Home After Dark

by Kavita Nandan

USP Press. Fiji

ISBN 9789820109216

Reviewed by SUMEDHA IYER

Early in Kavita Nandan’s Home After Dark, the protagonist Kamini meets V.S. Naipaul and tells him that A House for Mr. Biswas is her favourite book. He asks her where she is from; when she says she is Fijian, he simply says “Ah, that’s why you like the book.” This congruence between Fiji and Trinidad, two island nations that were former British colonies, is deeply frustrating to Kamini: “Yet we knew very little about the specifics of each other’s lives, content to exist in our separate worlds.” The protagonist’s deliberation on the specificity of postcolonial experience seems indicative that this is something that Nandan’s novel aspires to.

If J.M Coetzee’s assertion that “all autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography” is true, then it finds especial resonance with Home After Dark. The novel reads as though there is a lot of the author’s own life being traced out in the narrative. On paper, there are elements of Nandan’s life that are in common with the novel’s protagonist. Nandan has spent her life between Australia, Fiji and India, and she is also an academic. But the synonymy between Nandan’s biographic details and the narrative plotted out for Kamini are not of themselves interesting. Nandan’s storytelling skill relies on the weaving together of various cultural, personal and geographic spaces and endowing them with engaging detail, and she does this well.

The initial chapters lay a strong foundation for the rest of the novel, and the novel begins with an arresting incident: Kamini recounts choking on her own mother’s milk as a child in Delhi. Ironically, her rescuer in this instance turns out to be the very same man who takes her father hostage in Fiji eighteen years later.  The details of her father’s imprisonment during the Fijian coup of 1987 are skilfully woven together with the young Kamini’s intimate experiences of home and anxieties about her life outside of it. There is a lot for Kamini to take in. The violence that her father is subject to in the coup is painful to contemplate, and is coupled with the unnerving distractedness of her family in light of the situation. Nandan cites Yeats to capture the sudden reality that is thrust upon Kamini as she enters adulthood: ‘the centre cannot hold ‘. In describing the new found chaos of Kamini’s life, Nandan makes implicit the previous part of this line in Yeats’ poem  – ‘things fall apart;’.

After Kamini’s formative experiences are described the main story arc is introduced. The middle thirds of the novel mainly moves between her relationship with her family and her relationship with her Australian husband, Gavin. When she moves to Fiji she is happy to be among her relatives, and finds a comfortable place in their lives. Within these familial spaces she is able to sift through the various pieces of her past. These parts of the novel make for deeply satisfying reading. Nandan deftly draws small incidents so they have symbolic significance: “If I saw a coconut lying at the bottom of one of the trees, I called out to my father so he could slice through the husk to reach its heart… I was eager to replace my small island for the vast unknown world. But only when I thought I had the luxury of possession.” This movement outwards from metaphor to broader postcolonial implications gives the story specificity in the nexus of place, culture and experience.

Ultimately though, the novel moves to a crescendo along the narrative lines of her relationship with Gavin, and for this reason it warrants some unpacking. The reason why Kamini moves to Fiji is primarily for an academic position, and she brings Gavin with her. However, Kamini’s relationship with Gavin is far from ideal.  The emotional isolation that her relationship with Gavin threatens to cause is brought in contrast with the support that she gets from her family.  Gavin has been unemployed and suffers from depression. After initially being enamoured with the newness of Fijian life and the sights of Suva he becomes bored, and his unhappiness becomes even more apparent.

The confidence of Nandan’s lyrical prose and weighty metaphor gives way to a different style of writing. Nandan’s rendering of Gavin is still highly detailed, but they are also matter-of-fact, more quotidian than flowery: “[h]e had packed two pairs of shorts, three T-shirts, a Sydney FC jumper, a grey cosmetic bag with toothpaste smeared on the zipper, his medications and the adoption folder in its special plastic casing.” But these unadorned descriptions are no less interesting than the lush imagery that Nandan deploys in relation to her family and past. Nandan simultaneously sketches Gavin’s low emotional ebb and Kamini’s ambivalence towards him. Revulsion, pathos and love move together with breathtaking economy as Nandan describes the inner world of Kamini and Gavin. Although less assured than Nandan’s writing on Kamini’s family and childhood, Kamini and Gavin’s fragile emotional world is just as engaging.

The book ends a little hurriedly; Nandan ties together the loose ends of the Fiji-oriented plot too quickly as she tries to circle back to the themes that she began with. It is as if the novel has taken a long walk in a particular direction before trying to rush back to the point of origin along the very same route. The novel could be a little longer; after taking the time to go along with Nandan’s unpacking of various geographic places, relationships and cultural spaces it isn’t unreasonable for the novel to take a little more time to reach its conclusion.

But the slightly abrupt ending is not nearly enough to take away from the joy of reading Home After Dark. As Nandan deftly ties together various aspects of Kamini’s reality – the everyday, the intimate, the cultural and political – what comes through is an imaginatively complete novel that is greater than the sum of its parts.
 
SUMEDHA IYER is a PhD candidate in English at the University of New South Wales. Her thesis examines works of contemporary Australian fiction in terms of multiculturalism and transnation.

Stories of Sydney

Ed by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Seizure

ISBN 978-1-921134-26-5

Reviewed by REBECCA ALLEN

Soaring white-tiled sails curve up into the cloudless sky. Below, foamy tails of boats criss-cross that famous stretch of liquid blue. Waves glitter in the summer sun. A post-card city.

Sydney shows off the same made-up face in thousands of glossy snapshots sold down at Circular Quay. Though irrefutably beautiful, there’s no denying this iconic image we so love to promote is, in fact, a fundamentally two-dimensional representation of a much more complex, multi-faceted reality.    

The anthology Stories of Sydney, (2014), turns away from such stereotypes in favour of a more diverse – and authentic – representation of our city. A collaboration between Seizure and SWEATSHOP, two dynamic, community-minded literary platforms, the collection brings together a culturally varied group of fifteen published and emerging writers. The ratio of five writers from inner Sydney to ten from the Western suburbs was deliberately chosen to better represent the geographical spread of the city, and lend a voice to writers from migrant backgrounds. As a consequence, Stories of Sydney offers a refreshingly contemporary perspective of the chaotic sprawl that this cosmopolitan metropolis has become.

The anthology opens with Sanaz Fatouhi’s “Ceydny”, the moving story of two Iranians who meet by chance at Campsie Woolworths in Sydney’s west. While the narrator has lived there for fifteen years, Ceydny the refugee has only recently fled persecution in Tehran, seeking, without success, a romanticised Sydney where “‘I would wake up everyday and see the Opera House’” (9). The poverty and isolation he meets, however, convinces him that this is far from “‘the city of my dreams’” and it is this sense of deep disillusionment and displacement that leads him to determine that Sydney is a “‘place where I have to construct myself’” (9). He thus adopts the name Ceydny, a deliberate misspelling which conveys the way in which his sense of self is defined by a rejection of the glamourised Sydney and shaped, instead, by the personal reality of his new life in Campsie: “‘Sydney with an S with its perfection is not my city. Ceydny, the way I write it, is the city I live in’” (9).  

The fourteen stories that follow echo this idea, making Fatouhi’s story the ideal opening piece. The concept of the intersection between the self and the city, identity and place, is explored in all the texts, albeit through different thematic lenses. For example, experiences of growing up in Sydney are examined in the childhood snapshots of George Toseki’s “The Primary Years” as well as Sophia Barnes’ “Fellow Travellers”, while Sunil Badami questions what it means to be a middle-aged Sydneysider in “Swings and Roundabouts”. Differently, passing time and the role of memory in our relationship with the city is the focus of both Benny Davis’ “Two Wheels” and P. M. Newton’s “Aqua”. The importance of family as well as cultural ties and obligations also features at the centre of many of the stories – in “The 25th Paragon of Filial Piety” by Amanda Yeo and “Chrysoula” by Susie Ahmad, to name but two. Sexuality, gender, class and disability appear as other key concerns, while realism – often of the grittier variety – dominates as the overarching stylistic choice, lending unity to the anthology as a whole.      

On second reading, certain pieces stand out as particular highlights.

In “Chrysoula”, Ahmad represents the clash between cultures in Sydney’s suburbs to comedic effect. The Muslim Lebanese narrator is nagged by her Greek Orthodox beautician Chrysoula about getting married: “‘Settle down,’ is what I would like to say, but then that’s exactly what people want me to do, because I’m such a wild Lebo who travels to New York and wears vintage clothing and prefers a burrito to a falafel” (103). The short story parodies cultural stereotypes, particularly through Chrysoula’s grand generalisations as she advises against marrying a Muslim: “‘They won’t let you eat bacon…’ I hear her take a big breath, like that would be a deal breaker for her” (109). While the narrator feels compelled to yell, “‘Pigs eat their own shit’”, in defence of her culture’s conventions, she can’t help but project her own assumptions on to Chrysoula’s community in turn, reflecting on how if she was to marry a Greek, “I would rather a Greek from Earlwood. Greeks in Earlwood are taller, speak better English, don’t wear G-Star jeans and go to Newtown Church” (106). The story also underlines the conflicting identities within the Muslim community, as the narrator is careful to differentiate herself from Dima, a fellow TAFE student and “your typical ‘Look at me, I’m a real Muslim because I wear a hijab’ girl from Bankstown” (108). The narrator is, instead, an Alawite Muslim from Marrickville: “We don’t wear the hijab and we don’t have fancy mosques that take up the whole street. Some of us like to drink champagne at weddings and take Johnny Walker for a belly dance… I think Dima is in training to become one of the seventy two virgins” (108-9). Beneath the humorous overtones we see a Sydney that is chaotically multicultural yet curiously fractured, with neighbourhoods typecast as cultural subdivisions and a narrator who fiercely defines her sense of self not only by religion and culture, but also by a circumscribed geographical location.

In “More Handsome than a Monkey”, Peter Polites gives us a much more sombre perspective on Sydney – his modern noir piece exposing the city’s underbelly of drug-fuelled corruption through a distinctive, clipped narratorial voice. Polites’ Sydney is claustrophobic, the narrator having only just kicked his drug addiction and “Moved out of the single-brick and fibro shack of my parents’ and into some shoddily built high-density apartment” amid “canyons of flats” (142, 148). He passes his “short and shitty” days in “purgatory”, working at the local bowls club where “Viet launderers rode us … Black moula went through slots and transgressions went over shoulders” (142, 143). Suspended in a monotonous in-between space, his life becomes a routine of “Getting home late. Sleeping in late. Waking washing ironing work” (157). As a consequence, when a new face appears at the bar he becomes smitten, attracted to “Nice Arms Pete” by the alternate world he symbolises: “A wheat-fed kid I could see swimming in billabongs near a farmhouse. Sandy hair, skin smooth but slightly sun-aged. You could see clean living on him” (144). As the narrator’s feelings grow, so Pete’s interest in him wanes, and it isn’t until he travels to Orange to visit Pete’s hometown that his heartbreak takes effect. Beneath the “Vistas of green” and “Quarter-acre blocks and red roofs”, he realises there is the same “old racket” going on; that, in effect, the countryside is as equally tainted as the city: “Import the labour. Get a cut from the farmers looking for cheap workers. Dealers kept contact. Selling the farm workers drugs. A bloke married to a nurse mumbled about overdose spikes” (159, 158). Polites frames the narrative with a sense of self-searching. In the opening lines the narrator reflects that, from his mother’s point of view, “I was her thirty-three-year-old that moved out of home… A substitute for the love of her husband, someone to cook for, clean for and complain about,” while at the story’s conclusion he realises that “To Nice Arms Pete I was trade with lamb eyes and something to pass the time. His beer stooge, occasional root and sometimes driver” (141, 159). The narrator is left bereft, having found no connection to country or city, and, lacking any clear sense of his own self, he slips back into a drug-induced haze.

Reading Newton’s “Aqua”, we find a totally different representation of Sydney – one that anchors the city within the historically framed debate surrounding the Vietnam War. Sophia, the story’s narrator, is deeply attached to North Sydney Olympic pool through the memories it triggers of a happy, unified family before the death of her teenage brother in Vietnam. Revisiting the pool for aquarobics classes, she finds Luna Park’s “round-eyed stare fringed in thick black plastic lashes” is “a taunting reminder” of happier times (195). With a child’s tone of wonderment, she remembers night-time swimming carnivals there, the “ferries and trawlers lit up like houses… the city lights twinkl[ing] like every Christmas tree I could ever imagine” and carefree summers spent “Dog paddling across [the pool], bumping into Mum’s thighs… clinging to Dad’s back, watching Johno dropping straight as a bullet’s flight from the very top platform of the diving board” (190, 196). Nostalgic reminiscence of these pre-war holidays is contrasted to memories of later summers, spent at an altogether different location: the Marrickville army depot. As the arguments increase between a mother who wants to “Save our Sons” and a father who encourages his own son to enlist, Sophia finds “The army depot in Marrickville becomes a regular destination” for protests (202). Her mother takes her and their placards “to stand silent in the sun as parents give their sons up to the army with varying degrees of pride and fear” (203). The fracturing of her family’s collective identity mirrors the socio-political breakdown of the times, underscored by the tragic death of her brother in Phuoc Tuy province. Although haunted by the image of his drowning, (“the last thing his mates see is his gun, his fingers still wrapped around it before they both disappear”), Sophia’s visit to North Sydney Olympic also recalls those summers Johno spent diving from the tower. The images of drowning and diving coming together as an interesting parallel; one horribly inescapable; the other marked by a sense of agency, of fun (208). As the title suggests, water plays a major role in the narrative – reflected, on a stylistic level, by the fluid temporal shifts between past and present: “I leave the four-year-old girl… and feel my body reframing itself from memory into the shape of me” (193-4). While the pathos of the narrator’s loss is apparent, a sense of release is also powerfully evoked as she moves her “arms in time to the Aqua teacher’s instructions, not far, not fast, just enough for the muscles and memories to loosen” (201). Revisiting the pool could thus be read as a type of catharsis – a way of reconciling her adult self to the traumas of her child self, and, perhaps, a way of ultimate acceptance.  

While it must be said some stories are not as strong as others, lacking as compelling a narrative or as memorable a conclusion, Stories of Sydney is, as a whole, a unique offering that explores our contemporary city in all its diversity, aiming to bridge what the editors describe as the “the divide between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ Sydney” (248). As readers, we come away with a greater sense of the ‘complete’ city, how we define ourselves as Sydneysiders and what it mean to live in Sydney today.  

REBECCA ALLEN is a freelance editor living in Sydney, with an Honours degree in French language and literature. Her writing has appeared in The Australian and Honi Soit. She has edited Hermes, the Sydney University Student Union’s literary journal, interned as part of Mascara’s prose fiction editorial team and continues to volunteer for Contrappasso Magazine, a journal for international writing.

Drones and Phantoms

by Jennifer Maiden

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-9221-46-72-4

Reviewed by MELINDA BUFTON

Jennifer Maiden’s Drones and Phantoms is her 19th poetry collection, the most recent in a list of titles published with marked regularity since the early 1970s. Her work is frequently noted to contain recurring themes that circle violence and war, her bio on The Poetry Foundation website neatly summarising this as occurring ‘…through multiple voices, including those of public figures, family members and fictional or mythical characters’(1). In Drones and Phantoms this technique is the defining logic. The poetry adopts the voices in order to disrupt, and to decouple expectation from experience; from the expectations a reader might have regarding the treatment of violent themes, right through to the expectations of reading contemporary poetry (the jump-cut effect of a conversational multiverse that tantalisingly suggests the famous can access a kind of secret mentoring scheme). The question of exactly who is speaking is fantastically fraught; the question itself is an elastic and provoking device that never lets up, is eerily relentless. The other side of this – also stretching each poem to its fullest tension – is who are the poems speaking to?

‘Uses of..’ is a motif used in many of the poem titles throughout the book, in most cases with less macabre resonance than others: for example, ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Sparrows’, ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Silence’, ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Judith Wright’. The recurrence of the phrase suggests that the elements housed by each poem are interchangeable nodes for the purposes of a well-built poem. Alternatively, each is a selection of sharp highlights taken from of our world that require actual (almost verbal, real-time) response. In ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Dismemberment’, the reader is offered a selection of narratives that illustrate the 2012 killing and dismemberment/autopsy of Marius the giraffe at Copenhagen Zoo (it was widely reported that this took place in order to comply with the zoo’s policy of not retaining animals unsuitable for use in breeding programs. Subsequently, zoo staff dismembered and fed parts of the giraffe’s carcass to other zoo animals in a public viewing area of the zoo, which was described by the zoo as an educational opportunity for children to understand anatomy.)

In this poem, there is no easy path through these ‘Uses of’, although poetic consideration is given to what players in this tableau have offered as moral, scientific and political reasoning that underpin the act: ‘The team dissecting Marius look as proud as nurses’ (p 65), ‘On the internet, Danes attack those mourning Marius saying their priorities should be human or the improvement of animal species’ (p 65), ‘Looking up “Bestiality in Denmark” on the search engine I found that there really are many successful working brothels which provide animals for the customers’ (p 63). And, just before the end, musing that Marius must have been relieved at the offer of rye bread so early in the morning, ‘That is as close to grief I will go on this’ (p 66).

Should we as the readers, go closer? Is that what is being asked? The work seems to say ‘I will not pretend to be impartial, and you will not pretend to ignore’. This is perhaps a very modern blueprint for how political poems can work; and by work, I mean leaving a stain in your thoughts for many days to come, because when the insufferable is jammed up against the absurd it must be unknotted carefully. Which is to say, the lines ask us how we will consider the close juxtaposition of bestiality – and the faint suggestion that this is particularly popular with the Danish – with the idea that ‘..Only the best med students carve cadavers’, this latter phrase preceded by the directive ‘You should remember, too…’. We are being told we need to consider all aspects, and not be knee-jerk – as by a patient teacher – while a patrician tone slides in from the side: ‘Only the best med students’ (emphasis mine) contains echoes of other societal markers, such as class, or authority within society. This in turn may subtly remind the reader to ask questions regarding who makes the decisions in our worlds; who is speaking, and who are they speaking to? That this has been achieved with poetic shifting voices rather than overt statements of protest or defence illustrates the way in which this densely-packed poetics operates.

Adoption of voices within this work is overwhelmingly conversational in tone (irrespective of the speaking position or adoption of voice/s). The conversational language also operates as a bait-and-switch mechanism. The neat trick of here-now-Queen-Victoria-but-wait-Port-Moresby-Tony-Abbott…? (‘Victoria and Tony 3: Woods and Feathers’ p 26). We don’t (most of us) know the political figures featured so pervasively in this work, but we are familiar with ideas of them. In the past, perhaps we would call this ‘use of popular culture’. In Drones and Phantoms it allows us a moment of scene-setting before the dialogue and musings of politics, war and human nature begin in at us.
 

Jane Austen woke up in smoky Sydney.
Tanya Plibersek was on TV, and in
her lounge room watching herself, a form
of self-consciousness Jane thought might
always prove promising for wisdom
(p50)

 
Maiden has previously indicated that this is their intended function, stating ‘They [the famous or known figures] are recognisable entities with a cluster of connotations and derivations around them, that the reader knows who they are and what to respond to’(2).

It is exactly the right thing to do, in this age when poetry has need to be heard in a noisy world. Subjective (poetic) voices fit with the zeitgeist; everybody has an opinion – or not even, more often fragments of such a thing – broadcast amongst the myriad platforms allowed us. This poetry speaks to us with its assured voice(s) of reason(s) but relentlessly ask us to step up to the stage with it. It is as wise as casual as (our collective idea of) Helen Mirren, yet repeatedly suggests we be mindful of attempting to pin things down:
 

In what seems neither simile
nor metaphor but maybe economy
of a proud if whimsical nature
The Good Spirit of the Universe will re-use
sounds and patterns.
(p 59)

 
Maiden’s statement that the reader knows ‘who’ they’re dealing with when presented with famous names is reassuring and the device can operate this way – there is no denying that a familiar figure provides an entry point – however, it would be too neat if it were as translucent as all that (and, it could be argued wouldn’t be poetry without textual layers present, at a variety of depths).

To take this further in self-reflexivity, another feature of Drones and Phantoms is references to other poets, who are not exclusively contemporaries of Maiden. At the centre of the collection lies a poem entitled ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O’Hara’. It takes us through a porthole of recollections of being compared to other poets and O’Hara – without having yet read him – to an extended conversation with O’Hara on a twilit New York evening in a different paradigm. The ‘Maiden’ voice says:
 

‘Someday’,
I’d say, ‘I would like to read you, but
of course now there is my current worry
that influence might be retrospective,
and that I’ll recognise your hand
In everything I’ve written, anyway’.
(p 35)

 
Having also been compared to O’Hara before having read O’Hara, I am temporarily taken aback; inadvertently joining her in this category is puzzlingly good, despite it being nothing more than coincidence. (The prism deepens as I read on; Maiden has written an Anne of Green Gables poem. I had never seen one of these before, but I’d written one…)

It’s an indication of the effectiveness of the work that I find myself thinking ‘What does this mean, this breadcrumb trail of messages of me?’ Pushing aside my own worries about plagiarism-in-advance/recognition-of-influence, it seems as though being somehow interpolated into the text is the natural outcome of being interrogated – indirectly – by its many voices.

Although it could be argued that only poets will feel a jolt of recognition at being compared to poets you haven’t read (and the awkward conundrum this generates), and that the poems featuring Australian politicians will have more resonance for those living in Australia, in the end – that is, at the point of writing yourself in – this doesn’t matter. Drones and Phantoms is a compendium of philosophical dioramas that, through its determined call-to-think and multi-dimensional ethical puzzles, goes way beyond any necessity of knowing the characters’ names.
 
 
Citations

1. The Poetry Foundation, accessed on September 21, 2015.
2. Maiden, J. Interview by Jason Steger, Sydney Morning Herald, January 28, 2014

 
 
MELINDA BUFTON is the author of Girlery (Inken Publisch), and PhD candidate in the nonfictionLab at RMIT University. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Southerly, Rabbit, The Age and Cordite.

The Blind Man With The Lamp

by Tasos Leivaditis (trans. N N Trakakis)

Denise Harvey

ISBN 978-960-7120-32-8

Reviewed by ANDY JACKSON

Ever since its emergence, the prose poem has been a uniquely potent embodiment of paradox. While a poem, arguably, could be defined as the literary form which declares itself to be “not prose”, a prose poem has it both ways. It moves with the energy of poetry, yet fills the page, withholding from the reader the relief of the line-break pause. No wonder spending any prolonged period of time within this space tends towards claustrophobia and anxiety. Poet Gretchen Henderson has written, “the prose poem, boxed as it is, for me seems to embody a want of movement – physical, aural or otherwise, made apparent by the limitations and liminality of its boxed-in body” (353).

In The Blind Man With The Lamp, Tasos Leivaditis takes up the haunting paradoxical temperament of the prose poem, and carries it into a register of existential fatigue and disquiet. The poems were originally published in 1983, when the poet was 61 years old and in declining health. Yet these precise and fluid translations from the Greek by N N Trakakis – the first English translation of a complete collection by Leivaditis – emphasise that while the biological kernel of these poems can hardly be denied, the book clearly emerges in the shadow of failed political visions. Behind it lies a questioning not only of political dogma but of humanity itself.

The Greece of Leivaditis’s childhood and adult life was dominated by war, economic depression, and ongoing internal conflict, the nation for many years subject to military dictatorship, ostensible democracy returning only in 1974. The Left which held Leivaditis’s sympathies was subject to ongoing and ruthless persecution. In 1948, the poet himself was arrested and imprisoned for three years. His poetry evolved from its modernist and surrealist beginnings, through overtly polemic political writing, to the poetry we find in The Blind Man With The Lamp – philosophical and religious in tone, yet wrenched with yearning and fatigue.

The poems inhabit a profound disillusionment, yet always leaning over the precipice rather than falling into it. The opening poem begins, “It was night and I had made the greatest decision of the century – I would save humanity – but how?”; then the titular blind man with the lamp appears. “’My dear brother’, I said to him, ‘God has sent you’, / and with zeal we both got down to work…”. The final poem of the book, “Lethal Game” has Leivaditis wake into a room “with the blinding light”, playing a seemingly endless game of cards, the stakes of which appear to be life itself. Suddenly he is alone in an abandoned and ruined city. “’Sweet mother of Christ’, I whispered, ‘at last all is finished. / Now I can start over again’.” At this point, we are back with the “blind man” – to my mind an unfortunate metaphorising of an embodied condition, yet emblematic of Leivaditis’s sense of loss and inevitability.

It comes as no surprise, then, to read in the excellent introduction by his translator Trakakis that in the middle of his career Leivaditis published a collection of “Kafkaesque” short stories. His poems invariably begin in the middle, with narrative momentum and a growing sense of confusion and dread, yet also with a kind of wonder. Perhaps analogous to the ghazal form, they are energised by an intense desire that can never be consummated, or rather they are fulfilled only in their own frustrated travel through the maze which has no exit.

While they are prose poems, the usual “box” shape of the form invariably breaks off, usually at the end, reminiscent of the form of a written letter. Some are truncated to the brevity of the aphorism – “I never would have imagined that so many days go to make up so short a life” (“The Deceptions of the Calendar”). Even the longer poems are shot through with long dashes, and drift off at the end with ellipses, either actual or implied. Leivaditis conjures the existential texture of moments of transition and frustration. Here is “Wayfarers” in its entirety –

         We are those who have been on their way – we never had a place of our own – where  are we going? where
are we coming from? On occasion we stay somewhere for a while, but
Fate quickly remembers us again and we leave.
         And only on occasion, at the time when dusk falls and the few violets shudder amongst
the hedges, we are overwhelmed by a strange awe, a feeling as though we are returning to the
place from which we had been forever banished.
         Or perhaps the twilight is our only homeland…

The liminal is a recurring trope of the book. Time and again, Leivaditis returns to images of dusk, night, outcasts, doors, dreams and silence. Though what is perhaps most striking about The Blind Man With The Lamp is how this sense of potential and inevitable night is combined with an acute theological yearning. Leivaditis seems to recognise that an entirely new world is not possible. His God seems to dwell, suspended, in absence.

I spent much of my teenage years and early adulthood in thrall to Christian evangelicalism, so I appreciate the existential and social engine behind the religious impulse. As time went on, though, the concepts and structures became transparent and suspect. I was left with only a kind of awe at the ineffability of life, and a sense of grief at injustice and suffering. This is the origin of Leivaditis’s poetry. Its paradox is that it sustains a deep piety hand in hand with its despair.

I should emphasise, though, that The Blind Man With The Lamp is no monochrome paean to resignation. These poems read as merciless confrontations with the real, but they are essentially elegies for existence. Leivaditis reminds me here of another master of the prose poem, Franz Wright – both exhibit a kind of cruel tenderness. In “The Birth”, Leivaditis enters the room of a crying man, who points out a crucifix on the wall. “’You see’, he said to me, ‘compassion is born’. I then bowed my head and I too cried, / for centuries and centuries would go by and we would not have anything more beautiful to say than that”.

In his short and potent book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Franco Berardi asserts

Only if we’re able to disentangle the future… from the traps of growth and investment, will we find an escape from the vicious subjugation of life, wealth, and pleasure to the financial abstraction of semio-capital. The key to this disentanglement may be found in a new form of wisdom which harmonizes with exhaustion. (80-1)

I wonder if perhaps we will only survive (and reclaim the pleasure that is possible) by listening to the body – our own, others’, and the body of the earth. These bodies are tired of the impossible unceasing growth that is demanded of them. Leivaditis’s poetry emerges out of this fatigue, this bodily disavowing of the current paradigm. It sees clearly the dilemma of the present era, yet it also sees the pitfalls of our innumerable attempts to resolve this dilemma. In “The City”, “the protest march had just finished and the police officers were erasing an entire revolution that was written on the walls…” For Leivaditis, poetry is a place where we may hear God “walking heavily inside my words, eager to surmount the limits of the world” (“Conversations”). But it is also “another form of dying” (“Unknown Debts”), a reconciliation with the irreconcilable.

Citations

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles, CA : Semiotext(e),   2012.
Henderson, Gretchen. “Poetics / ‘Exhibits.’” Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. El    Paso, TX : Cinco Puntos Press, 2011. 353–5. Print.
 
 
ANDY JACKSON’s poetry collection Among the Regulars  was shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize.  He won the 2013 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize with the thin bridge, and his latest collection is Immune Systems (poems and ghazals on India and medical tourism). Andy has performed at literary events and arts festivals in Australia, India, USA and Ireland.  He writes about the poetry of bodily difference at amongtheregulars.wordpress.com

Captives

by Angela Meyer

ISBN 978-0-9875401-2-6

Inkerman & Blunt Publishers 

Reviewed by EUGEN BACON

The photographs, when they come out, look just like Victorian-era death portraits, only my subjects are still alive. (15)

Noir graphics on the front cover of Captives foreshadow light and shade, life and death. A reader might approach this book of flash fiction with curiosity, wondering if these themed fragments are for everyone. But it is doubtable that one needs to find a penchant for the short form to locate these stories as windows to the real world. Clever harmony, or discord, in the text invites this reader to what author Sandra Horn calls a suggestion of more, a glimpse or hint of a wider story (2015).

Angela Meyer’s compilation, her first book of fiction, is disciplined. There is thought, attention and restraint in its writing. It is this restraint, Meyer’s confidence in the reader—their ability to decipher—that makes this body of micro-fictions compelling. The prose is uncomplicated, taut at its best, poignant. It transverses times, invites the reader to years 1883, 1918, 1934, 1971, to yesterday, then and now.

Captives opens with a pocket-sized epic, ‘The day before the wedding’ (3), where a bride-to-be runs onto the marsh, sees her lover through a hood of dew, halts: his gun is trained on her, not the ducks:

Bang! Another duck pivoted sideways and spun towards the ground. That was her cousin’s doing. Still her love had the gun trained on her, and she stood, and even when he lowered it and his expression revealed play, a joke, she knew she’d seen his true face.

This opener sets the assemblage’s tone. True to the short story, the narratives have the ability to ‘throw the reader straight into a world, and pull them out again just as quickly, leaving them asking questions, and constantly thinking’ (Canlin 2015). Aligned with the title Captives, the collection’s characters are incarcerated in some physical, physiological or psychological condition. The reader encounters Miranda’s flighty mind in ‘Uproar’ (17):

A pregnant woman stared at Miranda’s orange jumpsuit. It was what He had told her to wear today. Miranda imagined the train was a rocket and made the sound of thrusters between her teeth. That way it would get her to the hospital faster.

‘Are you lost?’ asked the pregnant woman.

Miranda wasn’t sure.
She said, ‘They don’t call it Bedlam anymore, you know.’

Each titbit—longer ones exist—offers insight into the human nature or condition, obeys a propensity to confound a reader’s expectations, as author Paul March-Russell suggests a short story might (2009, p. viii). A finger of chill touches careless memory in ‘Thirteen tiles’ (28) where reminiscence compounds a man’s entrapment in a windowless room, a rectangular one. Suspense snuggles with idiosyncrasy in ‘Foreign bodies’ (31) where small-shouldered, nondescript Kate asserts authority in a simple yet complex act of swallowing: objects. Slowly she bulks to a grim conclusion in the women’s cells. Then the reader cannot help but share the childless woman’s longing in ‘Empty cradle’ (39):

Mostly the desire was so great I knew I had to hide it from myself, but seeing Isabella’s bloody bairn crying hotly in the morning had wrenched me like a neep out of the ground.

Insight arrives in staccato, like the score of horror movie music, in ‘Rock, paper, severance’ (74), a story that invites the reader to a sense of foreboding of which the hitchhiking runway is yet unaware:

He didn’t normally pick up redheads. But her skin was pearly, almost translucent, like the brucite. He put a rock in her hand … ‘I’m tired,’ she said, and mimed sleeping.
I pulled over for her and she won’t even have a chat, he thinks, glancing at a dark blue vein across her chest.  

The collection is partitioned into seven thematically linked subsets: On/off, Up/down, In/out, With/without, Here/there, Then/now and Until. Meyers uses a recurring motif of conflict, aloneness, knowing, unknowing. She offers a strong sense of person, of place … Her flash fiction is set around the world; there is, for example, Norwegian ‘The north’ (4) with its ore currency or Scottish ‘Highland pickers’ (35), with its character McCulloch and his dialogue: They’d nae get a hoold of tha’.

Speaking to the subsets, On/off appears to be about tragic knowing, perhaps a dawning or resignation … Ol’ Henry in ‘Brand new’ (10) is a startling find with his ‘permanent present tense’ (Corkin 2013):

He looks out the window, his mind winding back, moving on. But his body is still turned toward me, radiating warmth.

Up/down pays attention to ‘the suicides’, the lost—all people—even the wrecked, like the woman in ‘The old man’s dog’ (18), a mongrel bitch. In/out bears themes of being between worlds; for instance, ‘One of the crew’ (23) portrays corporeal presence yet psychological float, while ‘Amsterdam’ (25) depicts a narrator’s solitude in a world filled with strangers. With/without places emphasis on the fragility of being … Like the narrator and the ‘missing’ little boy in ‘A cage went in search of a bird’ (41):

When the boy rolls over in the night he takes the blanket with him, locking it down with surprisingly strong arms. It’s the only thing that annoys me about him. He’s been in my room for three days … He doesn’t ask for much.

I didn’t take him—kidnap or abduct him, I mean. He followed me. 

Here/there is a backdrop to living and dying; presence and absence, a person’s ‘episodes’ … Then/now is mesmeric with in-the-moment stories, reminiscence stories, engagement with the fringes of society. In the heart of normality, the reader is suddenly plunged into the abnormality of a truth (such as infidelity) … The closing section Until is a promise, even if it arrives in the face of apocalypse, or a child in the train window, or the blackness of space, or a blue-white current of death that leaves a skeleton, reaching …

Even as longer pieces like ‘Nineteen’ (81) could be clipped or tightened the writing stays full of light and darkness. It startles. It prompts the reader to reflect, to cross-examine existence. Meyer captures the everyday with conflict and tension, with a subtle interrogation of life and death. Some of her stories are potent but forgettable with stronger distraction. Others like ‘The day before the wedding’ linger, summon your mind to constant thinking as you lie in bed at dusk awaiting the nudge of sleep: ‘they come to visit for a while, take you somewhere you didn’t expect and then put you back where you started before you’d even realised you were gone’ (Ariss 2015). The reader is more than a witness; Captives invites them to enter this space, and be present.

CITATIONS

Ariss, Paul 2015, http://www.cutalongstory.com/authors/paul-ariss/1363.html (accessed 6 June 2015)
Canlin, Alistair 2015, http://www.cutalongstory.com/authors/alistair-canlin/1246.html (accessed 6 June 2015)
Corkin, Suzanne 2013, Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H. M, Basic Books
CUT 2015, http://www.cutalongstory.com (accessed 6 June 2015)
Horn, Sandra 2015, http://www.cutalongstory.com/authors/sandra-horn/1387.html (accessed 6 June 2015)
March-Russell, Paul 2009, The Short Story: An Introduction, Edinburgh University Press
Permanent present tense 2013, ‘Permanent present tense by Suzanne Corkin’, http://permanentpresenttense.com (accessed 6 June 2015)
Rintoul, Don 2015, http://www.cutalongstory.com/authors/don-rintoul/1355.html (accessed 6 June 2015)

EUGEN BACON studied at Maritime Campus – Greenwich University, UK, less than two minutes’ walk from The Royal Observatory of the Greenwich Meridian. Her arty muse fostered itself within the baroque setting of the Old Royal Naval College, and Eugen found herself a computer graduate mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She is now a PhD candidate in Writing by artefact and exegesis at Swinburne University of Technology. Her short story A puzzle piece was shortlisted in the Lightship Publishing (UK) international short story prize 2013 and is published in Lightship Anthology 3.

Almost Sincerely

by Zoe-Norton Lodge

ISBN:978-1-922146-85-4

Giramondo

Reviewed by JESSICA YU

I grew up in a quiet and oftentimes dingy suburb in the outer north-west of Melbourne called Gladstone Park. Whenever someone asks me where I grew up or moved away from, I’m surprised if they have heard of it. What strikes me most is that I have no way of characterizing that suburb to outsiders. Tropes, stereotypes and ridicule are expected but nostalgia has softened my memories of the two-hour commutes to the city; the cat-calls and overt racism from passing cars; the lack of anywhere to go. These memories are the ones that I tell people about because they lack specificity but then there are the ones I don’t talk about: finding a thin, brown snake curled up amongst the tanbark of the playground and dreaming of it for months; the huge and beautiful bike track and the hilly meadows; not being allowed to play tennis with myself against a big concrete wall erected for the purpose in the local basketball courts; an aged stranger saying “Hello” as he pushed on the door of the men’s toilets and I pushed on the door of the ladies; hanging out all day at the local shopping centre for no reason and my brother impressing me beyond measure by buying me twenty-cent potato cakes from the Chicken and Chips shop. They are too private, too specific, too strange and unfinished for small talk.

For the most part, it is this intimate realm of the strangeness in the minute details of suburban life which Zoe Norton Lodge’s new short story collection, Almost Sincerely concerns itself with. Norton Lodge’s quasi-autobiographical/quasi-fictional stories are about the real Sydney suburb of Annandale, “that skinny little suburb that fell asleep between the good suburbs” (Norton Lodge 3). These stories are as quirky, erratic and as plotless as suburban life is apt to be.

Her story, “How Come Why For Did You Call my Friend Denise a Bitch” is beautifully relatable for me in its lack of explanation over the real mysteries of childhood: not how sex works or where the light escapes to at night but why an older girl is mad at you and why she thinks you’ve called her friend Denise a bitch and why her grammar is so bad. It’s also one of the stories in the collection that feels like a well-honed and crafted short story rather than a pleasing dinnertime anecdote told by a verbose and very funny friend who is well-known for exaggerating the facts. The story fits perfectly within the limited point of view of Zoe’s twelve-year old protagonist of the same name who dramatizes this story of her mother bullying a pack of girl bullies who are bullying the Zoe of the story. The humour of this story is not just concentrated within Norton Lodge’s sharp zingers:

Mamma was one strict lady when I was growing up. Playtime at the park directly next to our house was limited to short spurts in high daylight….That’s how I grew up to be in a rare subset of ethnically Mediterranean people with the pallor of jellyfish (41).

The humour is plotted and planned throughout the two major arcs of the story: Zoe and her friends’ wonderment over which of their fathers drinks the most and the accosting of the girl bullies. Neatly, both threads are tied up when, to protect their safety, all of their fathers are ordered by their mothers to supervise their children at the park:

“Mamma made Dad go have his after-work half-bottles of Chardonnay in the park with Sally and Swayne’s dad every day after that. This was pretty good because our Dads were not as good at knowing what we were and weren’t supposed to be doing. Also it made it much easier for us to decide who was the most drunkest every day.” (48).

However, this sense of a nifty conclusion and a steady build-up to the end of this story is absent from some of the other stories in Norton Lodge’s collection.  “Petrol” was, for me, as meaningless and meandering a story as a car ride without a destination. A story detailing the fact that Zoe’s mother drives her from place to place and once sprayed petrol all over herself by accident was simply not enough to hold my attention. It seemed to me one of the stories in her collection that sunk into the realm of dinnertime anecdote rather than well-written and truly entertaining piece of fiction. Like “Hats” and some of the other stories in the collection, “Petrol” gave me the distinct impression of a story that would be funny if the writer was reading them aloud to you but becomes rather bland when read alone at your desk. This is of course, a symptom of many of these stories having been lifted from Norton Lodge’s live event, Story Club, in which she and others tell stories with an oftentimes confessional and humours bent to a live audience. A story like “Hats” about the minutia and everyday absurdity of our lives is exciting when told to friends. However laid flat and bare on the page, the story is nothing special without the intimacy of that storytelling experience to engage us. A reader is, perhaps, more sensitive to when a story lacks tension, momentum or real feeling in the words than a listener who can look the storyteller in the eye and hear all of those things in the trembling of their voice.

In the absence of plotting, Norton Lodge should be commended for her engaging and enigmatic characters and blown-up humour in stories such as “Madame Guillotine and the Imitation Samoan”, “The Birds”. “The Devil Wears a Denim Winter One-Piece”, “The Red Light” and “The Old Curiousity Shops.”  These stories are flat-out funny and so strange and charismatic that they are utterly believable.  “The Birds” made me realize I’ve been telling the story of the place where I grew us all wrong. Norton Lodge knows better than to simply re-write the classist tropes and familiar jokes that have been used to characterize these strange suburbs. Instead she opts for the unfinished and the odd which, as they always seem to in fiction, draw us closer rather than push us away as readers. In the same vein, we realize how many off-smelling untold stories we have inside of ourselves when we read “The Devil Wears a Denim Winter One-Piece.” This hyperbolic tale contains a very funny and memorable villain, LaReine. “The Old Curiousity Shops” is a personal favourite of mine because it articulated perfectly the sadness of the obscure and unpatronised small business on a literal level; while on a metaphorical level, shows that human beings can be totally lacking in self-awareness to great comic effect.

Zoe Norton Lodge’s Almost Sincerely made me think twice about the way I tell stories and the way I listen to them. Norton Lodge probed at the different facets of Annandale the way a scientist probes at microbes in a petri dish. She felt an anthropological curiousity about somewhere that was close to her heart and in doing so, she made me re-consider the ubiquitous for myself. Her humour is not to be taken for granted, it is the result of the kind of extreme close up lens with which she sees and sweats the small stuff in her writing. Almost Sincerely is not without its flaws as a work of fiction but as a book about celebrating and teasing ourselves for our flaws, perhaps Norton Lodge’s is the most fitting way for these stories to be told.

JESSICA YU is the recipient of the Young Writers Innovation Prize 2014 and founding editor of interactive narrativity website, Betanarratives. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been published or are forthcoming in The Best Australian Poems 2014, Cordite, Mascara, The Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings, The Saturday Paper and Award Winning Australian Writing. She is a 2015 recipient of a Grace Marion Glenfern Fellowship as well as a Hot Desker at The Wheeler Centre.

The Told World

by Angela Gardner

Shearsman

ISBN 978-1-84861-371-3

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

Le Serment des Horaces, a large neoclassical oil painting by the French artist Jacques-Louis David painted in 1784, depicts three Roman brothers saluting their father. The father holds their swords out for them so they can then go on to patriotically kill the three brothers Curiatii. 1784 is historical for us, but in 1784 the classical period was their epitome of History. This then is a typical ‘history painting’.

Angela Gardner begins her latest collection of poetry The Told World with a poem that bears this title. ‘History Painting’ is a work that reminded me of David for its lines ‘in the grand scale/what price heroic death, in brushmarks’. Where it differs is in the scene as a whole. Gardner is careful, cagey even, about what her history painting depicts, for it is ambiguous. There is ‘wind in long grass’, ‘children legging it away’, ‘a throat of gold’, but it ends with the lines ‘no more than the usual neurons’ trick/of light’. This conclusion is telling for it indicates to us what the major trope, organizing concept and device are in the book as a whole.

If The Told World is ‘about’ anything it is about light – as deception, as beauty, as thing. There are poems titled ‘Half-Light’, ‘Brightness’, ‘Night’ and ‘Beyond the Footlights’ and that is only in the final section ‘Solo estoy mirando’ alone. There is ‘Morning Light’ and ‘Animal Light’ besides. The eye, sight, looking, optics is there too in various phrases throughout. For example, ‘the one who looks at the mountain’ (‘Landscape with Birdsong’); ‘the tool’s crude optic’ (‘Barely Noticeable I’); ‘pathway beyond the eye’ (‘Pastoral’); ‘double mirrors’ (‘In Double Mirrors’).

Consider ‘Half-Light’ in which Gardner writes:

I’ll start you painting flat. Objects next:
modeling three dimensions until light-gleam
appears on something. Garment folds, soft
dark of velvet, a feather in an angel’s wing.
Distance then to frame – landscape
a mirror – so real birds dash against it.
Face and hands last, unless you count
everything pulled from background by light
and darkness    a stillness as it develops.

At one level this is a directive – how the ‘I’ will start the ‘you’ painting. It is a list of ascending difficulty – objects, garments, feather, landscape to realistic quality, then face and hands. There is the return of ‘i’ as an organizing vowel – light-gleam/something/angel’s wing/everything /light/stillness – that gives a pleasing cadence and sense of circularity too. As a set of instructions it may be useful, but as a pensive thought to be left with we have a comment on ‘half-light’, on what is suggested by the title.

‘Half-Light’ is one of Gardner’s more linear pieces. There are of course concerns other than light and object – sky, body, bird, suburb, landscape, Star Trek, birds, language, pollen, metamorphosis, Gallipoli, GPS, hens, clouds, and birds once again. Indeed, birds as part of the pastoral and anti-pastoral are central. Occasionally one must work hard to ‘uncover’ the meaning of the poem, which may or may not be the point. Difficulty of course has an important place and to slow down and apprehend The Told World is what adds to its painterly quality. Surely we can luxuriate in the medium rather than try to read the message? As she writes, perhaps paradoxically, ‘nothing is settled’ (16).

The Told World exhibits a sort of deformed realism, somewhere between the style of Le Serment de Horaces but not quite like the abstract modernism of say Mark Rothko, or Gardner’s own paintings or even Paul Celan. In other words it occupies a middle ground that discusses the real world but in a language that can be elliptical and understandable rather than transparent or hermetic. It is this disjuncture that I found most interesting and productive for it attests to an ongoing exploration of ideas through different media rather than simply an application of frame in both word and paint. Gardner then knows how to make her materials respond. This is not a simple ekphrastic relationship.

There is only one poem that explicitly references painting, and that is ‘ilium’, which is ‘after Sidney Nolan’s Gallipoli series’. Ostensibly ‘about’ the beach landing, the poems chronicle the relationship of a man and his horse, with the sea and war playing a pivotal role. The poem is balletic in parts (‘bodies ripped in streaming light’/…/…/in limp animal-hipped shallows’), which resonates with Nolan’s bursting shells. Yet there is a stripped back, almost spare quality too, again capturing the spaciousness of Nolan’s series. Read now Gardner’s work seems less like an attempt to build nation, to show bravado and a certain type of emerging masculinity that Nolan’s can be read as, and more as a comment on what war does to people and animals. Her re-working is subtle, effective, resonant and apt for our time.

Painting has always had a different relationship to photography. This has as much to do with the medium as the historical and contemporary language of its exchange. Gardner has a painterly eye and turn of phrase – warmer, longer, slower than realism, more ‘Poetic’ than a photo. We linger in her descriptiveness even as we are not overcome with lyricism or nostalgia. For those who want to know what the seen world is like, The Told World is the place to start for it gives us a view of life out there and in our mind’s eye with resplendence, charm and chiaroscurotic ability.

ROBERT WOOD holds degrees from the Australian National University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a National Undergraduate Scholar and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow respectively. His work appears in Southerly, Plumwood Mountain, Counterpunch and academic journals including Foucault Studies, JASAL and Journal of Poetics Research.

sweetened in coals

by Phillip Hall

Ginninderra Press

ISBN 9781740278584

Reviewed by JANETTE DADD

Jacques Raubaud, at the Sydney Writer’s Festival of 2014 made the observation that poems differ from novels in that if they do not stir a memory then the poem will not be successful. The poet has precious time to invite the reader, to establish rapport and empathy. It has to be, by skill of the writing, a quick strike.

This might be a problem for Phillip Gijindarra Hall in his book sweetened in coals. Hall writes about place with a gentle passion; in fact he writes about three places. His subject is the bush, the people of the bush and the place where his heart finds peace and encouragement, within his family.

Hall is known for his work with Aboriginal Australians, and has been honoured by members of different ‘countries’. He is a long distance endurance bushwalker working with Aboriginal communities and the youth of these places. It is from this background and the obviously strong family ties he has, that his book of poetry springs.

Therein lies the problem. It is well known that most Australians are urban dwellers and coastal inhabitants. This makes Hall’s task hard. How can he stir memories for his readers if these readers have never been to the bush nor had exposure to its sounds, scents and creatures? Also, there are many Australians, especially people new to this continent, who have no understanding of the outlook, the cheeky humour and philosophy of the Indigenous people of our land. Hall quickly lets his readers know his position on, and passion for, a different telling of Australian history in his first poem, Carpentaria Running the Flag, its finishing lines being …….

……the rusted
landscape where a charged sphere percolates
                    Indigenous space.

Know this writer invites you to open yourself and learn more about the First peoples of our continent.

The book itself is comprised of three sections – Dwelling, Praise and Home. I found the section Dwelling the most powerful of the three parts for two reasons.

Firstly, it is in this section that Hall subtly reminds us of the story of Australia before European settlement. In poems such as “Palimpsest”, “Dystopian Empire” and “colonial heads“, Hall invites us to look beneath the surface and behind the history of white settlement Australia. He invites us to see just how clever, ingenious and nuanced Aboriginal culture is.

Secondly in poems such as “Habitation” the poet stirs memories for me with his descriptions of remnant rainforest on steep edges of farms……..

A green catbird forages ahead yowling
from a tangle of vines

or

You break in on a stand of
ironwood and turpentine.

These are images that take me back to living at Comboyne. Our farm was on the edge of the escarpment above Taree. I can practically smell the bush when I read, but I have a memory Hall has touched, so the poems have place for me. Would they work as well for an urban- dwelling Australian? I am not so sure.

“Dwelling” is an important piece of writing that slowly and meticulously reveals the history before ‘history’. It is important because people of British ancestry and our more recent new settlers need to know this history and move towards the respect that should be shown for this ancient place and its people. Perhaps then, the attitude of begrudging assistance can be changed and the different views and philosophies of Indigenous Australia be upheld as valid and important.

The second section, Praise, has a wholly different tone and presentation. It is as if Hall is enjoying a time of rest between his strenuous walks. Here are short descriptive poems of different Australian fauna. Again, because of memories stirred, I find many enjoyable poems. “This Creation” is an example of Hall at his best, capturing a natural vision with few words but with each carrying a great power to stimulate the mind’s eye:

…………black
leathered angels seeding
a Daintree, gallantly reclaiming
                    the Garden.

Then there is “Creative Tension” where Hall compares a spider’s web construction to a radio telescope, each facing skyward to track movement. “Willie” is a cleverly set-out poem, line breaks devised to mimic the movements of the Wagtail. It’s a successful poem.

The third and final section of sweetened in coals is titled “Home”. As the name implies there are poems here for his family – well, really poems dedicated to family and friends are scattered throughout the book. I especially like “A Humble Fire” – for his son Aidan, nearly three – which I thought a rather predicable poem until the last line.

Finally Hall is however, back in the bush or his Borroloola Class and maybe this is the most telling part of all. Here is where this writer is most at home, in the bush, walking, observing and recording. Back in his element, his joy, his love, his sense of meaning becomes apparent.

Hall takes us and drops us in many different places. His top-end poems I relate to less than when he is in NSW, especially the Southern Highlands. He is in my country then and I know the land he talks of. Is it important to know where we are? At one level – no – as the words are powerful and evoke images easily, at another level – yes – because knowing the place can add extra meaning to the reading. It is important to make use of the reference notes available for some poems. The added depth of meaning and knowledge is worth the flick to the back.

Hall has an unerring respect for the bush and its people. For some readers, with little experience of Australia outside of our slick urban scenes, this work will perhaps not be successful. There are no memories caught in his words. However, there is another audience who would enjoy the work, cover to cover. There are people who do not truly breathe until they have their sacred bush around them. I know people I will share sweetened in coals with; and I know they will relish Hall’s ability to capture, in words, what they experience as one of life’s great pleasures.

JANETTE DADD has had two books published with Ginninderra Press: Early Frosts in 2013 and Eve’s Tears in 2000. She has also had work published in various anthologies. Janette is a performance poet, presenting her work at venues on the South Coast of N.S.W. She is presently studying for a Bachelor of Fine Arts through Curtin University.

On Manannan’s Isle

by Usha Kishore

Isle of Man, UK.

ISBN: 978-1-304-14507-9 (PB)

REVIEWED by Sutapa Chaudhuri

 
 
On Manannan’s Isle is Usha Kishore’s debut collection of poetry. The fifty-six poems included in this collection are multicultural in nature and present a ‘chiaroscuro world’ (‘A Spoonful of Indian Sky’). Intertextual and multilayered, these poems build up, as Kishore writes, ‘an in-between space’ (‘Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism’). Like Kishore, an Indian-born British writer from the Isle of Man, the poetic self in On Manannan’s Isle experiences life as an amalgam of the East and the West, of Ganesha and Manannan, of Indian monsoons and British autumns. In ‘Monsoon Nights’ Kishore writes,

… The smell
of sand perfumes the air in a trapeze of fireflies
and a courtyard quivers in the lap of a pale moon,…
Those monsoon nights rising from a fond letter
are drowned in cups of Darjeeling chai,
as a Manx morning wakes up to a tiger sky.

Poems like ‘Ganesh Utsav’, ‘Monsoon Nights’ or ‘Moddey Dhoo’ too consciously build up ‘an allegory of exile’ (‘Women Like Me’) through the use of mythology and intertextual allusions, especially through the figure of Shakespeare’s Caliban as in ‘On Teaching The Tempest’:

… Caliban rolls
in the dark recesses of my heart,
an accident like me, taught
to moon-worship in an alien tongue.

On Manannan’s Isle explores mythology— both Celtic and Indian— apparently in an attempt to connect the East and the West through myths and legends. The opening poem of the collection, ‘Ganesh Utsav’, seems to serve, for Kishore, as a point of entry into the alien culture. In this poem Kishore’s invocation: “Come Ganesha, bathe in the Irish Sea…”  tries to put the spirit of the Celtic deity who permeates the whole collection, Manannan, the guardian of the Irish Sea and its inhabitants, vis a vis the Hindu deity Ganesha. This seems to be a preamble to Kishore’s later attempt to assimilate the legendary Celtic guardian spirit, Manannan, as an integral part of the poetic persona’s exiled identity and resilience in an alien land. In ‘You Manannan’ Kishore writes:

But, you Manannan,
drag me by my sari tip
into your greenish depths
and imprison me,
my verses and all
in the barnacles that grow
on your rocky ledges.

Kishore’s poetic language in On Manannan’s Isle incorporates the signifiers of two different cultures, not only crossing cultural borders but also giving rise to a heterogeneous ‘mottled culture’ in which the meanings of the borrowed words are ‘translations of fabled history’ (‘Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism’). In this assimilative multicultural language, English, Celtic and/or Indian words or phrases are placed side by side. This hybrid language contains elements as discrete or as heterogeneous as

…my Indo-Anglian
accent, my Sanskritised Puritanism, my love
for Browning’s sardonic quips and Hopkins’s
sprung rhythm … my lingering love
for Tagore, my idioms sprinkled with French
and Latin, my sunburnt Malayali metaphors, as
old as Parasurams’s axe or my calling to equality

                               (‘Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism’)

Creative use of poetic language in this debut collection also shows Kishore’s affinity towards enjambments and broken sentences, used together with unconventional rhythms and a multicultural lexicon as in the title poem ‘On Manannan’s Isle’:

Gathering legends in a sibylline sunset,
the exile fills her wandering rucksack
with fairy fables that wing across time, …
The exile whispers: Vayu? Varuna? Indra?
Which of my thirty three million gods, are you?
I am but one more – cloak yourself in my swirling mists,
hear my laughter in the crashing waves, feel my power
in the roaring winds and say my name!
Manannan!
My veg!
or as illustrated in poems like ‘Power’ or ‘Waiting for Autumn’ :
Your moon, cloaked in mists, serenades
my chakora spirit with fragrant madrigals
and leaves his rays on the edge of my sari.

(‘Waiting for Autumn’)

The imagery in On Manannan’s Isle is evocative and lyrical as in depictions of ‘the jasmine coloured moon’ (‘Power’) or her portrayal of the sights and sounds, the colours and cacophony of a typical Indian bazaar in ‘Teaching Between Two Worlds’:

…jalebis frying in ghee, alphonso
mangoes in cratefuls, baskets of jasmine
flowers. Chikankari saris in sapphire
and emerald map the skies with threads

The poem ‘At Janet’s’, on the other hand, uses colour codes and cataloguing to portray the studied monochrome of an urban and sophisticated First World:

                                                   Even the conversation is black and white, crisp vignettes
from stratified layers of glossy magazines, effervescent
as freshly brewed coffee, biting into the tongue, like
saucer-biscuits…

The striking visual quality of Kishore’s images in illustrated in lines like ‘serpent kite sings/a cruel blue song’ or ‘With blood on their beaks, the cackling/hordes rise in a flurry of possessed white’ from the poem ‘Blackbird Chased by Seagulls’, a poem in this collection memorable for its dramatic quality.

Special mention has to be made of the eight ‘The Bones of Time’ poems in On Manannan’s Isle that evolved as part of an ekphrastic project with the British artist, Carola Colley. These poems are close renditions of Colley’s plein air canvas, and they too carry on Kishore’s theme of assimilation, and points towards, as Kishore writes in ‘Meayll Circle’, the concluding poem of Kishore’s collection:

An infinite meld; there is
no vanishing point, just
a harmony of hues…
a palimpsest of time and tide…
border crossings into an ancient,
shaman time…

The poem talks of migrant journeys and home comings — the ferrying across of souls — to adapt one of Kishore’s phrases in the same poem, reflecting a blend of experiences and colours in an ‘abstract landscape’:

…My eyes cannot
fathom this abstract landscape, but a blissful
tranquillity draws me into your float-mounted,
surreal world…

                        (‘Corrody Keeil’)

Kishore’s poetry in On Manannan’s Isle attempts to analyse the notions of Otherness and integration, displacement and exile and in that process interrogates the definitions of home and the boundaries of homeland. On Manannan’s Isle thus projects Kishore as a contemporary poet of the Indian diaspora with a strong, distinct voice — assimilative of the two cultures yet retaining its own tenor.

_____________

Sutapa Chaudhuri, is Assistant Professor of English, Dr.K.L.Bhattacharyya College, University of Calcutta, India. She has two poetry collections — Broken Rhapsodies and Touching Nadir. My Lord, My Well-Beloved is a collection of her translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s songs.

Death Fugue

by Sheng Keyi
translated by Shelly Bryant

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-922146-62-5

Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Paul Celan ‘Death Fugue’ (1)

Sheng Keyi has taken Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ as the title for her new novel, which has been translated by Shelly Bryant. The novel, which lightly disguises its connection to the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, begins in the city of Beiping, capital of Dayang, where the sudden appearance of a tower of excrement precipitates civil unrest and violence. Subsequently the main character, Yuan Mengliu, a doctor and former poet, finds himself in the utopian society of Swan Valley. There, language is employed in the service of the state, a state which is a eugenic meritocracy, a meritocracy eerily similar to the Dayang activist poet, Hei Chun’s book The Genetic Code of the City-State (82/3), with poets being granted supreme status if their verse is eulogistic. In an earlier novel, Northern Girls (2), also translated by Shelly Bryant, Sheng demonstrated her debt to the ribald comedy of the traditional and contemporary Chinese novel, but has in Death Fugue developed it into a refined satirical allegory depicting a society satiated with extraordinary wealth and which has become so pacified that its citizens can accept and justify any restriction on their freedom.

Although the connection in the narrative between the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the violence in Round Square, home of Beiping’s Wisdom Bureau, is what strikes the reader initially, it is the connection between political activity and writing, or poetry in particular, which lies at the heart of this enthralling, and at times confronting novel. With its intense focus on nature, the novel reminds us of the centrality of landscape in Chinese literature, and is in many ways a provocation on this subject. Place and emotion are inextricable elements of this literature, and in ‘Death Fugue’ the land of Swan Valley, as a site of allegory encompassing political philosophy, emerges as less of a place than an emanation of Mengliu’s state of mind, as a full-blown nightmare registering trauma and pain.

Death Fugue begins by introducing the principal character, Mengliu. He was once an acclaimed poet, a member of the revered group, known as the Three Musketeers. After the trauma of the massacre in Round Square, he gave up writing poetry and trained as a doctor, finding some solace in medicine. World-weary, he is essentially a romantic and a libertine, aware of and disturbed by his unknown origins. His orphaned state comes to haunt him every time he plays the chuixun, an instrument left to him by his unknown father, and which he successfully employs to seduce women. He pines for his lost love, Qizi, who disappeared at the time of the unrest, and rather like a character from Kundera’s novels, finds a way to be at a distance from current society, while ironically observing it through random seduction.

Objectification and distance, however, are not working for Mengliu consistently. Memory, trauma and guilt accompany him through life, and his playing of the chuixun reflects that refrain. Central to this state is his abandonment of poetry, which generally fits into his new image as a man of medicine in a depoliticised society. The central figures in his consciousness are the poets he once associated with, and their lovers. Through these figures, Sheng Keyi presents her central theme: what should poetry be? These poets either died as martyrs like Bai Qiu, whose rousing poetry he took to the grave, developed uncompromising ideologies like Hei Chan, or became traitorous like Jia Wen, a mole and trickster who Mengliu happens to fatally confront in his hospital operating theatre. Abandoning poetry has resulted in Mengliu paying a huge price ontologically, but he continues to value writing as an ethical calligraphic act.

How Mengliu continues to value poetry can be seen when he is mysteriously transported to Swan Valley. Here, all is beautiful on the surface, a wonderland of nature. This idyllic environment perhaps has its origins in Sheng Keyi’s experience. In an interview with Jane Perley (3) she discussed how her childhood village had a lush natural environment when she was growing up there, but now ‘all that has gone, replaced,’ she said,’ by factories that pour poisons into the river and smelly ditches filled with trash’.

In Death Fugue, this lushness of nature is eroticised, particularly through the character of Juli, (with whom Mengliu lives and attempts to seduce.) Juli appears to be almost a plant herself, surrounded in her home by an abundance of flowers so dense it is almost comical. Nature is also politicised; for example bird-shaped flowers seen blooming abundantly are considered to be ‘the spiritual blossoms of Swan Valley’, standing for ‘liberty and independence’ (51), and this is also connected with the violent suppression of protest in Dayang:

A faint smell of blood was detectable, sometimes seeming to come from the flora and fauna, sometimes from the sewer, and sometimes from a certain class of people who couldn’t seem to rid themselves of it no matter how often they bathed… The water in the moat there a violent scarlet stream. (20)

Mengliu in Swan Valley notices ‘the screech of birds as they whizzed by like bullets’ (21). When Juli’s red hairpin catches the light, ‘it was as if the sky was on fire. There was gunfire, fighting, killing, blood, tank-trucks rolling, and smoke (77).

As can be seen from the above examples, in the first section of Death Fugue, the narrative moves between Beiping and Swan Valley, and it becomes apparent that Swan Valley is a projection of Mengliu’s turbulent consciousness. The lushness and beauty, the extraordinary wealth and harmonious existence of the citizenry are all there to conceal the ugly truth from these same citizens of a society proclaiming freedom but in fact enforcing a totalitarian eugenic agenda. By providing a fermented tea which induces loss of memory and fosters acceptance of social rules we can see that Swan Valley’s social organisation illustrates the novelist’s take on contemporary society, where wealth fosters political passivity:

All of us born in the 60s were born with a sense of responsibility…those who came after us were more individualistic with nothing inside them except a desire for material gain. … It’s only natural that the people felt they had nothing to worry about. (83)

For Mengliu however, the beauty of the landscape is constantly blown apart by images of the massacre. At the site of a waterfall, ‘the sound of the water falling from that terrible height reminded him of the rumble of the tanks as they lumbered towards him. (38) And on a walk through a forest:

The fear of not being able to get out of the forest enveloped him. The forest at night reminded him of the scene so many years before, when young people grew like trees in Round Square, waiting for rain to come and cleanse them. The forest was silent and furious, bearing great sorrow and helplessness… (197)

This disrupted visual space can also be seen in frequent references to the traditional sage of Chinese poetry, writing and meditating in a remote and beautiful location; Swan Valley then, and nature itself, appears as a trope for the act of writing, and by its very absence in that society, writing as ethical field. The citizens constantly urge Mengliu to return to poetry, but as he complains, writing for them is a tame affair:

Esteban [a citizen of Swan Valley] had invited Mengliu to watch the rice-planting ceremony. The scenery as they walked along was glorious, and Esteban urged him to compose a pastoral idyll, in the hope that he would slowly recover his identity as a poet. Only the people of Swan Valley had the idle time to treat poetry – a bold and powerful mastiff – like a pug. Poetry was a raging fire not a rhetorical game. (99)

Part Two of ‘Death Fugue’ dwells on the consequences of the sedation of the population of Swan Valley, although some do break free of the spell, even if inadvertently. Horrors burst through the surface of beauty, revealing a society practicing ruthless natural selection, giving them at the age of 50 the promise of a nursing home with every facility. However an anonymous note discovered by Mengliu reveals the nursing home to be in fact a crematorium:

‘I’m sorry, but I have to tell you a harsh reality. The truth is, you are living in a sheltered society where the truth is hidden… The nursing home is an execution ground for the elderly. Living people are thrown into ovens, as if they are burning pieces of wood. Please break open the gate of the nursing home and have a look inside. You will find no one there, only ghosts.’ (302)

Sheng Keyi, in ‘Death Fugue’ has composed a work which is bold, humorous and tragic. The second section of the book loses some of the focus of the first, with unnecessarily picaresque longueurs, which detract from the serious revelations which appear almost incidental as a result. Swan Valley, as Mengliu comes to realise, is a product of Hei Chun and Qizi’s utopian ideas. The novel ends with a scene of sham cultural production, with Mengliu seen on a boat, celebrating the shooting of a film called ‘Death Fugue’, while his former lover, the anaesthetist-turned-poet Suitang’s voice, ‘amplified to fill the room, was brimming with an embellished beauty.’ (375)

NOTES

1. ‘Death Fugue’, Paul Celan, trans Michael Hamburger, www.poemhunter.com
2. Northern Girls, Sheng Keyi, trans Shelly Bryant, Penguin 2012
3. ‘Chinese Writer Tackling Tiananmen, Wields ‘Power to Offend”, Jane Perley, New York Times,A4, Oct 11, 2014

JENNIFER MACKENZIE is the author of Borobudur(Transit Lounge, 2009), republished in Indonesia as Borobudur and Other Poems (Lontar, Jakarta, 2012). She has presented her work at many festivals and conferences in Asia, most recently at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Myanmar (supported by the Australia Council for the Arts) and at the Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators Conference in Singapore

The Deep North

by Bronwyn Lea

Braziller

Edited by Paul Kane

ISBN 978-0807616260

Reviewed by ANTHONY LYNCH

Think of the north, and in Australia we might think of Queensland, in particular the far north of that state. Or, we might think of the northern hemisphere – Europe, North America. Or Australia’s most immediate northern neighbour, Papua New Guinea. The north also suggests extremes of heat or cold. Having lived in Queensland, the United States and Papua, with time also spent in Europe, Bronwyn Lea has inhabited parts of all these geographic and cultural spaces. The Deep North comprises selected poems predominantly from Lea’s two major collections to date, Flight Animals (2001) and The Other Way Out (2008), but includes also a number of poems published subsequent to the latter collection. This ‘Selected’, the second volume of Braziller’s series of Australian poets (the first was Robert Gray’s Daylight Saving), draws heavily from Lea’s time in these various locations.

We need not of course read Lea’s title so literally. The title after all plays with an inversion, given we more popularly associate ‘deep’ with the south, particularly in a North American context. The north here represents a range of imagined ‘elsewheres’, physical and mental. But Lea’s poems do derive strongly from engagements with place and the people and relationships that have occupied her. Reading poems as ‘personal’ can be fraught (as well as nostalgically humanist), but certainly Lea offers in part a confessional mode while never lapsing into the maudlin rumination this might suggest.

Despite including poems written over a ten-year period, this selection pursues certain themes. The superb opening poem, ‘Born Again’, sees the narrator’s/poet’s ex-husband arrive out of the cold desert in North America – a visitor less welcome than the sparrow nearby scratching for seeds in snow. After a year’s absence he has returned, having found god who ‘forgave all of his trespasses’, though the narrator has not similarly forgiven: ‘My heart has a long ledger.’ The ex has come to collect the couple’s daughter. The narrator gathers a few belongings for the daughter, makes him wait outside. When she comes back out, her ex is kneeling in the snow, which has collected on his shoulders, the backs of his shoes, his upturned palms. The moment brings an unexpected ‘intimacy we never shared’. The poem closes: ‘Sometimes grace / comes like that, it falls like snow.’ (3).

This poem lays the groundwork for others that follow. The figure of the former lover in particular, recalled with tenderness and wit, recurs. ‘The Photograph’ retrieves the same setting (in an earlier period) as the opening poem, the narrator and man on the ‘dusty porch’, dog curled at the man’s feet, the couple’s fingers entwining as they reach for their beers. There’s a rare hint of nostalgia, and of rue: ‘In the photograph / we don’t ever let go.’ (32).

Such a subject can easily lead to a voice of bitter regret, vindictiveness, or maudlin self-pity. Lea resists all of these, and writes instead with mature reflection on the nature of intimacy and of memory itself. In this, she shares common ground with Tracy Ryan, whose Unearthed (2013) also measuredly, assuredly, addresses a former spouse. Lea shows how language is both helpmate and obstacle in conducting a relationship and in conveying its provenance. ‘Driving into Distance’ is a meditation on the tension of between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ and the strange beauty of ‘little losses’ (67).

Lea’s is very much a poetry of what’s observed and felt ‘in the moment’. There is no particular indication here that Lea is a self-declared Buddhist, but aspects of Buddhist philosophy – observance of the present moment and of the natural world, acceptance of change and adversity, the retrieval of grace in small acts – are often present. The selection in fact ends with ‘Hand of the Bodhisattva’, an observation of a first century AD Indian statue, and perhaps a gently ironic counterpoint to other poems dealing with feet – the most playful of which is ‘Standing in Bette Davis’s Shoes’, composed of lines delivered by Davis from her most famous (and famously feisty) roles.

Lea is also on the front foot in ‘Orthograde’ and the sequence ‘Seven Feet & Where They’re From’, the latter responding to John Forbes’ ‘Four Heads and How to Draw Them’. Reflecting on the position of feet in cultures including Greek, Chinese and Aboriginal Australian, this sequence is also an eloquent metapoetic play on the foot (we might of course think of metrical feet in verse), most strongly in evidence in the seventh poem, ‘The Etymological Foot’, in which the foot’s place in adage is gently subverted.

Most poems are told from an implicitly or explicitly female point of view, but ‘The Cairn’ and ‘One of the Horses at Marly’ are told from non-human perspectives. Both cairn and horse address humans who are moving from one place to another but barely able to locate their own selves let alone navigate their environment. As series editor Paul Kane observes in his introductory note to this ‘Selected’: ‘Travel, of course, is always displacement and it functions here as an image of inward dislocation’ (ix). Or, in the words of the horse from Marly: ‘O // human too dizzy to see, you shoot / an arrow & it stabs you in the back’ (56). By the end of ‘The Cairn’, we discover the one being addressed is ‘Bronwyn’, continuing the exploration of self that began earlier with the poem ‘Bronwyn Lea’, in which the arrow is as much emblem of injury as it is of Cupid’s love: ‘My name fits me perfectly as the arrow fits its wound’ (9).

The wound is a recurring though not overworked motif in this collection, most often manifesting as a sense of loss following the absence/departure of the lover. Longing, including sexual longing, is a hallmark of absence, but, as in ‘Found Wanting at Zen Mountain Monastery’, female longing is often experienced differently to its male counterpart:

Desire or craving, he says
(he means to say thirst),
is the cause of all suffering.
(He is the one who will not remember me more,
the one who lets my face fall
without shock like vapour
from his mind.) (72)

Not that, thankfully, the female is a victim without agency:

So the woman fired up her motorbike,
rode through the hills to the monastery,
left her credit card with the office monk
and walked into the zendo. (73)

Many of the poems, including those dealing with the past, are written in the present tense, giving personal history an immediacy. Lea also demonstrates her quiet attention to form, moving from free verse to unrhymed couplets, tercets and quatrains, with occasional forays into haikus, most notably in the excellent ‘A rush of butterflies’, which deftly builds on themes addressed earlier in the book:

By my foot, a skink
fixes an eye on me – more
devoted than you. (77)

Longing and loss never manifest as self-indulgence. As Kane notes: ‘Lea has that capacity to imagine and identify with the other, even (with “fierce tenderness”) those who have caused her pain’ (xi). And absence, as experienced by the narrator or others, can be sensual:

as the Japanese woman
turns her nightgown inside out

to dream of her absent lover –
constructs of seams and loose threads

facing the world, the seeming seamless
elision of silks against her flesh

in daylight she watches her body age (‘The Nightgown’, 26)

‘The Poet’s Bed’ might remind us of Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’, sans lover:

The sheets have been changed
since she lay here, maybe even the mattress,
but the frame remains the same: (27)

And sometimes the abandoned marital bed is a liberation, as in ‘Women of a Certain Age’ who are:

waking to the sound
of their breathing …
… The dawn will be theirs to hold
a little while – its lightness – they will forget
some of what they have experienced
and remember what they were born with, (12)

In the deep north of memory, Lea nevertheless recalls, with eloquence and tenderness, some of the experience she has gained. And, without bitterness, some of what she has lost.

ANTHONY LYNCH is author of the short story collection Redfin and the poetry collection Night Train. His reviews have appeared in a various publications, but most often in The Australian and Australian Book Review. He is the publisher for Whitmore Press (http://whitmorepress.com), which specialises in poetry.

Open House

by David Brooks

UQP

ISBN 978 0 7022 5352 2

Reviewed by NADIA NIAZ

How can we
Be so arrogant, to think that our
souls are worth so much?

David Brooks poses a cogent question and one that has often been asked by writers. Surely the act of writing is one of arrogance, the act of preserving our own thoughts an act of egotism. Expanded to the way modern humans interact with their environment the question remains valid, even essential. But the question of our value is not just an interrogation of our arrogance as a race – it is also a vital component in creating and re-creating ourselves, in understanding not just who we are, but how.

There is a meditative quality to the poems in Open House that seeks to answer these questions, but gently. There is through much of the book a sense of a breath held for a moment of contemplation and then gently released. It is the kind of book one must read slowly so that each poem, each line, may sing itself into being and back, and us with it.

Some readers may find the length of Open House daunting – most books of poetry published today are fairly short and self-contained and may be read in an afternoon. And yes, this book does demand a lot of attention, but it is also the sort of volume that you can come back to in a quiet moment, the sort that you can dip into the way we do into our favourite music albums, and revisit the bliss of its music.

Open House constitutes a poetic, and sometimes actual, journey. Each of the five sections that comprise this volume has its own distinct character while also retaining a logical relationship with the others. The poet’s voice rings out clearly through each, carrying the reader from poems about place, history, and loss all the way to the last section, which conveys a quiet wonder and delight at life and existence.

This is not to suggest a linear progression so much as a development of interconnected interests. While the first book is more solidly grounded in history, the present exists in it as well, and while the last book feels more about the present – or perhaps just conveys more presence and immediacy – the past is given its due.

‘A Place on Earth’ interrogates the poet’s sense of belonging, truth, guilt, and the quest for peace and meaning. Themes as disparate as Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, looking back at one’s youth, night trains, and quotidian intimacy, sit comfortably side by side and often flow into each other. There is a historicity to these poems – a sense of things observed and absorbed, but not let go. Perhaps, as in the blood from ‘The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto’ and the dust coating all things in ‘Dust’, it is history itself that persists in holding on.

This changes considerably at the beginning of ‘September’. Suddenly there are images of abundance, ripeness, pulchritude, and a relaxing of sorts. This is however quickly juxtaposed with images of sexual abuse and a grittiness that shakes the reader out of the trance of plenty. The poem ‘Nona’ may be the best encapsulation of the nature of this section. In it, Brooks describes an old woman as carrying the history of the town (and perhaps, by extension, of the nation), “a kind of midwife to the day” (32) performing such tasks as are necessary to transform it into a place where travellers may find comfort. With her death, “another part/ of the village/will flap untended in the Boria, another/ house lose its hold.” (33). There is a great noticing, as Rilke might phrase it, of people, things, animals and birds – the smallest creatures are given attention. In contrast, the reduction of ‘pederast priests’, to two words seems an act of righteous contempt.

‘Open House’ brings the reader back to Australia. The title of the section (and the book itself) suggests an inspection, which in turn implies an invitation to come in and browse, assess, and judge what one sees. However, as with actual inspections and open houses, much of what we are shown is curated and translated and so it is here. As in the rest of the book, each poem is crafted with great thought, attention, intelligence and feeling. Brooks seems a poet entranced by life in its variety. The opening poem, ‘In the Kingdom of Shadows’ sets the tone:

In the Kingdom of shadows, world without end,
slugs traverse the prairies of the soul,
mice enter the pure land,
cockroaches conquer the valleys of death.

In the Kingdom of shadows, dominion
of cats and sugar gliders,
moths are mastering the constellations, spiders
whispering their histories to the stars.

In this section, the quotidian and ordinary are made as evocative as the lofty and philosophical because he has understood that both must exist for there to be life.

‘Report from Blue Mountains’ is another shift in mood. It is less contemplative and more direct. The rest of the book seems more the ‘report’ and this section its defense as the poet seems to be in communication with others for much of it. This does not diminish the poetry, but rather adds an element of the conversational to a book comprising mostly soliloquy thus far. It is not that there are no other people in the book – indeed there are many and they are well described characters or beautifully rendered spectres – but that the poet seems to talk to as well as about them here. Here the poet seems to be stepping out more fully into the present world rather than examining it from afar.

The final section, ‘Reading to the Sheep’ repeats the now familiar themes of nature, the observation of creatures, domesticity, but in it the poet seems even more present than in the previous section.

If I’ve regrets
whose life is without them?
If I have debts let the creditors come.
The rain this morning
was like the first rain,
the sun in your eyes the first sun.
(‘Birthday Poem’, 146)

Unsurprisingly, sheep appear rather often in the poems and although they may not seem the most poetic of animals, their solidity and solemnity, their presence in the immediate moment, is effective. This feels like a good way to close this meditation on life and place and belonging, this journey through not just looking at things but seeing them and experiencing them by being open to them. The observer necessarily changes the observed, but seldom is the observation so gently and yet thoroughly presented. This is no aggressive investigation but rather a letting be that echoes concepts of mindfulness and meditation. Muck like the best haiku, the poems feel both complete and resonant.

Brooks is not a strongly political writer, but his views on animal rights are evident. Politics and poetry – particularly in English – can be an uncomfortable fit, so it is further evidence of Brooks’ mastery of the form that these poems often have an odd sweetness to them despite the brutality they describe. Brooks knows to turn the lens onto himself and his own actions and let the message grow from that presentation where lesser poets focus instead on the message to the detriment of the poetry.

Brooks not only captures the minutiae of life and turns it into poetry that makes the reader catch her breath – finding poetry in the mundane is almost the mission of the modern-day poet and writer and many do it well – but also takes the frankly anti-poetical and weaves it into poems that remains accessible and open as well as multi-layered and tantalising.

The quiet, unassuming nature of his poetry that comes through even though each poem is brilliantly structured and considered is what places Brooks in the league of the greats. You don’t so much read these poems as hear them sing themselves into being in your mind, as if they were always there, waiting to be awoken.

NADIA NIAZ is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne where she teaches Creative Writing.  Her work has previously appeared in TEXT, Strange 4 and The Alhamra Literary Review.

Disturbance

by Ivy Alvarez

Seren 

ISBN 9781781720875

Reviewed by ANGELA STRETCH

For every verse novel there has to be a starting point, a line in a letter, a speech or a phrase with symbolic meaning, or an image. In Disturbance, it is an inquest into the death of three family members.

Ivy Alvarez introduces us to a spare, judicious survey of a wide range of daily experiences,which begins when a number of half-apprehended intuitions fall into place, the shudder of realignments travel through the body like an electric current, raising goose bumps that herald the imaginative grasp of a sociological truth. Alvarez’s lyrics are strikingly modulated to specific human registers as if she had the killer’s demons tested, then submitted them to the rigors of nothing less than a whole human drama. What drives us? What drove Tony, a husband and father to a family murder suicide?

While I was reading Disturbance, a homicide took place in the Riverina (NSW), at the hand of a respected farmer. The perpetrator turned the gun on himself, after murdering his wife and three young children. The rural community continues to struggle with the fact that ordinary men, men who are seen as good men use violence.  Alvarez’s depiction is a chilling parable to the brutal tragedy that unfolded, west of Wagga Wagga. In both cases the victims affected were from small-town middle class families, who’s nearest and dearests had received no forewarnings about the unfathomable acts that were to happen. In Disturbance the family are framed as being wealthy, with an up-for-sale home valued at fewer than two million. They are owners of a BMW and hold a life insurance policy worth three hundred thousand. Tony seems an average sort of country Dad, with a hankering for hunting, golf and a swinger for a mistress. The mother Jane is troubled with the banalities of her estranged relationship with Tony and the drudgery of her domestic life. In the poem Warning (49), we glean Tony’s possessive nature, his building reproach. There are diametric complexities between the two families but the grim reality of violence is evident.

Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, Alvarez settled in Cardiff, Wales where she wrote her first collection Mortal (2006), a reimagining of the betrayal of the Greek goddess, Demeter and her daughter Persephone to the underworld. The narrative sustains its power because it is the speech not of just one person, but the souls of a mother and daughter. The maternal origin points us to the source of the world, the point of intersection between nothing and something. In Disturbance, her second book, Alvarez responds to a real account of a double murder suicide that happened in the United Kingdom and like all effective incendiaries she confronts history and comes to terms with an array of cultural influences, a complex, divided inheritance; the daughter who didn’t choose to survive, the mother who didn’t choose to die.

These are strong poems which move fluently between the living and the dead, the reported past and the recorded present.  There is a perverse malevolence that gnaws at you in the second poem from the circumstantial evidence listed, quantified by duration, frequency and moral accountability. The post-mortem begins in Nuclear family:

They met 27 years ago

One injunction
One divorce

One emergency number
dialed at 7.11 pm

                                  (Nuclear family, 8)

Alvarez traces the tormented, catastrophic history of the family members, embuing them with only flashes of emotional colour. Witnesses are shadowed by questions of what might have passed, as are we, who try to read between the lines and fathom the family’s irreversible fate. The story pulsates with the biographical measures of a family’s destruction attested to by the local community, neighbours, the estate agent, journalists, the Detective, policemen, the mistress, and even the local priest.

The self-evident sometimes has to be restated, reinterpreted and questions recreated about characters to get behind the mask. A dialogue between the public and the private spheres is an important part of a good narrative and poets continue to set the standard in searching for a deeper reading of the humanity of the lived life, and a vivid sense of the life once lived. In this portrayal the extraordinary comes into view in the mainly private spheres of Dad, Mum, son, surviving daughter and the other more than twenty voices that are both directly and indirectly involved.

Alvarez seems compelled to share her understanding of dyfunctionality. We may not know it comprehensively, but the book offers us at least a dramatic core that performs or perhaps explains. She provides cumulative details, evidence and testimonials, chiseled on the page in various forms, playing with sequencing and time.

The words of the Operator who received the call for help hang in the air:

The phone rings: laughter and shrieks.
Another crank call, two cranks in ten minutes.
I just got here.

The minute hand swings over.
It’s 7.11 pm.

(Operator, 10)

And much later we hear from a Witness:

We’re laughing − a rare thing.
After dinner and we’re at the sink.
We hear a car on the gravel drive.  Our laughter dries.

                                    (Witness, 75)

And so it must have happened by increments across the community— that slow withdrawal of voices, the silence falling as the conversations between people querying the unexpected, suggests something intense and morbid had taken place.

off the record?
five thousand per dead body
but we don’t look at it
that way

(The estate agents, 14)

There’s a shiver of black humour, or rather a notation of bodily memory that reaches home to acknowledge the curiosity of why things happen.

I don’t know what could have set him off

then again
I cannot understand
how cows know
to chew in unison

(A neighbouring farmer, 15)

The poems succeed by inflection, as different circuits are rewired, allowing us to register subtleties not previously accessible. Alvarez provides us with a sense of comprehension through the views of a community numbed, a complex socio-economic layout of whom and where to place the blame, to seek justification for actions made and to perhaps identify the warning signs and be more vigilant in the recognition of these signs.

What is captured is a capacity for monstrous indifference, a means to register murder, sociopathy and violation. The tragic genre is the poet’s intent, an archetype of assemblages generated by one expectation leading to the expectations of the next. In The Journalist speaks III, this non-fiction verse narrative achieves a stage pitch.

all complexity flattened to a headline
‘Three shot dead in village’

Black cameras crowd in,

flashbulbs white as maggots.
She gives them a flat, dry stare,
The surviving daughter who releases her statement.

                                    (The Journalist speaks III, 50)

Disturbance is a book of dark intensities and deeply felt connections, haunted and haunting, at once brooding, sensual and lucid. A smaller cast of characters would make logistics simpler, but the reasons for domestic violence are just as compounding. The apparently simpler observations by a cast of characters play out a vital role; to speak out from within community, take on a deeper responsibility that incorporates some element of recognition of this major societal issue.

Alvarez’s diverse upbringing may have provided her with the social and political purpose to write about domestic violence from varying points-of-view. In doing so she has developed an elliptical but determined way of approaching her subjects that pushes forward an array of directions by turning back and engaging in a past she has imagined.

the thin bridge

by Andy Jackson

Whitmore Press

ISBN 978 0 9873866 4 9
  
  
  

Reviewed by CAMERON LOWE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They crack open the bone
gates of your chest

to rechannel the paths
your life runs. Five hours

busy around the opened
chasm – machines and

surgeons. (p. 20)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking New Sky

Ouyang Yu

5 Islands Press

ISBN 978-0-7340-4824-0

Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

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

Distance

by Nathanael O’Reilly

Picaro Press (2014)

ISBN 978-1-921691-76-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and a subsequent rebuilding:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suite for Percy Grainger

by Jessica L Wilkinson

Vagabond

ISBN 978-1-922181-20-6

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CITATIONS

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

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

Maze Bright

by Jaya Savige

Vagabond

Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER BROWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battarbee and Namatjira

by Martin Edmond

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922146687

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here Come the Dogs

by Omar Musa

Penguin

ISBN 9780670077090

Reviewed by REBECCA JESSEN

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

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

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

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

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

Where are these cunts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORKS CITED

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

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

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

Gap

by Rebecca Jessen

UQP

ISBN 9780702253201

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

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

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

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

Stand in front

of the fridge
forgotten what
I’d come for

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

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

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

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

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

Kick around

loose gravel
waiting for
the bus home

fixated
by a magpie
on the powerlines

watch it

swoop

for its prey
with such
measured
urgency

wonder if

getting

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

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

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

Indie shakes her head
tears forming

‘Please
don’t let them
take you’

I put my arms
around her

try
to give her
a feeling
of safety

knowing
it won’t last. (195)

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

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

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

WORKS CITED

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

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

A Vicious Example

by Michael Aiken

Grande Parade Poets

Reviewed by ALI JANE SMITH
   
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fixing the Broken Nightingale

Richard Allen

Flying Island Books (2013)

Reviewed by MICHELE SEMINARA

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

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

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

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

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

(‘13 Acts of Unfulfilled Love’)

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

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

I breathe in          this moment is
the same as any other

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

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

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

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

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

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

and those who you knew about
are in the middle ground

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

And that’s everywhere
you look.

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

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

(‘Armistace’)

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

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

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

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

… love
vibrates at a frequency
outside of the range

of what we
normally can hear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madame Mephisto

by A.M. Bakalar

Stork Press

ISBN 978-0-9571326-0-3

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Promise

By Tony Birch

University of Queensland Press, 2014

ISBN: 978 0 7022 4999 0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret Maker of the World

by Abbas El-Zein

University of Queensland Press, 2014

ISBN: 9780701150071

Reviewed by TESSA LUNNEY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His skin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreign Soil

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Hachette Australia

Sydney, NSW, 2014

ISBN 978-0-73363242-6

Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Candles of the Night

by Ian Bedford

Lacunar Publishing

ISBN: 9781922198129

Reviewed by SUBHASH JAIRETH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transactions of Belonging

by Jaya Padmanabhan

Leadstart Publishing

ISBN-13: 978-9383562275

Reviewed by JESSICA FALEIRO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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