinking my parents’ wine
                 Eating thick slabs of cheese
                 Grilled on toast while watching
                 Day night cricket matches on telly.
                 Or if the Austudy hadn’t run out, 
                 Drinking Carlton Draught downtown
                 In the Shamrock Hotel or the Rifle Brigade…

Events of the heart are often presented in a similarly descriptive style, “oscillating between melancholy and desire” (Anna Karenina in Canberra), with a reliance, sometimes, on the use of adverbs.

                 She needed someone to hold. 
                 I eagerly took up the task,
                 Tracing the contours of her
                 Delicate face with my finger,
                 Gratefully inhaling her warm breath,
                 Entwining my limbs with hers…
                                                     (“The Present”)

I think the impact of this can be to emphasise the physical detail at the expense of the emotional impact and hence, to lessen the likelihood of surprise. I found myself sometimes wishing O’Reilly would place more trust in his reader. On the other hand, I was taken with the way he presented some of his ideas so evocatively. His strongest poetry alluded to possibilities. This was particularly evident in some of his endings:

“Saying yes, yes to the unknown” (The Present) or “you showed us the world, then let us go” (Mentor) and the last line of the book, “The Trinity of your Australian Life”.

This final example ends one of the most moving poems of the collection, ‘Requiem’, in which the internationally situated grandson is not able to attend his grandfather’s funeral in Australia due to the pending birth of his child. A poem based on such poignant points of the cycle of life, with the inherent knowledge that this man was not able to hold his dying grandfather and the great-grandfather will never hold his grandchild would have to affect the reader.  But it is the details of the grandson that made this poem live for me. Images of the expatriate grandson; opening the package containing his grandfather’s “duct-taped binoculars and dusty green corduroy cap”, being held by his wife “as he sat on the toilet and wept”, of remembering his music and stories and potato crop while he held his newly born daughter. Poetry rich with imagery but controlled by emotional truth is a potent poetic combination.

The title poem “Symptoms of Homesickness” works differently from others in this book, but cleverly. The expatriate protagonist laments somewhat ironically, the aspects of Australian life he misses, and with his musings, the tone shifts from poignant to self- deprecating to funny. So it is a shock when the final lines read,

                     When the pain is almost too much to bear.
                     Wondering how much it costs to fly a body home.

Although I would call for a tightening of the poetic technique and editing in Symptoms of Homesickness, it is a work that has me buzzing. Its content is interesting and does the important work of preserving a unique cultural history within the Australian experience. Most significantly, it projects work with a distinctive Australian voice. Elements of the poetry are entertaining, beautiful and frank. I am grateful to the poet-teacher in ‘Mentor’ who “convinced a roomful of teenagers that poetry matters”. The most significant poems have me excited about the future possibilities that we are likely to see from this poet. I will be queuing to buy his first full-length manuscript.

E. A. GLEESON‘s poetry collection, In between the dancing, received the award for Best First Manuscript and was published by Interactive Press in 2008. Anne lives in Daylesford, Victoria where she works as a Funeral Director.

Dog Boy

by Eva Hornung

Text Publishing, 2009

ISBN 9781921520099

Reviewed by KATHARINE GILLETT

What is it that makes us human? In Dog Boy, Eva Hornung examines the instinct to nurture and protect, not as an inherently human trait, but as one belonging to the invisibly marked territory of a pack of stray dogs.

Four-year-old Romochka is abandoned by his mother at the onset of a Russian winter. As the chill begins to creep under his blankets and the sky loses its light for the season, he is driven by hunger to take to the streets.  When he follows a dog to her home under an old church on the outskirts of Moscow, it is the beginning of a new life for Romochka and suckling alongside the dog’s pups he feels the safety and warmth denied him by his human mother. Almost immediately, the themes of loyalty and love take hold and as the next few winters unfold, we see Romochka’s education extend beyond the primal need for survival.  

Perhaps in order to understand what it is like to begin again, Hornung—who previously wrote as Eva Sallis and is the author of journey-themed Hiam and The City of Sealions among other works—travelled to Russia to research the book, which is based on the true story of a boy living with dogs in Moscow. Her cultural immersion extends in the novel to a linguistic one, resonating Romochka’s loss of his human language, which is, of course, useless in his new surrounds:

There was so much in the new world to be learned that he quickly forgot anything that didn’t touch him. This new world had immutable laws. It was divided into realms of danger and safety; it had clear enemies and its own demons. (p. 38)

In a book largely without dialogue, Romochka must learn to rely on his senses: ‘Day was a brief visitation of many greys. Romochka could see the dogs’ eyes and shapes inside the lair only at midday. Otherwise he could see nothing, but could hear and feel where each of them was’ (p. 67). Exiled at the edge of the city, straining to see in the dark or attempting to smell the threat of a stranger, Romochka’s intuitivism takes over, as if he has been reborn.

While the story of the wild boy is not new, Dog Boy explores another aspect of this age-old tale through Romochka’s knowledge of what it means to be human. There is no need for the question raised in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life: ‘What species does [the wild boy] think he might belong to? Does he recognise his own?’ (p. 52). Romochka knows he was once a boy and his contact with humans is frequent and, ultimately, essential. Indeed his reflections on his past life are fundamental to his character:

Romochka could remember this place, but it seemed utterly changed. He savoured the memory, curious. He had been a boy then, with a missing mother and uncle, following a strange dog. He remembered how cold and hungry he was. How unknown the trail ahead. (p. 40)

Romochka quickly adapts to his new life and Hornung convincingly describes what it might be like to live in a wild world. She shows Romochka and ‘black sister’ sharing a slippery rat, each inclination of a paw as loaded as language; Mamochka, his dog mother, licking Romochka’s sores as his clothes tighten or lie wet on his skin; and Romochka’s developing understanding of the territory as marked out by the scent of his brother, ‘black dog’. Romochka becomes so immersed in his dog-world, boundaries begin to blur and the story not only becomes plausible, but realistic and entirely believable.

The language is terse and tight, perhaps reflecting the fact that Romochka has little time to meander; he must quickly move between the hunt for food and the hunt for warmth. In brief moments of abandon he connects with his dog brothers and sisters, tumbling and biting in play, but the frivolity is always short-lived and we are soon drawn back into his isolated life. Given Hornung’s background as a human rights activist, the isolation and exile Romochka experiences could be suggestive of asylum and other states of displacement where the absence of language becomes, like detention, a barrier to inhabiting place.  Similarly, although Romochka is accustomed to the harsh Moscow winters, the cold weather, at its extreme in the concrete bunker of the dogs’ den, does little to ease his transition to his new life.  Romochka spends long stretches of time unable to face the outdoors, to fend for himself, instead relying on the dogs to bring him food, a practice he finds demeaning, even in his vulnerable state.

Although there is scope for action and tension in Romochka’s situation, little seems to infiltrate the dogs’ world.  Any sense of danger is quickly resolved, and, as a mother would reassure a child, the support of Romochka’s dog family is quick to materialise. Because Romochka lives in an in-between world, he is accepted on the periphery of existence: tolerated and feared by humans and dogs alike.  The nearby residents who scavenge on the rubbish mountain and the population in town largely ignore them. When a threat finally comes, it is not in any physical sense, but in an emotional sense, when Momochka brings another human baby back to their home.  Here, emotions that have no place in a dog’s world start to surface and our concerns begin to shift away from the present—where the family have proven their resilience time and time again—to each boy’s future.  That it takes the introduction of another human to bring about the crisis is an inevitable consequence of such a new and complex emotional world; in dealing with his boy brother, Romochka is forced to confront himself.

There comes a moment in the second half of the novel when Romochka sees himself in a mirror for the first time. When he sees a boy—a boy with wild black ropes and tendrils for hair instead of fur—he is shocked: ‘He wasn’t what he thought he was … His calloused paw and scarred forearm were stringy, bald, filthy, long. Wrong’ (p. 161). It is almost a relief to see Romochka in this way, shocked into his own existence. It’s a timely reminder that he is a boy and a life beyond the lair beckons. As he stares at his reflection, all he has come to believe starts to unravel and it’s hard to imagine what the future holds for him and his brother. Can they survive in a human world? We do know that whatever happens, it won’t be an easy journey. After all, the question of how to bridge the indefatigable space between worlds is a question not even humans can answer.

KATHARINE GILLETT has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Newcastle and a background in community publishing and cultural development. She is the coordinator of the Newcastle Poetry Prize. 

The English Class 

by Ouyang Yu

Transit Lounge, 2010

ISBN 9780980571783

Reviewed by SALLY FITZPATRICK 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Having resisted colonial forays for millennia, China is ironically westernizing itself, a cultural revolution with arguably as much impact as that of the Great Proletarian Revolution.  Even the poorest Chinese peasant, willing to dismiss the intense beauty embodied in the Chinese language, may believe the English language has the power to transform their life. This belief in the transformative power of English is the driving ambition, and perhaps the flaw, in the heart of Jing, the hapless, truck-driver protagonist of Ouyang Yu’s  recent novel, The English Class.   

Although Jing’s aspiration leads to his downfall, his character provides an ingenious vehicle for Yu’s endless curiosity with both the Chinese and English languages.  Yu’s prolific output, to the order of an average of two books per year for the last twenty years, speaks of a man whose fascination with language acts like adrenalin in his blood.  In The English Class, as he explores the idiosyncrasies of language, Yu ploughs the cultural wealth hidden within the fields of the two languages, fertilizing, cross-pollinating and producing a delightful linguistic hybrid.

The effervescent energy of this novel, and the charm of its innocent protagonist, compel interest throughout the entire four hundred pages. Reminiscent of the picaresque hero Don Quixote, the hapless truck-driver, Jing, tilts at the windmill of the English language as he bounds around in the Unique, his rattling, truck-without- breaks. More aptly perhaps, Jing resembles Sun Wu Kong, the famous Monkey King, hero of the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, who lampoons the phantasmagorical world of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist belief.

Like Sun Wu Kong, Jing also takes a journey to the West, albeit a West that is now located south, in Australia, where he believes he can rise above the material world, if only he can master the English language. “I can read and speak some English, whereas they can only read and speak Chinese,” Jing thinks about his workmates at the truck depot.  “All I ever wanted to do is move away from people, from them, from a life bound by materialism into a life of metaphysics. Truck driving is all about moving goods from one place to another. I want to do something like thought driving, moving thoughts from one place to another.”  (115)

Yu brings the flavour of the truck depot to life in precisely rendered characters, such as the fastidious Canton, who “just sits there, his left leg thrown over his right while his right knee constantly jerks up and down as he makes a sucking noise through his big-holed nostrils.” (15)  The dialogue makes for effortless reading, humouring the reader as it seamlessly segues the two languages. Gu, the story-teller workmate,scoffs at the aloof Jing:  “You think people who go to universities are smart? Goupi! Dog fart nonsense. The xiao bailian, small white face, doesn’t even know how to change a tyre properly and he’s learning ying ge la xi, Englishit!”  Mundane English expressions permeate with new meanings and with comedy as Jing attempts to memorize one hundred English words every day at the wheel of his truck.  “He knew what egg stood for but what was egg on?  . . . he could hardly make any sense of it.” (22)

When he enters University in Wuhan, Jing obsessively unpicks phrases and expressions, as if at a sub-syllabic level, some kind of power will be released, like splitting the atom, which will finally provide the desired transcendence.  Investigating the many ways the ideas of yin and yang pervade the Chinese language, for instance, Jing notices that yin, female, is both more prolific than yang, and always bad:

. . . yin wind, yin shadows, yin cold, yin darkness, yin privacy, yin conspiracy, yin danger, yin soul, yin clouds, yin thief, yin world . . . Are there other cultures out there that are only concerned with the yang as opposed to the yin? Is English as bad? Jing could only remember an English word, history, which seemed to suggest that it was a man’s story, not a woman’s. His memory became blurred as sleep pervaded his senses. He thought he fell off a cliff into the pond behind the hill. (155)

Yu balances dark consequences, the barest foreshadowing of the blurring to come, with whimsical touches that keep the text light and delightful.

While Jing idolizes English, a realistic undercurrent flows through the text. This tension between the ideal and the real is the source of the humour that pervades the novel.  Yu satirizes Australian society, holding up a mirror that reflects an undeniable cultural poverty in the suburbs. The new English teacher at Wuhan University, the Australian Dr Wagner, muses to himself:

Already he was faced with a class of young people whose aspirations travelled far beyond the borders of China, whose motivation was like nothing he had ever seen in a comparatively dreary Australian suburb, and whose learning skills were amazingly intuitive, coupled with a respect for their teacher that few of his peers could experience in Australia. (240)

Yu’s prose is vibrant with his original and creative English, which he tints with the colours of Chinese literary tradition:

The falling sun would set the lake waters ablaze with fire throwing down a long wide shaft of myriad colours and hues. The air was scented with wild flowers mixed with the smell of raw fish, and memories of the recently dead . . . in the distance was the university hidden among dense foliage with the roofs of its buildings half visible, most conspicuously a column of black smoke twisting every other way above the old library at the top of Luojia Hill. It took Jing quite some time to work out that the smoke was formed by millions of mosquitoes flying together towards the sky. (159)

Here we see the classic antithesis that enlivens Chinese language and poetry, with its surprising juxtaposition of fish and flowers, smoke and mosquitoes. The writer’s prose style resonates at the same time, with alliterative English. Yu revives and rejuvenates language, with his use of archaic expressions, perhaps unearthed as a result of the Chinese government’s exclusive use of romantic era texts for its English curriculum: 

“A penny for your thoughts, E Jing, you are in a brown study again!”

“No,” Jing said. “I’m actually in a green study.”  He said this as his hand swept the air in an arc that included the tree-lined bank encircling the lake and greenish hills beyond. (236)

Even Yu’s use of words, such as ‘greenish’, maybe considered vague by a native English writer, provide subtlety and charm, while contextualising the received language of the protagonist and the narrator.

The third and final part of the text leaps forward twenty years to a suburban garden in Melbourne where Jing struggles to align his dreams with reality.  Here, the narrative also becomes blurred and sometimes hard to follow, as the voice changes between characters, locations and time frames.  Even so, Yu maintains humour in the bleakest of situations. As Jing becomes unhinged, he is diagnosed as suffering from:

. . . cultural disorientation and bilinguistic confusion  . . .  exhibiting such symptoms as a difficulty in switching back into a ‘foreign’ culture after living in his ‘mother’ culture for a brief time; a constant need to assert the superiority of his former culture over the present culture in public while unreasonably denouncing his former culture in private; and a perennial sense of  victimization that he did not enjoy full rights as his other fellow citizens did because of his ‘wrong’ skin colour, his wrong shape of eyes and his wrong gait. (365)

Crash landing in the wasteland of the West, the windmill is destroyed and Jing’s identity disintegrates under the impact.  Instead of the hoped for transcendence, Jing finds alienation in the face of cringing racism. Ultimately, however, there is a strange surrender to ockerism and the ordinary, which suggests Jing may yet revive himself.

While the Chinese and much of the Asian block scramble to learn English, Australia remains aloof, providing the merest tokens of Asian language education to their young, and failing to provide the means for a meaningful cultural exchange.  The English Class is a work that shows the rich cultural potential of language contained within Australia’s immigrant population, a potential for which our previous Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, aka Lù Kèwén or 陸克文, was openly aware. Australia could embrace its place in the East, become better acquainted with its neighbours, and even learn from their ancient philosophies and languages. ‘Easternization’ is a foreign concept, and as yet, an uncoined word.  Ironically, spell-check corrects it to ‘westernization’.  Let the easternization of Australia begin!  Meanwhile, we can look forward to more from the writer of the adventures of Jing.

SALLY FITZPATRICK is completing a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. She is currently writing a memoir about her time following the footsteps of her daughter in China.

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 3^rd Apostle

            at Port Campbell – seen

            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.

Among the regulars

by Andy Jackson

Papertiger

March 2010

ISBN 9780980769500

REVIEWED BY DEBBIE LIM

 An online piece by the Academy of American Poets suggests that poems about the body ‘are often poems of celebration and awe, poems that delight in the body’s mysteries, its "dream of flesh"’.¹

In Andy Jackson’s ‘Among the Regulars’ the body is far from romanticised. Instead, the body – specifically the ‘irregular’ or ‘different’ body – is viewed as a battle zone that divides the self. In ‘A Passing Thought’, the poet concludes: ‘This body / is no sanctuary – it is here the war is fought and won, / before I can even decide which side I’d rather be on.’

Jackson, who has Marfan syndrome, takes the body (sometimes his own, sometimes those of others) as his immediate subject in this powerful first full-length collection. However, this is essentially a book about marginalisation and its impact on the experiencing of self. It is both personal and political, employing subjective experience to question the status quo. While the poems are often introspective they cast an equally acute look back at the world.

Often the speaker is placed within a specific social situation. In ‘No Shelter’, for example, the poet describes being targeted by hooligans while walking home:

Floating home from a poetry reading, fog and who I am

closing in as I walk forward, I am still visible.

A mostly full stubbie of beer, VB I suspect,

            thrown from a slow car, swoops over my shoulder.

  Typical of the collection, the language is beautifully cadenced yet grounded by a conversational tone and everyday details. The poems play out within unremarkable settings: backyards, pubs, hospital rooms, parties, swimming pools. But in Jackson’s poetry, the real drama takes place internally. He has a particular skill for capturing the crucial detail that belies deeper social tensions. For example: ‘a hairline crack dives across a wall’, ‘a Study Bible’s width away from my wife’, ‘a nurse’s ‘uniform opens an inch, / briefly exposing a hint of the sensitive flesh / of our different positions, how cold it can be.’

‘Among the Regulars’ contains three numbered sections. The first and third comprise a substantial number of poems presumably based on events from the poet’s life. In the second section, many poems are dedicated to or inspired by real-life people, most of them unconventional by way of their bodies. These include someone born with androgen insensitivity syndrome, a Melbourne video performance artist, and Justin Fashanu (Britain’s first black footballer to be paid a million pounds and who later came out as gay).

These poems inspired by others are fascinating portraits. However, ultimately I felt more often moved during the first and third sections, and felt these sections also contained the strongest individual poems. Nevertheless, I enjoyed these people-poems for their reach and shift of perspective

One such poem was ‘All is Not as it Seems’, dedicated to Ilizane Broks, born with androgen insensitivity syndrome. The condition means genetic males have outwardly female physical characteristics. However, often it’s not until puberty that the syndrome is diagnosed:

            It’s too soon to ask you which box you’d tick,

            which cubicle you’d rather use. Now, the mind

            is a humming stillness, the body ambiguous.

[…]

Your soft wings hide the outline of wings.

At the verge of thirteen, your toes grip the edge.

            Beneath your feet, a wind you dare not predict. 

I also enjoyed the territory of ‘Strange Friendship’, a poem about the awkward and unspoken boundaries of male friendship:

            The clinking of pool balls is an ambient sound,

            the crack and sigh of another crude attempt.

            I want to tell you how strange this friendship seems,

            to ask you where your grief is, as if in your composure

            you are being dishonest, but I fear this might be

the stone thrown into the clear face we’ve made.

Friendship between young Australian males is not a typical poetic subject. Taking place on a couch in a pub ‘where a certain absence / of intimacy’s the done thing’, the narrator yearns for a more honest connection with his friend. The final line undercuts the open-hearted disclosure with a comic ironic twist, as the narrator suggests: ‘I reckon I’ll get another. You want one?’

But for me, Jackson shows his strengths best in poems such as, ‘Nothing Personal’, ‘Quasimodo’, ‘Hairline’, ‘The Embrace’ and ‘Labourers’, from the first section, and ‘Secessionist’, ‘Breath’, ‘Metaphor’ and ‘The Embalmer’s Art’ from the third. These display a compelling voice that is incisive, complex and affecting.

Emotionally, it is a confronting collection. As I read, I felt admiration for its accomplishment while simultaneously cringing. The poems conjure those painful experiences of non-belonging that everyone has had and (mostly) buries as deep down as possible. Not so Jackson whose poems replay such events in aching close-up. In ‘Hairline’, for example, the poet recounts a childhood incident with his brother:

            In the wake of what you said as if I wasn’t here,

            it is so quiet I can hear my chest swell with breath

            then shrink. A hairline crack dives across a wall.

              Cobwebs wave in the breeze and paint flakes fall.

            Mum attempts to patch the gap with diplomatic talk,

            but the air won’t go back outside. So that’s it –

            you want to know if this pain of yours is a sign

            your spine will curve like a treeless leaf,

            turn into mine. […]

Sometimes poems with a polished style can seem emotionally distant, as though the original impetus has been refined away. The poems in this collection, however, retain an immediacy that pushes under your skin. Perhaps this is partly generated by the intense focus on the physical; the reader is riveted into the poem like a self into its body. At times, the close perspective felt almost claustrophobic. Jackson uses William Carlos Williams’s adage ‘No ideas but in things’ to great effect. He also knows that attending to ‘things’ can be a powerfully subtle way of conveying emotion.

A handful of poems verged into prosiness and as a result felt flat or strained. ‘Beneath the Surface’, ‘Severance’ and ‘Opening Night’ were examples of those that, for me, did not quite lift off the page. Also, ‘Comfortable’ and ‘Cells, Dying’ seemed to lack the richness of characterisation and detail needed to make these poems fully convincing.

But these criticisms seem petty cast against the book’s strengths. The best poems go beyond being technically successful works on the page; they also reach out with a complex humanity. This is a poetry in which seemingly contradictory attributes are embodied. Lyric beauty combines with an unflinching gaze, self-assuredness with vulnerability, awareness of minute bodily gesture with existentialist questionings.

The vivid sensual image is a signature feature of Jackson’s poetry. Here are a few examples: ‘that patch of schoolyard asphalt / freckled with blood like the breaking of rain.’, ‘The thin white frames of schoolgirls rise like lighthouses.’, ‘A million things are hidden in this bass clef shape’, ‘the vehicle / that will make a jigsaw puzzle of your face’. Such phrases are visually arresting but also have an effortless music and are rich with psychological implication.

If the poems in the first section establish the poet’s entrapment in his body, and those in the second extend to the experience of others, then the poems in the final section seem connected by the notion of the self’s separation. Many of these are about death, division, or a crucial life-segmenting moment.

‘Secessionist’ (which won the Rosemary Dobson Prize in 2008) is one such poem. Perhaps my favourite of the collection, it is visceral and masterfully controlled, combining a sense of the surreal with an almost savage economy. In it, the speaker describes the hellish existence of living with his estranged twin, who shares his body (seemingly like the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng):

            I feel a breath at my neck and wake. A dream

            only a stranger’s brain could make jolts me back

            into my body. Who else roams these bones?

            The morning sun cannot melt him away.

            He throws back the sheets as I reach for the snooze,

            my brain a dead leg he drags through the day.

Tautly paced, the poem culminates with the speaker plotting to kill his other half: ‘And tonight, as he slips / into sleep, a molecular frequency keeps me awake, / sharpening this knife.’ The ending gains greater pathos from the implicit knowledge that murdering the twin also entails suicide. The question being asked might be: How far will we go to escape the pain of our (bodily) selves?

The image of conjoined twins – two identities vying within one body – seems a fitting metaphor for Jackson’s vision of the self. It’s an image of the self in conflict, its dual (duelling?) entities: self versus body, self versus society, and ultimately, self versus itself. Perhaps even the self in time (past battling future) is yet another conflict. But while it’s essentially a portrait of division and alienation, it’s also one that asks us to consider the multiplicity of identity. Interestingly, this twin imagery is reflected in the book’s cover artwork: two white resin heads sculpted in the poet’s likeness sit nestled together in a bird nest.

Another central recurring image is that of gaps (and cracks, silences, holes and vents). In ‘The Direction of Vents’, a woman walks up to an old tree in a park and wraps her arms around it: ‘…perhaps she has opened / a vent in her skin, wider than the nib of this pen / that lets things out, not in.’ The vent seems to represent a means of personal release.

But perhaps it is the final poem that offers the clearest insight to the significance of gaps in the collection. ‘The Embalmer’s Art’ is an unsettling elegy spoken by an embalmer who takes us behind the scenes of his vocation. Here are the last three stanzas:

            Every line looks how the family expects –

            precise, seamless, unremarkably human. Yet

            the gaps are beyond repair and leak. Under

            each clean surface, tiny lives swarm and feed.

            I evoke a face with the eyes shut, the frozen

            unknowable dream. This is our recurring theme,

            that in grieving there are some curtains

            we don’t want thrown open, this skin

            a net composed of yearning, and of holes.

Here, the gaps suggest the irreparable distance between the self and others – a space through which emotional pain flows to the surface. They are the holes in the body’s theatre curtain that expose the vulnerable authentic self.  

One of the most memorable poems for me in the collection was ‘Breath’. Dedicated to the poet’s partner, it reads as one of those seemingly effortless works conceived when life’s chaotic points momentarily align. Here it is in full:

BREATH

For Rachael

I ache to speak without a mouth, make the page

a pale limb dotted with life’s subtle buds.

The world and its molecules turn without this strife.

I have thought myself into knots, my intensity-twin.

There is a language of body, a grammar of gaps.

That day bowed down with the weight of our tongues,

your room a womb for the selves we’ll become.

And now, adrift in the silence of Pärt, an absence

both Rothkos know, I think of you and weep

with joy, even though the continent is shrinking.

My skin is a map of welts from pinching myself.

            Go to our room! You say, as the streetlight blinks,

            and take that brace of language off, your heron-ness –

            for a while, I will cushion your mind with my breath.

Perhaps breath – of the self yet unbounded by it – is one way of spanning those gaps, and transcending the body, albeit briefly. This is a radiant sonnet which forms a rare still point in the book.

‘Among the Regulars’ is a distinctive, impressive and thought-provoking collection. By asking the reader to step into the body of another, it challenges us to consider the impact of assumptions of ‘normality’ on the individual. Ultimately though, it is the presence of Jackson himself breathing through the lines which makes this such a moving work.

1. Academy of American Poets. www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/18999

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.

Your doctors promise

Miracles: new arms, new skin.

Burnt  

We are shy. Ruins wait.

(160)

 I’m the Asian fella going to university knowing little English

 or the kid from Albury studying Asian Cinema and Culture

 I’m the one serving your grass juice,

 the suit pushing you aside during the CBD rush-hour.

(162)

unaware that we

were writing the walls

tighter around us.

 

That we were writing

toward a full

stop.

 

Now–

As I write a new cage

for my memory of you–

 

The last echoes of alexia

have dispersed into

the open universe &

 

The drunk stars still sing:

 

(103) “The Pit”

Where you are is not foreign.

Where you are is home.

(91)

what does “pullulate”

mean anyway? what is history

but the sweep of shifting sands?

what place is left to dare?

it’s neither Cairns nor Perth.

if she hopes to survive,

she must find a home

for a battered mind,

a lonely, aching breast.

(97)

        This is what gives the words

room to think. I beat in soft wads

of butter, warm milk and cream, pyramids of salt

and anticipation, all the cloud air puffs out at me

its warm potato breath, I am balancing, perfectly

all the white potato space in between

the scaffolds of real potato.

 

(156) “White Poem No 4: Ode to the Potato”

I drive in a dust pile, Tank Girl shambolic through early evening paddocks, steel wire coat hangers and polyester string looped & shuddering clots past the milkers, bright static radio & duco bent in panels where city chunks of 80s pop & supermarket fluorofoods bounce on the back seat along the gravel bolt beside the Gloucester river, all hot-headed

 i (149)

Yet this allegro slows to more solemn movements where time is “ silently/ unfurling in the late sun’s gravity ”(153). There seems to be a desire to test and tease; to make of the landscape something more complex. Another youthful variant of the bucolic myth is found Ashley Burton’s poem “Swimming in the Murrumbidgee” with its unpretentious idiom.

Above the sand

Spirit fish spin in the rivers of air.

A fish knows how to carry coolness deep inside its body,

How water glides

Even when it can’t be seen

The spirit fish are whispering the names of all the stars 

(37)

Feeling the world give and give, one thing opening up to another, is what I enjoy most about  writing. My poems don’t start from ideas, but are very definitely derived from sensory experience. (28) 

 

I see what I do as exploratory, responsive to the pressures of language and my own intuition and  memories as they converge in the moment, in going places, in observing and being part of experience. (145)

 

If poets breathe life into the premise that the personal is the political, they will inevitably confront these issues of identity, which are at the hub of destructive conflicts. (219)

  All over the world

  poets are going up in flames

  leaving

  little piles of ashes

  in the shape of mountains

  it seems we do no notice

  their going

  so much else is ablaze

  but the darkness

  is growing and

  it is not our eyes

  (244)

 

Two Responses on the Poetry of Thanh Thao

by Michelle Cahill and Boey Kim Cheng

Humility in the Work of Thanh Thao

by Michelle Cahill

When Boey Kim Cheng and I first read the poems of Thanh Thao we were immediately struck by their quiet tone, their gentle transformations of personal and public suffering, which stem from the kind of humility we are in need of as writers to feed our souls. What is the soul anyway, we might ask ourselves, and why has it become so unfashionable to speak of compared to the other resources available to a poet’s creativity; such as language, or the body, or food? That would be the subject of another essay, though perhaps the reason is part of a broader, secular, and largely culturally-programmed sensibility. This aside, we felt that Thanh Thao’s poems, translated by Paul Hoover and Nguyen Do as part of an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese poetry, have much to offer our readers. Most of us can recall an emotional or ethical response to the Vietnam war: because it was the cause of such social and political dissent; because it was the war that epitomised the 1960’s Beat generation; because there are palpable scars, wounds and trauma in the history of Australia’s eleven year involvement in that protracted conflict and its aftermath; because it was a kind of prototype for the way in which the Australian public can undermine official versions of any war. We are mostly familiar with the protest or witness themes of Judith Wright, Jennifer Maiden, Denise Levertov, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Allan Ginsberg, but the Vietnamese perspective is relatively unknown, and it’s within this context that we can locate Thanh Thao’s work.

The dominant and interconnected themes of Thanh Thao’s poetry are the war and memory. Memory and forgetting mark out an imaginative landscape of resounding echoes, in which the poet is able to recover and reconcile the past, with its conflicting and long-suffering legacies. The poet depicts fragmented moments of unmasked vulnerability:

 echoes from fifty-six years ago
a day as pale as today
that no one cared about, no one remembered
a little puppy is dumbstruck looking at a lonely street

(“March 12”)

The images encountered are personal and domestic; of childhood, family, village, field, and against which the war becomes a prearranged backdrop.

 like someone beating a drum, the rain dropped on my waterproof army poncho
which was torn and badly needed mending
my friends were like forest trees, diminishing day by day
the war cut them down
like an electric trimmer
but now they’re all at peace
I remember also that evening, as a child,
the sweetness of the banana in my mother’s hand,
even sweeter when she carried me on her back!
the road over the dike echoed the soul of the river
dark brown sails and bamboo shadows floating slowly
a bridge where an older man got tired
and lay down to rest but not sleep  
(“To Suddenly Remember”)

 The poet is able to segue events here into a temporal fluidity where childhood returns to old age, where war becomes peace. Often the lines are unpunctuated, and uncapitalised, allowing their clauses to drift. The voice weaves through these suggestions with remarkable clarity; the rain beating like a drum, the bridge and the bamboo shadows providing the associative narrative links. There is no blame or anger evoked in any reference to the war, the poet adopting an entirely non-partisan attitude. The authenticity and immediacy of the speaker’s voice, resembles the surreal empiricism of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poems. Komunyakaa’s poems however move at a much faster pace and are more brutal in their tone. In Thanh Thao’s verse, the brutality of the war is described indirectly and seems to be subsumed by the natural landscape. There’s a subtle irony, for instance, that his army poncho is badly in need of mending, or indeed in the figure of the old man, exhausted but not quite sleeping. In another poem, “To Suddenly Remember,” the poet juxtaposes an image of the war with the sound of thunder and with gentle descriptions of nature:

the aged sunlight
an evening of summer rain
and the bomb’s echo from the Duong bridge that sounded like rolling thunder  

(“To Suddenly Remember”)

Without knowledge of the Vietnamese language, one cannot fully appreciate that the rhythmic simplicity of these translations attempts to be faithful to the floating lines and to the monosyllabic tonal variations. This also renders the poet’s subdued impressions of war. War is referenced in Thanh Thao’s poetry in a manner that suggests that the function of memory is not to make recriminations, but to preserve the suffering, and to speak for those who have suffered. It’s interesting to read the poems within the context of the time-honoured ca dao tradition of folk poetry with its repertoire of landscape imagery: paddies, harvest, village. In his essay on Vietnamese war poets, Kevin Bowen refers to this lasting connection between the land and its people;

The belief in the power of the land to sustain and transform the terms of struggle is pivotal to both poem and culture.

A culturally-derived reading will also identify in these poems a residual trace of Tang tradition which fused Buddhist, Confuscian and Taoist values, preferring to reflect not on reality but “the idea beyond the word”. That kind of meditative moment and simplicity can be found in Thanh Thao’s work where we sense the poet’s self-effacement, his cautious recognition of the enemy within.

With two pens,
two chopsticks,
I’m going to look for the source of water
slowly and quietly.
Look, the pen is a little nervous,
breathing with every stroke.
I know I’m in a drought;
go slowly and silently. 

(“Andante for the Millenium”)

At the same time the quest for darkness in his poems differs from much of the nationalist Vietnamese poetry of the post-war period, with its elegiac tone and its ideological correctness. Visual phenomena arise accidentally and without warning, as in the poem “Suddenly”:

suddenly
without apology
a man flew through the treetops
leaving behind a woman, a thin trail of smoke
suddenly
the ships searched for a place to rest
the stars searched for a place to be seen
crowding into a puddle of water
where it gives birth to the sky
suddenly
as the poems searched for their flames

The images are fragmented and arbitrary, hinting at horror with ironic lyricism. It’s as though the text becomes an existential and unofficial platform, offering its own version of reality. Similarly, in the poem “Untitled,” the metaphor of fishing conveys to us the movement, and the synaesthetic moment of the surprise catch.

of snatching shadows from under the green sadness
of water hyacinths.

(“Untitled”)

With their sibilant sounds, there is nothing fierce or deliberate in these lines. The language seems effortless, not attempting to qualify or categorize; being born out of the sense of a deeply subjective darkness, one which is searching for its “flames,” as if the poems themselves were the source of light. That play of light and darkness is a recurring motif, a wave oscillation that shifts from abstractions to concrete images, as in the poem “A Journey,” where a cow is described as chewing the sunset:

A daydream takes me; I go into the private darkness of light.
The darkness differs significantly from reality, but it is still the reality
of a cow chewing the sunset; on one side is the yellow sunrise, on the other the   darkness of sunset –
the faint border between
reunion, separation, reunion.

 The poem invites us to take this journey; to experience the points of entry and departure. Yet there is no indulgence in the materiality of language. Rather than delineating the boundaries of presence and absence, the past and present are integrated into a new whole. This perspective in the poet’s work admits to the possibility of recovery and healing. The Vietnamese people have much to heal; their country having been occupied at different times by China, France, Japan and the USA; their war of independence lasting over 120 years, during which time hundreds of thousands of civilians perished or were displaced. The configuration of darkness in Thanh Thao’s work can be interpreted as a personal and deeply registered acknowledgement of that suffering. In his most controversial poem, “A Soldier Speaks of His Generation”, which was prohibited until political reforms took place in 1988, the poet’s tone becomes more overtly critical:

In our generation,
that train whistle is a declaration.
The generation in which each day is a battle,
its mission heavier than the barrel of mortar 82
that we carry on our shoulders.
The generation that never sleeps,
that goes half naked and patiently digs trenches,
that is naked and calm in its thinking,
that goes on its way as the past generation has gone,
by ways various and new.

The seemingly inconsequential details of the soldiers’ lives are evoked with compassion in the “small lumps of steamed rice” they share, or the “cans of sour soup.” And while the camaraderie between the troops is described, their sense of a shared destiny is conveyed more palpably than that of a shared purpose. This humanity leads away from any myopic nationalistic sentiment, to something of a more universal condition.

What do you want to tell me in the hazy night, Quoc,
as you sing passionately the whole flood season?
The Dien Dien flower raises its hot yellow petals
like the face of a hand that sunlight lands and stays on.
Our country comes from our hearts, simply,
like this Thap Muoi that need no further decoration
and is completely silent.
Stronger than any romance, this love goes directly
to any person
who doesn’t care about the limits of language

(“A Soldier Speaks of His Generation”)

 The poem does not try to be a testimony, nor does it attempt to protest the immorality of war, a criticism that can be made of much of the stateside poetry of Levertov and Ginsberg. The suffering while not arbitrary, belongs to a more general condition, a landscape where a star rises “from a water-filled crater”, where the faces of many are seen to be floating.

They are so very young
as they flicker along on the stream
into a distant meadow
on an endless evening. 

They’re the people who fought here first, 
twenty years ago as one generation,
and also the ones who will come later,
twenty years from today.

That evening
on the small canal
artillery attacks and flowing water.
How clearly you can see
the faces of
       our generation!

(“A Soldier Speaks of His Generation”)

The clarity of Thanh Thao’s poetry, his “strange and attractive voice”(Nguyen Do) can be attributed to the many faces of the war he describes. While private and personal, the poems always hint at the historical and social context of the world they remember. It’s poetry that makes the text-world relationship vulnerable, without an undue reliance on complexity or anything ostensible. Yet there is a gentle irony in this resignation, which points to the possibility of dissent, of perceiving new and different realities. And in this humility, in this acceptance of suffering as a condition of human existence, there is immense compassion; something which feeds our soul, leading us beyond the poem.

I already know
that other worlds
are no different –
a bird that tries to love its cage
has no need to begin singing.

(“Andante for the Millenium” (2000))

Notes

“Some Other Poets of the War” (1994) by Kevin Bowen is referenced in “War Poets From Vietnam” by Fred Marchant
Humanities, March/April 1998, Volume 19/Number 2

“The “Other War” In Thanh Thao’s Poetry”, Nguyen Do, Sacramento, December 21 2004

War Against Forgetting: The Poetry of Thanh Thao

by Boey Kim Cheng

In Ho Chi Minh City you see everywhere signs of a new Vietnam emerging: the widening of roads, the ubiquitous construction cranes, the gleaming new shopping complexes, the convoys of new foreign cars. The country is eager to catch up with its northern enemy, turning itself in a matter of a decade from a failing impoverished Communist state closed to the rest of the world, into an Asian tiger that is communist in name only. The Indochina conflict and the Vietnam War seem distant memories. In a country so long trapped in its traumatic past, the prosperous future promises deliverance from its troubled history. But it is a deliverance that carries with it the danger of forgetting not just its proud and bloody past but its traditions, the values for which it fought those wars. That is why Thanh Thao’s work is vital. It is a deep and searching work of memory, of a self engaged in the project of salvaging its own and the country’s memories.

Thanh Thao has the ability to make you feel like you are listening to him remember and what is remembered are not the big events, but little markers of time, seemingly insignificant images that can conjure up an entire scene, and make the memory so vivid:

comes a faint sound of women selling rice cakes  
on my birthday
it makes me remember
a packet of rice
a bowl of dried sweet potato mixed with molasses
a mother who was thin as the morning light
and laughter beside a heap of trash

(“March 12”)

The past comes to life through a metonymic process, the sensory details evoking the poet’s childhood, a series of vignettes flashing before him, all giving a sense of coherence, wholeness, uninterrupted by war. There is a wrenching nostalgia that is born out of the time’s depredations and the effects of war, a longing for pre-war harmony and innocence that is pastoral in nature. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell identities the pastoral impulse in the war poets as arising from a need to counter the traumas of the trenches with idyllic images of rural England. In the same way, the longing for the ancestral home, the rural vision in Thanh Thao’s work bespeaks a need to heal the wounds of war with images of peaceful rural Vietnam, a Vietnam that may not have existed in history but which lives in the poet’s imagination.
There theme of return underpins Thanh Thao’s work, the return to that place in time where the adult poet can rediscover the child he was:

I come again to my father and mother’s home
were a yellow plum that was just planted suddenly blooms
like a spotlight on a flood plain,
like my mother’s eyes
staring from the garden’s corner
where custard apple has a pure greenness.

(“Untitled”)

The memory yields a moment of connection with his roots, bestowing a sense of coherence and belonging, the fruits conjuring a sense of Edenic innocence and pleasure. Home is a recurrent word in Thanh Thao’s work. The poems attempt to salvage the memories of home, to heal the ravages of war and time. In retracing the steps back to his childhood memories, the poet rediscovers a pastoral scene far from the war, the abundant fruit imagery here suggesting innocence and also, a deep part of him that is unscarred by the war. The brutality of war is there, but there is a saving tenderness that connects the speaker with his past, with his humanity. Memory provides the way to healing, to a past where a sense of wholeness and coherence can be found:

my parents lived there a home
a ten-square-meter country
but because of our greater home
my parents didn’t prevent me
from going into battle
not for a brave death or a rainbow
I’m the hand on a compass
that only turns toward home.

(“To Suddenly Remember”)

Thanh Thao’s poems of memory are attempts at homecoming, bringing the displaced wounded spirit of the veteran back home. The land is a nourishing and healing presence, though it is also fraught with travails and ambiguities. In this regard his work can be located within the ca dao tradition, the oral poetry that sings of the intimate connections of the Vietnamese with the land. In “This Is Usual,” we find a kind of ars poetica in which the poet affirms the ties between the land and poetry: “I lean on time to catch the time that doesn’t run out. / To ignore the land is to be old, dry, lean, and thirsty.”

At the heart of this intimate relationship between the land and the self is the presence of the mother. Like the word “home,” the mother is a recurrent image, a deep source of sustenance to the poet’s life and work. “Wave Oscillation” is an elegy to the poet’s mother:

For all of my life, two shades have consoled me.
Whose steps remain
On the village trail?
What lights are in your eyes now that the rain has cleared?
Now the small line that separates two sufferings,
But still leaves the spicy fragrant smoke of our stove
In the garden with its dark green banana leaves –
From morning to night you still walk back and forth there! 

The mother is still very much alive, at least in the poet’s memory – the present tense and the atavistic vision in the last two lines suggest the immanent presence of the mother. In “To Suddenly Remember” the memory of the mother is also atavistically invoked: “I remember also that evening, as a child,/ the sweetness of the banana in my mother’s hand,/ even sweeter when she carried me on her back!” Smell, the most primal of the senses, metonymically connects the mother with the child and remembering war-veteran, and brings the past into alignment with the present. The maternal image allows an escape from abjection, to use the Kristevan word, a return to pre-war intimacy and harmony with both family and the land

Thanh Thao’s pastoral yearning, his nostalgic impulse and longing for the maternal embrace stem from a sense of displacement, a traumatised sense of history that is as much his as the nation’s. His work seeks healing but does so without denying the past. The poet does not eschew the horrors but includes them in his attempt to understand himself and his country. It is a poetry that excludes nothing, that takes in the past in all its beauty and terror. In “To Suddenly Remember,” the memories of family home, the mother, “the ripe smell of bananas,” “some old chairs/ a small ancient teapot/ the aged sunlight/ an evening of summer rain” are inextricably mixed with the friends cut down by war and “the bomb’s echo from the Duong bridge that sounded like rolling thunder.”

Rather than keeping the binaries of absence and presence, the past and present distinct and separate, Thanh Thao’s vision integrates them into new wholes. Another binary in his work is the personal and the historical. By locating the personal in the historical and the historical in the personal, and bringing the past, however difficult and horrifying it is, into some comprehensive relationship with the present, the poet achieves a perspective that allows the possibility of recovery and healing. Through weaving together the private and the communal, the poet forges a conscience that reminds and warns, to use Wilfred Owen’s sombre word, and commemorates those who suffered and those who perished.

Perhaps the intersection between the personal and political is nowhere more powerfully articulated than in his most controversial poem, “A Soldier Speaks of His Generation”:

The day we’re leaving,
the doors of the passenger train openly wide.
There’s no longer a reason for secrets.
The soldiers young as bamboo shoots
playfully stick their heads from the windows.
The soldiers young as bamboo shoots,
with army uniforms too large for them,
crowd together like tree leaves on the stairs of the cars.
The train whistles too loudly
And too long, as if broken,
like the voice of a teen who nearly has his man’s voice now.

In our generation,
that train whistle is a declaration.

The generation in which each day is a battle,
its mission heavier than the barrel of mortar 82
that we carry on our shoulders.
The generation that never sleeps,
that goes half naked and patiently digs trenches,
that is naked and calm in its thinking,
that goes on its way as our past has gone,
by ways various and new.

As the title announces, the speaker is taking on the role of a spokesman for a generation that is being forgetting in a rapidly modernizing Vietnam. Through his own autobiography, he evokes the travails of a whole generation, bringing to life the faces of the individuals lost in the numbing statistics of casualties. The details, like those in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam story “The Things They Carried,” accumulate to give us the reality of the war; as in O’Brien’s story the relentless rhythm builds up to suggest the march, the inexorable trudge that is so much a part of the soldier’s existence. The details also bring the Vietnamese soldier close to us, his humane face free from demonization as the insidious VC or inhumanly fearless NVA:

Each backpack contains a uniform,
some dried fish sauce, and a small lump of steamed rice.
The camp’s wood stoves flame on the stone bank of a creek,
above which hang tall cans of sour soup
made from Giang leaves and shrimp sauce.
What we have,
we share,
share on the ground
completely.
To enemies, we spend all we have in battle.
To friends, we give until all we have is gone.

If you see that our skins are black from the sun,
our misshapen bodies seem older than they are,
and you can count the calluses on our hands
along with the war medals-still, nothing quite describes us.

(“A Soldier Speaks of His Generation”)

The poem commemorates the camaraderie, the sense of communal effort but it steers clear of patriotic drumbeating. It pays tribute to the individual soldier, confronts individual fears and privations. There is a moment reminiscent of Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”:

Unexpectedly, I meet my close friend again.
We both lie down on a My Long trail,
on an army coat under the dark sky,
where just this evening a B-52 harrowed the earth three times,
where for several years the bomb craters are uncountable,
where I suddenly speak a simple dream:
“When peace truly comes,
I will go to trail number four, spread out a coat and lie down
                completely satisfied.”
My friend gazes
at a star rising from a water-filled crater.
His eyes look so strange; I see
they contain both the star and the crater . . .

This a touching moment, a tender reprieve in the horrors of war, when the self moves beyond it own sufferings to share the pain and hope of the Other. In extremis, the self does not withdraw into its own privations but reaches out to the Other and this is a fragile but affirmative note in Thanh Thao’s war poem. There is also a further movement in time that locates the individual suffering in a broader context:

That evening rockets attacked,
Bending down the Binh Bat trees.
Sunset covers both banks like blood.
The canal is white from the flow of toxic gases.
Suddenly I see my face on the water’s surface,
among those poisonous mists,
on which floats the Binh Bat fruit,
on which floats our breaking country,
and I see
also floating the faces of many people,
some of them friends and some I have never seen.
They are so very young
as they flicker along on the stream
into a faraway meadow
                    on an endless evening.

They’re the people who fought here first, 
twenty years ago as one generation,
and also the ones who will come later,
twenty years from today.

That evening
on the small canal
artillery attacks and flowing water.
How clearly you can see
                the faces of
our generation

The speaker recognizes himself in those who had fought in the earlier war, as well as those who will inherit the legacy of this war. “A Soldier Speaks of His Generation” is not an anti-war poem, but a powerful war poem that effectively conveys what Wilfred Owen calls the “pity of war.” It is rooted in private experience but opens out to touch and embrace the others.

Thanh Thao’s work is driven by a dark imperative, an urgent need to remind, lest we forget. These are poems of intense, sometimes excruciating, disquieting beauty. The project of memory, of redeeming the past becomes especially urgent in new Vietnam, where capitalist developments are rapidly demolishing the world and beliefs that veterans like Thanh Thao fought for. His is a poetry of witness, of bearing witness to the sufferings of those who have no voice to express their sufferings. It is also a poetry of survival, a poetry that can recover a sense of beauty in the most barbaric and nightmarish experiences. Thanh Thao is a necessary poet for Vietnam and for our time.