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 Lewes, 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.

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.

The Circus

by Ken Bolton

Wakefield Press

2010

ISBN: 9781862546899

REVIEWED BY RAE DEE JONES

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

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

            Living brilliantly: outside –

            the green/   so blue, & the green

            is so bright  & the wall it is clinging to

            is totally in shadow   but only just

            because the 3 small horizontal lines   /of

            louvres/ have caught the midday sun,

            though they jut out only a little, & shine

            a brilliant white   a painterly tour de force like

            3 single white strokes of a loaded brush ….

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

            I want an insanity

            to enclose me   :a quote/ from Robbe-Grillet’s

            The House of Assignation: Lady Eva  “he will

            be driven mad   if she continues to give in

            to his phantasies”   I want that – that particular

            arse    slowly

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

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

            He hums the great Dion di Mucci tune.

            The Wanderer,

            Thinks of Christopher Brennan, a man killed by a tram on his way home.

            Rummages in his straw.

            He raises his foot,

            Looks for the syringe,

            But cannot find it.

            Good.

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

            When I read that doggone letter, I

            Sat right down and cried: She said now daddy I hate to leave you,

            But I’m in love with another guy –

            Da-doot-doot doot,da doot-doot doot!

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

In the dancer’s caravan Regina Xo is naked astride a man. It is Giorgio Verzotti,      

Olivia’s fiancé.

            Should this be happening?! Moments later Olivia comes in.

            Giorgio! She is glad to see him and soon is in the same position. See, she laughs,

            Mine are much bigger than Regina’s. Regina smiles – she is making a pot of tea.

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

            He lived for danger, Andrea told Gina and Tomaz.   

            That modified tank, … Giorgio began. His dream

            Was to dive in and disappear. It needed an awful lot of plumbing.

–         Secret passages, side tanks … 

Once he dived and much of the water had leaked away,

It took a long time to come out.

We thought the trick had worked

And he would ride up on his motorbike, smiling.

He was concussed. Julie Lautone looked in

And he was floating about on top.

Children were impressed.

Man of strength- Man of wonder.

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

            “One of Beckett’s favourite actors,” Attila remarks.

            “Brecht, I think,” says Tomaz.

            It is too stupid and they turn it off. Gina reads the men their star signs.

            The elephant looks at a mouse near the caravan’s tyre.

But he does not really see it. He is thinking about Peter Lorre’s lines in   Casablanca–

“Rick, Rick, you’ve got to save me!”

Then he laughs …

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

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.

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