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Tag: Issue 15 May 2014

Vesna Goldsworthy

IMG_6729Vesna Goldsworthy (1961, Belgrade) lives in London and writes poetry in English, her third language, as well as her native Serbian, in which her poetry is much-anthologized. Aged twenty-three, she read her poems at a football stadium to an audience of thirty thousand people. She moved to Britain soon afterwards and did not write a line of poetry for over twenty years. Her Crashaw Prize winning debut poetry collection in English, The Angel of Salonika (Salt, 2011) was one of the Times Best Poetry Books of the Year.

 

 

Yalta

Everything in the world is really beautiful,  everything but our thoughts and actions…
A.P. Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899)

After they made love that first time
She still felt distant enough to use the formal you
In the first question she posed.

He contemplated the heavy Japanese scent
He helped her choose the day before.
Something less overwhelming, with more zest,
Would have suited Yalta better, now he knew,
Than the red spider lily.
That flower grows, so legend says,
Along the path on which you meet
Someone you will never see again.

He was still naked when he got out of bed
And sat down at the table to cut a slice of watermelon.
His testicles rested on the chair.
The lacquered wood felt pleasantly cool.
They stayed like that for thirty minutes at least.
Her little Pomeranian dog was there too
Watching his mistress, then him,
As he chewed the red flesh in silence.
The two pairs of eyes
Seemed similarly moist in candlelight.

If she were not naked – or not shy –
If she could only fling the window open,
Would they still hear the crashing
Of the waves
In the darkness below,
Like earlier that evening,
A century ago?

 

Sanssouci

I am old enough to remember
The appearance of Akhmatova’s Requiem,
The ambiguities of Brecht, Brodsky in his prime,
The Wall before it fell, the sound of planes
Taking off and landing. Nearby, another country.

On our long ride to Potsdam
We carved a crescent, a Cyrillic S,
In the first snow of the season,
As we wound our way across
The white spaces on the map,
Along the streets which echoed in Russian
And smelled of coal, cabbage, and wool.

It took years to reassemble
The memory of winter love-making
Undone on the parturition table,
In the encounter of metal and flesh.

The nurse returned with a pack of wadding.
It will cease in a day or two, she said
As though you were, already, absent. Do rest,
Drink some Georgian red, forget.
She straightened the shawl on my shoulders.
Under her uniform, the smell of sweat
Was just like mother’s, the night she was taken.

Our bicycles remained padlocked at the gate.
The brushstrokes of white powder
Emphasised the elegance of bars and chains,
A trail of lines in virgin snow,
To but not from, never returning;
So much blood and nothing
Conceived from so much love.
Of all that betrays us, the gentlest is memory.

 

Leaving the Party

We walk in silence bearing westwards
Along the towpath, against the current.
The Thames slithers and shimmers
On its slow way to surrender
Exhausted and spread-eagled on the sands of Essex.

Bicycle lights approach and frame us
In milky stills of gelatine silver.
Runners pound by in sweat and lycra,
Their footfall like strange amphibians’ heartbeat,
Mosquito buzz of music rises from their ears.
They give a wide berth to the couple of elderly clowns
In dinner jacket and sequins, carefully treading
With patent leather shoes unsuited to water’s edge.

At one point this evening we seemed unbearably close.
I raised my right hand to touch your temple.
Your hair, your fine hair, your fine white hair
Moved towards my fingers in static electricity.
There again was that question I was about to pose.
Then something behind your unquestionable goodness
Suddenly scared me, like ormolu and woodworm.

The cup of my palm still carries that faint fragrance,
The smoothness of black silk where the hand fell in defeat,
The soft woollen cloth, the white cotton underneath,
All those conspiracies of loom and thread
Expensively constructed to shield and to protect
Your skin, your warm skin, in all its unfamiliar creases.
Mine always feels porous, a layer to be shed,
Though I forever shiver — needing a cover, a shawl, a shelter —
Like some short-lived species of insect, a devil’s darning needle.
The darkness grows.  The heat’s abating. I’ll hold myself together.

 

 

The Chicken Coop by Gabriel Don

photo_mascaraGabriel Don received her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School, where she worked as the chapbook and reading series coordinator. Her work has appeared in Westerly 58:2, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Brooklyn Rail, The Saudade Review, The Understanding Between Foxes and Light, Yes Poetry, A Minor and Statorec.com. She has appeared in visual poems such as Woman Without Umbrella (vimeo.com/55691171) and Unbound (vimeo.com/54545554). She started several reading-soiree series including Pies and Scribes and Dias Y Flores in New York City and is editorial staff at LIT. She is a #bookdress and can be found on Amazon @ tinyurl.com/aq9ll8c.

 

The Chicken Coop

The chicken coop was outside, to the left of the house, down the side stairs, tucked away in the corner, opposite to the downstairs sliding glass door, that opened into a big room with grotty carpets and piles of oil cans, old tools, across on the other wall a topless poster of Pam and a door to where I slept on a water bed with my dog Scar. Dad liked to keep chickens. He installed the large wired cage as soon as we moved in. We got our eggs daily and chopped and roasted a chook for special occasions. We didn’t live on a farm or nothing. Sure, it’s not the biggest town in Austra’ia―it wasn’t something people did, keep chickens. If they wanted chicken meat or eggs, they’d go to Coles. Dad was just like that.

His dream was to own a prawn trawler. When he eventually saved up enough to buy one, days laying brick, digging holes, slabbing walls, he took it out on the river and got sick as a dog. Ah nooooooo. Mate, it was gross. He turned green and spewed for days. He chucked a sickie from work and spent the rest of the week at the pub drinking ginger ale and beer. I was working with him at the time and since I wasn’t old enough to drive the truck myself, I sat next to him, bony legs dangling over bar stool, sipping on a fire engine. I was eleven when I dropped out of school to work with Dad. We woke up at the crack of dawn and climbed up and sat down in the only seat: one long bench with three seat belts, up the front of the ute. Dad and I would argue over the tape deck. He wanted to listen to Kenny Rogers. I wanted to play ACDC. Best way to wake up mate, on a long drive to the work site. We’d go back and forth, until we’d stubbornly, cutting off our noses to spite our faces, listened to AM radio. The truck didn’t have FM.

The floor was filled with rolling stubbies, beer cans, soft drinks, bottles of old and hot Lift, greased wrenches and parking tickets. After Dad picked up the boys, I’d be squashed into the middle with the gear stick shifting between my legs. Boz, Dad’s dog, a beautiful black Doberman, was on the back, wagging her tail and slobbering her tongue into the wind. Dad didn’t want me to be a bludger. Had to earn my keep. I was always waggin’ school anyways, so Dad reckoned it was best I just tag along with him. Once, not even four years old yet, when my parents were out at a dance, all dressed up, I dismantled the living room cupboard with a screwdriver, all by myself. Mum threw a hissy fit. Dad looked proud.

When I was a youngin Dad would disappear for days, not come home. Mum would say he’d gone walkabout. Shrug it off, like it was normal. No biggie. She’d tell me to put my togs on and we’d go to Maccas for breakkie. The one that was right on the beach, yeah mate, it’s gone now. It was always full of surfies in boardies and no shoes, not even a pair of thongs. Mum looked like a movie star. She was in her early twenties, her black hair permed and her eyes hidden behind her big purple sunglasses. We’d eat pancakes, bacon and egg McMuffins and hash browns and spend the rest of the day at the beach. Slip slap slop. Mum would lie on her purple towel, sunbathing, reading a book and I’d body surf and climb rocks. Chase the bush turkeys. Sometimes she’d walk around the cliff hills with me. She’d show me the hidden waterfall and sing me a song to remember the colours of a rainbow. She had a song for everything.

Eventually Dad would find his way home, with a gutful of piss, stumbling and swerving, telling Mum he’d been working on a house in Brizzie, the words barely making any sense slurred and Mum would spit the dummy. She hadn’t even wanted to marry him, she’d cry. He chased her and chased her. He pursued her till he caught her, like a fish he’d throw back after he’d hooked it. I would sneak out the front door, run away from the smashing plates and loud screams, down the stairs on the side of the house and sit with Boz, his head in my lap, my legs curled and bent, my back leaning against the wall, looking at the chooks. They were funny little buggers. I’d watch them squabble, bobbing their heads up and down, pecking each other, fighting for a feed. Their cage, covered in shit, hay and rust, was always in need of a clean. Sometimes Dad would send me down there as a punishment with a slopping bucket of soap and water.

I remember the first time my Dad caught me and my friend Ben smoking. We had a nice big bowl of mull on my bedside table. We were lying in bed, vegging out, in our trackie dacks, playing video games, punching cone after cone. I thought Dad was away living on a building site while he did their renovations. Mum never told us off for getting high. She didn’t like confrontation or maybe she didn’t notice. Dad liked his grog and all but he down right hated pot. He came home early and smelt some smoke sneaking up the stairs. Mate, he was spewin’. I heard him punch a hole in the wall upstairs and tip over the television. Bloody oath. We could hear his heavy steps down the stairs and mate, we took off as fast as our legs would carry us. Luckily my room has a door into the back garden so we escaped outdoors and up the stairs and hid under the truck. He looked for us for ages, screaming he was going to kill me when he found me. We held our breath and nearly passed out from fright. I’m not a wuss and Beno is the biggest guy on our rugby team, a giant Polynesian who can tackle anyone on the field but Dad’s mental. We just hoped and prayed Dad wouldn’t get into the truck and drive to the pub for a schooner. We were under that truck till sunset when we finally, slowly and scared, popped our heads out and checked to see the coast was clear and legged it to Beno’s, where his old man didn’t care if we smoked.

I inherited my temper from my Dad. Poor Mum. She’s the sweetest, gentlest woman you’d ever meet and she had to deal with us drongos. I reckon in another life, without us, she could have been a prime minister or done something special, you know? She didn’t get a fair go. Mum loved to go to our club’s member’s draw every Thursday night. She was always hopeful, this was the week, she would win the large cash prize. Better than staying in, cooped up in the house. I loved driving in the car with Mum when I was little. She’d just take us for a trip, in any direction, no particular destination. She’d have Dolly Parton turned up to the top volume, singing, “I will always love you.” Or Tammy Wynette spelling out, “Our d-i-v-o-r-c-e becomes final today.”

We’d drive alongside the concaves and curves of the rivers, along the coast, past mangroves, through eucalypt forests; the thick smell of the gum trees entering the car. We’d venture into the middle of nowhere and in Austra’ia that’s not far from anywhere. If the car broke down, we’d be fucked. Not a light in sight. I’ve been taught since kindy what to do if I ever ended up stranded. How to gather condensation on cling wrap for water. Never drink from the ocean unless you want to go mad. The call that echoed: Cooee, Cooee, Cooee. It’s heaps dangerous on the roads. Wild life made their way across the highway, unaware the car had been invented. Kangaroos, especially, at night they become hypnotised by headlights and a big beaut of a thing, built like a boxer, not able to move, in the car’s path. It’s not that people care about killing a kangaroo, they’re hunted like pests here, cheapest meat you can pick up at the supermarket: a kangaroo can total a car and hop away. I’ve never hit a kangaroo, mind you. Worst accident I’ve ever had was when me and the boys were bored shitless on a Saturday so we decided to drive to the Bottle-O, fill up the esky with long necks and throwbacks and head upstate for a barbie. We got heaps smashed. My truck at the time didn’t have a door on the left hand side, next to the passenger’s seat, where I was sitting wasted on the way back and I rolled right out onto the road. When they got me home, I had to sit in a bath of Dettol, my whole body grazed.

My oldies kept at it―the screaming, the violence, the tears, the door slamming―my whole childhood. By the time I was bringing girls home, Dad had moved out. Mum and Dad weren’t divorced but Dad lived in an apartment on the main street of Coolie, above the pie shop, with a bogan, who had flabby arms and several chins, named Sharon and her daughter, Liana. He’d met Sharon at the pub. She sat with him, red nose with red nose, every day till closing. Mum was on the road a lot for work so I lived by myself most of the time. Only saw Dad at work. He’d invite me to join him and Sharon for dinner at the pub but I felt sick every time I’d see her. Once that bitch saw Mum sitting up at the bar with her friends at the Clubhouse and―so lucky I wasn’t there, Dad wasn’t there either―she went up and started talking shit and then pushed Mum off her seat. Poor Mum. Sprawled out on the blue carpet, in her finest clothes and jewellery.

I reckon people in our town are jealous of Mum. They like to cut down tall poppies. Flock together. Mum is smart and a looker too and she always behaves like a lady. She was just raised that way. She doesn’t think she’s too good for you or anything. She never got angry with me, not once. She’s not the type to speak her mind. I think after Dad, she got scared to. She’d rather walk around things, tell white lies. Hide up a supermarket aisle from workmates because she hadn’t answered their calls. Tell everyone what they wanted to hear. She never told me off for being a wally or bringing a different woman home every night. Even after she walked in on us having a pash. She was polite to them. Made them cups of tea. Invited them to go shopping at the mall. Even remained friends with them long after we’d broken up, when I wasn’t on speaking terms with them. The girls in town were nuts for me. I had to fight them off with a stick. Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.

At work, among the Bobcats, trucks and dozers, Dad and I got along just fine. Installing swimming pools, fixing floors, mending roofs. Drilling holes, swinging shovels, holding levels, watching the bubble move. On our smoko we’d sit together by the water and puff on a rollie, eat our meat pies with tomato sauce and drink a nice cold one. No need to talk about nothing. If it was a slow day and we had lots of boys on the job, I’d take off my big brown scuffed up CATs and have a snooze. Piece of piss. Dad would still come home with me sometimes. Have dinner with me and my sheila, Mum too if she wasn’t travelling. I’d go downstairs afterwards and watch recordings of RAGE with my girlfriend. Mum and Dad would chat upstairs: I could hear their voices murmuring down through the floorboards. When I went up to the kitchen to get another bottle of cordial and some snacks, I’d see them curled up together on the day bed, sleeping with the news on the telly. Dad wrapped around Mum, his arms around her waist, together, curved like a backwards c.

Sharon broke up with Dad and Dad came back to Mum. She was so happy to have him home but then we found out he was sick. One day Dad couldn’t walk straight, sober. He lost his balance. He was falling all over the place for ages before Mum and me convinced him to see a doctor. We thought it might be an inner ear infection or something. Turned out a lot more serious. Dad wouldn’t even tell me himself: he made me ring the doctor to find out. Sharon found out Dad was sick and wanted him back. Only when she knew he was dying. When Dad got sick, he deteriorated fast. One moment he was a capable man, working, driving, drinking; the next he was overweight, dribbling, swollen, in a wheel chair. Incapable of eating. Incapable of anything. That’s the worst mate. My hero. My dad. Not capable. Couldn’t do his hair, no more James Dean coif. Dad was vain. He wouldn’t have liked to go like this. Just wasn’t right. Lost the cheeky twinkle in his crystal blue eyes. When they started chemo his hair fell out. He’d been so proud of his hair. He used to tell me and Mum how his hair had been straight until he’d gone through puberty and then it went curly. I never believed him till I had children of my own and it happened to them.

It was hard for me and Mum to visit Dad in the hospital or talk to the doctors. Sharon was always there, the bulldog, pulling strings. That’d be right. When I did get the chance to see him, sit next to him, lying there barely conscience, it was hard. No one wants to see their dad like that. I hate hospitals. The whiteness. The smell of Dr Pepper. Adults turning back into babies, being rocked around in cots, being fed through sippy cups. Strangers forced to share rooms during intimate moments, birth, sickness and death. Doctors talking down to you. Pretending to care, scheduling you in so they can rush off to their golf game. Angry overworked nurses. Paying for parking. I got so many fines visiting Dad. I don’t think he even noticed me. He wasn’t there most of the time. Still I felt like it was my duty, to be there till the end. The hospital couldn’t do anything for him anymore. So we took turns taking him home, depending on his mood. Sharon insisted on keeping Dad’s new dog, Boomer, at her house. Wouldn’t let us keep Boomer at our house and Dad loved that dog. Sometimes more than me I reckon. So he’d go home to her apartment to see the dog.

Now Dad couldn’t come to work I was at the top of the pecking order. I’d oversee the boys on a job. Dad would have me fill out his cheques, forge his signature. Still trying to run the business from his sick bed. Pay for building materials. Sharon was the one collecting his social security cheques, taking all the money. I had to sneak him packs of cigarettes and a bit of money every time I visited him. Sharon’s sister was over during one of my visits and she said, in front of Dad, “Youz don’t worry. He’s not going to last much longer.” When Sharon found out about the cheques she tried to have me thrown in jail. Mum went and visited a solicitor and they said even though Dad told me to do it, it was still illegal. Sharon tried to convince Dad I was stealing from him. I never took one dollar off Dad. I only ever paid suppliers or contractors like he had told me to. Sharon was the thief. Mum had bought Dad a new wardrobe to replace his tattered shirts and pants. All brand new. Still had the labels on. Sharon returned them for the money. I confronted Sharon in the pub and told her she better not press charges against me. If she did she’d better watch out. She’d regret it. Sharon got all up tight and started whining to Dad, “You’re gonna let your son talk to me like that?” Dad said, “My son can talk to you however he wants.”

I didn’t know then but that day she’d taken him to the solicitors. He’d signed over everything to her. The land he bought with Mum’s money. He’d convinced her early on in their marriage to sell her shares in the family farm. With the money they’d bought a large plot together. Every year Dad had a new scheme of what he was going to do with it. Hadn’t done nothing with it yet. In his condition, Sharon had convinced him to change his will. A man who couldn’t even go to the bathroom by himself or remember our names. That was the worst part of hospital for Dad, he had told me they took a woman to the bathroom with him, in a group, the nurses took them all into the toilet. A lady had to go to the bathroom in front of him. He kept telling me how terrible it was. He would call me sometimes from Sharon’s and say it’s the milkman or a pizza delivery. Sharon was always there hovering and wouldn’t let him talk to me too long. She gave away the dog as soon as he died. To someone else. I don’t know who. I tried to look for Boomer but never found him.

Mum was away when Dad passed. I’m sure she would have been there every day by his side, taken time off work: if Sharon wasn’t there, growling and biting. After Dad died, everything was a blur. I’ve blocked most of it out to tell you the truth. He was only fifty-five. I was twenty-four. The funeral took place not too long after. I went with Mum and she was hysterical. All her incubating pain, at last hatched. I didn’t cry. Didn’t want to be a sook. Mum was still his wife when he died: they had never divorced. He was being cremated and Mum ranted on and on about her aunt’s cremation when she was a little girl that she still had nightmares about: a dead body on a conveyor belt, being rolled towards a curtain, dropped into an incinerator. Mum, who is a devout Anglican, summoned images of fire and brimstone. I wasn’t very useful to Mum at the ceremony. I got wasted and high and ended up at a brothel or strip club. Can’t remember.

When Mum found out about the changed will, she did nothing. She could have easily had it overturned. Easily have had the new will annulled but she wouldn’t. When I went to pick up Dad’s things from Sharon, the things she hadn’t wanted, the things that weren’t worth anything, she’d already thrown them all out. At least I had his truck. I went and picked up Dad’s ashes. Sharon didn’t want them either. It had always been Dad’s wishes to be sprinkled into the Tweed River, at its mouth, where it meets the Pacific Ocean. I walked out, along the rocky peninsula, alone with Dad’s ashes and began to release them into the wind. The second my fistful of ashes was released into the wind, the wind changed and I got a mouthful. I was pretty upset for a moment but then I saw the funny side. I reckon Dad would have laughed.

When I bought a house of my own and moved in with my wife and baby girl― finally out of Mum’s hair, she’d let us live with her, after I got married, after I had my first child―I built a chicken coop underneath my house, in the backyard, next to the pool. I finished building it real good; a bloody ripper, then I had a coldie next to their cage and watched the chooks. Funny little buggers. They’re fond of company, have their own little community in the chicken coop but they get real aggro every time I put a new hen in, have to be real careful, otherwise they beat the poor chook up. They’re real stubborn too. They like to sleep in the same space and if another chook took it, they just lay right on top of it. Once a hawk swooped down and picked up one of the roosters having a stroll around the yard. No joke mate. Picked him up and flew away. That rooster was the leader of the pack. The rest of the chooks got all confused after that. Took them a while to return to normal.

 

 

Cassandra Atherton reviews “New and Selected Poems” by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

9781906188078img01

New and Selected Poems

by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Carcanet, 2013

ISBN 978-1906188-07-8

Reviewed by CASSANDRA ATHERTON

 
On the eve of his eightieth birthday, it seems appropriate that Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s New and Selected Poems offers readers an insight into his rich oeuvre and the opportunity to remedy, at least on a small scale, what Michael Sharkey (2007) has argued is the ‘few [who have] systematically read his works….from the first publications through to the most recent’.  Wallace-Crabbe has published twenty-five books of poetry, from The Music of Division (1959) to the recent publication New and Selected Poems (2013). He has another book, My Feet Are Hungry, forthcoming from Pitt Street Poetry, as well a New York collection, Afternoon in the Central Nervous System, currently in press. Wallace-Crabbe’s first Selected Poems was published in 1975 and a second, entitled Selected Poems 1956-1994, appeared in 1995. With Wallace-Crabbe’s prodigious oeuvre ever expanding, it seems that his selected poetry collections never quite capture his most recent work. However, the inclusion of new poetry in this selection makes it more up-to-the-minute’ even if, with Wallace-Crabbe and poetry, it is a New York minute.

While many critics and reviewers have prioritised Wallace-Crabbe’s larrikinism and playful use of strine in his poems, this praise is often at the expense of any analysis of the poetry’s gravitas. In this way, Wallace-Crabbe’s appeal to the Kunderanian light/heavy dichotomy of ‘being’ is often overlooked in the trickster moments where comedy displaces gravity:

Dear self,
You flip out of anyone’s grip
like a wet watermelon seed…
there you are…
off again.

In this way, in comic guises, such as ‘The Joker’, ‘wet watermelon seeds’ are used as a diversionary metaphor for the slippery self and Wallace-Crabbe’s nod to Pessoan heteronymic writing.

Indeed, reading Wallace-Crabbe’s poems chronologically lays bare his many ‘performances’ over time. In an interview with Barbara Williams, he stated:

One of my main areas of concern has been what I want to call psychomachia – finding different ways of dramatizing how the part of self…of one’s identity, sit down together, war with one another, interact…I invent topoi. (1987)

The internal dramatic movement of his poems leads to some sophisticated game playing and the biggest game, at the heart of his oeuvre, is the enticing way Wallace-Crabbe invites readers into the puzzle of his religious beliefs (or lack of them) and then, with a kind of prestidigitation, draws readers away, again. Indeed, tantalising statements are scattered through poems across the years, perhaps culminating in the new poem, ‘An Autumnal’ with lines such as: ‘When I come back to this garden after my death…I wonder just what my airy after-self will find…But I’ll be dead’.

I like to think that Wallace-Crabbe is amused by the critics’ determination to pin down a belief system in his poetry. In his own words, he is ‘not a religious man, but not an atheist either’ (2000). To readers, interviewers and critics he is a transcendentalist, (anti-theologian), agnostic, existentialist. Indeed, perhaps as a response to this obsession, Wallace-Crabbe ends the first section of his new poems in this selection with a juxtaposition of ‘The Poem of One Line’: ‘Whatever Christ meant, it was not this’, with his more wondrous and lonely ‘That Which Is’. One of Wallace-Crabbe’s personal favourites and a poem which he stated, at his symposium last year, defines his new poems, ‘That Which Is’ foregrounds ‘a brave form of ontological inquiry’ (Koshland, 2014):

       Admit it, then:
We are surrounded by the prodigious being,
By the isness that may be everything
Here and there,
Such universe of proffered being
Into which we are all of course plunged,
And it’s no bad thing,
Given our wayward, hungrily wafting minds,
To have been granted extensive something
To take a firm grip on. To smell.

The way in which the narrator is ‘plunged’ into ‘isness that may be everything’ is a sublime moment. The poet experiences divisions between parts of himself, resulting in a Kantian focus on the way the senses produce the world: ‘To smell’. It is a weighty moment that complements the lightness of the ‘hungrily wafting minds’.

Thirty-six new poems provide the opening text of New and Selected Poems (2013). I would have liked these poems to appear at the end of the book, rather than at the beginning, largely because it would have created the feeling that the poet is still writing and that there is no end to his new poems. However, it is interesting to read the rest of the book through the frame of the new poems; it offers a true retrospective on his previous collections of poetry. It is a shame that every poem doesn’t begin on a new page. While I understand this is costly and may have prevented as many poems being included in the book, it does compromise poems such as ‘The Secular’ which is a 17 line poem beginning at the bottom of page 63 after ‘In Light and Darkness’ and ending at the top of the following page before ‘Wind and Change’. It appears squashed into the leftover space, rather than celebrated as a compelling poem on the ‘abundant secular’.

New and Selected Poems contains the best poems from fourteen of Wallace-Crabbe’s books of poetry. From the Nabokovian ‘The Amorous Cannibal’ with its focus on lust, language and the cheeky play on oral sex:

Suppose I were to eat you
I should probably begin
with the fingers, the cheeks and the breasts
yet all of you would tempt me,
so powerfully spicy
as to discompose my choice

to, ‘The Domestic Sublime’ with its opening image of the deodorant ‘rolling into an oxter’ juxtaposed with ‘clubbable and promiscuous coat hangers’ and the ‘ripe sex’ of the garlic clove. ‘The Domestic Sublime’ is one of Wallace-Crabbe’s poems that has been set to music by Katy Abbott as a song cycle for a soprano (I believe Greta Bradman, Donald’s granddaughter, was the soprano who first performed it). Linda Kouvaras has also composed ‘Three Settings of Poetry’ by Wallace-Crabbe.

However, it is the poems about Wallace-Crabbe’s oldest son, written across the years, that I always find most devastating for their torturedness. In a kind of quaternion he includes ‘An Elegy’, ‘Erstwhile’, ‘Years On’ and ‘Oh Yes, Then’ in this selection. In ‘Oh Yes, Then’, which ends New and Selected, Wallace-Crabbe muses on what will become of his family when he is ‘rotting patiently where/my eldest, Ben, now lies’. In the final stanza, he states:

Where will you be, the flamingly
joyous hearth of my heart?
I can’t get the answer, no matter how
I tune up the shawms of art.

The moment Wallace-Crabbe’s longing for his son ends, the torture of being without his lover/soul mate begins. It is the eternal riddle that Wallace-Crabbe cannot solve; the double bind that love and death presents.

Wallace-Crabbe will, no doubt, have another Selected Poems published in the next decade. However, this New and Selected is ‘unbearably light’ and, in the end, a wonderfully weighty volume of poetry.

CASSANDRA ATHERTON is the editor of Travelling Without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Companion (MUP, 2014).

Linda Weste reviews “1953” by Geoff Page

0003030_3001953

by Geoff Page

UQP

ISBN  9780702249525

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

‘Innovative’: the characteristic imputed to a recent prize-winning verse novel [1] that left prose novel competitors on the short list, prompts one to ask: what determines innovation in a form whose conventions are not widely understood?

Geoff Page’s 1953 is a notable exemplar of temporal innovation in the contemporary verse novel. In its unique arrangement, this collection of poems about life in a small town called Eurandangee rejects the conventional linear unfolding of narrative events in a chronological and causal sequence. Each poem presents a different character in a different location within the storyworld, and each of these characters is participating in events that are taking place at the same time, half past two on Tuesday 17th February 1953.

Page is circumspect as to whether 1953 actually is a verse novel because it breaks with temporal conventions of the verse novel form: “In anything that’s got the word ‘novel’ attached to it, you’d expect forward narrative momentum,” he contends, “but with 1953 you get this diverging off in different directions, all these separate stories that are connected” (Interview). To assist understanding of narrative arrangement in 1953, Page uses a metaphor of yam roots to convey “a whole lot of horizontal stories that are interconnected” (Interview). This spatial metaphor may over-simplify the temporal dynamics of the narrative, and in particular, understanding of its continuity. The poems’ typography and consecutive page layout means that the narrative sequence comprises “parallel phases” (Ireland 107) of co-occurrent events. That is, each new poem is “placed after a given sequence, though on the level of events, the reader is meant to assume [that the present phase of events] occurs parallel with that sequence” (107).

While writing 1953 Page had a number of templates in mind, including Our Town, Dubliners, The Spoon River Anthology and even Under Milkwood, “a number of different sorts of works whose pre-existence enabled (him) to think of doing a local contemporary version of life in a small town”, even though, he maintains, “my idea is a bit different” (Interview).

Indeed, temporal parallels contribute an important difference in 1953: since the destinies of most characters diverge rather than converge, the narrative arrangement serves to thematise small town isolation. The pejorative use of “small town” to convey a place and people limited in outlook and in opportunities, however disparaging, conveys a kernel of reality for each of the forty or so characters. Their particular circumstances may vary, yet each character has a sense of being constrained.

Page brings attention to this limitation, to show his characters in a difficult situation, experiencing a “sense of stasis or flight.” He explains: “A lot of the characters would like to flee. Some characters are locked in a stasis and don’t know how to flee, and others don’t realise they need to flee. A few are completely happy in their life … but a lot don’t realise the extent of their unhappiness” (Interview). Thus among the characters are Stan, the town clerk, who “wants his life to be / one long re-reading of the files” (8), Pete, who “did not get out although he did the Leaving [Certificate]” (71), and Peggy who is “stuck here sadly married to / this half-arsed wizened little town / just big enough for real estate, / the wrong end of the line” (11).

The onus is on the reader to adduce not only the chronological sequence of story [“and then?”] but also the causal relations that link events, the plot causality [“why?”].[2] The events themselves are not bound together with a trajectory that culminates in a resolution. Readers may attempt (or not) to reconstruct a plot in the absence of an obvious narrative sequence.[3]

Other distinctive temporal features of 1953 are its anachronies. Many poems contain one or more retrospective evocations of an event, or events, that took place prior to those happening in the “narrative now”.[4] These analepses are apparent to the reader as s/he reconstructs or reconstitutes the chronological sequence in which events supposedly occurred, especially as these vary in order of presentation from the main narrative. By providing background, analepses suggest causal links between characters already introduced, rather than advancing events. Analepsis in 1953 varies in duration; in how long it departs from the narrative now. It can last to almost the end of a poem before a return to the narrative now occurs. For instance, in “XIX Sheena”, reference to the narrative now begins at line seventy-two, just seven lines before the poem ends: “Right now, today, at half past two, / he’s back there in the office” (53). In other poems such as “VI Sandra” there are regular shifts between analeptic references to past events and the present narrative now.

The temporality of 1953 utilises prolepsis, in allusions to future events, such as “There’ll be a convent and two schools, / a café that we don’t see yet” (2); and “I see a day not too far off / when it and I’ll be stretched and tested” (53). Prolepsis can also suggest “how one incident led to another, or underline the future relevance of specific events” (Ireland 104). It can entail “anticipatory hints” (106), “deliberate artifice” (106), or hypothetical, “fantasy projections” (106) which the verse novel need not actualise. In poem “VIII”, for instance, Pete Smith speculates about his prospects of marrying Sandra, the doctor’s receptionist:

He thinks to take her to the flicks,
A four-square hall with simple seats
its owner calls the Palace.

But that’s a move that’s still too far.
He’s seen the way her parents watch her,
protectively, with expectations,
though no great show of force.

They know the market for her looks,
suitably embellished.

Their daughter, they have made it plain,
will marry into business or
a homestead with five thousand acres.

Sheep or wheat, it doesn’t matter.
A minor clerk, for all his pension,
would need to argue hard,

assuming he could ever get
(as he has, so far, failed to do
her serious attention. (20)

Since it is through our knowledge of temporal conventions and their violations in fiction that we recognise temporal innovation, it follows that innovative verse novels depend on their conventions being widely understood, separate from novelistic conventions, and not too narrowly upheld.

This is not to suggest determining innovation in verse novels is uncomplicated, as 1953 illustrates: its non-linear temporal ordering of events, arguably uncommon in verse novels, is by contrast, so well-recognised as a strategy for representing time in the prose novel, that many theorists consider it conventionalised, particularly in postmodernist fiction.Such theorists already acknowledge a range of temporal variations in fiction: “retrogressive temporalities (in which time moves backwards); eternal temporal loops; conflated time lines or chronomontages (which yoke different temporal zones together); reversed causalities (in which, say, the present is caused by the future); contradictory temporalities (which consist of mutually exclusive events or event sequences); and differential time lines (in which inhabitants of the same storyworld age at a different rate than others)” (Jahn 3).

Page is modest about 1953’s innovation: “I don’t think of myself as a very experimental poet. In some ways I’m very retrograde,” he maintains. Rather, he considers 1953 a “genuine experiment” (Interview).

Entirely suited to the experiment is the use of iambic rhythm: this alternates unstressed syllables and stressed syllables, and in 1953 lends a pulsing rhythm to the narrative. Page has a facility for iambs, and believes his poetry in the last 20 years or so, has “definitely become more iambic.” Now he prefers “to hear everything in a clear iambic tetrameter or trimeter” (Interview). The threes and fours — the metrical length of lines, the number of feet contained in each line, “give a sense of formality that I like”, he admits.

Page views the interplay between poetic and narrative strategies as fundamental:If you make it too compressed, too lyrical, then you can’t get the forward momentum, and if you make it not sufficiently lyrical, then it’s not very different from prose, and then you have to ask, well, what’s been gained by writing the novel in poetry? You have to strike this balance and that’s the hardest thing about writing any verse novel” (Interview).

Five other verse novels, two novels, two score of poetry books, and several non fiction titles, translations, and a biography currently comprise Page’s prolific and significant literary contribution. In 2013 alone, Page published three titles: 1953, Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry) and New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann). For his efforts Page has won several awards including the Grace Leven Prize, The Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry, and the Patrick White Literary Award.

It would be fitting if future accolades were to recognise 1953 as a verse novel of innovative means.


NOTES

1 The Marlowe Papers: A Novel in Verse by Ros Barber, winner of The Desmond Elliott    Prize 2013, Great Britain.
2 E. M. Forster’s ([1927] 1993) distinction between story and plot.
3 I acknowledge the considerable differences of opinion among theorists regarding reader-response theories.
4 Chatman’s term in Story and Discourse.

 

WORKS CITED

Alber, Jan. “Unnatural Narrative”. In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. URL = http://www.lhn.uni- hamburg.de/article/unnatural-narrative
[view date:2 Feb 2014]
Ireland, Ken. The Sequential Dynamics of Narrative: Energies at the Margins of Fiction. London: Associated University Presses, 2001.
Page, Geoff. Interview by Linda Weste, 6 December 2013.
—. 1953. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2013.


LINDA WESTE  is a poet, editor and teacher of Creative Writing. Her PhD, completed at The University of Melbourne, researched late-20th and early-21st-century verse novels. She is currently writing her second verse novel.

 

Tiffany Tsao reviews “The Pillow Book” by Jee Leong Koh

1-95417f3fdeThe Pillow Book

by Jee Leong Koh

Math Paper Press, 2012

ISBN: 978-981-07-3078-9

Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO

In taking its title and opening epigraph from one of the first masterpieces of the zuihitsu tradition—the pillow book written by Sei Shōnagon in the tenth century—Koh’s own pillow book seems to invite close comparison. However, as the pieces that follow the epigraph unfold, one after the other, it becomes apparent that to yoke The Pillow Book too closely to its namesake would be to miss the point entirely. The book is a playful meditation on the liberating, not binding, aspects of similitude—the ability of many objects, people, places, moods, and moments to share and even multiply and nuance sameness without being reduced to being the same. The lists that make up a good portion of the chapbook are exercises in drawing together the disparate. Under ‘Well Organized Things’ we find:

‘A dictionary. A rainforest. A supermarket.’

And categorized as ‘Sharp Things’ are:

A clever child.
Magnetite in a homing pigeon’s beak.

Like all zuihitsu, the book is the same exercise carried out on a slightly larger scale: miscellaneous lists, thoughts, observations, and memories gathered in a series of pieces that could itself be a list titled ‘Things to do with Jee Leong Koh’. ‘In the year I turned thirtythree,’ Koh tells us fairly early in the collection, ‘I moved to New York City to find out if I was gay and a poet.’ And though this is the stuff that Bildungsromane are made of, the pieces roam back and forth through Koh’s life in a non-linear, desultory fashion. Thus told, experiences one might think wholly dissimilar instead yield resemblances. The two years’ of mandatory army service as an adolescent in Singapore are contiguous with his sexual encounters in New York:

‘Once, the guys carried up a popular mate, spreadeagled him in the air, and split his crotch against a pillar. It was done in jest but, oh, how excited everyone was, now I see!’

Moving overseas has also meant not moving overseas:

‘working in a rented room in Queens I write by the light of Singapore, a tall yellow streetlamp with its cloud of flying insects.’

Embracing Christianity in youth mingles with his sexual awakening:

‘A tree shot up from the broken ground. It raised a crown of leaves. It rode as rigid as a sceptre. Its name was Good and Evil. Its name was I Am Alive. Its name was Frangipani.’

‘In the New American Standard Bible, which I owned then, Jonathan loved David as himself. That was how I loved Darren when I turned twentyone.’

Past and present, here and there, comradeship and sexual intimacy, spiritual and emotional and physical enlightenment—all are folded in on each other, variations in different keys in different passages on something that is ineffably one thing that can never (should never) be reduced to being just one thing.

Even the central object of the book’s charming opening piece—the eponymous character, the pillow—is not just one thing. It is the bolster of his first thirty-three years (‘the long pillow held between my legs and hugged to my chest’), which by association is also the other long thing between his legs. It is a substitute for a woman, asserts his handsome English friend Darren, who does not suspect that he, not woman, is the object of the Koh’s affections. The pillow returns at intervals throughout the book. It surfaces surreptitiously in ‘When I Go Home with Someone’ as Koh sleeping in the arms of a lover (‘He presses me against his chest’). It reappears by a stretch of the imagination in the similar-sounding ‘pillar’ that splits the crotch of the armymate. It announces itself in ‘Japanese Things’: ‘Hugging pillow, also called a Dutch wife.’ Dutch wife, Japanese hugging pillows, pillar, Jee Leong, Darren, woman, penis, bolster, book by Singaporean man in the twenty-first century, book by Japanese woman in the tenth century—a series of things like but not equivalent.

One is faintly reminded of Michel Foucault’s account of similitude in The Order of Things, where he describes the mode by which Western knowledge operated prior to the sixteenth century: ‘the face of the world is covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words—with “hieroglyphics”, as Turner called them. And the space inhabited by immediate resemblances becomes like a vast open book; it bristles with written signs; every page is seen to be filled with strange figures that intertwine and in some places repeat themselves. All that remains is to decipher them….’ The Pillow Book is a poetic account of a similar mode of knowing, experiencing, and living in the world. Yet the truth of its testimony does not rely on grand overviews of human history, but on the bits and pieces that comprise one individual—the trivial, the subjective, and even the petty: his list of ‘Hateful Things’ includes ‘Small talk when I have not had a drink. Squeaky voices. They are especially unbearable when they read poems.’

These occasional moments of ungraciousness punctuate The Pillow Book, and though they never overwhelm, they counterbalance the vulnerability and self-aware wit that characterizes the collection overall. At one point, Koh weighs in on the morning-after etiquette of lovers: ‘sometimes it is charming if he will not leave me but walks me to the train station. It is definitely not charming when he leaves with me in order to do laundry.’ There is also an sly haughtiness in the observation, ‘When one could show up the ignorance of a loudmouthed enemy, but refrains, that is delicate too.’ But then again, The Pillow Book never pretends to be anything but an unapologetic baring of all of the poet’s self. To quote Koh’s quotation of Sei Shōnagon’s pillow book: ‘I was sure that when people saw my book they would say, “It’s even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.”’

 

TIFFANY TSAO is a poet, academic and critic whose work appears in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann)

Jo Langdon reviews “Ephemeral Waters” by Kate Middleton

Ephemeral Waters Middleton-cover-for-web-214x300

by Kate Middleton

Giramondo, 2013

ISBN 978-1-922146-48-9

Reviewed by JO LANGDON

 

‘Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find obsessive’, begins Joan Didion in ‘Holy Water’, an essay from the author’s 1979 collection The White Album. It was this essay and its attentiveness to water and human responses to it that came to mind recurrently in reading Sydney poet and essayist Kate Middleton’s second poetry collection, Ephemeral Waters, a book-length poem that follows the Colorado River across five states in a poetic exploration of landscape and the human imagination. It is a stunning sequence, and a book that continues to pursue the intersections between poetry and other written forms, blending and blurring generic conventions in its focus on the ‘real’ world.

Poetry is often the language we turn to in order to express love, loss and other experiences of extremity. Poems appear frequently at weddings and funerals, and are often written or recited in response to violent and traumatic events. The mode is similarly associated with the extreme by way of the sublime: the ineffable or overwhelming extremities of immense environments and landscapes. At the end of the book, Middleton notes that the project offered an opportunity to ‘chase the sublime’. ‘Inevitably,’ she writes in a two-page epilogue (‘Reflection, After’), ‘the river kept expanding around me, and flooding over me. Even as my understanding of how much I would never know grew and grew, my own ardent naiveté kept me from sinking’ (124). Collaging archival materials, conversations, ‘found’ language, and moments of subjective experience and observation, Ephemeral Waters skilfully, seamlessly apprehends both the tangible and intangible force of the Colorado in all its immensity.

It’s important to stress that quoting from this bookcan do no justice to the poetry as it appears on the page. Along with the margin notes—ephemera that supplement, double, and at times diverge from the primary text—Middleton’s use of space and the shape of the poetry is itself a feature of this work. The enjambments are always accomplished and, importantly, the lines never slip into prose or the prosaic. When a story, fragment of history, or lines of conversation arrive, it is never at the expense of the poetry—or more specifically, the poet’s use of language.

Most remarkable is how much Middleton has included in what are sweeping and yet often spare lines: the landscapes arrive with a great sense of tactility, and dialogues rush forward, frequently in humorous, surprising ways. ‘No, you can’t see the river / from here – the sign says so’ (83), we read in Arizona (or overhear, rather, as the note ‘2nd Speaker’ in the margin suggests). Wry observations such as this appear elsewhere, such as at a scenic lookout pages earlier, where a young boy sits next to the poet and, ‘as if he has practised his sigh tells me in the voice of / a seasoned traveller             Well, it sure is Grand’ (77).

Ephemeral Waters opens with ‘Instruction (Prologue)’, and immediately introduces both the river and poet’s proportions: ‘none of it / is yours        It does not / acknowledge you’; ‘You will learn / something             You will learn / nothing but absence, but rock’s / wonderful indifference’ (1). In the subsequent section, Part I, ‘Colorado’, the poem pans in on a ‘thread of water / you can easily straddle, if only …’ (5). The details, so keenly observed, offer glimmers of intimacy, accessibility: ‘Water just covers my feet / the rocks of the streambed bloom / in orange and lilac’ (6);  ‘Listen This too is where waters are born’ (11).

By the Kauffman House Museum, Grand Lake, place is further inhabited, this time by its human history as the reader is introduced to the ambiguous figure of Mary, on whose story ‘[t]he women at the Historical Society / can’t quite agree’. We read: ‘They agree that she needed sunshine / They speak as if she lived / in the almost-snow’ (12). Mary’s biography plummets, then, into violent tragedy:

Gun in hand she killed them

            The children on the floor

she then turned despair upon herself

An imperfect shot

                        Four days till death (13)

Surfacing, the reader is gradually returned to picturesque sites and panoramas, the kind of which are seen elsewhere in the book, such as in Arizona, where ‘The Colorado River’ is ‘Now clay-coloured / now brilliant jade // now glassy, now dirty milk’ (81). Likewise in Nevada, the poet writes: ‘Now in postcards / all we see is blue-green / and terracotta, water’s glass // laid over more redrock’ (92). These glimpses of landscape are never simply pleasing pictorials, however, and the reader’s gaze is continually redirected as the poem zooms in and out, shifting in often unexpected directions.

In Part V, ‘California/Arizona, Border Water’, Middleton writes: ‘Somewhere here world unworlds / itself, weirds into desert planet’ (105). ‘Weirds’ might be a verb that drives moments of this collection, documenting as it does the sublime and the extreme. Yetthere are recognisable experiences glimpsed here also: the small talk of tourists, the gingham of restaurant tablecloths, drinking water carried in bottles and cooled in streambeds.

At ‘Adventure Park’ (according to the marginalia), we are offered an evocative, eerily beautiful portrait, beginning: ‘I swam in the famous pool at twilight // As steam / rose off / the weird aqua / bodies soaked into dusk’ (21). The poem’s speaker observes a couple seated on the pool’s steps, reading ‘his and hers pulp novels, never speaking / to each other’, both tuning out ‘the chatter of bikini-clad teens who discussed beauty / under the darkening sky’ (21).

The pairing of corporality and beauty, and of beauty and violence, is prevalent throughout the book. In the subsequent section, Middleton hears of a boy—presumably another teenager, or perhaps a younger child—who disappeared at ‘No Name creek’.Contemplating the time it took for his body to travel the river’s course (twelve days), the poet invites us to ‘Picture what remains—the washed up // dead arrive abraded; skinless; / smashed beyond reconstruction’ (22). On the following page—marked ‘erratum’ in the margin—Middleton notes: ‘Only later I learn that the body floated / four more days than I had heard / before the current offered up the leavings // thirty-five miles downstream’ (23).

In Utah, horses appear via film footage from John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950), and the presence of those wonderfully uncanny animals heightens the intensity of the familiar and unfamiliar: ‘The opening reel shows us horses / easing their black and white bodies / into the waters, muddy and green’ (35). Bodies are continually entering and emerging (although not always) from the vast and often unfathomable body of water.

Elsewhere, human figures step in and out of the poem with ease. Children appear frequently, as do family groups and various couples. ‘Park Service volunteers’are dressed in ‘matching ranger-green’ (14). In Kremmling, a couple are ‘Two at odds’:

            She’s marionette

thin and tells me she can clack needles

with the fluency of puppet strings

He’s sturdy, votes right          They disagree

but enlighten me on fire, on water

rights, on local names and on how

loneliness grows more elastic How

unchanged debates give comfort

(16)

In Part III we meet Joe, an asbestos worker on his way to Utah to see his daughter De Challey, ‘Like the canyon’ (73). ‘Holding apricots’, ‘He laces the story with water / and we drop / into my rental, drive miles away’ (73). Here, as elsewhere, the language doubles the water’s movements and shifts, its inherent fluidity.

Middleton’s presence as the poetry’s speaker, as an observer and collector of moments, is always light. Although the first-person ‘I’ appears frequently, the speaker’s subjectivity never encroaches upon the poetry, and the focus of the work is always elsewhere: ‘ – gathering, gathering –’ (8), to quote the poet. The poem is continually sieving through the water’s history, populated as it is by shattered bodies and ghosts, speculation, historical documentation, and the imaginations of others: filmmakers, explorers, locals and those visiting.

‘I have lived with the river much more in imagination than in actuality’, notes the poet at the end of the book. For readers of Ephemeral Waters too, the Colorado and its political and personal histories will live on as haunting, shifting presences. Middleton reintroduces the reader to the world, to the strange and familiar, in ways that stay on, dwelling in the imagination with a sense of something akin to the obsessive reverence described by Didion, decades ago.

 

CITED

Didion, Joan 2009 (1979), ‘Holy Water’, The White Album, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, pp. 59–66.

 

JO LANGDON is the author of a chapbook of poems, Snowline (Whitmore Press, 2012). She is currently a literary studies PhD candidate at Deakin University, Geelong, where she teaches in literature and professional & creative writing.

 

Geoff Page reviews “Indigo Morning: Selected Poems” by Rachel Munro

IMsp

 

Indigo Morning: Selected Poems

By Rachael Munro

Grand Parade Poets, 2013

ISBN: 9780987129130

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

 

Rachael Munro’s second book, Indigo Morning: Selected Poems, is intriguing on at least two levels, the autobiographical and the aesthetic. Her first book, Dragonshadow, was published in 1989. Although this new collection is highly personal in many ways it offers no definitive clues as to what’s happened to the poet in the intervening 24 years. In poems such as “Proof of a Day” and “Profiteroles” there is a hint that alcohol may have had a role but it would seem to have been a more complex and elusive story than that word alone might suggest.

The collection is divided into five parts of which the first two graphically evoke a classically happy Australian rural childhood, near the Hawkesbury River and on the Monaro. Munro’s empathy with animals is evident throughout and she clearly understands that horses (and cats) vary as much in their personalities as humans do.

This talent is felt particularly in poems such as “Wanting” and “The Old Bay Mare” where, in the latter, the poet remembers:

She wouldn’t be caught.
She’d defy, elude me.
In the hundred-acre paddock
we’d have to herd her
from the four-wheel-drive
and even in the yard,
bribe with lumps of sugar. (p.44)

The language here is simple, perhaps overly so, but true also to the experiences described. One sees comparable risks taken at the end of “The Last Summer” where Munro recalls “Climbing out of my own window / after midnight / just to watch the stars.” (p.29) There are times when simple, honest statements like this can seem naive but there are also times when they are the most powerful strategy available. This is one of those occasions i.e. when elemental language does justice to the comparably elemental experience of “watch(ing) the stars”.

The same emphasis on literal description is seen throughout the section, “Cat, My Child” — which, as a whole, with its scrupulously close visual attention and thoughtful speculation, is almost an up-date of Christopher Smart’s famous poem, “For I will consider my Cat Jeffrey”. A nice sense of the section’s mood as a whole, along with some extra metaphoric energy in the middle, can be felt in the second stanza of “The Faint Fragrance of Clean Damp Cat”:

The grey kitten is upstairs
performing his toilette
in the hills and hollows of my unmade bed.
Soon the crumpled sheets will wear
the faint fragrance of clean damp cat.” (p.59)

In the book’s last two sections, Munro moves away from animals and childhood into more problematic areas. They include passing references to alcoholism already mentioned — and a sense, at times, of intense loneliness. The latter is evinced strongly in “From a Suburban Window” (“I sit in my niche by the open window / and listen to the aura of silence — / heater whirring, occasional bird calls, / palms fronds restless in the slight air”) (p.77). The poet’s (or the speaker’s) rather desperate efforts to counter such loneliness with a Christmas party are convincingly evoked in the prose poem, “Profiteroles”, — which concludes:

I’m feeling mild pangs of enthusiasm and it’s so disconcerting and slightly painful to change a mind set. I wonder if two Panadol would help?” (p.73)

Even more forceful, in a different way, are two “set piece” poems at the end of the book, “The Newborn of Ashkelon” and “Love and Despair”. The first is a complex meditation on the recently-discovered bones of baby skeletons (95 % of them male) found in a third century AD Roman sewer under a bath-house/brothel in what is now Israel.

Like “Love and Despair”, a sinister poem about AIDS transmission which follows it, “The Newborn of Ashkelon” is a graphic consideration of issues such as prostitution and infanticide which persist through time and across cultures.

Girls could grow up
in the bath-house and become the next
generations of prostitutes, an investment
by the mother, an insurance against aging. (p.86)

These two pieces make a strong climax to the book — and some readers, including this one, may well wish there had been more of them along the way. They tend to make the poems about cats, horses and childhood, evocative though they are, seem a lead-up to something more powerful and less personal. Perhaps Munro’s third collection will feature more poems which confront such inherently dramatic material — though it’s hardly the reader’s (or reviewer’s) role to be so prescriptive.

GEOFF PAGE  is a Canberra-based poet and critic. He  has published twenty-one collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. His awards include the Grace Leven Prize and the Patrick White Literary Award, among others.

 

John Upton reviews “Barnacle Rock” by Margaret Bradstock

barnacle_rock_310_444_sBarnacle Rock

By Margaret Bradstock

Puncher and Wattmann, 2013

ISBN (paperback) 9781922186126 (e-book) 9781922186133

Reviewed by JOHN UPTON
  

‘You will go back through the quiet bush’, says the eponymous poem in this collection, ‘past Aboriginal middens / rainbow lorikeets nesting / in tree knolls / to the uninhabited beach’ (Barnacle Rock). And during this journey through time and space, the reader encounters a full-length portrait of Australia – geographic, social and moral. The examination is close and critical. The title’s metaphor imagines white settlement and society as a layer of barnacles fastened to this continental rock, and the book explores ecosystems of beach, basalt and brutality. There’s elegance in the writing, freshness in the imagery and pace in the telling, but there’s also heart – Margaret Bradstock cares about Australia, and the direction in which it is headed.

The collection is in five sections, each focused on an aspect of the story: early white contact, settlement and exploration; landform and landscape; a personal suburban life; a closer focus on Sydney’s landscape of water, beach and cliffs, with a lighter tone and a sprinkling of humour; and an enraged protest about the direction of the country and the world with issues such as global warming and the nuclear industry. Bradstock’s favoured free verse trimeter gives past and present a unifying heartbeat. The collection offers a generous 120 pages of poetry and gathers in a busy lifetime’s work and thought.

In the early exploration poems, short lines, vaulting detail and quick dips into historical fact give a pace like a stiff wind behind a clipper ship. Some might argue that these poems are irrelevant to the theme, but they provide a context. An introductory piece ties Marco Polo to Captain Cook, Donald Horne and today’s Bra Boys: ‘Life’s a beach, all right … waves rolling in forever / and the slide of sand. / The “sacred geometry” of ocean’ (Country of Beach). Then we’re back to a Portuguese shipwreck in 1520, and a 1522 map showing a sunfish like ‘a dinner plate with staring eyes / bird’s beak of a mouth / fins like trencher handles’ (Sunfish). There are Dutch traders, British buccaneers, French scientists, and a mad thrust by Captain Cook into Antarctic waters that grimly prefigures a heroic expedition led by Douglas Mawson a century and a half later.

We also encounter convicts in chilling penal conditions: ‘Six months in irons, 100 lashes / for rebelliousness, insolence, refusal to work / the flogger dipping the Cat’s tails in sand’ (Convict Davis, 1824). The rhythm is edging now into five-beats, free verse but based on English poetry’s comfortable pentameter, which emerges fully-fledged in the early Sydney colony of Leichhardt As Headland: ‘Rum, horseracing, cock fights and prize fights – / Sydney’s a city now, known smugglers / and thieves accepted as city councillors’. As the nation matures, Douglas Mawson is in Antarctica, with vivid imagery as ‘Adele penguins confer like tribal elders’, and a line of people is ‘a papercut of small black figurines / in a vast expanse of white-out’ (Mawson: The Heroic Era).The salient detail of big, heroic deeds is rendered in memorable but economical language, understatement reflecting the character of the men involved. Colour and movement were not the issue then, nor are they here.

The second section introduces the Australia of landforms – Glasshouse Mountains, Recherche Bay, Uluru, Katherine township, the mental landscape of Sidney Nolan and Ern Malley – and, interestingly, the language is back in that three-beat free verse pattern that comes, I think, most naturally to Bradstock. The section opens with The Promised Land (p.44), a group of four short poems in which landforms become religious symbols. The second poem, Asylum In Eden, sees the light after thunderheads and wonders: ‘does it pre-empt the covenant / perhaps, or yellowcake? // Asylums offer sanctuary / but quickly become prisons. / Was it like that in Eden / fall upon fall of cages / in a stairway of descent, simulating / the free fall of angels?’

We’re also in Sydney’s geography, with high-rise plate glass windows occupying air once owned by pterodactyls, with black rats jumping ship ‘like absconding sailors’ to introduce bubonic plague, and Barnacle Rock, a 31-line summary of this sweep of history and landform, where ‘A man and his shadow / stride across the skyline / in the footprints of worn sandstone’.

These first two sections account for half of the book. The third section pulls the focus tighter, into ‘the detritus of domesticity’, life in the suburbs where ‘rust never sleeps’ (Patrolling The Balustrade For Rust). The focus upon ‘then’ and ‘now’ moves from broad history to personal memory – journeys to Marseilles, Bali, Vietnam: ‘If you could choose your past / where would it be? / back in the seventies, fifties[?] / … / I climbed the Bridge once … poised on the brink of something / burr of a wingbeat / the city gridlocked beneath us. // We feed coins into the automated / pay station / locate the car’ (Wheel and Turn).

The section ends with two strong pieces on the poet’s father: ‘You hear your dead brothers / calling from a different lifetime / their blackbird voices’ (Ask Not), and‘You drift in and out of memory / in and out of sleep / a receding tide of the river’s delta / … / A foghorn sounds on the river. / Wanting to be gone, you are still here’ (The River).

In the fourth section, the focus is again upon ‘place’, but the lens is set even more tightly – we’re now on Sydney’s beaches and headlands, in and on the water of ‘the glittering city’ (Morning, Bondi Beach). There’s sly wit: ‘Your board stands idle / behind the washing machine / … / another bottom of the harbour scheme’. That wit is on show again in Harbour Tolls Are Changing With the Times as it mourns Slessor in affectionate parody: ‘no ships’ bells or ventricles of light // the harbour flicking over / echoes a machine’s voice / North and South Head // a border crossing now. / You are upside down in the water / words written on the ocean floor’. This poem later suggests the reader ‘google underwater.com.au’. The tone in this section is playful, the happiest in the book. But it’s setting us up for something very different.

The fifth section is a howl of rage, just seven poems, but the lines are longer and the rhythms pound. In the first poem, The Catechism of Loss, nuclear radiation has been loosed upon the world: ‘Lost cities hammer out makeshift plans / the flattened landscape stripped / of its clockwork trappings’. In The Ranger Mine we’re told that for 30 years about 100,000 litres of contaminated water a day has been leaking from the tailings dam into fissures beneath Kakadu. In The Sure Extinction we’re warned that ‘The North Pacific garbage patch / is the graveyard where marine plastics gather / like nylon shirts in the wardrobes of old men’. In Walking in the Wetlands there’s more wonderful rage as she invokes Eliot, flaying the sad, self-centred anguish of Prufrock:

There will be time / before rain lashes against the skin of sea / melding into horizon / time to take in the Picasso exhibition / another journey, a Doris Lessing novel. / Rivers of ice that run forever / tectonic plates that shift and shift again / their earthquakes gathering force / won’t interfere with our idea of Christmas: the chant of carols, / feel-good donations’ (p.112).

The mood softens a little in the final three poems, but the threat is still there. Bees and polar bears struggle in changing environments. ‘Autumn arrives early, while we’re still not done with summer / or summer with us, sending me back to the bay’ (How Large Each Death Will Be). The collection ends with the cycle bending towards another winter: ‘Everything is waiting and still / this tenuous, fragile feeling / like a hand-held soapstone sculpture’ (Mississauga: Spring and Fall).

Because it’s a portrait, this collection limits its scope, forms and style. There aren’t villanelles and technical virtuosity. Thematically, it identifies important and topical issues – climate change, degradation of the land, the value society places on what it has inherited, and what all this means for Australia’s future. It’s a sober balance sheet, and one that isn’t optimistic, but it’s a grown up perspective – gloomy while still relishing life. Margaret Bradstock fulfils the mission of the evangelising poet – to seize and hold the attention of her reader, to fascinate and enlighten, and to address spiritual hunger in a satisfying way.

 

JOHN UPTON is a theatre critic. His poetry has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Canberra Times, Quadrant, Famous Reporter, Eureka Street and other literary magazines.

Elizabeth Bryer reviews “An Elegant Young Man” by Luke Carman

Carman-Cover-267x300An Elegant Young Man

by Luke Carman

Giramondo, 2013

ISBN 978-1922146-45-8

Reviewed by ELIZABETH BRYER

Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man, a formally innovative bildungsroman, is composed of eight story cycles set in Sydney’s multicultural western suburbs. The shortest of the cycles are the most experimental; these alternate with longer, more structurally conventional ones. The idea of the narrator as a version of the author is foregrounded from the first sentence, when the narrator tells us that his name is Luke.

In the opening story cycle ‘Whitman and the Whitlam Centre’ the sentences are short but, given the way they reel from one topic to the next, the effect isn’t to slow the reading down; instead, the sentences come like rapid-fire bursts that pepper the reader from every direction. The collection’s novel-of-education intentions soon become clear: the narrator recounts, in quick succession, different sources of wisdom—certain poets, children’s authors, musicians and films—alongside the often contradictory pearly words themselves, without ever making clear to which of these, if any, he subscribes. Thus there is the sense of the narrator throwing himself into the world, absorbing what comes into his orbit and seeking out whatever catches his interest, but not necessarily settling on anything concrete just yet. There is a breakneck energy, here, the impatience of youth, the feeling of needing to know now, of pushing boundaries and of a constant, insatiable thirst for knowledge. The confusion that is the world—its immensity and its perplexing incongruities—is also highlighted through this structure.

The reader’s narrative expectations are interrupted at every turn. The narrator’s associations are often unpredictable; the story appears to be going in one direction but then heads in another, often in the space between one sentence and the next. It’s worth taking a detailed look at the first five sentences of the second story of ‘Whitman and the Whitlam Centre’ to see the considerable degree to which this occurs.

The passage begins: ‘My name’s Luke and sometimes at parties when people ask me what it is that I do I say, “I’m a professional fraud, how ’bout you?” Nobody ever laughs.’ (6) On my first encounter with this opening, I expected it to lead to an exploration of identity, and it does, in a sense, but by way of an unexpected route of association: ‘To be honest I don’t go to a lot of parties.’ The admission comes from left of field and feels somehow dejected, a subdued confession after the previous story’s hyperactive energy, and after the more recent recollection of the narrator’s failed attempt at a party joke. In this way, the change in narrative direction is often accompanied by a change in key in terms of tone and emotive register.

The pattern of unexpected association continues when the next sentence similarly barrels off in a related, but surprising, direction: ‘Y’know I read in the newspaper yesterday that cocaine use has skyrocketed in Sydney despite police efforts.’ The association the reader makes  between this sentence and the previous three might be expressed as: OK, so those parties that Luke just admitted to missing out on—this is what must happen at them. The perspective is detached; it reads as a serious consideration from a narrator abreast of current issues. But just in case any of those conclusions start to seem stable or definitive, then comes the next sentence, a humorous, contradictory take on the situation that might also evoke in the reader sympathy towards the narrator and his apparent aloneness: ‘I guess that it’s good to know that somewhere out there people are having fun’.

Throughout this and other stories, the effect of the narrative technique on the reader is as an almost schizophrenic vacillation between chuckling with the narrator, feeling sympathy for him and simply trying to keep up with the associative leaps of his mind, which seems to take in everything at once and to draw unexpected connections. That Carman manages to achieve this tumult of feeling in the space of just a few short sentences is a remarkable feat.

Place is an important feature in all the stories. Geography is, for the protagonist, not separable from its inhabitants.  Granville is not Granville unless viewed through his father’s interactions with the world, just as Liverpool is nothing without Niki and Hadie, and Newtown nought without the university-educated creative denizens he meets.

In these and other places, Luke is a keen observer of the several milieus with which he comes into contact, not least because he often struggles to interpret cues and to act in accordance with them, especially when he isn’t comfortable with their implications. On the train from ‘Livo’ to Cronulla, his friends direct lewd comments at girls. He recounts, ‘I tried to join in. I yelled out, “Show us your milk duds.’ Mazzen said, “Bro, that was a mum. Don’t disrespect.” And everyone was disappointed in me’ (43). Later, he mentions how no-one shakes hands in Livo, but slaps palms together or does fist bumps. ‘I didn’t like it. For one thing, I never knew where their hands were gonna go and if you missed it was bad for both of you’ (53).

This awkwardness makes the narrator an ideal, sensitive observer of the kinds of social interactions that might go unremarked in another work of fiction. One of the shorter story cycles begins with musings on irony, on how Luke believes that people shouldn’t be ironic all the time; the droll title of this cycle is, of course, ironic: ‘The Easy Interactions of an Elegant Young Man’. One of these interactions is between Luke and a woman in a cafe: she comments on the book he is clutching, The Odyssey, and he is so startled he starts sweating and decides to hide the book under his arm in future. Indeed, the only easy interactions here are the ones Luke shares with his imaginary friend.

The narrator’s navigation of the social landscape often involves a navigation of violence. His aversion to it is at times apparent, such as when Niki throws stones at a streetlight, which sail into the night beyond the fence: ‘Every shot she took made me twitch and I worried about them hitting the cows that were mouthing and moving through the grass.’ (52)

The stories explore the notion of violence as a way of life and as a social ritual tied to class through the lens of Luke’s perplexity. The coming-of-age rituals to which Luke’s father subjects him sometimes involve violence, or the threat of such. The first time Luke meets Niki’s boyfriend he, on opening the door, throws a furious, poorly aimed punch at Luke. When a denim-clad, mohawk-wearing ‘scumbag Aussie’ punches Luke in Cronulla, Luke perceives ‘a strange ceremony going on that I needed to do something about. A ritual was taking place, and I was a major player, but I didn’t know my role. I felt afraid that I wouldn’t make the right moves and the crowd would be disappointed in me.’ (49) Luke is even more perplexed when, after he wins the fight, his attacker puts his arm around him and tells him that, as ‘Aussies’—Anglos—they need to stick together.

The end of the collection sees the narrator fulfil the bildungsroman’s coming of age, which takes the form of a melancholic story cycle that connects Luke, his mother and his brother in a triangle of trying to make do, of attempting to find various ways to invest in life enough to keep on with it despite their keen awareness of ‘the murmur of something gone’ (184) and how easy it would be to ‘go to sleep’ (182). It is an affective  ending and has, at its centre, a great poise and calm, in contrast to the frantic beginning of the collection.

But perhaps the heart of Luke’s growth comes in the penultimate cycle, which details his encounters with a number of women. Here, he embarks on a journey to warn a friend that everything he told her was wrong, that Kerouac did not have all the answers: the world is not an ecstatic masterpiece but instead ‘moves from order to disorder just like black holes and middle-class families’ (143). In the sites where Kerouac found meaning and epiphanies there is nothing, at least not here, in this context: ‘in Australia there is no beat to keep’ (145); ‘Australia is not the place for ecstatic truth’ (148). He objects to ‘steamrollers flattening the whole culture’ (147), and it is this bland homogenisation, this imitation of idols and ideologies formulated for other times and faraway lands that is key here. It seems Carman has responded to Luke’s agitated realisation: both speaker and author have delivered a work that’s far from derivative or affected, and speaks to and from this country in a way we have rarely seen before.

 

 

Prithvi Varatharajan reviews “The Double” by Maria Takolander

the double

The Double

By Maria Takolander

Text, 2013

ISBN: 9781922079763

Reviewed by PRITHVI VARATHARAJAN

 

We are fascinated, as a culture, with doubles and doppelgängers. This fascination is evident in our collective cultural consciousness: in our art. Think of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the protagonist stays forever youthful, and able to indulge in sensual decadence, while his locked-up portrait grows hideous and progressively older with each sin he commits. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century science fiction is populated by doubles in the form of clones, in stories and novels by Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin and Kazuo Ishiguro, among many others. And there are several films that present doubles as uncanny or disturbing, such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s excellent Solaris and Duncan Jones’ more recent Moon. From a few of these examples it seems that, at least in art, it’s when we seedoubles together—such as in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, whena young boy turns a corner in a remote and supposedly abandoned hotel, and encounters a pair of identical twin girls, holding hands, in a picture of perfect symmetry—that we’re gripped by a sense of the uncanny, of something not quite right, even vaguely terrifying. This sense of the uncanny, as something not quite right, is notably absent from performative but non-artistic contexts: in Elvis Presley impersonators, for instance, or in the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, who were part of a nineteenth-century travelling circus. While such doubles may strike us as curious, they rarely provoke the sense of dread that accompanies literary and filmic portrayals of the double.

Maria Takolander’s The Double is named after a novella by Dostoevsky, published in Russian as Dvoynik. Dvoynik is the story of a Mr. Goliadkin, a lowly titular councillor who lives alone in St. Petersburg and talks in a roundabout and deferential way that reflects his extreme timidity. Goliadkin consults his doctor, who tells him to be more outgoing, and advocates forcefully, “you need to reorganize your whole life radically and in some sense break your character” (12). Soon afterwards, Goliadkin is standing forlornly in the rain and snow, following an episode in which he—completely out of character—gate crashes an aristocratic ball and is evicted in disgrace. The mortified Mr. Goliadkin now wants “not only to escape from himself, but to annihilate himself completely” (44). What follows is the story of an opposite Mr. Goliadkin—a bold, cruel, and cunning Mr. Goliadkin—who comes into being and slowly insinuates himself into the first Mr. Goliadkin’s life. The story is full of a dreamy uncertainty about what is actually happening at any time (“he, ladies and gentlemen, is also here, that is, not at the ball, but almost at the ball” (34)), and implausible events that nevertheless feel inevitable. Mr. Goliadkin’s reality is unstable—I’m tempted to say “dreamlike,” but the story ought not to be reduced to a dream—and full of multiple doublings and mirrorings; these produce a pervasive sense of uncanniness and dread in the story.

Takolander’s The Double isn’t exclusively about doubles and doppelgängers, but it has the eerie foreboding of Dostoevsky’s tale. This sense of foreboding springs partly from structural doublings, from inexplicable repetitions that occur in both Dostoevsky’s Dvoynik and in the stories that make up Takolander’s The Double (Takolander may have learnt to double in poetry, which revels in repetition: she’s an acclaimed poet and essayist, and this is her début book of fiction). However, some of the stories in The Double—most notably the Roānkin sequence in part two—are also characterised by an extremely playful whimsy that’s opposite in spirit to Dostoevsky’s Dvoynik.

The Double is comprised of one large section, containing eight stories including the title story, “The Double,” and a smaller section, containing four interlinking stories centred on the fantastical character Zed Roānkin. A foreboding mood infuses the stories in the first section, while the second section is characterised by playfulness, bordering on absurdity, but these moods sometimes bleed into each other. The first section features stories that are doubles of other stories, stories which revel in inter-textuality. Their titles are suggestive of this: “The Red Wheelbarrow;” “Three Sisters;” “The Double;” The Obscene Bird of Night;” “Mad Love;” “Paradise Lost;” “The Interpretation of Dreams;” and “The War of the Worlds.” Takolander’s interest in inter-textuality is a distinguishing feature of her work. It also underpins her second collection of poetry, Ghostly Subjects.

Many of the stories in the first part of The Double are about migrants, and feature barren, almost gothic landscapes, tinged with melancholy—though it’s hard to generalise, as the stories are quite different to each other. But, in general, there is a lot of oppressive silence (“the windmill clunked, and then its wheel began to churn. It was more noise than he had ever heard out here” (130-31)); stark corporeal imagery; strained romantic relationships; and occasional violence. Takolander is adept at portraying family scenes that are imbued with a quiet drama, but she can just as adeptly portray the dramatic in a quiet but arresting way, such as in “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Along with structural doublings and mirrors, which turn up in a few stories, men are doubled or paired, in “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Mad Love.” Both of these stories feature an undesired man that a female character is married to, and another man or boy who represents what her lover could be. In “The Red Wheelbarrow” there is a disinterested, violent father and an interested, loving son, who cares for his mother after an episode of violence. These scenes are charged with an unexplained eroticism:

Kneeling on the linoleum floor in front of her, I started cleaning the protruding thumb with the damp clump of paper. I noticed the breasts and nipples under the threadbare cotton of the nightie, and I saw that her lean thighs were smeared with blood. Her face, curtained by her hair, was streaked with tears. (6)

The most significant doubles in the first section—significant for being actual rather than metaphorical—occur in the title story, “The Double,” where a man encounters another who looks exactly like him. His wife, meanwhile, keeps recalling a doubling that occurred in Finland, before she migrated to Australia; both man and woman are haunted by the memories of these doublings.

The mode of storytelling is varied, and Takolander switches dextrously between male and female points of view, and third, second and first person narration. The intermittent second person address in “Three Sisters” felt like an experiment, but a successful one (“Do you see the derelict cottage out back? Three sisters live there” (31)). “The Obscene Bird of Night” was an unexpected delight: it features an eerie urban landscape, comprised of inanimate objects that speak to the narrator, in the manner of a surreal children’s story:

‘Help me,’ the fire had called, trying to make itself seen through the sooty glass.

The man hesitated in the hall. He should have gone in to feed it another log. The cold, after all, was something they all had to contend with.

‘Why bother?’ said the night, pressing its weight against the kitchen window. (87)

However, the more conventionally realistic stories in this section (“Mad Love,” “The Interpretation of Dreams”) are also the strongest. Put another way, Takolander is masterful when she returns to portraying an everyday reality, having exercised her imagination on the uncanny. The weakest story by far is “Paradise Lost,” a post-apocalyptic scenario featuring a somewhat paranoid narrator, which lacked movement, in the absence of dialogue or any other character interactions.

The book’s second section, on the elusive Zed Roānkin, abandons the forebodingly uncanny and revels in the hilariously absurd. These stories are also where the double is most powerfully present: Roānkin haunts these episodic and interwoven stories as the poet-philosopher that the narrators recoil from, aspire to be, and eventually become. His nonsensical but strangely compelling ideas, expounded in a little pamphlet titled The Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry, are worshipped for their “realness”: but he is a grotesque fabrication, and mirrors the other characters’ own self-fabrications. These stories are about pretension and fakery, particularly in the world of poetry; this is underlined by the other book that keeps turning up in the stories: Workplace Fraud.

This is a fine collection of short stories, both jarring and pleasurable to read, from a wonderfully novel imagination. Takolander wrote her PhD thesis on South American magical realism, and subsequently published a book of literary criticism titled Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground. The Double certainly has elements of magical realism in it—most strongly in the Roānkin sequence—and these are grounded, so to speak, in the figure of the double. Doubling here is not only an event but also a structural mechanism for blurring the lines, in fiction, between the real, the unreal, the surreal, and the magical.

CITED

Clarke, Arthur C. Imperial Earth. London: Gollancz, 1975. Print.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Double and The Gambler. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. 1846. New York: Random House, 2005. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. Print.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Nine Lives.” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Print.
Moon. Dir. Duncan Jones. Stage 6, 2009. Film.
Solaris. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Visual Program Systems, 1972. Film.
Takolander, Maria. Ghostly Subjects. Cambridge: Salt, 2009. Print.
—. Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Print.
The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick.Peregrine, 1980. Film.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Mighall, Robert. 1890. London: Penguin, 2006.

 

PRITHVI VARATHARAJAN is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, and a freelance producer of radio programs for ABC Radio National’s Poetica. His reviews have been published in Australian Book Review and Islet, and his poetry and prose have been published in IslandMeanjin and Voiceworks.

 

Martin Edmond reviews “Moving Among Strangers” by Gabrielle Carey

0003207_300Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow & My Family

by Gabrielle Carey

UQP

ISBN 978 0 7022 4992 1

Reviewed by MARTIN EDMOND
 
 
The quest memoir, poorly defined as a genre, is an ancient form with roots, most likely, in pre-literate times. Briefly, it is a narrative, told usually in the first person, of the progress of a quest. The protagonist sets out to find something or someone and, after the search is over, tells an audience what happened along the way. A peculiarity of the form is that failure often figures as a peril of the quest and, paradoxically, part of its successful outcome. This sounds more enigmatic than it is: a gatherer who sets out in search of yams and comes back with bush tomatoes has both failed and succeeded; so has a hunter who goes after kangaroo and comes back with nothing at all: each will still have a story to tell. The success/failure axis of the quest, and the uncertainty it presupposes, is one of the driving forces of narrative in this form of non-fiction; and the multiple outcomes it proposes make, often enough, for literature that is both flexible and engaging; sometimes very moving too.

Thus, the protagonist of a quest memoir does not necessarily find what s/he is looking for; but might find something else. The form is adaptable and capacious and requires of its reader absolute trust in the narrative voice. There is no place here, and no point to, the unreliable narrator. Self examination, however, is very much of the essence and in this respect quest memoir has strong affinities with memoir in its standard form; but has a different relation to time than either the standard memoir or its near cousin, autobiography. Although it can take the form of a chronological account, it does not need to and frequently does not. In sophisticated hands a quest memoir may more resemble a work of fiction; you may not ever know quite what is coming next and its time chart might look more like a mosaic or a collage than a progression.

Gabrielle Carey’s Moving Among Strangers is a quest memoir with just such a complex, mosaic, time structure. It is also a quest that in some respects fails to achieve its objective; but in that failure discovers other things. She tells her story with grace, delicacy and precision. And with a kind of circumspection that is, to use a by now almost obsolete word, mannerly. This quality, this reticence, is not simply characteristic of the writing in Moving Among Strangers, it is one of the themes of the book; and, inter alia, a virtue possessed by its principal subject, the writer Randolph Stow. Carey writes several times of the old virtues, of which reticence is one; others include simple good manners, respect for the privacy of others, quiet observation without the need to proclaim the results of that observation; and the ability to withhold judgment, not just for a year and a day but over the course of an entire lifetime. As the quest memoir might fail and yet thereby attain paradoxical success, these old virtues may be seen as a set of negatives which, to use a photographic metaphor, when properly developed show up as incontrovertible positives.

Gabrielle Carey has, as we say, always known there was some kind of family connection between her mother’s people and the Stows but has never investigated it fully—until now. The book opens with her mother beginning to die of cancer, a process that will take three weeks. A week into that brief period of exit, Carey brings her mother an anthology of Randolph Stow’s writing and is astonished when she, who has apparently ceased to be able to read, delivers a near perfect recitation of her favourite Stowe poem called, appropriately enough, ‘For One Dying’: Now, in that place where all birds cease to sing . . . Carey tries to persuade her mother to write to her old friend, then living in England, but she will not. In the end, the author writes herself and so initiates a brief correspondence which initiates the quest that animates the rest of the book: that is, a search for the hidden connections between her mother, Jean Carey, neé Ferguson, and her rather younger confrère, Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow.

It is not my intention to detail the stages of this quest, which is various and strange and leads the author far afield—to Western Australia, where she meets or re-meets multiple among her lost and/or forgotten relatives, from both sides of her family; and to England where, under an oak sapling in Wrabness Wood outside the village of Harwich in Suffolk, she visits Randolph Stow’s grave. For by this time, before they have had a chance to meet or even to talk upon the telephone, he too has died: one of the most poignant missed connections in this quest is a result of Carey’s failure to notice the telephone number written at the bottom of the page of one of Stow’s letters to her until it is too late to call. When she returns from the furthest of these pilgrimages, there is another death, the third, this time that of her older sister, with whom she has, somewhat fractiously, nursed their dying mother in the earliest stages of the book.

In some respects, then, the book cannot help but become a meditation upon dying. And, concomitantly, a meditation upon what is lost to us with the death of those who are close to us, whom we have known or loved, admired or respected. Carey’s accomplishment here is two-fold: while on the one hand she expertly notes the gaps in memory that can never be filled, the personal information that was stored only in someone’s mind, and then imperfectly, the documentary traces that were too insignificant or too troubling to be preserved; on the other she uncovers a rich cast of living characters who by their palpable presence on the page, bring back much that seemed irretrievable and add more that was not known before. I refer here not only to the rediscovered extended family in WA but also to Stow’s friends in Suffolk who do so much to fill out his portrait.

That portrait is, for me, the central achievement of this book. Again, it is deft and economical, elegant and intricate: accomplished as much by omission as by inclusion. There’s a kind of tact involved here which is supremely important in this kind of writing: you are going to have to speculate but, by the same token, there are few things more tiresome than an author who speculates too much. Those texts infected with might-have-beens and would-have-beens, perhapses and of courses, only serve to erode the reader’s trust in the authorial voice. Here we have something almost opposite: it is Carey’s refusal to speculate that somehow allows Stow, that silent man, a voice. Here, again, it’s the negatives that develop a positive that is far more convincing than any speculative portrait might have been.

Her refusal to speculate also allows Stow to preserve his privacy, which was evidently of great importance to him as a man and as an author; he remains an enigma to the end. There were just eight novels, five of them written before their author turned forty; a handful of poems, again mostly written in the first half of his working life; a few other heterogeneous works, including libretti and children’s books. The latter part of his life, which was spent in England, living quietly in that part of the country from which his English ancestors came, produced just three books: the twinned Visitants and The Girl Green as Elderflower; and the last book, called The Suburbs of Hell, published in 1984. For the next quarter century, until his death in 2010, Stow published nothing.

Silence in a writer is provocative: witness the swirl of conjecture that still surrounds the author of The Catcher in the Rye. More recently, in the plethora of books that have come out to mark the centenary of the birth of William Burroughs, we have his own startling testimony: that he believed an evil spirit entered him at the time in the 1940s when he shot his wife dead; and that his literary career was a sustained attempt, ultimately successful, to exorcise this demon. Stow is a very different writer from Burroughs but it does seem that in his case, too, there was a need for the kind of exorcism that writing can accomplish; and when he had said what was in him to say, or what his daemon required of him, he was content simply to live. His conflicted relationship with his home country was certainly one of the engines of his writing and it is quite possible that it was only by leaving all that behind that he could attain a modicum of happiness in his personal life. Carey’s evocation of Stow’s last years, courtesy of his English friends, is exquisitely modulated and very moving, intimate even as it leaves Stow’s essential privacy intact.

Gabrielle Carey’s Moving Among Strangers is a relatively short book, beautifully designed and presented by the University of Queensland Press, in which the strangers of the title turn imperceptibly into friends or, at the very least, acquaintances; a quest which does not achieve its aim and yet somehow manages to illuminate its subject in such a way that we as readers feel, howsoever briefly, that the unknown may yet be known; an evocative, highly descriptive, journey to places as far apart as the dusty coasts of south western Australia are from the green shade of a Suffolk village; most of all, a foray to the edges of that undiscovered borne from which no traveller returns.

Near the end of the book is a section which is rather like the old rhyme ‘The House That Jack Built’, summarising the path of incident and co-incidence that made up her quest. Then, in a lovely paragraph that begins: This, then, is what I have learned about the dead . . . she writes her conclusion. There is a profound sense here that it is in conversation with the dead we most become ourselves: something that pre-literate peoples have always believed. I kept thinking of the words of a Warren Zevon song, from his late album, Life’ll Kill Ya, itself a kind of quest memoir, and written within sight of his own early death. The refrain suggests: we take that holy ride ourselves to know. It is a holy ride that Carey takes and, on the evidence of the book’s ending, increased self-knowledge was a consequence; as well as an understanding of the beguiling phenomenon of the effervescence of elderflower wine. For readers there is something more: an insight into the mystery at the heart of a writer’s vocation.

MARTIN EDMOND is an author, poet, screenwriter who teaches at UWS. His awards include the Jessie Mackay Award and the Montana Book Award. He lives in Sydney.

Joel Ephraims

Joel Ephraims lives on the South-East Coast of NSW. He studies creative writing, philosophy, and literature at the University of Wollongong. In 2011 he won the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and in 2013 his chapbook of poetry, Through The Forest was published as part of Australian Poetry and Express Media’s New Voices Series.  

 

 

Vipassana Frog Pond after Meditation and Dawn

   Dragonflies synch in misted dawn air
around  mutated fingers of a dried dog turd white ash
   tree; through the hyperbola your tea cup
spoon-end makes with the unseeablely starlight lipped sun.
   Pond new birthed as a biologist stirred mid-dream,
usual as his motions vacuuming up fondue fountain crumbs.
   Lilies lie green Pac-men recovering nonchalantly
from heavy drinking with mouths still open for ghosts.
   Ripple of rain’s pear explosions programmed
by Blue Mountain weather intermittent in petroleum
   tinctured water where larvae by gradations form.
All ghosts long eaten their eyes hover in room at bottom
   unseen by orange fish mothers amongst their eggs.
Frogs reincarnated Pali teachers sing final chorus chants
   echoing morning pond before Nirvana incognito;
Pac-men  power pellet nourished drift over digesting sankharas.
   On wooden tree walk rail your elbow crooked
player’s hand splayed toward  clock and hushed breakfast hall…
   Anicca Anicca Anicca…

 

 
Breakfast in the Hall of Shadows

blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue

blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue

attentions tune to metamorphosis of steams

mists movements of underworld personalities

lugubrious gods unravelling vista hides

raisins rice grains floating volcanic islets

mirage filmed tongues oasis held spoons

curling yogurts water machine clarity

sighing form behind green mesh glides

melody of beasts burning in nestled forests

blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue

blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue

 

 

Jennifer Mackenzie reviews “The Question of Red” by Laksmi Pamuntjak

The-question-of-redThe Question of Red

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

Gramedia Pustaka, 2013

Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE

 

From where she was standing, on the backyard of the hospital, the only objects she could make out were the parts chosen by the dying light. Idlehorse carts, bamboo bushes deep in sleep, an abandoned pile of buckets. She walked on, into a garden that suddenly opened up, ending in a tight barricade of trees. She heard the slapping of wings as birds tried to sneak into pockets of warmth amid the leaves. She could hear the gentle snap of twigs and their descent to the ground. There was nobody around. Then she saw a flash of light, a strange sheen from the direction of the thicket of the trees. It refracted through the landscape infusing it with sadness. Strangely it was the colour blue.

Later, Amba would learn that Bhisma had never taken colours for granted. He would ask her endlessly about how she perceived different hues, listening intently to her descriptions, whether a poetic burst about a sunset or a reflection on a fruit as banal as the aubergine. When she finally understood the reason for this rich strangeness it would be too late: he would be long gone. For now, she walked toward that light. (181)

 

Colour is central, as we may ascertain from the English title of Laksmi Pamuntjak’s The Question of Red (Amber in the Indonesian edition). The novel was launched at the Ubud Festival in October last year and colour glows with symbolic resonance over the surface of the narrative. In the passage quoted above, Amba is walking towards a light, which in its portentousness, will be the occasion of irrevocable change. But if it is the colour blue which appears to signify the embodiment of love, it is the colour red which appropriates and dominates, a volatile red broadcasting the dangerous, unpredictable and bloody world of revolutionary Indonesia in the 1960’s. And it is red, with all these connotations as we will come to understand, which the colour-blind Bhisma is unable to perceive, which will separate the doomed lovers, Amba and Bhisma.

The Question of Red is in part a bildungsroman set in an era of political turbulence. A young girl, Amba, fulfils her dream to study at university, rejects her devoted suitor Salwa, and has a brief passionate love affair with Bhisma, a worldly doctor educated in Europe. Parallels are drawn, a little heavy handedly, with characters of similar names and destinies as in the classic tale of the Mahabharata. There appears to be no irony in the depiction of Amba’s father, Sudarminto, bestowing the fate of the name upon his daughter. The Question of Red tells the multi-vocal story of Amba and Bhisma’s love affair, which begins in a hospital in Kediri in East Java, and is played out in two short weeks, amidst the violent days surrounding the attempted coup and Suharto’s coming to power in 1966. Leaving the hospital Bhisma, who has left-wing sympathies, travels to Jogjakarta to treat a dangerously wounded revolutionary, accompanied by the apolitical Amba, a naïve student of literature at Universitas Gajah Mada. Significantly out of her depth and struggling to maintain the emotional thread to her lover, she is separated from him by the bombing of a protest rally they are attending, and never sees him again. Some years later, Bhisma is transported to the island of Buru, the notorious camp set up for political prisoners by the Suharto regime. When the novel begins Amba, now in her early sixties and having received a mysterious e-mail, travels there to discover his fate. The strength of The Question of Red lies very much in its evocation of place and mood. Changes in village life show traditional social structures being overtaken by new political agendas and a hardening of attitudes by an increasingly divided populace employing intense and heated rhetoric no matter what their political persuasion. Engaged to Salwa, but troubled by his undemonstrative devotion, Amba moves to Jogjakarta and at first her studies go well. Campus life is fondly described.

However, political strife both distracts and impedes her studies. To break the impasse, she takes the rash step of journeying to strife-torn Kediri to help out in the hospital office where she meets Bhisma. Bhisma has been working in the hospital where victims of communal conflict are brought in daily, and he has been treating patients of every political colour. But the properties of colour, the question of colour for him “can be a problem …I have to guess the colour by its light. I can’t tell if the berets worn by the soldiers who come to the hospital are red or green!” (227) Fundamentally, colour-blindness leaves Bhisma exposed, both politically and personally, as it compromises his capacity to clearly read signs of danger. It was on the third day of October when news came through that PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia) leader Aidit had fled to Jogjakarta. At this point, Bhisma and Amba are drawn into the conflict.

The scenes in Jogjakarta are particularly well-drawn by Pamuntjak, as she conveys the volatility and crisis-charged behaviour of the revolutionaries. She also convincingly portrays the action of people attempting to retain some kind of normalcy through this situation. Bhisma takes Amba to an artist colony which he considers ‘safe’, a place raided by soldiers a few days later. Amba, desperately clinging to her love for Bhisma, Is shown choosing clothes as if she is going to a party, deciding on a red blouse as a suitable item to wear to the ill-fated rally, a choice which has tragic consequences for both of them.

The novel portrays locations vividly and incorporates key historical events without weighing down the narrative. With much sensitivity, Pamuntjak describes the response of a local man, Samuel, to Buru post-prison:

It is the afternoon. Amba and Samuel are sitting on the stone seats beneath an assembly of trees in a schoolyard in the village of Walgan … He [Samuel] sees anew how pretty the school is. Banana trees line the outer walls, while inside the courtyard is hedged by a row of duku and turi, and a durian tree. The sense of prison has gone, now its fences and borders resemble nothing of the Buru that raised Samuel. But at the back, where pinang, aren and tall grass spill out uncontrollably far into idle land, the school suddenly looks endangered and vulnerable, for there it is no longer sheltered under a signage, no longer fenced in. (64)

The scene suggests the absence of Bhisma, the silence emanating from many untold stories and the crisis to which Samuel is a witness. Pamuntjak is at her best conveying place, from village life to Jogjakarta, from Buru to the Jakarta art world.

Being a large rather unwieldy novel encompassing many time-frames and a large number of characters and settings, the book’s main difficulty lies with characterisation, a difficulty which could have been effectively addressed with astute editing. The narrative would have sparkled with the elimination of certain sub-plots; for example, the story of Samuel merely diffuses rather than encapsulates the intensity of Amba’s search for Bhisma. In the English version reviewed here there is also a problem with register, with the occasional colloquialism and anachronism having a jarring effect. In regard to characterisation, it is difficult to reconcile the early portrait of Amba with the woman viewed by Samuel, and pointedly, by Amba and Bhisma’s daughter, Srikandi, with the shift from interiority to appraisal being quite unsuccessful. The depiction of Amba growing up as a mild rebel in a fairly conventional family of wise father, thwarted mother and empty-headed sisters is followed by an extended piece delineating her insecurities in relationship to Bhisma, and this lengthy piece works against the image of her as a strong and independent woman, the version which the reader is supposed to accept. The reduction of this depiction of insecurity would have strengthened the novel considerably. The idealisation of male figures in Amba’s life is also something of a weakness, a problem that is somewhat addressed through the forthright character of Srikandi. There are also unexplained absences in the plot. It is not clear why Bhisma did not attempt to find Amba in the years following the coup, and for Amba to excuse her lack of action as due to a sense of unworthiness, is rather exasperating as issome of the second-guessing going on with various plot tie-ups. These deficiencies significantly reduce the impact of Bhisma’s Buru letters to Amba.

Despite these problems with plot and characterisation, The Question of Red is at its best in presenting the days prior to the Indonesian holocaust of 1966, and in its sense of the personal tragedies it brought to so many, when the country’s dream of freedom and independence lost all colour and was reduced to ashes. It is from this perspective that we can view a scene late in the book when Srikandi, daughter of colour-blind Bhisma, at her exhibition opening, is asked why there is so much red in her work:

I grew up with red you see, it has been the colour of my life. I learned at school, of course, that red meant one thing: Communism, and I understood how that made us all fear it… At home as a child I grew up with the most glorious shades of red – ruby, scarlet, vermillion, puce, carmine, claret, burgundy, crimson, magenta, damask, garnet, maroon, and I knew the power of each of those names. And for that I have my mother to thank. She was a warrior, someone who was not afraid of anything.” (332/3)

 

JENNIFER MACKENZIE is the author of Borobudur (Transit Lounge 2009) reprinted in Indonesia as Borobudur and Other Poems (Lontar, Jakarta 2012)

Beibei Chen

Beibei Chen is currently a Ph.D candidate, who came to Australia in 2011 to study in the English department of UNSW at Canberra. She is interested in representations of history, memory and identity in Chinese Australians fictions. She spends her spare time writing essays and poetry related to life stories of Asians in Australia. She has a passion for representing diversity of life, dreams and memory.

 
 

Homesick

Two Sharp, Sydney,
Darkening, Conflicting, Yearning, Struggling and twisting.
Neither did I have strong ‘Aussie’ coffee;
Nor walk to the hill growing a gumtree.
I suspect myself being sick.
Lost my soul,
Spelt “scapegoat” wrong into “space-goat”
People laughed.
I cried for home.

 

The Intruder

He came from the unlocked backyard door,
And straight to my kitchen,
When I was standing still in the rented roof,
Suddenly prepared to salute:
For he is the general of this foreign land,
I am the stranger who is prepared to intrude.

 

Letter to Pessoa by Michelle Cahill

Nicholas Walton Healey pic Michelle Cahill lives in Sydney. Her fiction appears in AntipodesEtchings, Southerly, Meanjin, TEXT,  Alien Shores (Brass Monkey, 2012) and Escape (Spineless Wonders, 2011).She is the recipient of a Developing Writer’s grant from the Australia Council and has received prizes in fiction and poetry.

~Photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey
  


Letter to Pessoa

When I open my eyes Aleandro has left, his bed sheet folded. For a moment I’m in Santa Monica. The whirring fan, the garish pink walls seem vaguely familiar. Alcohol settles like a carpet of snow falling softly in my head. On the desk next to your Selected, there’s a note, saying “Thanks” with no address. Not even a number.

It’s so humid my wristwatch could be melting as in Dali’s famed masterpiece but the dream is my own and the mattress is hard against my back. I rub my eyes. I’ve missed the last bus. (Should mention that I met him at a tapas bar, El-Xampaynet. And fell for his champagne curls, his unmannered charm.)

Resisting waves of nausea I stand.  Pull on jeans. Check face in a piece of mirror stuck above the sink. Try for a clean shave.

Estrella is in the courtyard. She is busy stacking boxes of Fontvella, the floor cluttered with piles of dirty clothes and cylinders of gas. Fuse wires spread like vines across the cracked plaster. I can hear the squeak of the pulley used to hoist laundry up to the terrace.

Church bells gag. Beyond the rooftops the sky crushes me with its vivid blue. The old man at reception nods sympathetically. He guesses I have my suicidal hours. Aren’t we ever-restless? Rebellious clerks for whom the streets are never desolate, littered with cigarette butts and last night’s pardon.

Two blocks away a bar is open.

Coffee rouses me. The owner looks weary. He starts carving the jamon in thick slices. Strings of garlic and the chintzy jingle of a radio tell me it’s time to find your whereabouts, to leave this stinking city behind. An old man thumbs through the classifieds.  The smell of his Rex mingles with the odour of stale piss, the floor trashed with butts and greasy smudges.

Flâneur, you made me dream of Lisboa. Of theosophy, of black and white mosaic tiles, of slaves and cool Atlantic breezes. Of Afro jazz, pastel facades and Alfonso Pereira. Or perhaps it was the poems of Álvaro de Campos. I’ve wondered if they were fabrications or if he lived in you? What ships left the rat-infested harbours transporting poets? What ships are docked within us?

Old radio plays a sevillanas, the guys at the bar are drinking cerveza, the coffee wakes me up.  Then she strides in.  The Countess of El Raval come without her chariot. Dressed in a flimsy blue dress, with her daughter, a three-legged dog and a fat man wearing bifocals.  Her eyes are piercing, her face sharp though I can tell that once she would have been pretty.  She’s waving her arms, still high, gnawing her pastry voraciously.  Joking with the men at the counter.  I can’t get over the mad glint in her eyes as her head spins and she feeds the dog a chunk of bread.  Or the wide gap between her teeth when she smiles or the click of her heels. What voice speaks through her? What would you make of her in your song book of poets? Seafarer, ambassador of taverns, if I could read your marginalia, peruse your trunk stuffed with verses, chronicles and odes, uncensored. If I could hypertext as Pessoa to Pessoa of the Countess of El Ravel, or find in Portuguese the precise cipher.

Circumstance is drab, a deadweight lessened by drama. It could be five minutes later, it could be twenty though it happens approximately that the Duchess arrives. A fat platinum blonde she is wearing a fake tiara and so much eyeshadow her eyes are blue balloons like stingers. The bartender becomes angry, beads of sweat on his brow.  He serves her swiftly before retreating to the scullery. But the men line up, talking while staring through her gaping dress.

How does one purge of this excess? I write as myself in the half-light, allowing a swarm of feelings and observations to grow. My epistles are tactless though the concubine retreats in me. She is mostly febrile, an impulsive raconteur, conversing with herself.

I’ll wait for you in Bar Trindade on Coelho da Rocha. Perhaps you’ll enter carrying under your arm a leather suitcase. You’ll order a 2, 4, 8 and the waiter will bring matches, cigarettes and brandy. He will fill your empty bottle. Perhaps you will observe my profile, my gaze and all of us will converse through one medium. Or you will drink alone until you leave staggering into an evening of sparrows and dust. What happens isn’t certain. All that we have are fragments of the mirror. Cold and sharp in their edges but precise and dazzling when the light sweeps back into them and we see outside of time.

They say you write in English and in French, sometimes in Edwardian cafés.  I believe so. The wind speaks to you saying silence is everything. You dream like an argument without feeling. You are two singing in time; you are a double pain which I already know, weary as I am of climbing these stairs to the fifth floor of a building in Rhonda de San Pedro. Maria Gonzales with the heavy accent asks me to come back in an hour. Waiting on a Consul’s initials.

‘I’m so sorry’ she purrs with a flirtatious smile, behind the counter of the dark room.  (Her honey-blonde hair pinned, her details imprinted on a card I’ll keep for a few days in my back-pocket.)

So what if there are postponements? Delays should not concern me—genius of dreams. I’ll never be anything. I sit in a café, drink a green glass tea and read Álvaro de Campos’  “Tobacconists”.  Tomorrow evening we could meet among the ministries in Martinho da Arcada. Strangers like us belong to the street: we ebb and flow with the crowd, we rise with the evening as the heat swells slowly by degrees. The straight guys lunch in cafeterias under the shade of trees and umbrellas, watching the pretty signorinas parade. I’m starting to feel jaded but my bags are packed. A train leaves this evening for Lisboa Oriente.

Passengers hurl their baggage into racks. Young and tough and cheap, we display all the talents that Dali would despise. We reek of sweat. The guard stamps my ticket. A shrill whistle reins-in the day. Now my journey begins and I’m reminded of your best heteronyms. So many minds and sundry, the petitions of your shadow portraits. Not one could erase Aleandro or the genteel women of Barcelona, who seem like the dreams I know are not dreams. Their voices unravel and speak over me, and in my thoughts as I begin to write them….

 

Autumn Royal

unnamedAutumn Royal is a poet and PhD candidate at Deakin University. Autumn’s writing has appeared in publications such as Antipodes, Cordite, Rabbit, and Verity La.

 

 

 

Strained

I saw my heart on the airport terminal floor,
and gasped at how my misunderstanding bled
into fibres scarred by shoes and suitcase wheels.
My organ’s meatiness was too raw to keep in mind,
so I bought a New Idea predicting my horoscope for 20__.
I rolled up the magazine and squeezed,
hoping for a meaning to drip from the gloss.

 

Saba Vasefi

10012540_735538899831301_426715317_nSaba Vasefi is a poet, a documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She was a lecturer in Tehran, Shahid Beheshti University. She became a member of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters. She also worked as a reporter for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. She was twice a judge for the Sedigheh Dolatabadi Book Prize for best literature on women’s issues. She was expelled from the University after 4 years of teaching due to her activism. Her documentary film about child execution in Iran ”Don’t Bury My Heart” has been screened for the BBC, United Nation, Amnesty International, The Copenhagen International Film Festival, SOAS university, University of Oslo, Dendy Opera Quays cinema and Seen & Heard Film Festival. She has published poems, research papers, articles, reports, interviews and multimedia about executions, censorship, and women and children’s rights. Her multimedia piece, “Shirin, A Soloist in the Silence Room” was screened in Geneva for the UN. She has also had work published in the anthology “Confronting the Clash: The Suppressed Voices of Iran. She was director of First Sydney International Women’s Poetry Festival (Woman Scream). Currently; she is completing a postgraduate degree in documentary at The Australian Film TV and Radio School (AFTRS).

 

Slap Fingerprints

Translated by Sheema Kalbasi

It is not without reason
that I no longer miss
Like the tea stirred in the cup
Haze dances around my temple
flock by flock
The Pimp
And the shameless
Scream their pain loud
It is still I
who expands like blood from
collarbone to
legs
But not
ripened enough to be picked from
the branch
The more the wheel turns around
the more confused I become
Like a reptile crawling handless and
Footless
Tell me where in this rotten hole I
should give birth to my daughter
So that the titmice paint her dress
Maroon
With ruby grapes
Now that in the long famine
Queues
I swallow rationed moldy bread
Where on earth should I entrust
Her
lest my imprisonment arrest the
motion of the Heaven
In the long term prison of life
Where is safe
For this out of circle baby
Who goes round and round
To find a face
Branded with slap fingerprints
 

 

 

Deb Matthews-Zott

Deb Matthews ZottDeb Matthews-Zott has published two collections of poetry, Shadow Selves (2003) and Slow Notes (2008). She runs the Australian Poets’ Exchange Facebook Group, which has a membership of over 800, and is convener of SPIN (Southern Poets and Musicians Interactive Network). ‘The Weir’ and ‘The Pug Hole’ are from her verse novel in progress, ‘An Adelaide Boy’.By day she is a Librarian.

   

The Weir – Changing

Generations of Adelaide boys
have fished and swum at the Torrens Weir.
There’s a photo at the State Library
of five boys playing in shallow water
on the other side of the sluice gates
before they were installed.
It’s taken in the early 1900s
and the boys are all naked,
without any shame.
Was it different then?
or did the men with secret desires
always lurk there in bushes and change sheds
awaiting their prey.

One summer I was taken by surprise
in the old stone building, cool and damp
reeking of urine and keeping the shouts of play
at a distance.

Paralysed, I clenched my whole body, aware of my skin
the tug at my swim trunks. Thick fingers trembling
over early pubic hair. The fight or flight response letting me down
as bearded lips brushed me there, thrill of tongue, trembling thighs
a sick chill in my stomach, being drawn in, afraid, confused, but
somehow pleasant, heart lurching, unsure how to move away,
to end. Creak of old wooden door, the slackening of a spider web,
a fly caught in sticky silk, to be devoured. The world of boys burst in,
innocent, the flick of towels, push and shove of rough play, breaking
the act, in a flurry of escape. Utterly changed.

 

The Pug Hole

From Port Road, Welland, to the brickworks
at Hindmarsh, was only a 3K bike ride.

Off the main road, just beyond the river
the pug hole was an adventure playground,
where we’d spend all day clambering down
into the cocoon of clay, with deep pockets
of water, sprouting reeds, and a cache of
rusted rotting junk we transformed for play.
Old corroded tins were threaded with wire
for catching tadpoles in murky puddles.

Abandoned car bodies, afloat in deep
wells of oily water, became pirate ships
as we straddled them, and fought each other
with sticks, constantly shifting our weight
to keep the wrecks from sinking into the mire.

It wasn’t unusual then for a boy
to carry a slug gun or .22, slung across his back,
and to fire at bottles or tins lined up at a distance.

There were holes all over Hindmarsh and Brompton
which, having given up their clay for bricks
became dumping grounds for waste
and a rich source of amusement
or childrens’ imaginations.

The watery fissures were muddy but slicked
with slippery rainbows. When you stopped to notice,
the smell was a mixture of dead animal, iron, and rotten socks.

When it was time to ride back home
we carried the swampy scent of the pug hole
on our clothes,
to our mothers’ ire and disgust.

 

Sean Burn

portrait of sean burnsean burn’s third and latest full volume of poetry is that a bruise or a tattoo? (isbn 9781848612945)
was published by shearsman press, autumn 2013. www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/burn.html

 

 

 

regina carter

thru first smoke days ov
autumn   this havana
violin swinging   like
leaves singed   slowburning
            slowburn in   smoke ov this

 

miya masaoka                                                                                              

stripping the live
violins ov staccato teas
the spent fuel the hard
edge ov lullaby   incense
signals   bad girl   dis   integrate

 

myra melford

stitching time yr blue
blue-sing exhilarations
multiple nations
chord-calling yr striding yr
crush-seek see-sawing the now

 

sz   – foundmap ov budapest. my icarus hands in exile / circus madonna fighting on an empty cock street / dream ov a sycamore / collection ov pharmacy / when hearts meet performance / wandering street playing chess / wandering street playing leaves / motive entitled autumn / country accident sweeping golgotha downtown / towing the feeding trough upriver / jumping over the patriot ship w/out show / satiric priest dancing water / latrine lovers reflected / forced march to the font / girls private war / street writing a mobilization letter / wandering spring : sleeping snow : kiss-cooking underneath / officer stripped ov his commune at beginning ov the badge / backwards feeding eternal tender touch ov the small town judge selling the hospital mass market / march hand waiting for two wounded april comrades / dont throw stones at each other : dont throw each other at stones – image-whispering / swineherd rippled in a cockerel glass / cd it possibly be said / cd it possibly / everything can be traced back to everything / everything can be traced back / even the smallest / everything can be /   documentarist / cubist / surrealist / absurdist / dadaist / da da da

 

 

MTC Cronin

MTC Cronin has published eighteen books (poetry, prose poems and essays) including a collection jointly written with the Australian poet Peter Boyle. Several of her books have appeared in translation including her 2001 book, Talking to Neruda’s Questions, which has been translated into Spanish, Italian and Swedish. Early 2009 saw the publication of Squeezing Desire Through a Sieve ~ Micro-Essays on Judgement & Justice (Puncher & Wattmann, Sydney) and Irrigations (of the Human Heart) ~ Fictional Essays on the Poetics of Living, Art & Love (Ravenna Press, USA). Her work has won and been shortlisted for many major literary awards, both internationally and in her native Australia. Cronin has studied arts, law, literature and creative writing and after working for the decade of the nineties in law, began teaching writing in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. She currently lives, with her partner and three daughters, on a biodynamic farm in Conondale in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland of Queensland. Her latest poetry collection, The World Last Night [Metaphors for Death], was published in late 2012 by University of Queensland Press. A new collection – The Law of Poetry – is forthcoming through Puncher & Wattmann.

Lesson

Every day, crucify what you know.
Watch the stone practising what it knows
of bulls and men.
When the dream begins to fall, don’t catch it.

Console the words which have lost other words.
Learn how to wholly speak
for the voice that speaks in shards`
but hints at love.

Move! And then move again!
The distance from your mother’s womb
is measured by adding what is now clear
to a bowl of yellow peaches.

Show me something perfect!
Learn the inside of your heart.
Be shaken by infinity awake.
Break poison like bread.


History Lesson

The cradle of history
is filled with rocks
which were all gathered yesterday.

The tomb of history
is surrounded by mourners whispering
in the ears of tomorrow.

Just what happened is nowhere.

 

 

Nathan Curnow

_DSC8907 (1)Nathan Curnow lives in Ballarat and is a past editor of Going Down Swinging. His work features in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2010 and 2013 (Black Inc) and has won a number of awards including the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize.  His most recent collection, RADAR, is available through Walleah Press. Nathan has been twice short-listed in the Peter Porter Prize.

 

 

 

The Guru

his rants make sense with ‘listening glue’
he is convinced he can poop a dove
he prophesies that a dragon will shake the building
separating the wheat from the chaff

murderers go to hell and play Cluedo forever
Salvation—harder than pissing on a frog
we dig him a moat and fill it with lions
‘hurple’ is the mantra of the month

he blesses each raid on the cannery outlet
gives us hair bracelets and Kalashnikovs
flexible parentage is the number one doctrine
everything consensual at first 

how much sunshine to bleach a camel
tepanyaki is your mum
his koans are unique and so expensive
they are impossible to forget

passing the time with games of wink murder
while he sleeps in his celestial vault
it is his destiny to ascend in a skybox we bought
with the life savings of non-believers

rejoicing when the famous clown becomes a convert
until we become wary of tricks up the sleeve
we patrol the stockpile and then the orchard
executing the voluntary penance

and when the guru returns trembling on stage
trying hard to poop one with wings
we see it all makes sense in his divine program
on guard for whoever smirks first

 

Séances

teenagers help their parents conduct them
in exchange for car keys and weed
but if they tire of quizzing the Ouija board
the pointer just keeps on moving
packed away the wooden heart slides faster
knocking against the sides of the box
some wrap it in blankets and stash it in a draw
some submerge it in the tropical fish tank
an anonymous narrator transcribes War and Peace
there comes the back story of the Cheshire Cat
and something is spelling quality mince matters
perhaps a butcher with undying remorse
this last parlour game this after-life rhythm
a constant tapping of fees and charges
Rosabelle-answer-tell-pray—believe believe believe
over and over from beneath the house
wedged in a locker at the Ever Fit gym
abandoned in a food court at an empty mall
the dead metronome counting down
some set it on fire to watch their flaming souls
posting premature messages from the grave
some never tire remaining stuck to the board
for answers that will come soon enough
as the family car pulls out throbbing with bass
denouncing the beats of the Angel of Death
the last players of hip hop middle fingering
the stereo uh   yeah   uh   uh   uh

 

 

David Malouf

malouf-author-pic-hi-res-photographer-conrad-del-villarDavid Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934. Since ‘Interiors’ in Four Poets 1962, he has published poetry, novels and short stories, essays, opera libretto and a play, and he is widely translated. His novels include Ransom, The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. His latest poetry collection is Earth Hour(UQP), while his compiled essays, A First Place are published by Knopf. He was awarded the Scottish Arts’ Council Muriel Spark International Fellowship and was the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. He lives in Sydney.

 

 

     Photograph: Conrad del Villar

 


Aquarius

One of those sovereign days that might seem never
intended for the dark: the sea’s breath deepens
from oyster-shell to inky, blue upon blue,
heaped water, crowded sky. This is the day,
we tell ourselves, that will not end, and stroll
enchanted through its moods as if we shared
its gift and were immortal, till something in us
snaps, a spring, a nerve. There is more to darkness
than nightfall. Caught reversed in a mirror’s lens,
we’re struck by the prospect of a counterworld
to so much stir, such colour; loved animal
forms, shy otherlings our bodies turn to
when we turn towards sleep; like us the backward
children of a green original anti
-Eden from which we’ve never been expelled.

 

Toccata

Out of such and such and so much brick-a-brac.

Cut-glass atomises. An Evening in Paris
stain, circa ’53, on taffeta.
Four napkin-rings, initialled. Playing cards, one pack
with views of Venice, the other the Greek key pattern
that unlocked the attic door our house
in strict truth did not run to. A wrist
arched above early Chopin: bridge across water
to a lawn where finch and cricket take what’s given
as gospel, and even the domino I lost
in the long grass by the passion-vine
fits white-to-white, four voices in close canon.

Where in all this are the small, hot, free
-associating selves, a constellation
of shoes, sweat, teacups, charms, magnetic debris?

In the ghost of a fingerprint all
that touched us, all that we touched, still glowing actual.

 

Earth Hour

It is on our hands, it is in our mouths at every breath, how not
remember? Called back
to nights when we were wildlife, before kindling
or kine, we sit behind moonlit
glass in our McMansions, cool
millions at rehearsal
here for our rendezvous each with his own
earth hour.
            We are feral
at heart, unhouseled creatures. Mind
is the maker, mad for light, for enlightenment, this late admission
of darkness the cost, and the silence
on our tongue as we count the hour down – the coin we bring,
long hoarded just for this – the extended cry of our first coming
to this ambulant, airy
Schatzkammer and midden, our green accommodating tomb.

 

Shy Gifts

Shy gifts that come to us from a world that may not
even know we’re here. Windfalls, scantlings.

Breaking a bough like breathy flute-notes, a row
of puffed white almond-blossom, the word in hiding

among newsprint that has other news to tell.
In a packed aisle at the supermarket, I catch

the eye of a wordless one-year-old, whale-blue,
unblinking. It looks right through me, recognising

what? Wisely mistrustful but unwisely
impulsive as we are, we take these givings

as ours and meant for us – why else so leap
to receive them? – and go home lighter

of step to the table set, the bed turned down, the book
laid open under the desk-lamp, pages astream

with light like angels’ wings, arched for take-off.

 

These poems appear in Earth Hour, first published in 2014 by University of Queensland Press, and reprinted here with permission.

******

 

The Making of Australian Consciousness

1

The Island

Looking down the long line of coast this morning, I see the first rays of the sun strike Mount Warning and am aware, as the light floods west, what a distance it is to the far side of our country­ ─ two time zones and more than 3000 kilometres away, yet how easily the whole landmass sits in my head. As an island or, as I sometimes think of it, a raft we have all scrambled aboard, a new float of lives in busy interaction: of assembly lines and highways, of ideals given body as executives and courts, of routine housekeeping arrangements and objects in passage from hand to hand. To comprehend the thing in all its action and variety and contradiction is a task for the imagination, yet this morning, as always, it is simply there, substantial and ordinary.

When Europeans first came to these shores one of the things they brought with them, as a kind of gift to the land itself, was something that could never previously have existed: a vision of the continent in its true form as an island, which was not just a way of seeing it, and seeing it whole, but of seeing how it fitted into the world, and this seems to have happened even before circumnavigation established that it actually was an island. No group of Aboriginal Australians, however ancient and deep their understanding of the land, can ever have seen the place in just this way.

It has made a difference. If Aborigines are a land-dreaming people, what we latecomers share is a sea-dreaming, to which the image of Australia as an island has from the beginning been central.

This is hardly surprising. Sydney, in its early days was first and foremost a seaport; all its dealings were with the sea. Our earliest productive industries were not wheat-growing or sheep-raising but whaling and sealing. It took us nearly thirty years to cross the first land barrier. Right up to the end of the nineteenth century our settlements were linked by coastal steamer, not by road or rail. In his sonnet ‘Australia’, Bernard O’Dowd speaks of Australia’s ‘virgin helpmate, Ocean’, as if the island continent were mystically married to its surrounding ocean as Venice was to the Adriatic.

As the off-shoot of a great naval power we felt at home with the sea. It was an element over which we had control; more, certainly, than we had at the beginning over the land. It was what we looked to for all our comings and goings, for all that was new ─ for news. And this sense of being at home with the sea made distances that might otherwise have been unimaginable seem shorter. It brought Britain and Europe closer than 10,000 miles on the globe might have suggested, and kept us tethered, for longer than we might otherwise have been, by sea-routes whose ports of call, in the days before air travel, constituted a litany of connection that every child of my generation knew by heart. Distance is not always a matter of miles. Measured in feelings it can redefine itself as closeness.

And this notion of an island continent, contained and containable, had other consequences.

Most nations establish themselves through a long series of border conflicts with neighbours. This is often the major thrust of their history. Think of the various wars between Germany and France, or Russia and Poland, or of British history before the Union of the Crowns.

Australia’s borders were a gift of nature. We did not have to fight for them. In our case, history and geography coincided, and we soon hit upon the idea that the single continent must one day be a single nation. What this means is that all our wars of conquest, all our sources of conflict, have been internal.

Conquest of space to begin with, in a series of daring explorations of the land, which were also acts of possession different from the one that made it ours merely in law. This was possession in the form of knowledge; by naming and mapping, by taking its spaces into our heads, and at last into our imagination and consciousness.

Conquest of every form of internal division and difference: conquest of the original possessors, for example, in a war more extensive than we have wanted to recognise. Later, there was the attempted resolution, through an act of Federation, of the fraternal division between the states; and, longer lasting and less amenable of solution, of the conflict, once Federation had been achieved, between the states and the Federal Government. Also, more darkly, suppression, in acts of law-making and social pressure and through subtle forms of exclusion, of all those whom we have, at one time or another, declared to be outsiders among us, and in their various ways alien, even when they were Australians like the rest.

That early vision of wholeness produced a corresponding anxiety, the fear of fragmentation, and for too long the only answer we had to it was the imposition of a deadening conformity.

In time, the vision of the continent as a whole and unique in its separation from the rest of the world produced the idea that it should be kept separate, that only in isolation could its uniqueness ─and ours─ be preserved.

Many of the ideas that have shaped our life here, and many of the themes on which our history has been argued, settle around these notions of isolation and containment, of wholeness and the fear of fragmentation. But isolation can lead to stagnation as well as concentrated richness, and wholeness does not necessarily mean uniformity, though that is how we have generally taken it. Nor does diversity always lead to fragmentation.

As for the gift of those natural, indisputable borders, that too had a cost. It burdened us with the duty of defending them, and the fear, almost from the beginning, that they may not, in fact, be defendable.

Our first settlements outside Sydney, at Hobart in 1804 and Perth in the 1820’s, were made to forestall the possibility of French occupation (and it seems Napoleon did plan a diversionary invasion for 1804). Then, at the time of the Crimean War, it was the Russians we had to keep an eye on. The Russian fleet was just seven days sailing away at Vladivostok. And then, from the beginning of this century, the Japanese.

This fear of actual invaders, of being unable to defend our borders, led to a fear of other and less tangible forms of invasion. By people, ‘lesser breeds without the Law’, who might sully the purity of our stock. By alien forms of culture that might prejudice our attempt to be uniquely ourselves. By ideas, and all those other forms of influence, out there in the world beyond our coast, that might undermine our morals or in various other ways divide and unsettle us. All this has made little-islanders of us; has made us decide, from time to time, to close ourselves off from influence and change, and by settling in behind our ocean wall, freeze and stop what has been from the beginning, and continues to be, a unique and exciting experiment.

From The Boyer Lectures, 1998, first broadcast on ABC Radio, later published in A Spirit of Play, ABC Books, 1998 Published in A First Place, by Knopf, Random House, 2014

This extract is published in the chapter, titled, ‘A Spirit of Play’  page 124-129 from the collection of essays,  A First Place, by Knopf, Random House, 2014

******

 

Lia Incognita

headshotLia Incognita is a Shanghai-born, Melbourne-based cultural critic, media maker and poet- provocateur whose work has appeared in PerilOverlandMetro, Going Down SwingingSocial Alternatives and Melbourne Poetry Map. Lia presents radio monthly for Queering the Air on 3CR Community Radio. www.lia-incognita.com  

 

 

 

 

 

toisan

toisan
the armies and opium cored you

you spat out your children
like fireworks, sparks scampering
they bright and travel far

far enough to fade     out of sight

blowfish mouth deflated
spider babies kiting on silk thread
land them softly     softly
so they swell & full up
six strange sheets of earth
to the crinkled edge
long there over indigo water
cold roiling broth, the sea
sometimes as heavy
as bolts of dye-dipped cloth

they bright and travel far
mass of black-haired heads
lacquer bleached cliffs
and sallow beaches

they wear pigtails and tax
your boys, left wives and children behind
or were children, ahead of their age
chasing faraway time that can turn
to gold, if it all pans out right

they bright and travel far
tattoo steel scars right across
cut down carved up country
for thieves to ride hoofless
and make more rapid plunder

toisan
call the ocean to you
bid it carry your song
tell them boys, slow slow walk
soft your feet on foreign soil
hold tight to each other and jŭ tóu

hao jiu bu jian jia
they long time no see home

 

Cyril Wong reviews “Turn” by Wendy Chin-Tanner

Turn_Front_CoverTurn

By Wendy Chin-Tanner

Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014

Reviewed by CYRIL WONG

 

Wendy Chin-Tanner’s poems in her debut full-length collection, Turn, returns with part-nostalgia and part-anguish to her Chinese-American childhood in New York City, while contrasting these memories with her current life. The ambivalences of the past and the future react against each other through the prism of parenthood in a dialectical way, producing a poetic synthesis of emotions and revelations for what it means to exist as a wife and mother in the present day. Pathetic fallacy is self-consciously utilised in projecting inward conflicts and almost unbearable emotions upon the natural world; the external becomes a mirror for the internal, providing a much-needed sense of catharsis as the mirror reveals how the personal can also be absorbed into the timelessly universal.

The book begins with a moving tribute-poem (“Tempest”) to the poet’s grandmother who “soothes … with the smell of her, / of Tiger Balm and something acid, / and female underneath”, a mother-figure tenderer than her immediate mother, at least in the poet’s articulation of memory. The past is perceived in terms of physical tactility that is never far from literal pain and with a corollary ability to selflessly withstand it, but also rich with the intimacies of unspoken female love. Such implicitly gendered demarcations are made clearer when the following poem (“In the Dutch House”) paints the grandfather as a man of darker contradictions, emotionally dependent on the forbearance of his wife but also abusive to both her and their children, forcing the poet to ask starkly: “What kind of man was this?”

Historical to mythological figures from Hua Mulan to Persephone become the subjects of subsequent poems, which attempt to undermine easy stereotyping inherent in earlier gendered demarcations. For example, Persephone’s mother becomes culpable for not hindering her daughter’s fate at the hands of Death because his “stench” rejuvenated the earth. The poet, in a personally revealing and psychologically revelatory piece, points out that in her own life, she has been afraid to let her own mother witness her labour, alluding to the lineage of “bitterness” (both emotional and viscerally physical), symbolised by “foam bricks” of cotton pads wet with blood, that inexorably connects mother to daughter (“Mother”). The female experiences of vaginal blood-letting to childbirth, the complex psychological and physical consequences that accompany such landmark events, are portrayed as sources of pained ambivalences: such experiences are simultaneously shameful, even traumatic, but paradoxically, they also provide reasons for celebration. Couched in lyrical descriptions of meaningful physicalities and a growing awareness of future loss, the poet paints a more straightforward and affectionate moment as regards her father: “my fingers tried to read / the patterns in the tracks running up his arms … his temples showing only a dusting of white; // snow freshly fallen onto soil” (“Father”).

A celebratory note rings out between the sexes later in a moment of copulation, when the poet describes the sex act in almost cartoony ways: “Our hips bucked, and the confetti from your / cock burst … a tickertape parade / celebrating inside … our victory, rising so high above / you and me and everything we knew” (“Veteran”). A childlike wonder and innocence comes through in spite (or because) of obvious consummation, in which the poet abandons a previously “female” condition of pain layered with joy for a more transcendental form of “high” beyond dichotomies of gender. But it is through childbirth that the poet finds a clearer, celebratory link between past and present, as mediated through passionately gritty language: “pubic bone yawning wide / open like a rusted gate that could not close” (“Saying Yes”). The poet finally understands what it means to be a mother, like her mother and grandmother before her: “you do not forget the pain … and you imagine that you could sail / up like balloons over what had ruined you, / the wrong beginnings, the wrong turns” (“Saying Yes”). Whatever mistake she has made, or which has been done to her, in the context of her childhood and later adulthood, have in a sense prepared her for her role as a parent in the present moment.

But the poet is also determined to locate the eternal that exists beyond, but which also incorporates, the intensely personal and the complicated knot of intimate relationships. In one poem, she writes that “we are no longer as / we were that winter … the river beneath its sea / of silent glass seethes … The steady live rush carries on” (“On the Thamespath”). Then in a later poem about recognising signs to remember a dead relative, she recalls being told “how matter could be neither created nor destroyed, and, since the universe was breathing … like sand dissolving … it was possible for particles to behave as waves, / waves as particles, joined in space and time” (“Signs and Symbols”). The universe mirrors the changes and the complexities of our emotional to physical risings and fallings exactly, but more than that, there is a timelessness beyond our narrow conceptions of time, an eternity of ever-lasting change, a “live rush” that carries on in spite of our thoughts or actions; with nothing truly lost since we remain inextricably and literally “joined in space and time”. As the poet writes in the end, in spite of past regrets and previous betrayals, all we are left with, then, after acknowledging our places within the infinite, is our capacity to love: “The wheel / turns and we love again / not in spite of death but because” (The Wheel”).
 
 

CYRIL WONG has been called a confessional poet, according to The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, based on “the brutally candid sexuality in his poetry, along with a barely submerged anxiety over the fragility of human connection and a relentless self-querying”. He is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of poetry collections such as Unmarked Treasure, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light and After You. He has also published Let Me Tell You Something About That Night, a collection of strange tales, and a novel, The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza. Cyril has served as a mentor under the Creative Arts Programme and the Mentor Access Project, as well as a judge for the Golden Point Awards in Singapore. A past recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature, he completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His poems have been anthologised in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W. W. Norton 2008) and Chinese Erotic Poems (Everyman’s Library 2007), amongst various journals and publications across the world.

Ron Pretty

In Barcelona copyRon Pretty’s eighth book of poetry, What the Afternoon Knows, was published in 2013. An updated edition of Creating Poetry will be published later this year. He spent six months in Rome in 2012, on a residency granted by the Australia Council.

 

 

 

Translation

She could not speak to her mother
when they met. She had just turned
twenty one, but had never seen this
small dark woman until then, except
in photos. Harris sat beside her, his smile
inviting them to break the silence.
He would translate, he said, if only
they had something to say. Mother and
daughter looked at one another, tears
on their cheeks. Tell her, she said to Harris,
tell her I did not know where she’d gone,
which country she went to. I used to
watch the planes fly over, she said,
and wonder where they were going,
and if she was on them. Alana
– for that was the daughter’s name –
reached out to her without a word.
She took her hand. Visanthi,
the mother said, that was your name.
And still it is, the daughter cried.
Tell her, she said through her tears,
tell her that’s what it is. Star sapphires
falling as tears, and a second mother,
in her pale silence watching
Alana Visanthi there in that room,
Sri Lankan sun streaming in where
mother and daughter are holding hands
having no language except its loss.


Dreams

Krystel said, I am happy with my mother,
my family here; I have no need to go
seeking for that distant other on that island
I have no wish to see. You do not feel
there’s something missing, her lover asks,
his pale hand caressing her straight black hair.

A long time ago her infant self was flown
out of penury into suburban class.
She’s never been back to see the village
she was plucked from; she loves her parents
who brought her home, happy they’d never
have to face again the heat, the beggars
on every corner, the guns at every checkpoint.

This is my home, she tells him, I have no other.
She will not tell him how she dreams, some nights,
of elephants wading a stream, a road side stall
selling papaya flecked with lemon, a cripple
begging under a figtree. The dreams recur,
but she has decided her life is here; she wants
only her mother and a lover who holds her
in his strong white arms as he kisses
and kisses again the warm dark skin of her face.

 

 

Given Another Life by Jonathan Tan

TANBorn and raised in Singapore, Jonathan has worked and lived in Berlin and London. He once bungee-jumped and climbed a volcano to reason out the meaning of life. He is currently cobbling together his first collection of short stories. His stories have appeared in The Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Literary Yard (India), New Asian Writing, BananaWriters and Fat City Review.

 

 Given Another Life

Five minutes to three in the early hours of the morning, Adinda sat upright on her bed, wiped the sweat staining her forehead with the back of her small bandaged left hand. Clutching the glass of water beside her bed, she took a sip tentatively, waiting. At exactly three, she took the cell phone beside the glass of water, dialed the number she now remembered by heart. She did not put the number on speed dial because she wanted the pleasure of punching in the numbers on her phone in the dark. It took a while for the connection to get through; a number for Singapore. Ten rings on, a familiar female voice barking down on the end of the line filled her ears. Without saying a word, Adinda breathed down hard in response. That was when she then hung up, feeling good that justice has been served.

The first couple of nights the voice on the end of the line – jarred with bewilderment – bellowed exasperatedly, “Hello hello, who is it?” Adinda held her silence. Then came the familiar note of annoyance – flaring in the voice each time she did not carry out the tasks to her satisfaction – bridged to a not-too-distant past where Adinda has sought to make a better life for herself and her family; now it was all broken and her future had become dimmer than before she set foot in Singapore.

By the time the calls persisted for the ninety-seventh time – a day short of her entire stay in Singapore – Adinda broke the silence and spoke: “Why you do this to me? Why you made my life susah?”

.           .           .

Given another life, Adinda would not want to be where she was. Easing the curtain to one side, she took in the muggy haze outside. Even without opening the window, she could smell the stiffness of the air sufficiently up her nostrils.

“It was the smell from your home lah,” her madam’s mother-in-law said.

She missed the sarcasm at first, but learnt later that the smog blanketing the island emanated from her homeland. She marveled at how the fires raging in the part of her world were suffocating those living miles away.

High over the city-state hundreds of windows embroidered life stories of which one of it was now her own in the flat she would have to call home for the next two years. As she wondered hard how things were back home, in the same breath of thought as she stole time to stare out of the windows was a curiosity to find out what went behind those windows opposite hers that she cleaned daily; a morning chore before she prepared breakfast for Sir and Madam and their toddler son. Given another life, would these people want to be where they were? Then she thought about herself, would she want to be where she was?

Adinda wasn’t sure life was any better in the city-state with the constant frowns that creased Sir and Madam’s faces as they returned home after work. Back home as evening fell, her good neighbour and friend Ainul would sit with her chatting outside their homes, taking in the bustle of villagers coming and going, exchanging hellos and words with other neighbours passing by, looking up at the stars stitching their brilliance in the skies. Here, Adinda soon learnt that Sir and Madam retreated behind the shut door, the curtains drawn as hundreds of windows, not dissimilar to theirs, were torched with lights, the whiteness shone through the darkness with dissonance as the night fell.

In her homecoming, Ainul’s fruits of labour in full display – modern goodies, money to rebuild her dilapidated, rotting wooden house into something sturdier – awed Adinda. She pictured in her mind the kind of life that could possibly lie ahead of her in the city-state. More so, the better life she could have in her own homecoming, to deal with her immediate wants: to patch the leaking roof over their heads, to fill sacks of rice in the lumbung, no longer to endure hunger.

What scared her were stories of fellow maids falling to deaths from the high-rise flats while extending themselves perilously out on the ledge to clean the windows. Thankfully, her Madam had specifically forbidden her to climb out on to the ledge. Her madam said: “Just clean the inside can already.”

Her Madam’s mother-in-law was the demanding one. She would give Adinda a makeshift stick made of half-cut bamboo pole with a cloth tied around it, asked her to extend herself out of the windows to clean the outer panels. Arching her hand against the window panels as she extended her body outwards, Adinda tried to suppress the giddiness rising up her head, resisting to either look upwards or worse, downwards, keeping her eyes peeled over to the hundreds of windows on the opposite block. She wondered at the obsession of having the squeaky-shiny cleaned windows that served little purpose since the curtains were drawn shut most of the time. Was she just being punished because the soot from the forest fires burning back home had stained the windows?

.           .           .

Before she had the maid, Lynn Tan reminded herself not to be too fastidious, cut some slack with her maid. Besides, however remote history has seemed for her generation, the forefathers settling on the island were coolies and labourers seeking a better life. Lynn reasoned there were no grounds for her to get upset over trivialities with her new maid, brushing aside horrid stories she gleaned from friends about maids who slacked, stole things, or worse took things into their heads and did silly things like falling to their deaths performing seemingly harmless chores, or hooking up with a man.

Given another life, Lynn wouldn’t want to get a maid at all. Having someone else living in their midst was the last thing she wished for. As it was, being out and about working long hours five days a week, she wanted the freedom and quiet in the evenings and weekends to move around in her home. The slightest noises intruding upon her shook her with annoyance: the closing and opening of wardrobe doors as the maid placed the folded laundry back; the clattering of the plates and cutlery as the maid washed them; the dull plodding sound of footsteps as the maid padded heavily across the floor to pick toys up. Her presence was everywhere; Lynn did not like it at all.

But a year into taking care of her newborn, Lynn was exhausted by the never-ending regime of diaper-change, the unreasonably shrillness of her newborn crying, the dull routine that trapped her in the flat. No longer was she able to steal time in between lunches to do up her toes or hair, get a dress or a pair of high-heels, catch up with gossips over lunch before heading back to the office. Work in itself wasn’t always pleasurable but it offered pleasant distractions, moving her mood along the way, in a spectrum that was unavailable to the life with a newborn at home.

After her newborn was hospitalised for weeks with a viral infection, after her mother-in-law’s insinuation that she shouldn’t have brought the boy out to shopping just because she was bored, after her husband’s rationalisation that she might feel better ditching the role of a stay-home-mum, Lynn decided to hire a maid. The arrangement was that her mother-in-law watch over the maid who in turn take care of the daily needs of the boy – plus – to complete all the household chores as humanly possible each day. In the search for the perfect maid, Lynn and her husband stated specifically that they wanted someone who was good with toddlers, able to cook simple meals, clean and tidy, hardworking, strong but pleasant-looking, without body odour, for that matter, no unpleasant traits or habits of any kind. No mention was made on whether the ideal maid was one who could tolerate their nonsense or that of their mother-in-law’s antics.

Nodding her head knowingly, the maid agent reassuring Lynn and her husband that they had just the perfect maid for them, said: “Just look here ah. This folder contains some of the best maids we have from Indonesia. You smart. Cheaper to have them than Filipino maids. Also, they don’t ask for rest day every week. One month rest one day, can already.”

“Isn’t that against the law?” Her husband, always the law-abiding kind asked.

“Get the maid to agree can already. Not against the law lah. Also, some maids don’t want off. Want to earn more money, send home mah.”

.           .           .

Adinda had a fitful sleep the night before she was sent off to Singapore. She dreamt about how clean Singapore was that the pavement could be eaten off if she was too hungry. She was on all fours, licking the pavement that tasted like roasted pine nuts, the air sticky with cotton candy, the sun warming a toast of rendang curry. Then it began to rain in her dreams. The skies opened up: rags after rags of damp fell, some slapping on her head, shoulder, body with a disapproving thud. Soon she found herself unable to move any step forward, stuck in the rags piling high up as the skies gave no sign of letting up. That humid morning as Adinda left her dreams, woke up soaking wet with sweat on her back and forehead, she was lost to the future lurking ahead.

The circumstances were such that no one in her family dissuaded her to work in Singapore. She won’t be the first or the last in her village to set foot in the city-state to work as a maid. Other than her friend Ainul, she could recount at least a dozen others from her village who had worked in the city-state. She considered Jakarta. But the idea of being somewhere foreign, good money, clean and modern that she has heard so much of, excited and scared her at the same time. She was terrified by the prospect of living somewhere perched high up without the grounds beneath her feet, terrified by the unknown life that was to become part of her for two long years.

To raise money for her passageway to Singapore, her family pawned whatever little valuables they had, borrowed from their relatives too. Grateful, Adinda promised herself that once she was able to pay off the loan owed to the agent, she would start to remit as much of her wages as she could back home. She knew the first ten months would be tough in Singapore, getting little more than thirty dollars each month from her employer, the rest going to the agent for the fees in bringing her to Singapore.

But seeing her neigbours returned home, laden with goodies and modern appliances from Singapore, it strengthened the resolve in her to go out there to make a better life. She pictured herself returning home with the latest handheld game for her adik, a wardrobe of nice clothes for her kakak, a brand new Yamaha motorbike for her abang, a good quality TV for her ailing orangtua already in their seventies always squinting their eyes to see what’s on the TV. Sitting in the newly renovated home, she would regale her siblings and parents of life in the city-state, of the people there, of their secrets, of their success, of the modern conveniences that someday somehow it would come to their village, slowly but surely.

 .          .           .

“You clean like that, not clean. Must clean like that.” Impatience rising up the mother-in-law’s voice as she snatched the mop from Adinda’s hand and demonstrated to her.

Then she ranted on again: “Thought they teach you how to clean before you come Singapore. Did Ma’am show you how to clean the floor? She didn’t scold you?”

As the weeks followed, Adinda was quick to realise that the reassuring smiles that welcomed her soon ceased to bracket their faces, the voice grew harder, harsher each time she did something wrong, or what they thought was wrong.

When the bowl slipped out of her hand – crashing on to the floor, sending the half-eaten rice all over the corner where she sat on a high stool to eat her dinner in the kitchen – Adinda went to bed that evening hungry. Slipping into the toilet to relieve herself when everyone in the household was asleep, she drank from the tap to dull her hunger, the wound stitched between her left thumb and index finger glistened in the dark as she unwrapped her bandage to take a closer look.

“You are very stupid. Why use your hands to pick up the broken bowl. Use the broom to sweep it up,” her Madam’s voice quivered in anger, as she stood with her in the A&E at Changi hospital to get her wounds treated.

.           .           .

“Just send her back lah,” her mother-in-law said the next day. “If your boy is near her, he could have got hurt also. Lucky. I can cope with the boy on my own. Now your this one stupid, cannot do things properly.”

Since the maid came into the picture, Lynn was annoyed that her mother-in-law and even her husband presumably made her the custodian of the maid. Any fault with her, any complaints about her clumsiness, her inefficient cleaning that left ant trails, the inability of coaxing her boy to take naps, rested squarely on her shoulders: teach her, manage her, tell her. Lynn was sick to be the one telling the maid what to do.

“Why can’t your mum just tell her properly what to do,” Lynn said to her husband.

“Mum doesn’t speak much English or Malay. How to communicate. She needs you to instruct the maid,” her husband replied, conveniently brushing aside any responsibility.

That evening when the decision was made to send her home, Lynn felt heavy in her heart. But she acquiesced, hoping to put to rest her mother-in-law’s non-stop complaints about the maid. The inconvenience of a maid was perhaps too much to manage, as if life hasn’t put enough on the plate.

One morning in the following week while she was getting ready to clean the windows, wetting the cloth to tie on the bamboo stick, Adinda was asked to pack her belongings stuffed in the storeroom, where she also slept. The Madam’s mother-in-law then quickly did a thorough check ruffling through her personal stuff. “Just to make sure she didn’t steal anything,” she said to Lynn, ignoring Adinda who stood by and watched on clueless.

At the airport, her Madam pressed two fifty-dollar notes into her small hands, and said: “Use it to get something you like inside.” It was the first time that she came into touch with so much money since coming to Singapore.

“For me? Thank you, Madam,” Adinda said gratefully, resolved that she would bring home and show her family how a fifty Singapore dollar note was like. Then she asked, “Why am I going home?”

“We’re going on a holiday. You balik kampong first,” said Madam’s mother-in-law, her face crowded with a disapproving glare.

.           .           .

“Why? You send me back to agent I can still work in Singapore. Why you send me home? You lie. Why?”

On the other side, Lynn uttered little more than a sorry – one that sounded tired than sincere. Since the maid left, she had to face up to the music of coaxing her son to sleep, a task she never had been good at. Despite her mother-in-law’s assurances to help out, Lynn came home mostly to unwashed laundry or dishes – the menial tasks that were once forgotten and relegated to Adinda – she had to take it upon herself to do it.

“Stop calling, Adinda,” Lynn begged. “I’m sorry, as I said.”

It was barely past three in the ungodly hours of the morning when Adinda let out a loud sob on the end of the line. The ninety-eighth call, the number of days she was in the city-state. Long after she hung up, the sob stubbornly sat, ringing restively deep in the air.

 

 

William Byrne

williambyrne_1William Byrne is a South Australian poet in his twenties. He has always lived in rural and coastal townships, excluding an urban interlude for university study for degrees in architecture and design.

 

 

 

Aspergers

Water dries so fast
on my fore and index fingers
once I leave the chiesa,
that foreign place of incensed marble.

It evaporates
as soon as I see the sun
and basking in it, the smooth shoulders
of the lane’s cobblestones. I trip

in my penance, later, while seated
in the brassed café
as my lips part for vermouth.
Again I see Rome’s dark shoulders

then her leather heels and passing souls,
then half smoked cicca,
their pale ghosts hanging in the streets,
then smooth, tanned Roman fingers. 

Chiesa water dries so fast on my fingers.
The vermouth is also dry.

 

 

Wheat

In my old car, tyres wet, we spoke
black over green like a Rothko painting,
the young crops startled in our headlamps,
their fronds thrashing in the yellow glow.
You too were startled when I turned the headlamps off,
even though we had pulled up aside the field.
The lamps were deadened, yet the radio hailed
in a distant AM. Ice crystals formed on the window,
shading thinly the edge of the screen.
Beyond the glass, grey clouds brushed past the moon
rising on the curved horizon beyond
wheat past further than sight from two sets of eyes could see.

Afterwards, we drove to a town
at the edge of the wheat, leaving the earth
on the side of the road where we parked
a dry-ish print framed in rain craters
and shallow puddles bleeding into its soft sides.
We laughed so hard that night as we spoke and tried to see.

 

 

Dimitra Harvey

Dimitra HarveyDimitra has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from the University of Western Sydney – Theatre Nepean, and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from University of Sydney. She’s had poems published in Australian Poetry’s Members’ Anthology, Meanjin, and Southerly. In 2012 she won the Australian Society of Author’s Ray Koppe Young Writers Residency.

 

 

Station

After I’ve spent the night being someone else, and going home –
wriggling out of that alien face like an old skin – I like to walk
all the way to the end of the platform. You know, how it tapers
to that thin wharf of concrete? With the one fluorescent light
on its high pole, and the sign that says, Staff Only Beyond This Point.
From here, you can just make out the glitter of the next station.

At this time, no-one will walk the distance through the dark to get here –
the platform’s lights are sparse, dull beads on the night’s chain.

Across the tracks the fence hangs slackly, a gaping jaw. Stillness
clings to everything like frost. A woman’s laugh, the clink
of glasses – the city’s noises are padded here; a siren wails
like a half-asleep child. Then a whip of wire, a spring-loaded lash.
The train pulls up, groaning in its metal.

 

 

Sun

It’s dusk, and I’m listening to an old
Indian devotional, the woman’s voice is a coil
of plum honey. As the sun slips down the empty
western sky, the tiles of houses are silvered
in light. At some angles the sun
is forked by newly budded branches. I’ve stared too long
at its gold-lash pinwheel, the quills of starfire.
When I turn my gaze away, its brightness clings
to my pupils, and I think: she’s singing about love.
Her voice winds, and slides, and slips upwards,
and falls, honeycombing through the notes.
But it’s the sun she’s singing about, waking the buds
with white fire, hard as crystal.

 

 

Luke Fischer translates Evening Poems by Goethe, Trakl and Ausländer

Photo Luke FischerLuke Fischer is a Sydney-based poet and scholar. His publications include the poetry collection Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013), a monograph on Rilke and phenomenology (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2015) and a book of bedtime stories (The Blue Forest, 2014), as well as poems, translations and articles in Australian and international journals. He won the 2012 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and was commended in the 2013 FAW Anne Elder Award for a first book of poems. In 2008 he was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney. He has held post-doctoral fellowships and taught at universities in the U.S. and Germany.

WANDRERS NACHTLIED II

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.


––Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

VERKLÄRUNG

Wenn es Abend wird,
Verlässt dich leise ein blaues Antlitz.
Ein kleiner Vogel singt im Tamarindenbaum.

Ein sanfter Mönch
Faltet die erstorbenen Hände.
Ein weisser Engel sucht Marien heim.

Ein nächtiger Kranz
Von Veilchen, Korn und purpurnen Trauben
Ist das Jahr des Schauenden.

Zu deinen Füssen
Öffnen sich die Gräber der Toten,
Wenn du die Stirne in die silbernen Hände legst.

Stille wohnt
An deinem Mund der herbstliche Mond,
Trunken von Mohnsaft dunkler Gesang;

Blaue Blume,
Die leise tönt in vergilbtem Gestein.


––Georg Trakl (1887-1914)

VERWANDTER TRÄUMER

Abend
verwandter Träumer
mit Schweigen
begabt

Du zeigst
dem Menschen
das Ziel
das sanfte Hinüber
in eine
andere Welt

––Rose Ausländer (1901-1988)




WANDERER’S NIGHTSONG II

Calm is
Over every hill,
In all the canopies
You can feel
Barely a breath.
The birds in the forest keep silent.
Wait a while and
You too will rest.




TRANSFIGURATION

When the evening comes
A blue face quietly leaves you.
A small bird sings in the tamarind tree.

A gentle monk
Folds the lifeless hands.
A white angel distresses Mary.

A nightly wreath
Of violets, grain and purple grapes
Is the year of one who sees.

At your feet
Graves of the dead open up,
When you lay your brow in silver hands.

Upon your mouth
Silently dwells the autumn moon,
Dark song drunk on poppy-sap;

Blue blossom
That quietly sounds in yellowed stone.




RELATED DREAMER

Evening
related dreamer
gifted
with silence

You show
human beings
the goal
the gentle transfer
into
another world