Tag: Issue 14

The Swan Book

by Alexis Wright

Giramondo, 2013

ISBN 978-1922146-41-0

Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL

The hallmark of a great writer is the capacity to renew and reinvent their creative vision which Alexis Wright achieves with startling virtuosity, sureness, wit and political astuteness in The Swan Book. This is an eclectic fiction, mythopoetic, a meta-narrative epic that takes Wright’s invigorated representations of Indigenous and wilderness mythologies to new levels. Her third novel, it follows on from the internationally-acclaimed Miles Franklin, award-winning Carpentaria, turning its focus to the future, to environmental crises as much as Indigenous crusades. But The Swan Book goes further. It places Wright’s work in a rich, transcultural literary tradition, its verbal pyrotechnics reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s fiction and James Joyce’s Ulysses; its unflinching forecast written with the potency of Cormac McCarthy or George Orwell, it weaves outback realism with remixed Dreaming, classical references with political allegory, post-colonial and postmodern tropes.

The Swan Book tells the story Oblivia Ethyl(ene), a girl who never speaks after being raped by a gang of petrol-sniffing youths. She is dug out and rescued from the bowels of an ancient story-telling river gum by Bella Donna of the Champions, a European gypsy refugee from climate change wars who arrives on the coast of Australia and makes her way to Swan Lake. The lake has become silted into a swamp, a sand mountain littered with rusted craft, overseen by a white Army. It’s a dystopian future where the policies of intervention remain widespread; where the current wave of conservative thinking is used ‘to control the will, mind and soul of the Aboriginal people.’ The themes of belief, sovereignty of the mind and ancestral voice which were heroically rendered in Carpentaria, find a pessimistic and cleansing register in The Swan Book. Nothing is spared; Wright turns her acerbic lens to illuminate an encompassing scope of Australian political and cultural life, while the land, topography, birds and mutant wildlife flow sinuously in spates and epidemics through the braiding of the narrative.  Some passages are written with penetrating zeal:

This was the place where the mind of the nation practised warfare and fought nightly for supremacy, by exercising its power over another people’s land ─the night-world of the multi-nationals, the money-makers and players of big business, the asserters of sovereignty, who governed the strip called Desperado; men with hands glued to the wheel charging through the dust in howling road trains packed with brown cattle with terrified eyes, mobile warehouses, fuel tankers, heavy haulage steel and chrome arsenals named Bulk Haul, Outback, Down Under, Century, The Isa, The Curry, Tanami Lassie, metal workhorses for carrying a mountain of mining equipment and the country’s ore…   (165)

There is a sense of the journey of storytelling running through the book, tracing Oblivia’s passage from scribe, whose fingers trace the ghost language of dead trees into Swan maiden, from First Lady wedded to Aboriginal PM, Warren Finch and living in urban sanction to a widow returning to the swamp as guardian of a myth-making swan. Along this winding odyssey through dust storms, floods and cyclones that exist outside of linear time, Oblivia witnesses and internally records the plight of refugees, illegal crossings, the homeless hordes, the aberrant reptiles and displaced birds. One senses that Wright herself gives over to the textual process, surrendering to its detours, its meteorology, absorbing and weaving whatever arises along the way. Her dialectical suppleness and impressive knowledge makes for an innovative, politically-engaged Australian and translocal vision.

The centrality of language is signalled in the remarkable opening prelude, Ignus Fatuus, (meaning ‘illusion’, or ‘phosphorescent light over the swampy ground’) in which the narrator embodies the creative voice as a cut snake virus replicating ideas and firing serological missiles at intruders. It’s a perfect metaphor for the sceptical, chaotically mistrusting tone and establishes voice as an internal harbinger of environmental destruction. Ventriloquisms and shavings of literary allusions combine with popular cultural references ranging from Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song to hybrid motifs such as an ‘Aboriginal tinkerbell fairy.’

Reading the opening chapters I almost felt assaulted by the insistent catalogue of swans: swans of all languages and lyrics are interpolated. The black swan in a Central Australian swamp is an unsettling symbol of Indigenity in its figurative miscegenation with the white swan of Bella Donna’s European folklore. But the brilliance of this excess is to intentionally fetishize the naming and discursive power of language so that the reader experiences language as invasion, as appropriation, as indoctrination, just as Bella Donna herself invades the swamp country of the Northern Territory like ‘an old raggedy Viking’ bringing stories of floating disasters, of refugees from zero geography. After she dies, the swamp people who had once rejected her stories begin to speak Latin in their conversation, becoming ‘Latino Aboriginals’. Wright subversively takes irony and parody to extremes as a way of destabilising not merely language but concepts of nation, deconstructing the colonial currency:

It appeared that the old ghost had colonised the minds of the swamp people so completely with the laws of Latin, it terminated their ability to speak good English anymore, and to teach their children to speak English properly so that the gap could finally be closed between Aboriginal people and Australia. (80)

In making this claim, the hyperbole exceeds stylistic effect and becomes predictive, a potent rehabilitation of colonial assumptions of control. Allusions to the European and White Australian lyric tradition of swans create ambivalence as they parody and place under pressure the authority and superiority of prevailing narratives. Instead, the omnipresent variety of storytelling is eclectic, transcultural and global, invoking inter-racial beliefs of future, past and present. Not only are all kinds of swans admitted into the way that stories are told, the characters are genetically diverse, or like Warren Finch’s minders, ‘inter-racially bred’. Half Life, the mild-mannered camel man who guides Oblivia during her Ghost walk tells her:

We are Aboriginal herds-people with bloodlines in us from all over the world, he added, and dreamily listed all the world’s continents that he could remember being related to these days, Arabian, African, Asian, Indian, European all sorts, pure Pacific Islander ─ anywhere else I didn’t mention? Well! That as well! Wherever! Even if I haven’t heard of it! No matter ─ we got em right here inside my blood. I am thick with the spirits from all over the world that I know nothing about. (315)

Wright’s work is reconstructive, seeking to operate outside of colonial paradigms and boundaries, refusing to be contained. She is able to seamlessly shift gears from third person narrator to interior monologue, from Warren to Oblivia’s point of view. Sections of the novel that contain more conventional dramatic prose such as those that describe Warren Finch meeting with the Aboriginal caucus are skilfully juxtaposed to provide relief from denser periphrastic prose. A descendent of the Waanyi people, Wright’s vast experience of activism, of policy-making bureaucrats and small-town, outback corruption is evidenced.  One could argue that the meta-fictional structure of the novel feels somewhat contrived with a prologue and an epilogue used to frame a less self-conscious tension between the polyphonic narrator and the narration however the unevenness is intentional; Wright asserts herself as a highly skilful, erudite yet relaxed storyteller, warping the conventions to compromise aesthetic purity for the benefit of interrogation. The humour is eclectic, switching wavelengths and vernaculars arbitrarily so that languages and styles are remixed and mashed up.

Aside from its sheer literary brilliance, I find the strengths of this novel to be its refusal to seek order or resolution and the way it replicates so much diversity: indeed,   as the narrator suggests, ‘How bold to mix the Dreamings.’ In her essay “On Writing Carpentaria” Wright speaks of memory and trauma, asserting that

When faced with too much bad reality, the mind will try to survive by creating alternative narra-tives and places to visit from time to time, or live in, or believe in, if given the space. Carpentaria imagines the cultural mind as sovereign and in control, while freely navigating through the known country of colonialism to explore the possibilities of other worlds. (1)

In The Swan Book she writes a mythopoesis of swan ghosting, of environmental havoc and (un) heroic Indigenity where the sovereign mind and colonial repression are in schism. If there is a swan song it is madness, but the many registers of Oblivia’s silence reinscribe themselves as a timeless Dreaming. This is a self-reflexive book, refusing paternalistic narrative conventions endemic to our literature. Wright compels us to read actively; to reconsider the violence that brutalises Aboriginal Australia and to deconstruct the assumptions and complacencies which fabricate our ideals of nature and nation.

NOTES

1. Wright, Alexis “On Writing Carpentaria” HEAT, 2007

MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry and fiction. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Southerly, Westerly, Jacket, Poetry International Web and forthcoming in Wasafiri. She was the CAL/UOW Fellow at Kingston University. With Boey Kim Cheng and Adam Aitken she co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets.

Too Afraid to Cry

by Ali Cobby Eckermann

Ilura Press

Reviewed by SOPHIA BARNES

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s elegant, confident and distinctive memoir is a slim volume for all that it contains. If a reader has the leisure to read it all in one sitting (as I did) the impact of its interwoven vignettes, interspersed with poetry, will be heightened. It is a book which rewards complete engagement and a willingness to follow the sometimes unanticipated shifts in rhythm of its fragmented form. Following the success of several collections of poetry and two verse novels, Too Afraid to Cry brings Cobby Eckermann’s ear for the cadences of memory to sharp, crisp, at times even blunt prose.

Each chapter, identified only by number, is short (the longest only stretch to three or four pages) and these chapters are frequently separated by brief, titled poems. This combination — a kind of verse novel (or verse memoir) in itself — serves to give a reader the sense that they are taking a series of interrupted glances at a tumultuous, changeable and rich life. Cobby Eckermann moves across stretches of time confidently, zooming in on moments of encounter, epiphany or conflict in such a way that we feel irresistibly pulled along with her, piecing together the intervening time through poetry whose loaded imagery is beautifully interwoven with narrative events. Occasionally the poems foreshadow, occasionally they meditate on what has passed (though never in an explicit or heavy-handed way), and together they underpin the rhythmic power which makes this memoir such compelling and affecting read.

Too Afraid to Cry opens with ‘Elfin’, a spare yet lyrical poem whose motifs of song and growth, of flight and emergence, are juxtaposed quite shockingly, but very effectively, with the almost uncannily abrupt scene of child sexual abuse which begins on the page opposite. As readers we know immediately that the territory of this memoir will not be comfortable or easy for us to traverse; yet what I found striking was that even as this horror of violation is bluntly introduced, we hear the young Ali’s voice, loud and clear. ‘Fat chance!’ she thinks, as she endures her Uncle’s fumbling. She may have experienced adult betrayal in the worst imaginable way, yet this young girl is no victim — that much is clear from the very opening, and it’s an impression which only becomes more concrete throughout.

Ali Cobby Eckermann grew up as in indigenous child in an adoptive family. There is real, if often unspoken, love between mother, father and adopted daughter; nonetheless, as Ali grows up she comes to feel more and more an outlier. The abuse to which she is subjected in her school years brings her to consciousness of her difference, and it is a realisation from which she cannot retreat. The tragic irony of the pressure under which she is put to adopt out her own child brings home to the reader the scope of an inter-generational story of dispossession and loss, as well as sacrifice. Along with her ‘Big Brother’, Cobby Eckermann shares the experience of being both familiar and foreign, in indigenous and white Australian society.

Too Afraid to Cry narrates fitful travels through the outback, from town to town, taken in the years of Cobby Eckermann’s early adulthood, and it does so with unswerving honesty — the choices made or not made, the relationships begun and ended, the jobs gained and abandoned. This account of her movement through space, from job to job and finally through rehab to a place of family, creativity and healing is always counterweighted by the timelessness (it is undoubtedly a cliché, yet I can’t help finding it to be true here) which her poetry seems to evoke, or to capture — at the very least, to speak to.

There is the confronting clarity and bluntness of ‘I Tell You True’: I can’t stop drinking, I tell you true / since I watched my daughter perish […] Since I found my sister dead […] Since my mother passed away. Then there is the irresistibly continuity, the extending time of ‘Bird Song’: Life is Extinct / Without bird song / Dream Birds / Arrive at dawn / Message birds / Tap Windows / Guardian birds / Circle the sky / Watcher birds / Sit nearby / Fill my ears / With bird song / I will survive. Cobby Eckermann balances the unadorned prose in which she recounts her memories and her journey without apology or bravado, with the rhythmic undercurrent of her poetry.

As we become more aware of the myriad experiences of dispossession and of broken families which have so defined our colonial history in Australia we might risk a sense of being overwhelmed, of feeling as if we had heard ‘too many’ stories, of being unable to step back and to see afresh the scale of what was done, and to listen to the accounts of those to whom it was done. Ali Cobby Eckermann offers a fresh, unflinching and uncompromising iteration of a search for identity undertaken by multiple generations of adopted and adoptive indigenous children and parents. Yet she does not just tell her story to add to the existing record; she weaves a compelling narrative whose lingering emotion, for this reader, was a vital and entirely beguiling strength. A continued and unashamed pleasure in life, a love for colour and voice and land, sensation, interaction and perhaps above all, language, radiated from this memoir, and I think that stray lines of Cobby Eckermann’s poems will continue to surface in my resting mind for weeks to come.

SOPHIA BARNES is a Postgraduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, where her Ph.D has recently been conferred. She has published academic work internationally, and has had creative writing published in WetInk Magazine. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the WetInk / CAL Short Story Prize for the second year running.

When My Brother was an Aztec

By Natalie Diaz

Copper Canyon Press

ISBN 9781556593833

Reviewed by AIMEE A. NORTON
 

Natalie Diaz’s debut collection is a book about appetites.  It contains raw, narrative poems that pivot on her brother’s meth addiction.  Lyric surrealism is interspersed throughout and serves both as a welcome reprieve from the brutality of the narrative, but also expertly explores the universal hunger that brings people to their own personal tables of conflict and gluttony.  The setting is the Mojave Indian Reservation where Diaz grew up and where she currently works with the last fluent speakers of Mojave to save the severely endangered language.

Diaz’s poems grind with a savagery that doesn’t often make it onto the page.  The Aztecs are a culture known for ritualized violence and a theater of terror epitomized by state-organized human sacrifice.  Diaz does well to sew the Aztecs together with drug culture in the Southwestern US which is an area saturated with narcotics related violence.  Addiction itself is shown as a ritualized self-violence. The title poem ‘When My Brother Was an Aztec’ begins hauntingly.

    He lived in our basement and sacrificed my parents
Every morning.  It was awful.  Unforgivable.  But they kept coming
back for more.  They loved him, was all they could say.

The poem ends just as hauntingly when Diaz describes her parents searching for their missing limbs, looking for their fingers…

        To pry, to climb out of whatever dark belly my brother, the Aztec
their son, had fed them to.

Readers witness the violence of meth addiction, see the blackened spoons and the sores on her brother’s lips, hear the tribal cops outside on the lawn, understand from the poem titled ‘As a Consequence of My Brother Stealing All the Light Bulbs’ that her parents live without light.  The tone is unapologetic and fierce.  It is unblinking on a topic that breaks many families.  Yet a close read reveals unmistakable joy in the writing.  Diaz celebrates that language can express these truths, even if they are hard truths.  The poems are alive on the page, delivered with a skill that often hides underneath the intensity of the material.

The characters devour, feed, starve, gorge, thirst and more.  In the poem ‘Cloud Watching’, Diaz writes “So, when the cavalry came, / we ate their horses.  Then, unfortunately, our bellies were filled  / with bullet holes.”  In ‘Soiree Fantastique’, her brother sets a table for a party attended by Houdini, Jesus, Antigone and others.  It ends when the poet explains to a distressed Antigone “We aren’t here to eat, we are being eaten. / Come, pretty girl, let us devour our lives.”   The effect of all this devouring on the reader is that it makes one insatiable for more of Diaz’s poems.

There are three parts to the book.  The first section serves as an introduction to life on the reservation.  We meet ‘A Woman with No Legs’ who “curses in Mojave some mornings  Prays in English most nights  Told me to keep my eyes open for the white man named Diabetes who is out there somewhere carrying her legs in red biohazard bags”.  We visit a jalopy bar called ‘The Injun That Could’.   We learn of a literal dismantling of the Hopi culture when a road is cut through Arizona in ‘The Facts of Art’.  This section feels more historical and cultural than personal.  For the lovers of form, Diaz scatters a Ghazal, a Pantoum, an Abcedarian, a list poem and prose poems throughout the collection.

The third section contains a handful of love and lust poems such as Monday Aubade:

    to shut my eyes one more night
On the delta of shadows
between your shoulder blades –
mysterious wings tethered inside
the pale cage of your body – run through
by Lorca’s horn of moonlight,
strange unicorn loose along the dim streets
separating our skins;

The surrealism persists in the love poems.  Often, the act of loving is portrayed as a kind of sacrifice.  The answer to the poem titled ‘When the Beloved Asks, ‘What Would You Do if you Woke Up and I Was a Shark?’ ‘ is clear:   “I’d place my head onto that dark alter of jaws” and “it would be no different from what I do each day – voyaging the salt-sharp sea of your body”.   It’s obvious that Lorca has been a substantial influence on Diaz.  She places a passionate poem titled ‘Lorca’s Red Dresses’ smack in the middle of the third section as well as mentioning him in ‘Monday Aubade’ and other poems.

The engine of the book is the second section.  These poems cast and recast the brother as various characters:  a Judas effigy, an Aztec, a Gethsemane, a bad king, a lost fucked-up Magus, a zoo of imaginary beings, a Huitzilopochtli (a half-man half-hummingbird god) and various characters from myth.  The theme of the book is being present in the face of a powerful destroyer, or living through an encounter with the destroyer, witnessing the wreckage and not turning away.  Ruin is wrought by her brother’s meth addiction.  There’s a reach to her talent that challenges the importance of her work being limited by identity.  I read a few of her poems to Plath’s ghost saying, “Look here, you aren’t the only one that can plate up mouthwatering, award-winning anger for male relatives”.

Destruction of Native American culture by Europeans settlers and the continued, historical bigotry is featured in the poems.  Ships appear throughout the book as harmful things.  Take the wonderfully-titled poem ‘If Eve Side-Stealer & Mary Busted-Chest Ruled the World’ which is an alternative retelling of first people and creation, the last stanza reads:

What if the world was an Indian
whose head & back were flat from being strapped
to a cradleboard as a baby & when she slept
she had nightmares lit up by yellow-haired men & ships
scraping anchors in her throat?  What if she wailed
all night while great waves rose up carrying the fleets
across her flat back, over the edge of the flat world?

I struggled with the question in this poem:  what if?  Diaz refuses to answer it.  The mind still asks:  What if we erase just this one chapter where the Hopi’s burial sites are dug up for a new road?  Or, what if a daughter is not stoned to death?  What if Diaz’s brother had not gone to war and had not crawled into bed with death?  Diaz knows this can not be.  It is as likely as the world being flat.  Her answer is a refusal to see anything other than the violent, beautiful world we have that is full of lightning.  This is a brave approach.  Yes, destruction is also generative.  If there was an end to violence, then nothing new could be born.

Still, I wonder whether the perspective and tone in When My Brother Was an Aztec, which is in part the powerful backstory of Diaz’s life, will shift now that this fearless narrative is spoken.  I predict that the book breaks open a future to be found in Diaz’s not-yet-written poems to show what a world would look like if she were the boss goddess.  One truth is:  the future exists.  Another truth is:  we get to help shape it.   I confess that I read utopian science-fiction, so I know that Diaz has exactly the kind of brutally honest mind that should broker destiny by introducing a few options and answering that question:  what if Eve Side-Stealer and Mary Busted-Chest ruled the world?  I still want to know.  I’m hoping her second book tells me.  Diaz signed my copy of this book with “sumach ahotk” which is Mojave for “dream well”.  Yes, let’s dream well.

In my opinion, this book will have a powerful effect on American poetry.  By adding her forceful voice to the spectrum of next generation Native American poets such as Esther Belin and Orlando White, she’s already earned much recognition.   Diaz has received the Lannan Literary Fellowship, Balcones Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and made the shortlist for a 2014 PEN/Open Book Award.   The collection ends as it began – with hunger – when a lion devours a man.  The lion protests he “didn’t want to eat the man like a piece of fruit”.  The man “had earned his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion’s cage”. The book has earned its deliciousness by ringing, too.  My recommendation is to set the table and let the feasting begin.

AIMEE A NORTON is a research astronomer at Stanford University. Her research has appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, Solar Physics, and National Geographic News among other places. She is also an emerging poet who has published in Mascara Literary Review, Rabbit, Softblow, Many Mountains Moving, Paper Wasp, The Drunken Boat, Byline and Literature in North Queensland (LiNQ).

 Toyo

By Lily Chan

Black Inc

ISBN: 9781863955737

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

In the Folds of Making: A Review of Toyo by Lily Chan

Upon a close reading of Melbourne-based, Japanese-Australian author Lily Chan’s debut novel and memoir Toyo, a word cannot fail to strike our attention, returning like a litany throughout. It is the word “fold”: fold of the body as legs gently repose on the tatami in traditional Japanese fashion (183) or as the skin becomes wrinkled (240) and twisted (236) with old age; animal/vegetal folds as one coils in reaction “like an abandoned dog” (103) or curls back inwards like the petals of a flower (14); artfully folding and unfolding fans (52); folded cloths following the lines of a kimono (50, 60, 168), a pair of pants (80) or a shirt (136) or a string of tissues hidden in sleeves (232, 243 and 245); paper folds, yen notes appearing and disappearing magically (60), an old photo stuck in-between the curves of a curtain (63), hastily scribbled messages stuffed in someone else’s clothes (236), or the folds of the origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into decorative shapes and figures (10, 214).

    A fold is neither a wrap nor a box. If the latter simultaneously conceal and reveal, the former possesses an “elastic” quality working at “the extremity of the line” between closure and disclosure. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze commented in his work on Leibniz and the Baroque, “the unfold is thus not the opposite of the fold, but follows one fold until the next” (1991: 231), in the manner of origami. As suggested by, and as opposed to, the French idiomatic phrases “cela ne fait pas un pli” (there’s no doubt about it, literally meaning “it does not fold”) and “c’est un pli à prendre” (it’s something you’ve got to get used to), Deleuze traces here the contours of a subject whose form and content are neither straightforward nor linear, neither the one nor the other, but instead tortuous and tortured, and imbued with the prospect of limitless, multiple selves: “[This] labyrinth of continuity is not a line which would dissolve into independent points, like sand flowing in grains, but is like a piece of fabric or a sheet of paper which divides into an infinite number of folds or disintegrates into curved movements” (231).  

    Toyo narrates the story of a woman whose life as an exile would involve many detours. Toyo was first exiled from her origins and in particular her father, whom she met only twice, being the fruit of an illegitimate relationship needing concealment; exiled again from the safety of home in the face of war, poverty and the horrors of the atomic bomb, or the sexual abuse coming from various predatory men taking advantage of the situation – American soldiers but also a family doctor. In the event of her mother’s death, Toyo is compelled to attach herself to a new family and husband. This man is Ryu, who himself must face daily estrangement for being doubly crippled. A lame person posited within the diasporic folds of the Chinese community in Japan, Ryu struggles through discrimination with a level of strength and determination only those struck by proportionate ill fortune seem to possess: “They [the Chinese] were excluded from the healthcare schemes and prohibited from working in the public service; they had to register their businesses with the government department regulating alien residents.” (83)

    Upon marrying Ryu, Toyo is asked to give up her Japanese citizenship. A new identity pass and a new name, Dong Yang Zhang, are issued to her, so that “she felt as if her body had been crossed out, as if she no longer existed” (88). Against all odds, Ryu succeeds in setting up coin-operated Laundromats across the entire city of Osaka, where none had existed hitherto, in a post-war, fast-modernising Japan ripe with hope and renewed opportunities. However, Ryu’s baroque eccentricities brought upon by wealth, his public gambling, drinking and flirting in particular, as well as the fatigue that hard work necessarily entails, makes him neglect his inner health in turn, only to die too soon of a simple kidney infection. As Deleuze has argued, “baroque architecture can be defined by that scission of the façade and the inside, of the interior and the exterior, the autonomy of the interior and the independence of the exterior effected in such a way that each one sets off the other.” (234) It is this precarious equilibrium, in-between “the coils (replis) of matter” and “the folds (plis) of the soul”, that Toyo, following a series of deaths within the Zhang family, will seek to achieve in her new life in Western Australia and her adoption of Eastern Indian spirituality – a balance sought out by Chan herself within the very skeleton of her memoir.

    While the first part of the novel is chiefly concerned with replis, which as Deleuze’s translator explained, “evokes the movements of a reptile…the idea of folding in on oneself” (227), the second part of the novel set in Perth and in the country town of Narrogin, where Chan grew up, deals instead with the multifarious plis that migrant resilience and pliability imply. The reader may scoff at Toyo’s and her son Yoshio’s New Ageism, from nomadic trips to India to meet with Indian Guru Sai Baba, to the building of a communal ashram in the middle of the West Australian wheat belt. However, we must remind ourselves how personal questing through the teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism had proved extremely popular across the West back in the 1970s and 80s when we can infer the action to take place, this despite the elusiveness with which the historical fresco of Toyo’s life is depicted (one of the memoir’s chief limitations according to Alison Broinowski). The state of Western Australia’s sheer magnitude and Perth especially, one of the most remote cities on earth, have in literature often taken on an added religious dimension, as is the case in Toyo: “In Perth the temple seemed to be everywhere; the sky was a vast blue rooftop covering the entire city.” (180)

    Perhaps the best way of grasping Chan’s insistence on Eastern spirituality is by looking at the corresponding thematic centrality of old age in the last sections of the book. Descriptions of an ageing, Alzheimer-struck Toyo following her return to Osaka after many years away, “where she felt like a tourist in her own city” (228), have given way in my view to the most interesting, most moving passages in the memoir. Here, the reader comes to understand how Chan’s book is, beyond being a memoir, primarily a fictional account of her grandmother’s “own hallucinations, dreams and fragmented recollections” (252). For a literature routinely plagued by discourses of cultural/historical authenticity/veracity, “how to break the mould of diasporic fiction and offer readers something unique is the challenge Lily Chan faces in her first book” (Broinowski 2012). Keeping this in mind, Broinowski’s subsequent criticism of the book’s ahistoricism feels strange, and her assertion that “most memoirs are of people who in some way were public figures or agents of change [while] Toyo is neither”, seems not only misplaced but factually wrong.

    In effect, the genre of the memoir has more often than not been a prime vehicle for the emergence of erased stories by minorities – women, Blacks, indigenous peoples, as well as “ordinary” citizens of all kinds. These “micro-narratives” however deserve to be universalized due to the fact that matter “offers a texture that is infinitely porous, that is spongy or cavernous without empty parts, since there is always a cavern in the cavern: each body, however small it may be, contains a world insofar as it is perforated by uneven passageways” (Deleuze 1991: 230). The trans-generational nature of the memoir allows for a form of historicity that is neither fully personal nor “cosmological”, residing instead in the interstitial play of signs, the subterranean or subconscious “cave of making” (Bhabha 2009) that is at the origin of discourse. A dying, speechless Toyo will thus seek in her youngest grandchild a mirror to her own existence and a means of communication as she felt the irrepressible urge to speak to him, for “[she] saw, suddenly, that he was part of the constellation, that his very soul was flaring and bursting, and in the trajectory of his life, she could see her own intersect with his, the tenuous point of connection flickering like a sparked wire, yet to come into being” (258).

    A word must be said here on the allegorical, poetic prose of Chan’s writing, before I return to the problematic of the fold as a matter of conclusion. As Delia Falconer has argued, “it’s a shame Chan’s overrefined prose stifles their [Chan’s characters’] “lifeness”…as she strives too often to pin them to artful similes.” This is missing the fact that, mentioned several times throughout the memoir, the art of kabuki has provided the cultural and formalistic framework through which Chan was able to give life and resonance to each one of her characters. A kabuki is “a form of traditional Japanese drama with highly stylized song, mime, and dance…using exaggerated gestures and body movements to express emotions, and including historical plays, domestic dramas, and dance pieces.” Style being another aspect of diasporic fiction by which the literary establishment regularly condemns or relegates the latter to the dusty archives of life-writing, it is not surprising to find, yet again, reluctance in the face of the fact that,

“it is the way in which matter [content] folds that constitute its texture [form]…defined less by its heterogeneous and genuinely distinct parts than by the manner in which, by virtue of particular folds, these parts become inseparable. From that one gets the concept of Mannerism in its operatory relation to the Baroque” (Deleuze 1991: 245).

    The end of the book reverts in a roundabout way to Toyo’s illegitimate birth, but, unlike the image of a dog endlessly chasing its own tail/tale, Toyo at the dusk of life and for the first time felt fulfilled. As Deleuze again wrote, “the perfect harmony of the scission, or the resolution of tension, is effected by the distribution of two stories, which both belong to one and the same world (the line of the universe). The matter-façade tends downwards while the soul-chamber rises. The infinite fold thus passes between two stories.” (243) There would be quite a lot to say about Toyo’s stereotypical view of Australia, or her Orientalist (if not at times racist) appraisal of India – “India was dirty. Brown. Hot” (198) – or yet still, her complete ignorance of Aboriginal spirituality, but eventually, Chan’s writerly gift is to have shown us a life with multiple entries and folds, which is what distinguishes a rounded from a flat character.

    If Chan chooses to leave the reader with a sense of plenitude, it is because Toyo, unlike her mother, born in a small farming village and who due to unforeseen circumstances was never able to realise her dream of becoming a nurse, has been given the opportunity to travel, be mobile while reinventing herself and grow old to share her knowledge and experience with others, which is no small feat. Altogether, quite a baroque life indeed:

Toyo taught her grandchildren origami…She carried boxes of coloured paper squares to the three primary schools in Narrogin and taught them how to fold samurai hats, boats, masks, jumping frogs. The children watched her fold the coloured paper and gasped in wonder when she held the finished pieces up. She liked to wander around the classrooms and examine the children’s bent heads, their industrious fingers folding and unfolding…Children ran to their parents at the bell, brandishing their boats and birds and frogs and sumo wrestlers. She felt complete. (214)

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. 2009. “In the Cave of Making: Thoughts on Third Space.” Communicating in the Third Space (Karin Ikas & Gerhard Wagner eds.): IX-XIV. New York: Routledge.

Broinowski, Alison. 2012. “Rare Asian Family Study.” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 29.

<http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/rare-asian-family-study-20121228-2byac.html> (Accessed 13 Sept. 13).

Chan, Lily. 2012. Toyo. Melbourne: Black Inc.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. “The Fold.” Yale French Studies 80: 227-247.

Falconer, Delia. 2012. “Homing in on an Extraordinary Life.” The Australian, October 20.

<http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/homing-in-on-an-extraordinary-life/story-fn9n8gph-1226498574907> (Accessed 13 Sept. 13).

No Author. 2010. “Kabuki: a definition”. New Oxford American Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PAUL GIIFFARD-FORET  completed a PhD at Monash University. His work appears in Westerly, Transnational Literature and Mascara.
He teaches in Paris.

Transactions

By Ali Alizadeh

University of Queensland Press

ISBN 9780702249785

Reviewed by ELIZABETH BRYER

Ali Alizadeh’s Transactions is a panoramic cycle of vignettes that depict characters in a globalised world on the margins of Western and, most particularly, capitalist society. A vast array of characters jostle within its pages: assassins, prostitutes, poets, protesters and Oz-Exploitation directors, to name a few. Indeed, much of the delight to be had on reading the collection is in unravelling exactly how these people, all from diverse corners of the globe, are connected within the world of the book. Transactions is also a scathing critique of a system that exploits the most vulnerable, carefully laying out for scrutiny, as it does, moments, decisions and interactions that demonstrate the insidiousness of rampant capitalism and the questionable morals that it champions.

Because of the nature of the vignettes, the particular stories they tell are not so much stories as disparate moments, separated from each other in space but not so much in time, and revolving around a single interaction or conundrum. They are necessarily focussed and partial. While occasionally this can mean that some plot developments feel hastily resolved, or that characters can come across as types, this same feature also creates an intricate, interweaving architecture, much as if one were to find oneself in a building with many rooms, and through exploring these might happen upon hidden passages leading to spaces of a particular character—chambers, inglenooks, boudoirs—and staircases and doorways opening onto others. Indeed, the most successful moments are when the plot stretches across and through vignettes, sometimes skipping some only to reappear in others, and it is in this steady accumulation of connections and layering of experiences that the tone of the work, as well as its entwined themes, is best appreciated.

The title of the collection operates on a number of levels, encompassing more than just the usual context of business and exchange: in the world of this book, most things, even relationships and interactions, even the concepts of familial duty and mutual obligation, boil down to an economic imperative, and each of the transactions depicted is an occasion on which, in one way or another, one person is likely to give and the other, to gain. That the transaction is between unequals, all of whom must engage in the exchange while equipped with different levels of freedom of choice and with more or less to lose, is almost always the case. What is not often apparent—what is cause for much of the tension—is who will, ultimately, benefit. One avenging angel sees it as her duty to give those who have consistently profited through swindling another, whether through cruelty and maltreatment, a lack of recognition of the other’s humanity or uncompassionate policies, their comeuppance, to put it mildly.

Nothing, it seems, is free of the market, or of the pressures and fissures that this market places on and between people. And on one point the narrator is very clear: the corruption that the global system breeds does not just lead to wealth disparity, but to individuals both becoming expendable commodities, as when mining protesters are massacred and poor Liberian women are trafficked to Europe, and treating others as if they were, as when a would-be-author asks his co-author to sleep with a publisher to ensure their book’s publication. Those doing the exploiting, then, dehumanise the exploited, but in doing so they necessarily dehumanise themselves. But the narrator is careful to point to the potential dangers of all hierarchical systems, not just the capitalist one: one of the vignettes, whose protagonists recurs throughout the collection, shadows its protagonist as she comes to terms with the truth of her scientist father’s actions, or lack thereof, at the Chernobyl disaster. ‘He wanted to please the party. He knew there was something wrong with the control rods, Mama. But he didn’t say anything’ (p. 92).

Perhaps inevitably, given the subject matter, a strong sense of moralising at times comes to the fore. The poor are trapped in the position of bearing the system, and others, having risen through its ranks by way of economic or social capital, become a kind of embodiment of evil: there is Samia, the disease of affluence incarnate, in whose figure boredom and entitlement foster cruelty and sadism; there are Danish missionaries in Libya who use their women’s shelter as a means of trafficking women for the European sex trade; and there is a British magnate who has built her empire ‘upon the misery of others’ and yet sees herself ‘as truly innocent’ (18). Hypocrisy and corruption are rampant among the upper echelons, and are portrayed as unforgivable.

It is no mean feat to present such a geographically and culturally broad vision of humanity without falling into stereotypes, but Transactions navigates this carefully. Sometimes the fictional world created stretches credulity, such as when a character who has been poisoned continues to punch out words into her computer, the sentences becoming more fragmented, the words, more spaced. At other times, there are moments of confusion in the narrative logic that can prove distracting, such as when a mentally ill man stabs himself to death then self-immolates. But there is great delight in language, which is wielded with verve, and a playfulness and dexterity with form: some vignettes are epistolary, others are dialogue, others are poems and yet others are confessional. There are almost as many voices and registers as there are vignettes, here, without the forms ever proving distracting or perfunctory.

After the prologue, each of the vignettes carries the title of a tarot card from the Marseille deck, with one, ‘The Fool’, repeated—this is the title of both the first and last stories. Interestingly, the character to whom the title refers in the first story reappears in the last, though not, in the latter case, as the titular character, but as the one who proves the protagonist to be deserving of the designation. The circularity that this creates is effective, as is the astute choice to title the stories like so. Through the titles, the narrator suggests not just that world is thus ordered, but also frames the stories as, like tarot cards, tools with which we can attempt to comprehend the confounding nature of the system we humans have created for ourselves. Transactions offers us an assortment of stories that don’t just order the world, but help us understand it.

Parang

by Omar Musa

Blast! Publishing, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-646-59463-7

Reviewed by ANGELA STRETCH

It takes time to have a heart, to suffer, to feel the weight of things. The heart is alive precisely through its capacity for fellow-feeling.

Like the posthumous soul in Malaysian thought, memory disperses as if it is no longer attached to something tangible.  To keep the soul from disintegrating Omar Musa consistently evokes it, bringing it back into direct contact with the living world. In this second collection Musa negotiates the heart of Malay traditions and rituals comprising of family, people, objects and interactions.  It provides the living with structured occasions to refresh memories of the dead through symbolic communication, historical knowledge that transmit moral principles, gleaming rectification in order to strengthen relationships.

Dream specifications for Musa’s amorous relations: a prospect of limitless power whose miraculous condescension or grace it is to single out for special tenderness the minute grain of sand or crystal it anyway contains.  The contrasts between infinite ocean and finite pebble, between the fluidity of the saline medium and the attendant still of its denizens, between grandiose nominatives and familiarities, between absolute freedom and absolute dependency, such are the polarisations between the preservation of family memories and echoes of grand monumentality and unadorned ordinariness.  

The book begins with an evocation of terrible alienation, a nomadship only terminated by self-destruction: a lost soul surviving precariously in a memory.  

I stopped to bathe
and time tipped over the lip of a jug.
Just then I heard the echo of an ancestor,
wild and wise as a hart
[i].

The young man responds. Musa conceives of himself becoming a sort of teller, a people’s poet.  The same drive toward simplification and abstraction can be found in the book’s title. Parang, a self-made dagger with many uses as whetted in The Parang and the Keris.[ii]

But this commonplace parang?
I know how to use it –
to clear a lane through jungle,
to tap rubber from a tree
or with swish calligraphic
take a head
clean
off.    

Expressing stubbornness and tenacity that unfolds various meanings, Parang is almost a tale of a young man’s mortal frailty. The simple contact of intimate associations of those primary family members in a journey to Kuala Lumpar quietly affirms a bond stretching via memory beyond a grave.

The site of Musa’s discoveries through writing his own fragmented memoir, are chaptered in three presences; Parang, family and identity; Lost Planet, immigration and Dark Streets, environmentalism.

The nature of these voices are quickly revealed in stages of basic affective positions, inner attitudes towards life, “disembodied’ utterances that precipitate out of his contemplated experience.  The movement of feeling and imaginative personifications exist in the reflection of our complex and difficult times, saturated with human and artistic experiences. In Amsterdam:

A couple parted
to cross the road.
As they stepped off the curb,
their hands unfastened
and the asphalt
leapt open between them
like a grin
or a grave.

ANGELA STRETCH is a language artist whose work has been exhibited and published nationally, and internationally.  She is the coordinator of the Sydney Poetry program at the Brett Whiteley Studio and is on the National Advisory Board for Australian PoetryLtd.  She is the co-director of Talking Through Your Arts, and writes an arts column of the same name for Alternative Media.

Boom

by Liam Ferney

Grande Parade Poets

ISBN 978-0-9871291-4-7

Reviewed by MELINDA BUFTON

Liam Ferney’s Boom (Grand Parade Poets, 2013) is a much-anticipated collection of tightly-knit poetry, threaded with the things he has seen and the spaces he’s occupied, cast with a sardonic glance and the flick of a metaphoric burnt-down cigarette. It is the Steve McQueen of poetry collections, to my mind.  Or perhaps, even more accurately, it is a smart, enthusiastic 30-something guy at a party describing what it is about Steve McQueen that matters.  In really articulate tones, and with tie askew, because he’s come from work.  We get potency and we get the sublime, with a lot of grit all around the edges.  Intriguingly, the grit comes in the form of elegant sentences that surprise, their content seemingly slipped in under the radar of form.  I wouldn’t say this is the aim; just that the music of the lines takes your senses first, and then come the beautiful clusters of pop disintegration, fuzzy images of the right brand of cynicism, a professional eye on the world’s seams.  In an early poem within the collection, ‘Expecting Turbulence’, we get this:

First chance I get I’m SoCo mofo
backdrop a drained out montage, colours
of a nunsploitation print abandoned in a can.

(p 19)

In ‘that thin mercury sound’ (below) we get some more; pleasing rhythm with a certain amount of give, encompassing some event that could have been a bad day in the office or an international relations nightmare (Ferney is a poet who often mentions his work in public relations and politics, and we have this in the satisfyingly detailed bio included at the back of the book). We don’t know; it doesn’t matter.  What matters is he’s buried it in here for us to have, and that is an absolution that cleanses much more than a top-marks performance review or a constitutional crisis averted (am I right, day-jobbers?).

lost in a hard drive somewhere between
formats and a nasty Trojan horse the length
of an absence stretches like a hair band
co-opted into service as a lock a galleon

(p 47)

In addition to the poems with a fast, chopping sensibility, there are also more narrative inclusions.  A stand-out of the collection is a poem which takes us into the story of a relationship and a trip, ‘The September Project’ (below).  It has a litany of living that situates our minds eye into a maybe-Bukowski landscape (without the domestic violence), or somewhere past in a collage that feels both American and Australian, but may include Korea, as many of the poems do. He gives her Converse to ‘scuff at the mudguard’, and they wash dishes for bad pay and write.  The poem has pace, and an expansive sense of possibility that grows even while the relationship falters, as we know it will (It’s that kind of poem).  It’s the most lovely example of written melancholy, seen to particular effect towards the end:

in winter she was cold she was starting to remember
as he was learning to forget and they could not
sit still the September project through mountains
in boats across the vortex a continent as vast as hope
and that September they had the strangest dreams
while the wind stilled in the middle of the early dark
in a city where they had no currency and the tea
tastes metallic they watched sharks arcing through the ocean

(p 44)

At the conclusion, Ferney ends with a line that ‘the September project was never submitted’.  It’s this, in combination with an earlier moment in the poem ‘the September project was something/they could use in creative writing seminars/for all time..’ that makes us smile because we know this little hook, and that it saves us all – Ferney, and his readers – from too much sentimentality. 

Once we would have just called that postmodern, that the self-reflexive was a smart attribute with which to back away from content that dealt in the romantic.  Now, like late-model masculinity, we can treat it as an extra ingredient to the sentimental.  It is the dash of bitters in the sweet lemon and lime.  (And no, I’m not going to move on any time soon from this imagery.  How could I waste such an opportunity, when Ferney has a poem in here called ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’?  And given that his first collection was entitled Popular Mechanics?  I’m in good company.)

‘Millenium Lite Redux’ is a dense poem that skates us through place via questions.  It is typical of the many compact poems within the collection, and displays more of the fluidity that calls to mind John Forbes, but with the multi-faceted knowing that comes from having occupied so many roles and places already.  That is, a Liam Ferney poem about the dole is not a poem that assumes the role of poet first and foremost.  It’s a poem that says, quite rightly, how do I work these angles to get to the next place I need to be.  It’s a poem that says ‘the diary is a newstart fraud de art’ and ‘if you don’t have the ingredients don’t try to cook’, and then, in the close of the second stanza ‘and I think I understand the saints/stranded so far from home’.

Boom is poetry without swagger and with plenty of humility, yet the sum of this is a kind of roar and a knowledge of social and cultural lexicons laid out like samples for us to buy.  It reminds us, even within the lines, not to be a wanker;  ‘us’ being the nexus of the poet, the work, the readers. 

                                                                                                                          & that’s how
You get suckerpunched:
                                                 Using bigger &
                                                                Bigger words
As if somebody had tattooed
A scrabble player’s aesthetic                     
                                                                Over poetry’s flexed bicep.

(‘Crumpled Elegance’ p 15)

Despite its range of poems, it hangs together well due to the assuredness of voice (assured, even when it’s asking questions of itself).  It asks us to come inside the poems and take those parts we want, and while we’re there, to have a look at those parts that have been laid in via code, and to not flip out if they don’t give themselves up to us immediately (or ever).  It’s a text-y feast and there’s plenty to be had.  Dial room service and say ‘Bring me some man poetry of the modern day’, and you’ll get Boom.  Tucked in a white paper bag, like white toast in a Bathurst motel; exactly what you want.

MELINDA BUFTON is a Melbourne poet and reviewer,   Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Cordite, Rabbit, The Age and translated in Chinese poetry journal Du Shi.  Her debut collection is forthcoming from Inken Publisch (www.inkenpublisch.com).

My Funeral Gondola

by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Mãnoa Books / El Léon Literary Arts, 2013

ISBN: 978-0983391982

Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO

Where does life reside? Where does the spirit live? Where is the substance of the self? In Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s second poetry collection, My Funeral Gondola, ponderous wonderings become lighter than air, flying and perching like inquisitive birds, melancholy, merry, gentle, and sly. Inviting us to step through a prefatory poem that signals our passage into a world ‘No more black and white’, the poet guides us through the realms of liminality, and with her we experience the afterlives of herself and others, the reverberations of past dreams and memories, and the scattering of consciousness through time and space.      

In the first suite of poems, we witness the death of the author, and it would seem that demise is the beginning of new life: an all too vivid one in ‘Notes from My Funeral’ where the poet’s passing occasions an eclectic gathering of culinary, religious, and musical incongruities: dragon fruit next to salmon maki and baked apricots; African odes, Tibetan chants, and a Catholic priest. The funeral is not a last rite, but a rite of passage, and to the accompaniment of Liszt mixed with Dylan, the poet undertakes not final rest, but resettlement: ‘From one state of gratitude/ to another province’. The eponymous poem ‘My Funeral Gondola’ too bears its quarry with no fixed destination in sight. Rather

it positions itself
midway in a strait—so that shadows
by the woods
by the sun
travel over it….

Humans have souls, but so do words, we find out in ‘When the Title Took Its Life’. And they too yearn for escape from bodily confines:

    My saddest lines
    wish to know how they left
this pen
and why I imprison them
in corridors
along margins. Abbreviated
but exhausted from labour.

‘Erase me’, they insist. ‘Here is not life.’ Suicide by one name is liberation by another, and a playful rumination on words taking (their own) life becomes both a meditation on the nature of human existence (Is bodily incarnation life or is it an incarceration, a negation of life?) and a reflection on the failure inherent in the poet’s desire to capture life when life can only blossom beyond the artifice of the written word.

Scattering like ashes, the dispersal of life, of self, of soul continues through the second section, ‘Odd Spirits’. A puppet-master of ‘Javanese Wayang’ ‘steals/ away from his body’ and transmigrates into shadow: ‘Watch the shadows, not/ the puppets.’ The spirits of ‘François Dead’ and ‘Cremating Maestro’ reverse this journey: the material traces the departed leave behind become more than merely physical: they have a weight and heft that anchors the soul in the world of the living. François’s lodgings are packed away and cleaned, but ‘A musty hardcover/ of ancient elegies/ loosely translated from the Japanese’ brings him back into the room they have cleared out: ‘François said he stole it.’ An origami boat brings closer intimacy with the classical Chinese poet Li Po than ever achieved by contemplating his poetry and its subject matter: ‘Sixteen, I folded a paper boat for you,/ imagining it once carried Li Po, imagining/ it was his body….’ In the intertwining of the flesh and spirit, material and immaterial, substantial and insubstantial, all distinctions melt away.

In the final section, the poet’s life is broken across countries, addresses, experiences, and encounters: ‘Not Thinking About the Past’ (also the section’s title) takes us from 117 West 75th Street in New York to St. Albert’s Trail in Canada, to Block 33, Jalan Bahagia in Singapore, to 16 rue Séguier in Paris. Through the other poems, we visit a first night in Shanghai, a music lesson with Martha at the age of nine, 1980 in London, a pretentious academic symposium in Germany. Masterful is the closing ‘Return to Self’—a desultory series of beautiful, funny, and puzzling observations, recountings, statements—that somehow hangs together by imperceptible threads to give rise to a portrait of individual being.

The bigger your mole looks in the mirror, the more your body parts with ofty ideas. This is why Granny claims moles are temples. When I practice calligraphy, each splotch reminds me of a deformed atom.

With a diploma in healing orchids, I invent the way of healing her.
To quote a French humorist, God is absent, but the concierge will return.
We like the dirty goats approaching our bus-stop. Our bus is late, so are they.

Across time and space, death and life, solidity and abstraction, we are. Inexplicably so. At the coaxing of a lesser craftswoman, the finished piece could not hold. In the hands of Sze-Lorrain, breaking apart and holding together become one and the same, suspended, but not motionless.    

 TIFFANY TSAO is a lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle

The Book of Ethel

by Jordie Albiston

Puncher and Wattmann

ISBN: 9781922186263

Reviewed by DAN DISNEY

Jordie Albiston’s new book is the formal equivalent of an exclamation mark. These first-person narrative poems call from the ether of memory/invention, and in The Book of Ethel Albiston ventriloquizes her maternal great-grandmother’s voice to recount Ethel’s quest to locate (an always-capitalized) Home. Each stanza in this meticulously compressed collection has seven lines, and each line seven syllables; Albiston’s stylized shorthand is partly a codifying device, and partly a matter of form enabling a voice to be heard, clear and strange amid the fractured syntax. These songs, or fragments/fractions of song, are a kind of paean or colonial ancestor worship which tell a particular Newly Australian migrant’s tale: The Book of Ethel explores how intimacy and family happen in an Unheimlich dwelling, to explore (the so often migratory) patterns of identity and belonging.

In previous collections, Albiston has focused on history (in her accounts of the often-brutal colony: Botany Bay Document and The Hanging of Jean Lee) and genealogy (in her award-winning the sonnet according to m, written for her grandmother). In The Book of Ethel, Albiston once more voices a matrilineal tongue, moving backward through time to prise open origins. Ethel’s voice is both fabular and everyday, epic and romantic as she moves across a version of the world where supper-bells ring (9), measles are a mortal danger (16), and – imagine it! – women get to vote (23). Leaving Cornwall and boarding a ‘good ship out-bound for Melbourne’ (18), Ethel muses –

    em-i-grate     I am told it

    means ‘to go’     but will there be

    kerrek & croft     karn & quoit

    where we ‘go’?     will New Home have

    field & valley?     zawn?     wall?

    will friends be waiting for me?

    em-i-grate     emigrate     so

    (16)

Ethel traverses zones temporal, psychic, and linguistic, her voice burred with an outsider’s lexicon; the unrecognizable Cornish terms (helpfully explained in a glossary at the back of the book) heighten the sense that this narrator is abandoning an imaginative order. Thrice repeating the term (emigration-as-incantation?), Albiston wants her readers fully aware that –

a name may some-how     make     mark

(23)

which is, perhaps, epiphenomenal: like all of us, Albiston’s past is particularly inscribed (for another exploration of this, Les Murray’s interview in The Paris Review is illuminating). By including words that have neither currency nor cachet among contemporary readers, Albiston foregrounds Ethel’s life as one spent marking out new semantic boundary lines, and hyphenating ‘emigrate’ emphasises the job ahead: close readers will roll the word slowly in their minds too, to better understand how Ethel must (literally) come to terms with the great, grating reality of emigration.

    Albiston borrows from tropes biblical and demotic, parochial and rushing at us (largely) unpunctuated; the book’s title suggests an Old Testament-style testimony in which Ethel journeys to a promised land (‘Australia     finally!’ 21) to then marry her ordained Mister/Minister (‘Husband-Husband     wedded     Twice’ 25) and raise a family. But rather than some colloquial rites-of-passage, this book is a formally innovative tour-de-force; studded with verbal puns, Albiston’s language-as-material is split, spliced, broken, rendered and, persistently, urgently repurposed. The quirky style is announced from the outset –

so Life!     we meet once more     you

& I     in concert     concord

happy agreement to do

until done     my act     your stage

make     lie in it     this! my bit-

part     play     World     with me aboard

a Speck!     & then     gigantic

(7).

These lines-as-snapped-ligatures writhe with implication (I am reminded of Bob Perelman’s ‘Chronic Meanings’), and the poem’s stage is traipsed breathlessly by half-thoughts left as near-resemblances (‘do until done’ suggests do you take this person to be your lawful and etc) and absent echoes (‘make’ your bed and ‘lie in it’). These snapshots of an exiled life replicate a mind scanning, fitfully and non-editorially: we are inside Ethel’s mind, watching while new Homes propagate with children –

    Number

    5 still safe inside     coming

    soon     awaited waifs imbue

    such Love     Wave!     then say Adieu

    (31)

and, as the family swells, these songs come to speak gradually of Homeliness as intimate and relational: an abstract accommodation.

These, then, are ballads to love: that affect in which even exiles can find solace. Of course there is yearning (which love isn’t sharpened by craving) and Ethel is often inside the poems alone –

I simply wait & sit wait-

ing     he     Mister     gone off to

camp in the hills

(45)

and her solitariness is reflected in the Mallarméan <<blancs>>, which act as internal line breaks: sometimes scanning as comma-like caesurae, sometimes as semantic fractures, the spacing creates a glitching and staccato rhythm which tonally agrees with Albiston’s objective: Ethel’s homing is never hubristic, and never wholly comfortable. At many lines’ end, the enjambments take on particular significatory force –

daughter     daughter     daughter     daught-

er     son     & one inside     Home

(32)

A wry wit is at work here: in breaking at the seventh syllable, ‘daught-’, the new line conveys a fourth daughter and then, err (surprise), a son. The many intentionally widowed half-words (butcher-/y, vi-/olence, fun-/nels, any-/how, love-/ly) make Albiston’s lines strangely interlinear, contingent as the eye roves and returns, never quite sure what complexities lie just ahead, or indeed what might have been too-quickly parsed – much, I imagine, like Ethel, careful but not completely surefooted in her relocated life.

The ballad is familiar territory for Albiston, but these texts are as much pseudo-triolets (minus one line, and minus one syllable per line) as they are attempts at balladeering. What rhetorical gestures are at work in these ‘half-fourteener’ lines of seven syllables apiece? According to the Princetons –

When a pair of fourteeners are broken by hemistichs to form a quatrain of lines stressed 4-3-4-3 and rhyming abab, they become the familiar ‘eight-and-six’ form of ballad meter called common meter or common measure. (The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: 504)

In his launch speech, Alex Skovron speculates delightfully on the possible significance the number seven has for this text; performing revelrous calculations to compute numerological sense into style, Skovron notices –

both Jordie’s name and the book’s title contain 14 letters each – that is, 2 x 7. But that’s just for starters. Now listen. As I’ve explained, there are 7 syllables to each 7-line stanza; 7 x 7 = 49. Ethel died in 1949, and she was 77 years old! Interesting? She was born in 1872, and Jordie was born in 1961; adding 72 to 61 gives you 133; add those three digits together (1 + 3 + 3) and you get – 7!

My own sense is that there is no explicit explanation for the form, nor none required (I suspect Skovron may agree): Albiston fulfills her rhetorical structure sixty times over, and there is a synthetic weight to the bulk of her exactly-repeated shapes. The poet has afforded enough self-devised space for a gamut of affect (fear, yearning, loneliness, courage, humility, tolerance, joy) to occupy these texts. As Ethel states, arriving in the first of her many Homes –

          I must

muster Home     the rest over

time     the new me     century

aligned     1900 stand-

ing     sentinel-straight     straight     white

(27)

and these songs of survival and perseverance (straight and white) are also ultimately songs of homage: Albiston’s excavation of an origin speaks of Ethel’s hard-won belonging, a lifelong pursuit undertaken in tandem with the co-progenitorial Mister.

On the blurb of Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, Michael Braun describes the Danish poet as ‘no apologist for blind, rapturous singing, but probably the most form-conscious and reflective writer of poetry in Europe today.’ Jordie Albiston’s dance with form is a sophisticated yet radical gambol: these poems move decisively, sensuous and surefooted. In an interview with The Paris Review, August Kleinzahler speaks of the difficulty for contemporary poets to locate ‘a coherent, interesting structure’ and goes on to suggest that many ‘simply avoid the problem or take refuge in some rote “avant-garde” gesture like fridge-magnet indeterminism i.e. spilling the language all over the floor and stomping on it like a three-year-old child.’ Not so Jordie Albiston: The Book of Ethel is, as with Albiston’s other recent books, an astonishing confluence of formal constraint and authentic music. This is not the first Ethel to arrive on the Australian literary landscape, but Albiston’s character seems destined to be more than peripheral; The Book of Ethel comes from a poet at the top of their game, and Albiston is more than an Antipodean Christensen. She is making weird, intelligent arias, which we need listen to, again and then again to understand, at least partly, the fragments of our recent past: our provenance and inheritance. With this book, which more than confirms her talent, one senses Albiston starting to take up her place in a future version of how we will come to recognize Australian poetry.

WORKS CITED

Kleinzahler, A. interviewed by William Corbett for the ‘The Art of Poetry’ interview series (#93, The Paris Review), www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5789/the-art-of-poetry-no-93-august-kleinzahler site accessed 31.08.2013

Greene, R. et al 2012 The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th edition) Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

DAN DISNEY is a poet and essayist. He teaches twentieth century poetry and poetics at Sogang University, and divides his time between Seoul, Turin, and Melbourne. He co-edited New Directions in Australian Poetry with Matthew Hall and was awarded the 2022 Kenneth Slessor Prize.

Hotel Hyperion

By Lisa Gorton

Giramondo, May 2013, 50pp

ISBN 9781922146274

In her second collection of poems, Hotel Hyperion, Lisa Gorton shows us how memory is “a place less like place than like memory itself” (“Dreams and Artefacts”): a surface, which we may see through but not penetrate. These poems are concerned with the melancholy experience of spatial and temporal distances, and how these reflect the distance between one life—one self—and another.

It’s a concern that Gorton established in her first collection, Press Release, and that she has critically explored in her work on John Donne. In her award-winning essay, “John Donne’s Use of Space”, Gorton describes the metaphysical poet’s selection of “a master-image upon which he maps many, various, and sometimes contradictory ideas.” It’s useful to consider to what extent this is also a description of Gorton’s poetics, particularly the way they are plotted and polished in Hotel Hyperion.

The “master-image” of Hotel Hyperion takes multiple shapes—telescope, diorama, Snow Dome, spacesuit, crystal, house—which the poet treats as one type, “things closed in glass” (“Room and Bell”). Upon these, Gorton maps her

essay on memory. Her imagery tingles with the chill of synthetic and airtight spaces, their bloodless particles and unearthly quiet:

Patiently, ticket by ticket, a soft-stepped crowd
advances into the mimic ships hull half-
sailed out of the foyer wall, as if advancing into
somebody else’s dream —
the interior, windowless, where perspex cases bear,
each to its single light, small relics —

(“Dreams and Artefacts”)

We imagine the speaker’s voice ringing in sparse rooms, between echoing footsteps; and always through this book, the muffled white noise of rain outside:

long rain breaking itself onto the footpath,
breaking easily into the surface of itself
like a dream without emblems, an in-drawn shine.
Overhead, clouds build and ruin imaginary cities,
slo-mo historical epics with the sound down,
        playing to no one.

(“Dreams and Artefacts”)

A host of speakers—visitors, mothers, children, guardians—inhabits these spaces in Hotel Hyperion. The book’s few domestic scenarios are a red herring, as even homely settings become uncanny. For example, In the sequence “Room and Bell” (which might be the book’s finest section), Gorton gradually makes the comforting imagery of a childhood bedroom transparent: revealed as the deep memory of an adult speaker who, as a child, was already haunted in this very space by a spectre of her grown self. This revelation is amplified to disturbing proportions in the poem “Screen, Memory”, in which the speaker, who has come to accept the sealed interior of a space ship as home, miscalls a memory of bushwalking. In fact, she has received the “memory” from images screened onboard the ship.

In examining memory, Gorton is not simply concerned with the act of remembrance; she is interested in how memory reveals the very quality of being. In “Room and Bell”, experience is haunted or doubled by the shadow of our own consciousness. In “Screen, Memory”, as in all of the poems in Hotel Hyperion, the speaker is a witness and collector of reality—that is to say, the speaker is memory itself—for whom experience is refracted through the glass of other lives, other beings.

Beneath her book’s master-images, Gorton extends metaphors of intricacy and reversion. These become self-generating through the poet’s structural techniques of repetition, reiteration and variation. Perhaps the book’s most striking instance of such technique is its reprise of “Press Release”, the titular poem of Gorton’s previous collection: here reprinted as the seed of a new titular sequence, “The Hotel Hyperion”. As well as the rain already mentioned, lesser examples of returning meta-images include: moving clouds; a miniaturised ship (through a telescope, in a bottle, in a Snow Dome); displayed relics; and Mantegna’s The Triumph of Caesar. Their return mimics mild amnesia, once again reflecting memory’s fallibility; and, at the same time their presence reminds us that coincidence is the poet’s deliberate and provocative art.

At the level of line and sequence, Hotel Hyperion itself becomes the prismatic object it describes. In this book Gorton has claimed the long line with a determination and consistency unprecedented in her work. It allows her to extend whole corridors of thought without pause:

In a Storm Glass crystals
with the exactness peculiar to foreboding make neural
flare shapes: ultrasound-
coloured threads cross-stitched with blank, as of sensation
excised and, here, preserved in light.

(“A Description of the Storm Glass and Brief Guide to its Use in Forecasting Weather”)

This new affect of breathlessness contrasts Gorton’s essayistic register and typically rhetorical tone. This disconcerting tension adds urgency and pitch to these poems, signaling their linkages whilst pulling the reader by the arm, down the cold and glassy passages of their imagery. Amplifying the long lines, multiplying those corridors into networks of association, Gorton makes extravagant use of parataxis. This effect is most notably built through her liberal use of the dash, which creates the appearance of delayed conclusion:

A solution of camphor sealed in glass, they mass,
weather by weather, crystalline forms that vary
with electric change in air, and make a trophy of their
ruin —
so the clear spirit, which held all yesterday grey-
shadowed light,
this morning raises its more precise hallucination —
Jamesian
treasury of scruples, or that more formal vaulting of
remorse —

(“A Description of the Storm Glass and Brief Guide to its Use in Forecasting Weather”)

The shape of these lines flirts with prose, but Gorton’s style is steeped in lyricism; even the prose paragraphs of “Room and Bell” are sprung with musical punctuation, pace and sound effect. In the above lines, Gorton interrupts the long breath with abrupt enjambment. Frequently, line breaks hang on words that might conventionally be considered weak hinges: “of their” and “vaulting of”, for instance. However, Gorton’s reasoning of these breaks is formally precise, bringing attention not so much to the end-word as to the one hung beneath. Those words take the weight of a whole line. They are like a tolling bell or a heart sinking: ruin, remorse.

These micro-structures are more broadly reproduced by the arrangement of the book’s contents. Read as a lyric essay, each of its five parts contains a sequence or suite. Each sequence or suite forms images realised in the next. In “The Hotel Hyperion”, this structure reflects the sequence’s narrative of human generations, its poems ordered episodically to represent the reliance of one life and civilization upon another. The book’s final section, an ekphrastic sequence about Mantegna’s painting, The Triumph of Caesar, culminates this structure: framed by a contemporary viewer, looking into to Mantegna’s Renaissance viewpoint, which looks into to the Roman—and so we have Western tradition seen down the barrel of art’s telescope.

It’s a structural conceit that echoes Gorton’s own reading of Donne, specifically her focus on how his:

… one image of a circle and its centre, and the arrangement of relations that it represents in spatial terms… takes its shape and meaning from the shape and meaning of space in the ‘closed cosmos,’ where space is arranged in concentric circles. Donne describes the cosmic arrangement as ‘natures nest of boxes: the heavens contain the earth; the earth, cities; cities, men. And all these are concentric…’ and contained by ‘all the vaults and circles of the severall spheres of heaven’ [sic].

Whereas Donne views the experience of “men” as being ultimately situated within the circle of God, Gorton’s focus turns in the opposite direction. In her poems, we see—briefly, behind us—cities; but her focus is on the human sphere; and, within its circle, the mind; and within that, art. In “The Triumph of Caesar” Gorton seems to be telling us that art’s quality is the same as memory. But, like Donne’s idea of space, her idea of art is not totally Platonic. She suggests that art’s mediated quality does not mean that it fails truth; rather, art makes a true extension of human being. Like the way the mind captures and stores experience, art represents intricately nested perspectives with blurry, scrubbed-out peripheries:

        The picture is mostly of legs —
it shows the Triumph from a child’s viewpoint.
Soldiers and horses — so many, they crowd
perspective out. Only a few figures stand entire
at the boundary of the picture as if they would step
the next instant into that vast which is not there —

(“The Triumph of Caesar”)

This “mapping” of one horizon upon another is more complex than the single-point perspective claimed by Renaissance art. Indeed, according to Gorton’s viewer, the single-point perspective is already fallacious in Mantegna’s painting:

The pattern their legs make repeats
the pattern of lances, angles drawn against the clouds
like a working out of every possibility. Captured arms,
bulls crowned for sacrifice, prisoners, victories and
loads of coin, spears and catapults, colossal statues, elephants —
sights that replace each other, new and again
new, the way I remember highways from the back seat
of my parents’ car — fields stacked with light
which did not pass but poured through me —

(“The Triumph of Caesar”)

In another instance of return, this childhood anecdote is also the subject of a nearby poem, “Freeways”. As well as return or reversion, this gesture reveals a palimpsestic quality in Gorton’s writing, which draws our attention back to the act of making (poesis). In this way, she points to her own art of language and asks that we consider how we have inhabited the space of this book; how we have entered into its fictions and “perspective by perspective, into that vanishing point” (“The Triumph of Caesar”).

As an ekphrasis poem, “The Triumph of Caesar” isn’t particularly challenging—it largely follows the tradition of descriptive viewing (but for that lively intervention by the persona, above). Its reason for being is larger than itself, informed by and containing the conceit of the entire book. The poem performs this role capably enough—but then, as part of that conceit, it must.

Its absolute answerability to the intricate structure of the book might cause some readers to itch for escape. If Hotel Hyperion not only represents but resembles a “thing closed in glass”, does it cast light outwards, beyond its own bounds; or does it infinitely recede, “so self-consistent / its corridors turned into themselves” (“Screen, Memory”)? Do we, as in “A Description of the Storm Glass”, find ourselves posed by Gorton as “a reader, like the picture of a reader”?

The brevity (50pp) and self-contained unity of Hotel Hyperion resemble a chapbook. Unlike a longer and more various collection of poems, it may be read in one sitting, allowing intense engagement with its plotted images and structural dimensions. If Gorton’s poetic design locks out something, it might be the aberrant image; the unanswered question. Yearning for a flaw in its gorgeous glass layers, I feel the reader’s experience may be constrained by the poet’s fixed fidelity to one idea, so fully explored.

Gorton has observed of Donne that his “image of concentric circles” hosts not only complimentary ideas but also contradictions. Gorton comprehends her work so deeply and thoughtfully as a poet of ideas and as an editor, one wonders whether her mapping and re-mapping of this book’s idea has erased the possibility of contradiction; if there is any corner of this “house of images / where nothing is lost” (“Dreams and Artefacts”) that she has not fully remembered.

Clear Brightness

by Kim Cheng Boey

Puncher & Wattmann, 2012

ISBN 978 1 92145 094 5

Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER POLLNITZ

It was Coleridge who prescribed for Wordsworth what seems a superhuman task, that the poet who wishes to be considered original must “create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” — or rather, as Coleridge’s dictum is first recorded, “the taste by which he is to be relished.”  Since emigrating to Sydney from Singapore in 1997, Kim Cheng Boey appears to have taken on a similar project, for rather than ingratiate himself to the Australian readers, by adopting Australian themes refigured with some performative ethnicity, Boey has continued to write as a Chinese poet whose chosen language is English, but whose sensibility is Asian.  To put it more accurately, Boey is a Singaporean and international poet.  The tone or address of his work makes few concessions to Australian expectations; rather, he wants the Australian reader to enter international space, to make the passage at least part way to his perspective.  Four of his works over the past decade – the New section of After the Fire: New and Selected Poems (2006); a memoir of his literary formation and world travels which is also an essayistic yet beautiful prose poem, Between Stations (2009); the four-poem selection from his work he included in the dazzling new anthology, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2012), which he has helped to edit; and Clear Brightness itself, the first collection of his poems to come out since After the Fire – all help mark out the course he has taken as an émigré Chinese poet writing in Australia for a wider-than-Australian readership.                                                                                

It is an individual path, neither stridently postcolonial nor postmodern.  In one of the four prefaces to the Asian Australian anthology, Adam Aitken writes of poets who have chosen a “theory-oriented” path, eschewing identity narrative and politics; Boey eschews all three of these paths.  In his own preface, Boey describes a writer’s cultural migration as a process with no endpoint, “of negotiation, shuttling back and forth between places, between past and present, and between lives and narratives.”  To see such a perspective in practice in a poem, one can turn to “Stamp Collecting” from After the Fire, a poem which Boey also chooses to represent his work in the anthology.  The gift to a daughter of the father’s now fragmentary stamp album elicits a stream of intelligent, difficult questions: “Is Australia our home? / What is this country?  Why doesn’t it exist / anymore?  Why is the Queen’s face / on the stamps of so many nations?”  From first to last, none of the questions is fully answerable, but the daughter completes her own re-ordering of the album, picking “the last of a Singapore series / when it was still part of Malaya, / fingers the face of a youthful Elizabeth / pendant over a Chinese junk, / and slips it home.”  The poem avoids identity narrative, or what Boey’s beloved Keats described as the Wordsworthian “egotistical sublime”, by deflecting attention to another family member’s negotiation with an ethnic past and present national identity. 

In one poem from Clear Brightness, “The Causeway”, Boey does explicitly lament Singapore’s 1965 break from the Malayan mainland.    In “Stamp Collecting”, by contrast, the specific political implications of the Chinese and Commonwealth emblems on the stamp which the young collector “slips . . . home” are left suspended, and the invitation is to read them rather as symbols of personal and historical change.  The Queen and her former empire, like the Chinese sailing vessel, are no longer young.  The “junk” and the stamp itself are somewhat dated means of international communication and passage, back and forth.  Rather than a localised realism focussed on a spot of time, the poem opens out into an interrogatory, migratory exploration of a many-layered past and present.  If a poem like “Stamp Collecting” marks the point Boey’s Singaporean-internationalist poetry had arrived at in 2006, what new directions has he taken in Clear Brightness?

The volume’s title poem represents a pastoral or suburban-pastoral scenario of Australian life.  A December bushfire, licking the edges of a northern Sydney suburb, drives a father to make a midnight dash for safety through the “papery / ash . . . my son / bewildered in my arms, his sister bright-eyed, /exclaiming, It’s snowing, Christmas just weeks away.”  The father’s memory flicks, not to the northern hemisphere and the brilliant whiteness of a European Christmas, but to Singapore and the Chinese Qing Ming.  This spring festival of the dead translates as “clear brightness” but, transplanted to Singapore’s equatorial climate, is remembered as a feast of heat and ashes.  Qing Ming’s ashes were thrown up by the burning of paper money, “valid only in afterlife.”  The purpose of the offering, Boey drily observes, was  “to replenish the ancestors’ underworld credit.”  This quaint piety has now itself been disposed of – “the cemeteries dug up, razed” and the “bodies unhoused, ashed” – to make way for development.  “Grandma and Dad” avoided this ignominy by turning Catholic and going “straight into the fire” of a crematorium.  When the father returns to the “new life” he is making Australia, he finds it adrift with “ash, flakes falling like memory.”  Memory has its pangs, but the succession of erasures that Qing Ming has undergone has buried the particularity of the festival and its ceremony of mourning under a placeless “snowdrift of forgetting.”

Mortality and commemoration of the dead are not new themes for Boey, but they have new prominence in Clear Brightness.  The grandmother is again commemorated in “Soup” as the matriarch who, having lost family and friends to the atrocities of the Japanese Occupation, crafted the staple dish that served to hold together, if not the restless generation which followed hers, the generation of her grandchildren.  The preparation of the soup is music and dance and painting, and its savours, which come from the grandmother’s griefs and loves, joy and patience, make up “the whole/ that we chewed, sucked and slurped / To make us whole.”  The hymn to the hearth is itself a potage of dictions, of sensuous imagery and ekphrastic symbolism, of historical testimony and personal statement, and of witty instances – “the harmony of five flavours a corrective / to the imbalance around and in us.”  Set as the grandmother’s daily heroism is against the nightmare of history, her soup-making might also recall the phrase Yeats applied to Keats’s championing of physical pleasure, “deliberate happiness.”  This is what her ritual chooses, despite knowledge of what else has befallen and what awaits.

Elsewhere, in a series of poems about time and tempi – “Lost Time”, “Marking Time” and “Take Five on the F3” – the dailiness of experience and the making of art are further opposed and synthesised with unexpected results.  A rueful wit that diversifies and lightens the “grave news” gives these poems their prevailing tone.  Hearing Brubeck’s jazz number on the radio during the long shuttle to and from work, the commuter’s mind shuttles back to troop movements in World War II and forward to the articulated lorries sweeping past on the freeway, “from the darkened gums and paddocks dissolving to / rolling miles of oil palms and rubber trees.”  The jokey, jerky rhymes and rhythms here flatten into eternal recurrence, there take up an optimistic upbeat, but whatever the destination and whatever the moment’s mood “you just have to keep the pedal down.”  The paradoxes of experience, transformed into the contraries of art, make themselves felt in every poem and across the collection as a whole.

Clear Brightness is replete with series and sequences, the most impressive of which is a sonnet cycle, “To Markets.”  The Sydney market which comes first in this sequence might be the one just across the road from Gleebooks, and from there the cycle roams on nomadically, through “a queue of bazaars, Xian, Cairo, Marrakesh . . . ”  For me, Xian’s is the most tempting of the markets.  Formerly called Chang’an, the city was the gateway to the Silk Road and the barbarian West during the Tang Dynasty, and the birthplace of printing.  In stalls that peddle everything from “Mao watches” to “fake imperial coins”, you can still find “name seals in rose quartz”, and in “the street of calligraphers” see “a goateed old man trail his bamboo brush / across stretched rice-paper”, recreating “Wang Wei’s ‘Seeing Off Yuan / the Second on a Mission to Anxi’.”  This last is the one really coveted item from all the markets for which Boey prepares his fourteen-line catalogues.  It is the one memento he would he would like to keep with him, for “west of Yang Pass”, as the Tang Dynasty poet put it in the eighth century, “there will be no friends.”  And west of Xian, the market-goer of another millennium sees “the long caravan train / of memory and desire fading into the endless sands.”

“To Markets” is not only a cycle, but a corona, crown or wreath of sonnets, an Italian form best known in English as John Donne realised it, in the seven-sonnet prologue to his Holy Sonnets.  The precise formal requirements of the corona, met by Donne, are loosened, adapted and extended in ways that interrogate as well as underscore the conceptual content of Boey’s cycle.  The overlapping of the last line of each sonnet with the first of the next is calculated, less to show what local markets in a global conspectus have in common, than to probe what common urge impels us to join acquisitive queues, whether these lead into period-rich and culturally diverse bazaars, or into monstrous Western shopping centres, or into those fetes and fairs that sell secondhand wares, craft items and farm produce, and have sprung up in opposition to chain supermarkets.  The cyclical form allows Boey to ponder why it is we desire “to be desiring”, what spiritual lack or “want” it is that stirs “the want to want.”  “To Markets” poses Buddhist questions: do we want to be bound forever on the wheel of desiring more and more possessions?  Do we want to break out, eternally, if to cease from appetitive desires is to cease being fully human and alive, to “end here at this stall”?

“Memory and desire” – one of several conscious quotations or fully assimilated borrowings from T. S. Eliot in Clear Brightness – might be used to show how effortlessly Boey moves between a modernist line descending from Donne to Eliot, or from Keats to Yeats and Lawrence.  But to read the poems Boey has written in Australia solely by the light of these English traditions is to read him through the limited preoccupations of this reviewer.  Boey does indeed write with a “historical sense” of “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer”, and within that the whole of English literature, “in his bones”, but to that should be added his interest in later twentieth-century American poets who have made passages to India differing from Eliot’s idealist, Harvard-filtered approach to the Sanskrit scriptures.  No doubt Eliot’s concern for a poetry that registered the tempo of the modernist period and its cities, but remained stateless and timeless, has been a durable influence on Boey’s poetic.  Yet, coming from a Chinese perspective to Buddhist and other Eastern contemplative traditions, Boey refreshes what Eliot’s puritanical instincts made of desire and memory.  Eliot’s idealist purging of the love and fear of the beginning and the end has different outcomes to Boey’s musings, in “La Mian in Melbourne”, on the beginnings and endings of his plate of noodles.  If one turns back the clock a little over a millennium, to the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu’s “In Abbot Zan’s Room at Dayun Temple” – “Sanskrit sometimes flows out of the temple, / The lingering bells still echo round my bed. / Tomorrow morning in the fertile paddock, / Bitterly I’ll behold the yellow dirt” – it’s here one finds affective paradoxes and complexities in key with those of Clear Brightness.  Boey’s is a less detached, less idealist Buddhism than Eliot’s – so it seems to this Australian reviewer – but to slurp a Boey poem as an emotional whole, we must allow him to create in us a relish for his kinds of wholeness.

CHRISTOPHER POLLNITZ  has written criticism of Judith Wright, Les Murray, Alan Wearne and John Scott, as well as D. H. Lawrence, and has been a reviewer for Notes and Queries and Scripsi, as well as The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald.  His edition of The Poems for the Cambridge University Press series of Lawrence’s Works appeared in 2013.

Eldershaw

by Stephen Edgar

Black Pepper Press, 2012

ISBN 9781876044787

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

Publishers are not usually champions of narrative verse: it is not sufficient that writers of poetic narratives have literary history on their side. None would deny the pre-eminence of literary antecedent: the verse narratives that arose in each period — be it antiquity, the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance, the Victorian era, or modern times — are exemplars essential to the canon and remain in readership.

Small presses as a rule, are more willing to include contemporary verse narratives among their titles. Any style of narrative poetry may seek a place, but in a discerning literary market, a collection of the calibre of Stephen Edgar’s Eldershaw, by virtue of its formal accomplishment, asserts that prerogative, and is vouchsafed a welcome reception.

Edgar is conversant with the narrative poems valorised in western literature long before prose novels became an institutionalised genre. The technical elements of poetry accumulated over centuries are at his disposal, and he employs them with grace and ease. The process by which a poetic narrative emerges, unique, from each poet’s individualised treatment of elements and themes always inspires a sense of awe, and Edgar’s poems are distinctive; resolute in the contemporaneity of their storytelling, and full of references to the natural world, a feature for which his poetry is widely regarded.

Eldershaw comprises three long interlinked narrative poems spanning seventy-three pages in Part I, and a further sixteen single page lyric poems in Part II which in some measure link to the larger narrative. Part I has three sections: the first shares the volume’s title ‘Eldershaw’ and comprises nine segments set in the years 1941-1965; these have a non linear order that begins with 1955 and ends with 1961. The events in this story pertain to vicissitudes in the lives of twelve discernible characters, but focus in particular on the high and low moments of the central character Helen, who, twelve years after meeting Martin in London, finds herself unhappily married, with two daughters. Martin is attracted to men, and Helen’s affair with Lex over a period of years attracts detriment in Martin’s lawsuit; she loses both house and custody. In the later years, from 1961-65, after Lex has an affair with Vera, Helen lives alone in a Sydney flat, and the events of this period include a trip to Greece.

The second section of the verse narrative has a further seventeen pages in seven subsections with titles such as ‘April 1945. Evan. Fire’ and ‘November 2000. Isabel. Water.’ This cycle of poems, thematically framed by the title, The Fifth Element, conjures space, heaven, void, aether, quintessence- words used to describe ‘heavenly’ phenomena like stars or other supposedly unknowable, unchangeable, or incorruptible entities. ‘Character is destiny’- Edgar cites George Eliot citing Novalis, in the preface to the book, and we are drawn to what is vital about life, about energy, that is manifest in the fabric of these characters’ lives.

The third section, titled ‘The Pool’ provides a physical and emotional locus from which Luke [with whom the older Helen has had an affair]contemplates life, following Helen’s death. These poems draw attention to the miscellany of lives lived. ‘The Tapes’ recounts a drunken recording found among Helen’s possessions, and ‘The Papers’ refers to the documentation that gathers over a lifetime, and which stands in for Helen’s physical absence. Materiality is prominent, too, in ‘The Annexe’, one of sixteen shorter poems in Part II. The poem pans cinematically over the furnishings in a room: an Afghan rug, a television, a sofa and window blinds; nondescript, commonplace, generic, their qualities do not matter; they are objects that outlast us. What remains? The narrator of ‘Vertigo’ asks (105) ‘Are not your own/Made of the same and failing elements?’ (105)

Indeed the book makes much of material remains. In references to a Minoan comb, a crushed fossil, the detritus of millenia, Edgar’s narrative poems connect present to past. Edgar’s study of Classics finds synthesis in a host of classical allusions such as ‘Some drowned god drags your foot off Sounion’ (107) that imbue line, stanza, and narrative with mythical and allegorical constructions  of place – the magnificent Cape Sounion of now with its temple dedicated to Poseidon, and the cliffs from whence Aegus leapt to his death, a narrative event in Homer’s Odyssey.

‘A Hansel and Gretel pathway’ (7) — an intertextual, thematic construction of place — leads to the site of Helen’s historic family home, Eldershaw; a distinctively Australian bush setting with its ‘embassy of possums’ (8). In ‘Lost World’ (108) Edgar maps loss onto place as he describes, without sentimentality, fire’s devastation of a home that could be Eldershaw: the roar of bushfire ‘dragged by the vacuum it creates,/ Swarms up the slope into the sky’s/Exhausted limit, where a cottage waits./ …Trees thrash and, one by one, volatize./Paint bubbles from the walls. The rooms explode./ Fragments of melted window strafe/The lawn like wept and frozen tears’ (108).

In an age inclined to posit verse narratives as anachronistic, to produce a work such as Eldershaw takes resolve. Only painstaking refinement enables contemporaneous words such as ‘tweezers’, ‘bureaucratic business’, ‘garage’, ‘home-made Florentines’, ‘truck’, ‘curtain’ and ‘landlady’ to perch comfortably at the ends of metrical lines- a good many of which contain the requisite number of syllables and feet for iambic pentameter, while occasional lines accommodate a triple foot with an extra syllable at the end. The rhythmic momentum of blank verse brings buoyancy to unfolding events in the verse narrative, and complements Edgar’s accomplished application of metre.

Reading verse narratives can take resolve too, if one prefers prose, but narrative verse in English is not inherently harder to read than narrative prose. One challenge with Eldershaw may be to keep track of the inter-generational characters across the entirety of the narrative. Faced with its non-linear discourse some readers may reconstitute the chronological sequence, while others will enjoy the free association and fusion of time-planes in memory, and the corresponding emphasis on existential and psychological concerns.

An earlier and shorter version of Eldershaw attracted funding assistance from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and was published in HEAT 13 under the title ‘The Deppites’. Stephen Edgar has been awarded the 2013 Inaugural Australian Catholic University Literature Prize for his poem ‘The Dancer’. This adds to several other significant poetry prizes in Edgar’s credit, including the 2003 Grace Levin Poetry Prize, the 2006 Philip Hodgkins Memorial Medal for Literature, and the 2011 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize.

‘What compels writers to produce a verse narrative?’ Edgar once mused. [1] Now he has contributed to the longest tradition in literature in English. Eldershaw, constructed with great complexity, economy, and clarity, serves to demonstrate the staying power of verse narratives, despite contemporary preferences.

Works cited

1. Edgar, Stephen (2006) Book Launch: Geoff Page Lawrie and Shirley: the final cadenza. <http://www.stephenedgar.com.au/prose/BookLaunchGeoffPage.html> accessed 20 November 2013

LINDA WESTE is a poet, editor and teacher of Creative Writing whose research examines poetic and narrative interplay.