The Promise

By Tony Birch

University of Queensland Press, 2014

ISBN: 978 0 7022 4999 0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret Maker of the World

by Abbas El-Zein

University of Queensland Press, 2014

ISBN: 9780701150071

Reviewed by TESSA LUNNEY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His skin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreign Soil

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Hachette Australia

Sydney, NSW, 2014

ISBN 978-0-73363242-6

Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Candles of the Night

by Ian Bedford

Lacunar Publishing

ISBN: 9781922198129

Reviewed by SUBHASH JAIRETH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transactions of Belonging

by Jaya Padmanabhan

Leadstart Publishing

ISBN-13: 978-9383562275

Reviewed by JESSICA FALEIRO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stone Postcard

by Paul Magee

ISBN 9780980852394

John Leonard Press

Reviewed by BONNY CASSIDY

A short poem, “Swimming in Minus”, lies at the centre of Paul Magee’s Stone Postcard. Positioned here, it makes a statement about the collection; the kind of poem that a more predictable writer might have placed at the book’s opening:

Still dark at seven in the morning,
Melbourne winter, and the St Kilda ocean
separates me from my skin-wrapped bones.
Like Descartes, who refused
to believe his body
his own.
The thinking words in his mind were him.
Deserving the property title that is cogito.
If I can think then I’m still alive.

Indeed, the poem is an opening of sorts, as it begins the second of the book’s halves. Perversely, Magee delays this little song of survival until we have completed the first part: a series of unflinching, expositional poems on the birth of a son, separation from a partner, and death of a father.

Magee’s poetry has never shied from trauma, nor from reconciliation with mortality; in fact, both his first collection, Cube Root of Book (2006), and Stone Postcard seem to thrive upon traditional relationships between poetic expression and kinds of loss. He worries at loss and losing with a tough, philosophical morbidity. In this sense, Stone Postcard continues the elegiac mode and pensive tone of Cube Root of Book. Now, however, the notes of his poetry are less constrained by the minor scale: Magee’s poetic line is lifted by brevity, and his droll optimism peppers this collection, particularly characterising its second part.

Whereas “Swimming in Minus” takes a reflective perspective on experience, the very first poem in the book tries to represent it proleptically. As its title suggests, “Later” is haunted by knowledge – represented by ominous “shadows” – of events that are to arrive in the following poems. Magee pushes this knowledge to the poem’s unfinished periphery, its form and imagery insisting instead upon the naivety of a baby and the dazed wonder of a new parent:

Our shadows lengthen.
Rupert is four now,
in days, though to him here and there
must seem quite the same.
Day and night will come later, then years, and
metaphors for the new, immense visions for the eyes to see by.

Empty shoes on the floor mark places where their
owners stopped
stepping, then slept.
The house is a map of last movements,
books put down on page three-three-four,
flowers, a balloon,
‘It’s a boy!’

The book’s first part chronicles how the simplicity of the child’s consciousness is gradually paralleled by the complicated break-up of his parents. Magee represents that duality simply through the sequencing of his poems. After a suite of emotionally earnest poems such as “Song”, “Break” and “Ten Houses”, Magee will insert the fleeting and pointless fun of child’s play as exemplified in “Lions in the Beach”. Consider the tonal contrast between these lines:

Just broke up,
in point of fact.
Four years from sudden love.
I’ve lost a life
which was hers. (“Ten Houses”)
Rupert punches policemen in dreams, then blinks
at the beach,
out of sleep leaping and spinning
around in his underpants […] (“Lions in the Beach”)

Magee avoids artificially reconciling or framing such tension, instead dwelling in its awkwardness. Through these stark tonal shifts he is performing the dissonance of beginnings and endings, of course, but this sequencing is also a technique to heighten awareness of light and dark separately.

It’s also an essential relief from poems in which emotionally earnest can become cloyingly confessional. This mode expresses itself in some hyperbolic metaphors: “like kissing/on New Year’s Day over No Man’s Land./Perhaps this truce could last./ […] A trench is no place to be letting go” (“Song”); “Broken homes are what we try to house” (“Break”). In the title sequence, lyrical flourishes are traded for a more urgent voice. The effect reads as stylised therapy:

Here’s your fucking rock, my actions said
to the psychotherapist who had requested
from my six months’ travel in Tierra del Fuego
I bring him back one […]
Actually I was crying a mouth full of grief
an earshot of anger
saying people in glass houses
are obliged to throw stones (“Stone Postcard”)

Magee seems to be deliberately working confessionalism into a poetics of authenticity; as just two comparisons, John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan have also pursued this approach, albeit to different thematic purposes. Giving oneself over to this style will be more or less challenging depending upon Magee’s reader. For me, Magee’s poems deal most memorably with emotional difficulty when it is distilled into imagery: “the distantly approaching,/her face severely/then a smile that melts” (“Red Square”). The epigram “Thought & Fort” contains another example of this:

train of thought
light of thought
carriage of thought
thought conductor
view out
rest
take off armour

A few other, discursive poems in the book’s first part also have this quality. They are not witty in the sense of glinting wordplay or fancy rhetorical footwork but, rather, they have an airy, sketchy quality. Poems like “Here and Now”, “Painting’s Flatness” and “Tautology” see Magee practice quite a different poetics to his expositional mode; often, they are no less sad than his chatty, head-on approaches to pain and rage, but they are less ponderous. They leave space to bring us in:

Rosella bursts out of the tree like a flower.
I want to live in that time spiral.

These jasmines overhead, flying by
and everything else
is black. Behind the sky. (“Here and Now”)

Given the dark path that Magee treads in the book’s first part, it is no coincidence that Virgil appears repeatedly throughout Stone Postcard. He hovers; not only in literal form as a translated voice, but also as a guiding device which functions to illumine Magee’s thematic concerns. In the first part, Magee concentrates on Virgil in pastoral mode. His translated excerpts from the Georgics bring a voice of comfort, a lullaby in which mythic order and practical wisdom make a reassuring pattern:

The instant old Deucalion’s hurled stones
hit the earth and turned into snarling men,
who flung at life remain a stone-hard race,
Nature imposed law on the land. Up then,
turn earth, start early in the year so that
the many suns of Summer ripening
to full force can bake the dusty soil.

In contrast to Magee’s confessional poems, his translations of Virgil represent a relationship outside of personality, a realm tangential from immediate experience and yet rich with feeling. Virgil’s command, above, signals a turn in the book’s focus – from the world within the self, to the self within the world. This shift characterises its second part. If the first half is a brave descent, the second is a hopeful climb. There is still turmoil and grief in the second part of the book, but these are treated as studies; politicised and essayed, they see Magee experiment with a satirical and free-wheeling poetic voice.

Observing the world as a stranger – visitor, traveller, fish out of water – Magee is frequently astounded at the weirdness of daily encounters. His responses range from outrage to bemusement. A run of tart didactic poems, for example, echo the political barbs of Catullus and Ovid. A highlight is “Payable Thinking”, an embittered but concise opinion-poem about academic research pressures:

This would be a pampered little gripe,
but universities are a common house for a while
to four in ten of our children.

While Magee is careful to preserve musicality in his translations, elsewhere he values directness of voice over rhythm. While this tendency marks weaker points in the book’s first part, Magee’s loose line and plain diction are used to good effect in a set of impressionistic poems stretching from America to Australia. In one, “Coney Island”, an occasional ode to a hotdog eating contest, he echoes the din of the coliseum (“This is life and death”). Elsewhere, a series of suburban Australian scenes include a Salvos employment workshop (“… ployment, Inemployment, Unumploymnt”) and a misconceived church group display of fruit, “gayer than Satan’s butt” (“Brisbane Royal Exhibition”).

In this second half of Stone Postcard, social satire creates a cumulative sense that civilisation is founded on chaos; history on forgetting. This is particularly clear in Magee’s juxtaposition of his poem, “Smudged Newspaper Photo”, with a final translation from Virgil – this time from his jingoistic mode in the Aeneid – which Magee titles “Turnus Decides”. In “Smudged Newspaper Photo”, Magee contemplates a news report so horrific his speaker does “not know how to read”; Virgil, however, shows him how war can be aestheticised, as well as familiarised, through poetry:

Like huge brands of flame thrown into a woods
– the laurels in there crack as they catch light –
or seething rivers, which suddenly flood
smashing out from the sheer mountains to charge
the fields and plains, Aeneas and Turnus
devastated everything in their path.

Magee’s translation seems to relish the particularly bloody and cinematic nature of this passage, which acts as a climax to the book’s progression through trauma, as Turnus resolves: “The battle is mine/ to win or lose” (“Turnus Decides”). This war cry, which leads skillfully into one final, peaceful poem by Magee, stands far away from the wan voice that opens the book.

A “stone postcard” could mean a number of things. The image of writing in stone is commonly meant to indicate permanence, an indelible action. These are themes in Magee’s book, to be sure: the undoable mark of death upon the living; the hurting memory of a failed partnership. In the title poem it’s a literal rock brought home as a souvenir, as well as a metaphorical rock of anger to peg at somebody, anybody. In light of other poems in the book, it might also be understood as the weight of life that is lovingly transferred from a father to the son (tabula rasa) who is repeatedly addressed in the book’s first part; or, it could refer to Virgil’s epitaph, which Magee translates (“Over Virgil’s Grave”).

Considering the collection as a whole, however, the stone postcard comes to signify paradox: it is both heavy and light, anchored and moveable. The stony harshness of pain is leavened by a sense of the ridiculous; the poet declares himself, but does so with an informal poetic line and the great palimpsest of translation. The book’s two parts represent two faces, but if Magee’s voice can be characterized by one feature, it’s intensity – a word also used in the book’s cover blurb. Magee’s poetry is intense because he refuses to entertain the falsity of synthesis. A stone postcard is the tension between memory and freedom, between experience and the poetry that briefly contains it.
BONNY CASSIDY‘s second poetry collection, Final Theory, was published in July by Giramondo. She teaches creative writing at RMIT University and is feature reviews editor for Cordite Poetry Journal. This year she is a guest of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, and the Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland.

Lens Flare

By Benedict Andrews

Pitt Street Poetry

ISBN 978-1-922080-34-9

Peony

By Eileen Chong

Pitt Street Poetry.

ISBN 978-1-922080-28-8

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

It is often difficult when writers change from one literary genre to another. Reviewers — and writers in the encroached-upon form — are quick to “guard their own turf”. Benedict Andrews, in his first poetry collection, Lens Flare, arrives with a strong reputation as a theatre writer and director, both here and overseas. His first collection of plays is due out later this year.

As a first collection of poetry, Lens Flare is, in some ways, not unlike other poetry debuts. It exhibits a considerable range of concerns and techniques — and varies, perhaps inevitably, in quality. At the centre is a truly remarkable sequence of poems called “The Rooms”, of which more shortly. Bookending this are two sections which are decidedly more uneven. The first centres around (but is not confined to) Iceland, which has recently become Andrews’ main place of residence. The poems here range from the graphically erotic love sonnet, “Teufelsberg” to much more tentative poems such as “Rás 1” which starts out with the somewhat prosaic short lines: “Driving around / in the rain / listening to / scratchy jazz / on the radio // Magga says, / it’s getting dark / earlier and earlier …” “Scratchy jazz” is an evocative phrase but there’s not a lot, other than simple exposition, happening in the rest of the sentence.

The closing “bookend” of Lens Flare starts with the ten-part sequence, “Kodachrome City”. It varies considerably in techniques and degree of accessibility but is probably more consistent than the book’s opening section. In “Operaen”, a later poem, we have a good example of what some readers will see as a highly original image and others may see as spuriously melodramatic. “The sky, that well-fucked whore, sheds her sequin dress. / Lipstick smeared, petrol wet, / she strikes a match.”

As mentioned earlier, what truly distinguishes Lens Flare is its central, 35-page sequence, “The Rooms”. With two ten-line poems per page, we are given a powerful, almost encylopaedic rendering of the guests (and their activities) in a contemporary, relatively upmarket hotel. It could be anywhere in the developed world (though some details suggest a tropical location) and has a similar comprehensiveness to the “Prologue” of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, more than six hundred years earlier. Like Chaucer, Andrews casts a mordant but compassionate eye on what is happening in his particular microcosm.

Sexuality plays a big role, of course, but the situations of Andrews’ protagonists are various — from illicit ecstasy to acute loneliness. The profound superficiality of much of our contemporary culture, sexual and otherwise, is sometimes hinted at — and sometimes shockingly embodied. “Room 104” is a typical example. Its last eight lines are suggestive of quite a few other poems in the sequence and yet Andrews avoids any inadvertent repetition: “Soon there’ll be a ring from reception, / a man will knock, kiss her twice and step in. / Sipping champagne, they’ll watch fruit bats mass / above the gardens, they’ll tongue each other, / strip, make the room stink of wine and musk. / They’ll hack into each other like cannibals. / They’ll fuck until they can’t think any more. / So she reckons, rearranging her reflection.”

One can sense Andrews’ theatrical experience at work here — the way it’s all set in the near future (a common dramatic device these days), the detail of the fruit bats and so on. Each of the ten line poems is a kind of mini-play — or mini-masque — but their cumulative impact is hardly short of overwhelming.

In “The Rooms” there are many things we need to know about the sadness and delusions of our contemporary culture — and other things we would probably prefer not to hear. There are numerous, very telling couplets scattered throughout. One from “Room 203” is an example. “Jesus, money evaporates. On the fresh sheets, / his wife’s caressing limbs scratch like twigs.” Again, Andrews’ theatrical experience comes through when he writes of an actor: “Faces upon faces are laid on his. / A palimpsest of worn out masks. Truer lies.”

“The Rooms” is a very convincing presentation of  how much we differ and how much we are the same. It’s also a disconcerting look at where we stand at the moment — and where we might be headed. If the whole of Lens Flare were at this very high standard it would be one of this country’s most compelling first collections in the last few years.

***

Eileen Chong’s second collection, Peony, has many virtues, an almost accidental one of which is to remind us of how far we’ve come, multiculturally. There was a time, say the 1950s, when the typical Chong poem would have been unbearably exotic. As readers, we would have demanded footnotes and glossaries and resented being pressed too hard. Now, in 2014, we are at ease with most of her references; we feel (perhaps wrongly) that we half-know what she’s talking about already.

Peony falls neatly into four sections, only the first of which is “hard core” Chinese. Here we are treated to the Chinese feelings for food, family (children and grandparents, in particular), revered ancestors and the long history of the Middle Kingdom. Some of the poems are recipes in disguise (and this is not a criticism). The first few poems, mainly about Chong’s grandmother, remind us how quickly things have changed not only in mainland China but throughout the Chinese diaspora. “My grandmother cannot read / the words dancing across the screen, / lighting up in time with the music. // She sings from memory, / in the dialect of her youth …” (“Chinese Singing”). The poems here also remind us of the persistence of Chinese customs, a few of which we have come to know about or have even partly assimilated.

The remaining three sections (excepting the book’s final poem) are, for the most part, more “mainstream” but the Chinese dimension persists even though the contexts (overseas travel, domestic life etc) are different. Chong’s poetry, for the most part, has a plain-speaking aspect to it — and a delicacy which we can recognise as Chinese, even if such qualities are not unique to that culture and not all Chinese embody them.

It needs to be insisted upon, however, that Chong’s ambitions range well beyond mere acceptance as a “multicultural” poet. In Part II, for instance, there are several love poems which have a compelling, low-key eroticism, often in the context of a more general sensuality.  The poem,“When in Rome”, has Chong recalling how: “In the darkness of the providore / we stood and breathed in / the brine of the meats, the ripeness / of olives. We learnt the true names / of prosciutto. We tasted the warm / oil. The man behind the counter / asked where we were from. Paradise. / You should visit one day. He shook his head.”

As well as the celebration of the sensuous here, there is also a jokey understatedness which many of us like to think of as Australian. The one-word description of Australia as “Paradise” is a joke in itself — which the Italian shopkeeper may or may not have understood. The whole episode has a nice ambivalence — and artistic sophistication.

Another sign of this range and complexity is Chong’s political and social awareness. “Freeman’s Lobotomy” is a graphic rendition of an outdated, rougher-and-readier treatment for mental illness than the more subtle ones we have today (which remain less precise than we might wish). Chong has her surgeon’s monologue ending with: “All done. Withdraw the pick / and wipe it clean. Thank you nurse. / The patient will need nothing / but a pair of dark glasses. Tomorrow / we shall see how much better she is”.

Peony is a highly accessible and often moving collection which deserves, and may well obtain, a wide readership.

GEOFF PAGE is a Canberra-based poet and critic and the editor of The Best Australian Poems, 2014. His New and Selected is published by Puncher and Wattmann.  

Weekend’s end

by Tim Wright

bulky news press

Reviewed by CHRIS BROWN

Late last year I received in the mail a copy of Tim Wright’s poetry chapbook, Weekend’s end. I’d been in occasional correspondence with Wright for a few years and but for this, might never have seen (or reviewed) the book, which was made by the author and his Melbourne peers and never intended for commercial release.

While the roughed-up cardboard cover, stenciled with a gold stroke at a forward lean (and without names or titles) marks the venture as non-commercial, Wright hasn’t made this book writing against conventional (commercial) book design and production, but outside of it, the effect of which is to give precedence to the poetics of the cover, above any intended political function.

The inside cover introduces the title, Weekend’s end, inviting questions as to the relationship between the title and the single graphic feature, a gold line, almost a forward slash, of the cover. Weekend’s end, might suggest, for example, a division between work and recreation, a space between opposing  contexts – the forward slash suggesting an either/or of constructed time. I doubt that this was Wright’s intention, though it does foreshadow the questions of unity, continuity, and disjunction that come to characterize the poems of the collection. More relevantly perhaps, the title directs us quite literally to the ‘end’ element of ‘weekend’, a gesture closer to Wright’s interests I believe, for Wright’s poems gather energy around the elemental and particulate aspects of their composition; a point more observable as the book proceeds and grammatical continuities of the earlier imagery give way to the abstracted continuity of the closing poem, “course”.

Weekend’s end asks questions of the way a poem might negotiate the natural discontinuities of daily life and thought, as is made clear in the first poem of the book, “notes.”

the bamboo
bending

distracted

a feathered sky

The widening line-break suggests the diminishing connection between successive lines. The last two lines, “communist desire as a collective desire for collectitivity…, quote jodi dean and have nothing and perhaps everything to do with the five lines I quote above; they are related in their un-relatedness, as notes, which are not to be taken here as “just notes” but poetry, the first thought.

If “notes”, for its raw form, resembles a found poem, “accidental collage with Laurie Duggan and word processor”, works in a similar way. Procedures of early writing or drafting are given primacy; the means are here the end. The first three lines read:

Light spills through a gutter a certain

moment of tHe skirts the base of affirmative discourse on which

resemblance calmly reposeshe day, then…

This poem isn’t without its quotidian treats, as the first line expresses, but what’s important is the  question of the accidental itself. This poem embodies the aleatory, the poem is its actual and accidental procedure. Wright is writing a ph.d on Duggan so it’s no great accident that this intersection occurs, nor that the poem itself speaks through its chance arrangement to the relation of the critical to the poetic.

These two poems are as informal as the collection gets. From here on each piece seems a more measured synthesis of its often shifting imagery. Wright appears constantly to be testing language against itself, seeking and sounding out, finally intuited combinations of language, that hold, despite an apparent elemental disparity.

The passage here,

                whales
rose to the surface to
be doted on patted it’s what
we expect they expected
and came here for corner
ing glasses of coopers
extra stout staring
at it won’t do
you any favours the gin scent
still motes the catwalk

from “ugh boat”, left me asking where does one begin to quote and where end? A question itself that attests to the flow Wright achieves through and against the varied elements of the poem-compound. It’s not so much the lack of punctuation (the reader can look after that?) but more the repetition and enjambment, as well as an adept aural sense, that create a sense of movement, which is at once reflective and forward facing. It’s the kind of poem that makes it churlish to congratulate the single line or isolated thought, but there are bursts of semantic delight, as well as humour: “…glasses of…extra stout staring/at it won’t do/you any favours the gin scent…”. Whose shout was it? but as is common of Wright’s poetry, something else is at work here, and in the reflexive sense, I imagine the poet to be asking questions about making the work happen (“staring at it won’t do”. Fittingly then Wright makes his own book to accommodate the poems of his making.

“west end pastoral”, probably my favourite, is a gem; it’s more contextualized than anything else in the collection; though to which west end does Wright refer? I found myself thinking Brisbane (pastoral here ironized); or Newcastle? Wright is originally from Western Australia. Whatever the case, a strong social and political sense comes through here in a poem that quietly approaches the disposability common to contemporary suburban culture. This is the poem in full:

the couch and the dog
are out the front with the D-lock
docked like broken ferries
someone left their porch out overnight
chewing over a block of wood
in a blanket of cut grass
fumigating the bus stop café.

Questions of economy and restraint assert themselves in Wright’s poems. In a review of the recent outcrop anthology for cordite, James Stuart called Wright’s poems “reticent” but didn’t go on to give any examples to clarify the point. Certainly, there are few pronouns in Wright’s work; “I” barely rates a mention, though at the same time, the point of view’s often implied, at times, in the most apt manner: “this music is meant to/permeate certain emotions” (“weekend’s end”). Why not subtract the first person singular from such an equation?

Wright’s varied imagery gives space and light to the daily life recorded in his poems. “a camera”, for example, questions a framed, subjective reality, but in opening itself to a range of reference, undermines its own expression of a point of view characterized by limitation:

repetitions
on a sand dune
the limited selection
admitted by a window
things have changed

Each of the poems collected here present a vitalized discourse on the making of a poem, its roots and final composition. Like his earlier REDACTIONS (I-XII), 2011, Tim Wright’s Weekend’s end works brightly out from its own spirited objectives and resolve, establishing itself as a firm example of the wealth on offer in the gift economy of d.i.y publishing. Put it on your reading list, if you can find it.

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

The End of the World

Maria Takolander

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922146519

Reviewed by JACINTA LE PLASTRIER
 
 

In native American and other cultural traditions, the raven has a powerful symbology. It is considered a messenger who carries information between worlds, is of the earth but also capable of bridging to other realms. It can also represent the souls of the murdered. In this, it is an apt choice as the cover illustration of Maria Takolander’s second full poetry collection, The End of the World.

There is no direct reference to a raven in any of the book’s 41 poems but certainly it could be argued, as a lens for its reading, that many of them either directly or implicitly address the presence of the otherworldly, the ethereal and the spectral. There are also veils between the earthly world and our perception of it, and between a self’s experience and its familial and historic connections and heritages.

As Takolander writes in the first poem of the book, ‘Unborn’, which addresses pregnancy, ‘Still emerging from yourself, the bud of your nose alone/ makes the universe less impossible. You do not know/ that we are here, but this is how we watch you: on a/ black-and-white plasma screen suspended on a wall/ – the happy technician flicking us between dimensions/ like Dr Who – and as if from an infinite distance.’

This is a second collection and while the poet carries through themes begun in her first book, Ghostly Subjects (SALT, 2009), particularly in regard to poems about the intimate self and her family’s history in the first two parts of The End of the World, it also sets out on what feels like a new orientation – especially in the book’s final third section. These poems spring beyond the field of own experience.

In his recent non-fiction book, A History of Silence: A Family Memoir (Text Publishing, 2013), NZ author Lloyd Jones contends, ‘a writer’s works have a way of tracking back to his wellsprings.’ In the context of his book, this meant an examination of his lineage’s ‘ancestry of silence’, and ‘the sediment within him’. These are useful ideas to apply to the work in The End of the World where Takolander exhumes her own family’s spectres.

These ghosts are not only familial. They are also metaphysical, those of the dark imagination which has inhabited this poet’s work from her earliest poems, published in the 2005 chapbook, Narcissism (Whitmore Poetry Press).

Of Finnish origin, Takolander’s family members were killed in Stalinist purges. Some were exiled or they experienced other horrors of war. The traumatic consequences of these experiences, for themselves and descendants, are insidious and potent.  It is a brave poetry which addresses them.

In one of the finest poems in Ghostly Subjects, ‘Finland: Fables’, Takolander assized this family history in prose-poetry wording, each stanza a long-lined sentence:

In a kitchen there was a man who drank the worlds contained in bottles, but who could never find the strangers he had killed in the
war, whose blood had melted with the snow.

It is subject matter reprised yet differently confronted in a number of poems in Part 2 of the The End of the World, including ‘Mushrooms’ and ‘The Old World’. These are moving poems. In them Takolander explores not only for herself, as poet and a self, but also in poems such as ‘The Old World’ gives voice to the those gone before us, whose aching for what has been lost might (perhaps inevitably will) re-sprout in those who follow. The poem closes, ‘See how the sun burns all night, like a promise/ of the end of the world.’ This is one reference to the book’s title.

Later in Part 2 is the poem actually titled ‘The End of the World’. The subject matter is the history of and a visit to Punta Arena, Chile. Written in five-lined stanzas, it closes in language of an edged, gothic beauty:

…       
            their skullbones and cross-bones now encrypted
in the cemetery across the way, where angels dive among
            cypresses manicured into a wonderland silence
that takes the edge off death and the sight
            of all those abominable dogs, ranging everywhere.

This poem is an example of what has marked Takolander’s poetry since its beginnings. There is a discipline of form though she is writing in free verse which allows it to have the echo of formal metrics within it.  This tendency is always an opportunity for a poet to clarify and amplify their poetic thinking – the movement of mind in the work. There has also prevailed in her poetry – though it might be a strange term to use – a discipline in the language she chooses as her oeuvre’s ‘field’. It is an educated vocabulary but with a sense of the pared, of having been boned – also of the elemental or even glacial. I think of an earlier poem like ‘Storm’:

…

It may be true we don’t deserve this,

Our earthly things reduced
To shadows we dream

Things from: the firs, the stooks,
The fence posts¾none belong.

They don’t belong.
Yet we’ve always waked and slept

When the sky says we should,
Like birds and monkeys,

Abandoning the world
Evening after evening…

The majority of poems in The End of the World combine this clarified language with a formal control – and their poetic ideas are robust – but there are a number which don’t, and which make for uneasy reading. In these, certain lines or phrases are weak but the main concern is that the poetic conception has not been deepened – pressurized – sufficiently in the process of their creation. One example is in a poem about her forebears, ‘Missing in Action’. The material is unusual and powerful – her great-grandfather, ‘lost to Stalinist purges’, an eldest uncle, ‘dysentery got him as an infant in Karelia’, a grandfather of which she writes ‘(Hung over, he would beat the horses, their flanks shivering.’). And the formal structure is clear. There are lines in the poem which spark, but a major part of the poem’s language and its thinking through is not brought up to the task of interrogating – and so unearthing meaning – of such a tragic territory. (This is most definitely not the case with the earlier ‘Finland: Fables’, which traversed similar subjects.)

It is uncomfortable to criticize a poem whose material is profound, and of obvious importance to the poet. Having said that, in stark contrast is perhaps the finest poem in the new book, ‘Stalin Confesses’. Adopting Stalin as subject, the narrating, poetic voice is both authoritative and, in the most positive sense, destabilized and destabilizing. One wonders, at different points through the poem, ‘who is speaking now?’ This shifting of angles is beautifully controlled. The poem begins: ‘At my side I have concealed a child/ whose body was twice trodden by horses/ hauling carriages through our boggy village,/ the hooves like machines./ The child’s father, sludge-drunk and stone-fisted, beat him,/ as did his mother, full of God./ The seminary silenced his Georgian tongue,/ and the Russian army, even in war’s thick, rejected him./ The child’s face is smudged as the moon’s.’ Here is poetry whose language is muscled, precise yet allusive. It startles, and its promise drives through the whole work. Later is this: ‘He once entrusted to me a chronic dream/ in which his mother, father, unborn brothers,/ soiled villagers in their carts,/ the priest in his finery, and even God Himself/ will not, no matter the torment he inflicts on them,/ look upon his scorched soul/ and confess they were responsible.’

In Part 3 of The End of the World, Takolander takes up a different poetic drum. This poetry is sometimes fantastical – the final four prose poems are inhabited by Aesopic animals and the twists of fable. The part opens with poems, one section in catalogue form, inspired after 19^th-century ‘scientific’ treatises on criminology.

Here, in a later poem, are the opening lines of ‘Witch’:

Her Hair was the Colour of Dirt, her Fingernails
of Stone, but she did not Lack Shelter or Know Hunger.
She Knew how the Body forces the Foetus to leave
its Mucous Womb and Breathe Air, and she could effect
Certain Remedies for Those Unwanted, rendering
The Creatures, While Still Hidden, Powerless. Small
Corpses were not Such a Problem.  …

This final part to the book is adventurous and its subject matter and wielding, strange and beguiling.

JACINTA LE PLASTRIER is a Melbourne-based poet, writer, editor and publisher. Her poetry collection is forthcoming with John Leonard Press. To read more,  Jacinta  Le Plastrier

The Petrov Poems

by Lesley Lebkowicz

Pitt Street Poetry, 2013

ISBN 9781922080141

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

Lesley Lebkowicz’s The Petrov Poems is a verse novel that keeps its offerings close to its chest: at eighty pages the volume is slim and unassuming, its cover inconspicuous. While this reserve accords with its theme of espionage, nevertheless its subject — the defection of the Petrovs, an “escapade which rocked the sleepy town of Canberra in April 1954” (Jacket blurb) — ensures there is more to this verse novel than its appearance suggests.

The Petrov Poems required “massive amounts of research,” Lebkowicz acknowledges (Interview). Not only did she spend many hours accessing documents, including ASIO files, in the National Archives and the National Library, she spoke with Canberra people about their memories, and “walked around the Embassy, the Petrovs’ house and the Hotel Kingston”, until, she adds, “the details infiltrated the poems” (Interview).

The material was abundant, Lebkowicz recalls: “the Petrovs’ lives were choc-a-bloc with material made for a novel” (Interview). Lebkowicz has been mindful to ensure the content is accessible rather than overwhelming; the verse novel comprises four sections of interlinked poems in chronological order, and much of the narrative backstory and plot is in place by the end of Part I. The historical details are re-presented in a credible story world.

Initially Lebkowicz intended to write the story from the point of view of Evdokia Petrova and the other women involved (Madame Ollier, a diplomat; the air hostess, Joyce Bull). In order to do this, she had to know about Vladimir Petrov as well, and before long, she acknowledges, “I realised he was a gift” (Interview), though not exactly the stereotypical spy — “bumbling” is the term Lebkowicz assigns him. Nevertheless Lebkowicz wanted to convey Vladimir Petrov and Evdokia Petrova “as people, not as spies” whose “dilemmas were human and often heart-rending” (Interview). Her approach to speech and thought representation was “to take the reader in as close as possible to the Petrovs” (Interview). Lebkowicz states she chose “the intimate forms of their names (Volodya and Dusya) and gave a lot of their interior lives, especially Dusya’s”, but resisted first-person mode, realising that omniscient third-person narration in past tense would allow the overview she required (Interview).

How Lebkowicz embodies the Soviet diplomat-spy is often visceral, evoking a corpulent Volodya: “his fingers white slugs on the saucer”; “softness has long fled / his mind” (4). In ‘Blood II’, however, his body and mind dissemble along with future plans:

Each drink had laid down errant cells
in the dark of his arteries. They came loose and sidled
along networks that threaded his body.
His blood struggled.
His heart laboured.
A clot jammed the flow in his brain
and then nothing worked. Now words richochet
and can’t find the path to his tongue. (79)

The poem ‘Disintegration’ iterates the unstoppable advance of mortality: Volodya, post stroke, has lost his memory. When Dusya visits him in the nursing home, he does not recognise her: “No more strangers he yells. I want my wife” (80). It is poignant but moreover ironic treatment that Lebkowicz aims for in The Petrov Poems, and achieves. There is paradox, too, in this narrative of political asylum, in contrasting the metaphors of life networks as “a kind of containment” (78), and of ‘the body as a prison’ (79) with ‘the body needing shelter’.

If there’s a predominant poetic form in The Petrov Poems, Lebkowicz believes “it is probably the sonnet — but not the formal sonnet of earlier centuries. No end-stopped rhyme, though generally fourteen lines and a volta of sorts” (Interview). What may vex readers expecting a more prominent poetic template is this verse novel’s stylistic preference for description over trope. That is not to say that personification, simile, metaphor, are not present. Rather, poetic elements are muted, and the poetic narrative is naturalised and accessible:  “Water flirts with the boats.” (3); “…the letters she types / skitter over her desk like dry chaff.” (78)

Why many poems are expository, more focused on describing narrative space and the narrative events taking place, than on elaboration, is in part, attributable to the need for narrative momentum. Fewer poetic embellishments, in Lebkowicz’s design, “keep the pace fairly fast”  (Interview). The emphasis on description is also instrumental for spatial and temporal presentation. Description is a discourse strategy for the disclosure of spatial information (Ryan 2014), a means to convey “the physically existing environment in which characters live and move” (Buchholz and Jahn 2005).

The emphasis on description, therefore, is a concession to narrative ends; effective for reconstructing the temporal sequence of the events of the Petrov’s defection. This stylistic foregrounding of space and time is evident in the titles or subtitles of poems, for example, ‘Inside the Embassy I’; ‘Volodya crashes on the way to meet Mme Ollier in Cooma. 25 December 1953’; ‘Petrov and Richards meet in a car behind the Kingston Hotel. 26 March 1954.’; ‘Bialoguski’s flat, Point Piper, 19 March 1954’ and ‘Flight from Mascot to Darwin, 19 April 1954’.

Yet the emphasis on description extends the textual spatiality of The Petrov Poems beyond its setting, that of mid-twentieth-century Canberra, Australia, and also beyond its spatial frames — those separate locations where events transpire: the ship Orcades; the Russian Club; the ASIO office; the Embassy; Government House; Bialoguski’s flat; in a car behind Kingston Hotel; the airport; the safe house and the nursing home — to encompass story space, “the space relevant to the plot, as mapped by the actions and thoughts of the characters (which) consists of all the spatial frames plus all the locations mentioned by the text that are not the scene of actually occurring events” (Ryan 8).

The story space can then also incorporate Russia, Stockholm and the valley about which Dusya Petrova dreamed, “where almost-twin girls/took milk from a cow” (79); the labour camp where her husband was taken and died; and the “big room in Moscow” (17) where she and first husband, Román, lived together “with Román’s books on the shelves above the bed” (17). Story space in The Petrov Poems also maps the places about which Volodya Petrov thinks: Sinkiang, the autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, and one of the province’s largest cities; Yarkand, the ancient city on the Silk Road, once a major transport hub and centre of moneylending and trade;  the village of Volodya’s family house; the USSR; the farm he was raised on; Moscow; the countries of Canada and Japan from which other agents defect; and the farm he imagines himself living on, sometime in the future.

The narrative unfolds without a single specific reference to the Cold War, nevertheless it  becomes possible to convey Cold War divisions. Readers envision the frontier “to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region” imagined by the 1954 formulation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation — formed between the United States, France, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines — as they bring further spatial information — narrative (or story) world space — to the text on “the basis of cultural knowledge and real world experience” (Ryan 2014).

Lebkowicz, an accomplished poet, wrote The Petrov Poems without “a conscious model” although she had read other verse novels — by Dorothy Porter, Judy Johnson, Geoff Page and Vikram Seth. The act of writing The Petrov Poems was to affirm Lebkowicz’s enthusiasm for the verse novel: “It’s a powerful form —flexible and compelling” she asserts (Interview). The publication of The Petrov Poems by one of Australia’s small poetry presses, Pitt Street Poetry, consolidates Lebkowicz’s previous credits, a book of poetry and a short story collection.

Readers who regularly engage with the verse novel form, come to know its infinite variety.

The Petrov Poems is one of a growing number of verse novels internationally that narrativise historical material. The Petrov Poems does so without ostentation, yet its approach to its subject, at once compassionate and penetrating, arises from careful research, and ensures a worthy contribution.

WORKS CITED

Buchholz, Sabine and Manfred Jahn.“Space.” In: Herman. D et al. (eds): Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 2008 [2005]: 551–54.
Lebkowicz, Lesley. Interview by Linda Weste, 6 July 2014.
—. The Petrov Poems. Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2013.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Space”. In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University.  [view date:1 July 2014]
 “Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 1954”, Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, United States Department of State.  [view date:1 July 2014]

 
LINDA WESTE is a poet, editor and teacher of creative writing who researches poetic and narrative interplay.

Circle Work

by Cameron Lowe

Puncher and Wattmann

ISBN: 9781922186232

Reviewed by VANESSA PAGE

Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work is a graceful collection of poems, with no trace of the masculine, high octane themes that you might expect from a book bearing this title. Instead, the reader is drawn into Lowe’s strange and beautiful landscapes – where there are certainly circular themes at play – the simple cycles of things, seasons, relationships and days.

The circle symbolises a wholeness – a completeness, but also the idea of movement and motion, the elapsing of time. From this perspective, the idea of ‘circle work’ as a broad umbrella to hold over this collection of poems, seems apt.

The sense of movement is one of the most striking features about this collection. In particular, the visual movement that Lowe creates through the arrangement of the poems on each page. The words dance, skip and sometimes yawn and stretch across the pages, leading the reader subtly and deeply into the delicate scenes that Lowe has created.

The arrangement of the poems in Circle Work also appear to follow a loose seasonal pattern. In the opening piece, ‘In Memory of Flowers’, this scene is set, providing signposts to the season, setting up that sense of motion, but also a sense of waiting for the season to change, for the flowers to bloom.

And so, as winter/rain falls steadily/upon bluestone,
again the limits of/patience strain/to make flowers
(9)

Precise and seemingly ‘hand-chiselled’ observations and fragments linger constantly on the edge of the ‘domestic world’, melding effortlessly with the ‘natural world’:

a sky so blue
it dissolves
the noise of cars
(48)

This interplay of the earthly and the other-worldly through razor-sharp observations is at its most mesmerising in the piece ‘The skin of it’ which is told in six parts.

These observations, on the surface appear quite simple, but the poems are deceptively hypnotic, and have a way of working under your skin, with a gentleness, and sense of calm that makes the reading of them a pleasure.

The lapping of light over light – and the clock ticking in the kitchen, rhythmic as the dripping tap.
(13)

From this distilled beauty, Lowe shifts effortlessly into a contrasting space in simple vignettes that provide pockets of relief. I liked ‘At the Geelong Art Gallery – a great Australian poet discovers a potato cake in his pocket’ – a funny, simple poem that reminded me of one of major reasons I love the art form of poetry – the way so much can be said with such few words – this brevity, combined with Lowe’s seductive knack for opening windows onto crystal-clear and carefully painted scenes is on display here. A fantastic and tongue in cheek poke at ‘poet-types’’.

The book’s moments of beauty are frequent and lead the reader deeper into the collection. I found myself wanting more of them.

There are numerous references to sparrows and birches, flowers, the sky and the behaviour or light as it slips between the seasons, creating a strong, botanic thread throughout the collection.

In ‘The’ Lowe’s mastery of observation is at its beautiful best, as he once more leads the reader in the natural world through his keenly focussed viewfinder.

binding sunlight to bird/to blue sky/to the honey-cream colour/of dry grass – / a tuft of white wool/caught on a barb (31)

There is some repetition in references to onions frying, white pickets, powerlines and aerials even the presence of sparrows. While these references are evidence of the domestic mooring for many of Lowe’s poems their repetition is not enough to distract from the collection. It is, however, noticeable enough to provide little speed bumps that I found made me slow down while I thought back to the poems where I’d heard them before.

Still, it seems Lowe’s poems seem based on familiar aspects, scenes and surroundings and it is this consistency in the setting for many of these poems that helps to bind the collection together.

There is something very domestic about this collection – you could almost imagine the poet writing these poems while looking out upon the same familiar scene, perhaps in his own home, perhaps in another frequented place.

This domesticity is at play in ‘Practising everyday life’ where simple meal preparations, the narrator’s scene from the balcony hooks the reader into a much deeper internal conversation about his own relationship explained in the context of this ‘keeping on’ this cycle of things – both natural and domestic.

It’s there/in the no need to really think ease of the balcony
Or the clean, taut/ lines of aerials/at dusk
(68)

Wherever the setting, it is clear that Cameron Lowe knows how to document beauty and weave these moments into delicately powerful poems with transportational qualities.

I found the book to be accessible –this is simple language, done well. The type of writing offers a bridge to readers, whether they are regular readers of poetry or not. This is the type of poetry I like to read – where I can experience an emotion, open an imagined window onto a scene so clear and so precise that I could be standing in it myself.

Night sweeping by, the moon hidden, not a star to see
and you twisted suddenly in your sleep
as if something hurt or scared you
(67)

As all great art has that point of connection, it is here in the lines of Circle Work – in the relationships, the emotional responses, the observations and the sense that as a reader you are forgetting yourself.

This is a gift and Circle Work succeeds on this level. And while the repetition of scene, some references and subject matter is present, there are also cleverly placed moments of humour and relief to provide balance. Certainly the strongest poems in this collection draw the reader in, walking them along that tightrope between the natural and domestic worlds and offering  up countless opportunities for connection.

Find it, noting its shape that is something like a heart but more comely, something like a thought but more defined, something nurtured at the margins of the leaf itself.
(22)

VANESSA PAGE is a Brisbane poet who has published two collections of poetry: Feeding Paper Tigers (ALS Press, 2012) and Confessional Box (Walleah Press, 2013). Confessional Box won the 2013 FAW Anne Elder Award. She has previously been shortlisted in the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the ACU Poetry Prize, and blogs at vanessapage.wordpress.com.

Maps, Cargo

by Bella Li

Vagabond Press, 2013
 
 
 
 
The Tulip Beds

by A. J. Carruthers

Vagabond Press, 2013

Reviewed by TAMRYN BENNETT

As Rare Object #94 and #92 respectively, Bella Li’s Maps, Cargo and A. J Carruthers’ The Tulip Beds are set to become even more recherché as Vagabond rounds-out their long-running series at #100. Vagabond’s Rare Objects are revered, not only as one of the finest chapbook series of recent years, but for the Press’ cultivation of so many debut collections. This tradition of careful curation and experimentation continues to shape the transitory spaces of both Maps, Cargo and The Tulip Beds.

Li is a cartographer of a different kind. Her map-making is as aesthetic as it is topographic, plotting fragmented histories, horizons and the spectral lands of memory and dream. Coordinates ‘E 44 10 N 33 15’ mark the first poem and the prophet Mohammed’s journey ‘In the year of the Hegira 622, driven from he city and exiled’ (p.1). Rather than patch together gapped historio-graphic accounts Li allows the poem to remain open to multiple imaginings, an approach that resonates with Lyn Hejinian’s overthrowing of fixed meaning in her paper ‘The Rejection of Closure’ (1985). The openness, participation and uncertainty invited by Li’s deliberate spaces is emphasised in the line ‘Concerning the origins of the name “ ” (in the palace, there was a small )’ (p.1).

These gapped expeditions continue to traverse continents, drifting through centuries of knotted cargo and ‘drowned’ coastlines (p.8). Above each of the travellers a constant damp of clouds hovers, and after the precise ‘Accounting of knives, guns and hats’ (p.3) Li steers towards more subliminal waters with the poems ‘Two children are threatened by a , 1924 (Ernst)’, ‘Drowning dream’ and ‘Window’.

‘Drowning dream’, my favourite mirage and perhaps the most melancholy offering of the collection, adapts its first line from Anne Sexton’s ‘Imitations of drowning’ (1981):

That August I began to dream of drowning. It was the season
of water—strange storms troubled the air. All day I crept
along the edges of rooms, avoiding the precious windows—
half ajar, propped open with old newspapers where the
green sky pooled (p.11).

Here, the clouds that loom like lodestars above the travellers give way to storms and rising seas that swallow gardens and swell timbers of a seemingly abandoned house. The slow wreckage of exteriors is mirrored in the basement of the house ‘where a man—quiet and still as a mouse—floated face down in the dark’ (p.11). There are no numbers to navigate, no landmarks, only the hum of the house above and hope of a different nightmare. The final poem, ‘Window’, draws back curtains like ghost nets inside a blue room of sleep.

Something coming
through the window and you
can feel the hairs on your
neck do their little dance
and when you exit as
you must now that
you have entered
it is though
the win
do
w. (p.12)

Like the chipped histories stacked around it, the house and window offers nothing whole. Instead the poem calls us into the unmapped, where flotsam and forgotten songs wait to be rediscovered.

Cosmic hollows and harmonies also shape Carruthers’ The Tulip Beds – a toneme suite, a collection as intricate and interconnected as the sources that sparked its creation. In the opening TONE/ NOTE Carruthers explains the alchemy involved in assembling this work:

‘Multiple procedures converged in the making of this piece. Initially, I was struck by a photo image of the extinct filter-feeder Siphusauctum gregarum, which appeared to show a three-line “stave”, in a 2012 article by Lorna J. O’Brien and Jean-Bernard Caron. I then used this article, as well as English translation of Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi (1619), and Aristoxenus’ Elementra Harmonica, as source-texts. Many of the images were generated thanks to the extraordinary website www.seeingwithsound.com’ (p.1).

This omnium of sources problematises classification of The Tulip Beds in a similar vein as the fossilised tulip-shaped creatures that remained incertae sedis for such a long time . The incongruent categorisation of these soft-bodied creatures echoes in the first ‘bars’ of the suite as Carruthers recounts the mystery of flower-like filter feeder:

In which a fossilized
species deserving of
the name Problematica
is poeticized by a
scientist, who found in
the three lines of a
stave an image worthy
of the poetry of nature (p. 1)

With the puzzle of Siphusauctum gregarum finally solved by science, the suite curves into the mysteries of planetary motion. Carruthers splices lines from Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi with Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and images generated by sound augmentations. The curve towards such chords also mirrored in the pixelated image squares that sit beneath each stanza. The tulip-like calyx that populate the first 14 stanzas morph into grainy planets and human hands as the suite scales tunings of Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and the Earth.

tonoi

(The earth sings MI,
FA, MI so that you may
infer even from the
syllables that in this
our domicile MIsery
and FAmine obtain.)
SOMEHOW EXPRESS-
ED IN THE EXTREME* (p.12)

While this citational poetics of source matter, semitones and symbols riffs in original and unexpected ways, the collection succeeds most, for me, when Carruthers gives space to his own tones within this celestial cacophony. Perhaps the next instalment of Tonemes, a chapbook forthcoming from SUS Press, will score more of Carruthers’ original compositions.

NOTES

Hejinian, Lyn. ‘The Rejection of Closure’ (1985), in The Language of Inquiry, Berkley: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 40-58.

O’Brien, Lorna J.; Caron, Jean-Bernard. ‘A New Stalked Filter-Feeder from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale, British Columbia, Canada’. PLoS ONE, 1, 2012.
 

TAMRYN BENNETT is a poet and artist. Since 2004 she has created artist’s books and comics in collaboration, exhibiting works in Sydney, Melbourne, Switzerland and Mexico. Her poetry and essays have been published in The Drunken Boat, Cordite, Nth Degree, English in Australia and ImageText. She has a PhD in Literature from UNSW and is currently Education Manager for The Red Room Company.
 

Naming the Ruins

by Dinah Romah

Vagabond

Reviewed and launched by MERLINDA BOBIS

 
 
What do you do with loss? Or with the violated body? Or the devastated dream? What do you with ruins?

You name them. You story them. You incant them into ‘oracles of love.’

This is what Naming the Ruins and its poet Dinah Roma have done: ‘Make oracles of love.’ Even if the poet herself says, ‘No more’, in the opening poem Coda—

The first call
after the pain exhausts—
the voice valiant
in distance. No more
the need to pull in,
to muse on what
could have been.
Or make an oracle
out of love.
(9)

So, the poet protests: ‘No more’ to ‘make an oracle out of love.’ Even as each poem in this book is, in fact, an ‘oracle of love.’

Of course, there is a marked distinction here: To make an oracle out of love is to make love a portent or a promise, a harbinger of something else. But to make an oracle of love is about the loving in the making, as when a poem is loved into being, so

The words are uttered,
each syllable freed
for what it is.
(9)

So the loss, the violation and devastation, the ruins fall away, and what remains is

The sound of heartbeat,
crisp on the verge
of song
not of misery,
nor of joy,
(9)

But of desire, as desire is always on the verge of, which is the very locus of this book—this body re-instating desire that was once violated, devastated, lost.

But how paradoxical that this song which the poet verges on is, in fact

… the silence
of great cathedrals
as the last note
falls
in praise.
(9)

It could be the silence of relief, rest, or illumination after loss and lament, or even after reading a poem. It could be all of these silences, but more compellingly, it is also the silence of praise. That hush of awe.

I hear it in this collection—and strangely, or perhaps aptly, in the white space after a solitary word falls.

I, too, hear Rainer Maria Rilke coming into this white space, as if coming into the light in his Sonnets to Orpheus—

Only in the Realm of Praising should Lament
walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain,
watching over the stream of our complaint
that it be clear upon the very stone

that bears the arch of triumph and the altar.
—(The Sonnets to Orpheus, 237)

So I am led to ask: What right do we have to lament if we cannot praise?

Lament there is in Dinah’s poetry—and always, always praise. And even in the lamentation—whether it is for love betrayed, or for lives wrecked by superstorm Haiyan, or for the loss of a culture in Angkor Wat, or for a mother being laid to rest—lament becomes praise, when it becomes a poem.

In ‘Consuming Sorrow’, the poet raises both query and command—

Why waste the rites
of lament when they can be
put on show? Inside the pantry,
sorted out in cans, labeled
with fancy fonts. Each name,
a use. Or beside a vase of blooms,
magnificent in minutiae,
an exotic figure hand-picked
from a bazaar of all lost
and transported. Or let it
hang from your neck, the sheen
of gems guarding an order
of value, their shores and hills
polished after the silhouette of bone.
Or let a ring grasp the full
diameter of eternity in vows
engraved in indelible death.
(16)

There is a self-mocking stance towards the making precious of grief and its performance—something to be consumed—even as the poet strategically makes sorrow flesh, real, touchable—

Its nature is solid. Its measure
is mass and volume. So let it stand
among your prized possessions.
Let it say: here, touch me,
don’t be afraid. …
(16)

Hear the doubleness of the invitation: ‘Touch me’ and touch the grief (it’s out there, on display), and this body-in-grief (it’s me before you, reader). Make me solid too.

don’t be afraid

A call to courage like a call to arms, in a bid for kinship: from solid to solidarity.  So with her reader-witness, the poet is brave. To lament, to wail, to speak of ruins, to make them seen and heard as incantation—as Philippine shamans would. They who know how praise and transcendence are organic to lament; they who live by oracle-making.

So as we “witness” each poem in this book, we too are co-opted into this oracle-making.

… We [become] bodies
circling into radiance unimpeded
into the trail of sudden tremor.
(34)

It is this sudden tremor of consciousness after each poem that astounds in this collection. That returns us to the silence of great cathedrals.

So witness the lived bodies in this book—utter them, incant them.

Yes, Roma is a Philippine poet. She writes about her specific culture, its world and worldview—that she expands beyond this specificity, beyond the white spaces around her spare lines, beyond the page, the book, and into the air that we breathe.

Roma writes from the voices of her own home. And yet these voices can come alive in our own mouths: other breaths suddenly in our breath. Because—

I am the story told many times over.
I am someone in someone else’s
body of someone else.
(12)

Lest we forget: all of us are that ‘body of someone else.’ But only if we are willing and unafraid to acknowledge it.

NOTES
The Sonnets to Orpheus (I, 8),’The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans & Ed Stephen Mitchell. (1989). NY: Vintage, 1989, p237.
 
 
MERLINDA BOBIS is an award-winning Filipino-Australian writer. She teaches at the University of Wollongong
 

Sea of Heartbeak (Unexpected Resilience)

by Les Wicks

Puncher & Wattman Poetry

ISBN: 9781922186348

Reviewed by JOHN UPTON

 
Before you open Les Wick’s latest collection he’s already playing with your eye and your mind: the title is a joke and an admonition: it’s “Sea of Heartbeak”, not “Heartbreak”. A sentimental cliché becomes a warning – take nothing for granted.

Inside is much serious intent and more jokes, but the most immediate feature is Wick’s striking poetic technique, developed over 35 years of publication. Consider this:

Feed the stairs
roll the corridors like
your last smoke at this edge of lamps. Someone chose
this wacky orange for the waiting room.

An “array” of tests (military language).
Cancer is coming. Cancer has gone.
Moles bloom on atom geography.
Amidst a darkling fever
we delve.

Double barrage, his cinched levis.
Our bones aren’t a cage.
Armour, defence,
these constructs our words have mortared-in around
the pledge of mortality.

No-one would vote for this
but it’s ours.

(‘Calibrated’ 29)

A visit to a doctor’s busy waiting room is deconstructed and re-cut, slightly askew, so that we remain aware of the elements as well as the divinity of the whole. Wicks’s obliqueness makes us search for meaning. (Though one must admit this chopped reality sacrifices the elegance and sensuality of a long, voluptuous line).

Wicks’s style loves a different image in each line:

Silver whistles slept.
Trains had abandoned
that brittle underlife.
In the empty waft of untapped electricity
he was somewhere up the way
& I
in my plastic-bucket-blue uniform
was afraid.

(‘The Hinge’ 13)

This is the opening of the third poem in the book – the situation is set rapidly, there’s dramatic involvement for the reader, but each line is a separate idea, its build is subtle. An employee in the railway underground, perhaps Wicks, is sent to find a vagrant sheltering in a tunnel. A common situation made uncommon by the illuminations. This poem is a long narrative, unique in this collection, and it catches another important element in Wicks’s work – his sympathy for those marginalised and fighting for urban survival. Sympathy for the dispossessed links arms with his suspicious disrespect for authority, the same disrespect captured by his aggressive, choppy style that jiggles your elbow for attention. His poetic is personal but manages to wear its heart on its sleeve without being mawkish about it. Towards the end of “The Hinge”, the narrator finds the NFP (someone with No Fixed Place of abode) and brings him back to the railway office, where the police are called:

He was put
down on a stalwart vinyl chair at the security office,
a bent & filthy hope.              The police
smashed his head
into a matching grey desk.
……

All our days are numbered
moral failure                           impotent vicinities.
Rills of snot,
NFP leaked scared & crying –

the constables thought they had a simple solution,
No point laying charges with fuckin’ NFPs
YOU will never (bash)
come to Central (bash)
again! (bash).

Another moment caromed past,
into the linger of weight
like stone above air, late shift lives on lines.
Still or in flail,
our culpable hands.

(‘The Hinge’ p 16-17)

Violence occurs elsewhere in the collection, but it’s never as explicit as here. That exploration is of a different kind – of perception and reality, of morality, of the emotions. The world is glimpsed in vivid flashes, sometimes from lightning at night, sometimes from passing cars, or in glimpses in harsh daylight from the corner of an eye. The flashes are then edited into sequences that are sharp but puzzling, familiar and yet disturbing, dramatic but amusing:

Leaving the apartment block, note
Barry has a buzz on, a brim.
He sings & howls seamlessly. Down the street
a couple whisper like wire brushes, their love is a nail.

Later, on the train two troubled blondes
from a wooden part of town
exhaust what credit they have on the phone.
Some graffiti – Acpopulus Later. Yesterday, I was served by an assistant
in Islamic scarf & Santa hat. I fit in here,
this country when it works … no worries.

At Rockdale the promissory Black Garter Escorts
sits patiently beside White Lady Funerals.

(‘The Necropolitan’ 18)

Wicks works his ideas through images rather than argument. The poems are visceral; each shaped towards an emotional experience. As a technique for examining history, society and art, postmodernism excels; as a form to illuminate feelings and experience, it can drain the essence if poorly applied. Wicks understands that.

A different aspect of his work is his attitude to words. He’s as exuberant as James Joyce with a spray can and a wall. He plays the punster funster, having a ball: “we are a crowd of trees, awestruck / a crowd of fleas, hungry fleeing / crowd of pleas, more”; “eulogies of eucalyptus”, “lantana manana”, “plucked the snake out of sass”, “suit yourself or suture yourself”, “sprinkle wrinkles”, “[a cop] blocky blond and aerated with action”. His titles include ‘Magic Nihilism’  & ‘The Problem of Splendour’,  ‘The Necropolitan’, ‘On The Nature Of Wickedness And Plums’, ‘Ted Near Dead & the New Lyricism’, ‘Flotsam Ahoy’. He’s like a biblical prophet caught doing stand-up, who can’t believe his luck.

But mostly his eye is quick and exact:

The desert wind wears a blunt dust
cantankerous yap
lifts sheetmetal
from the deaths
of the snub-nosed Silverton buses all
cut like raw opal
pressed into a humiliating servitude
windbreaks for camels.
Punctuation of crows
affixed on air.

(‘Aeolus at the Mulga’ 49)

One reason his postmodern re-cutting works is because Wicks does a neat line in aphorisms. They’re scattered throughout the poems, but in “Secret Saids – Everything I Know” he piles up three pages of them, heaped like strawberries: “Certainty is fickle”, “Your dreams will wake you up”, “One can find truth in a bottle / but the light’s a bit distorted”, “Money isn’t everyone”, and my own reflexive favourite, “Nothing belongs to us all”.

Wicks has an aggressive and striking technique but what, ultimately, is he on about? Well, can you evangelize secular humanism? Wicks believes so. But he implies rather than lectures, his vision accretes through poems and instances, in nourished glimpses rather than a steady stare. And though the tone is knowing, cool, a bit sad, it’s also alert to fecundity and wonder. World-weariness is still a few drinks away.

Usually, though, wonder is understated – ecstasy isn’t cool in these back streets and corner pubs so the verse doesn’t soar –as, say, Murray can – but prefers its urban irony.

Wit is on the prowl, however, and can be warm, sly and cheeky or savage and judgmental: an evening railway station with  “scratchy girl-less gangs / with all the hate that Saturday / had thrown up all / over their denims” (‘The Hinge’ 13)

Although the voice is vernacular, the intention is literary, sometimes mysterious and deliberately difficult. ‘Healed and Hurt’ opens:

I blame you and the island. There’s an electronica,
champagne-strange tinnitus
that I wear like a lei. Feint complaint
from our hearts, all the uniforms are bleached.

(41)

Wearing tinnitus “like a lei “ is good, but I don’t know what the rest means. Which island? “Feint complaint”? Over-compression can reduce a poem’s impact, like a clarinet heard at a distance, where the melodic line comes only in phrases.

For the most part, though, exuberance and wisdom shine through, as in this celebration of the annual migration of bogong moths:

Small deaths serve simply to mark the way
another diaspora pit stop
on this acne-string of peopled coast.
Bogongs are fooled by trashy suns that humans make;
our floodlit, foodless acres of town.
But they leave this bleak cover
ride again
the lightstained indigo of evening.

(‘Shied’ 78).

Throughout this book, a sharp poetic eye works with practised skill to celebrate newness in the everyday.

JOHN UPTON’s poetry has been published in SMH, The Australian, Canberra Times, Quadrant, Cordite, Best Australian Poems 2014  and many other literary magazines and anthologies. He has had five stage plays produced and has written for more than 20 television drama series. His political comedy Machiavelli won the Australian Writers Guild’s award for Best New Play.

Sputnik’s Cousin

by Kent MacCarter

Transit Lounge

ISBN: 9781921924675

Reviewed by DAN DISNEY

If you are looking for narrative sensibilities or lyric sense-making in a narrow sense, then Sputnik’s Cousin is not for you. About as far out as its Russian satellite namesake once was, this is a book of astronomically strange experiments delivered as ‘poems and non-fiction’ (back cover). MacCarter’s texts are a kind of otherly reportage fed through deviant, garbled syntax, and these little machines of momentary expressive orbit are built to record the fetishistic weirdness of their human subjects. Indeed, and as if Sputnik-ing from the sidereal, MacCarter’s excursive and idiosyncratic inventions sputter heartily to their own trajectories; this is literature but not as we have known it.

The book is organised into seven discrete packages of high-octane oddness: in Sputnik’s Cousin we find prose, faux-sonnets, prose-poems, strange verse, even an historical melodrama. ‘Fat Chance’ is pure gallows humor, an enumeration of unexpected death which has less to do with the darker satires of, say, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 or Vanessa Place’s Statements of Fact, and is more like scrolling randomly through liveleak.com scanning for Darwin Awards nominees; ‘Pork Town’ is a Bataille-esque psychogeographical romp across the patina of Melbourne’s inner-western badlands, and both these non-fiction sections offer generic (but not stylistic) variation from the poems. ‘Stencil’ is a suite of 23 non-accentual ‘sonnets’, ungainly but measured, mostly rhyming; here, we may be forgiven for thinking MacCarter is lapsing into his own version of neo-surrealism. The eighth ‘sonnet’, ‘Geiger-Müller Counter’, seems at least initially to want to party hard with the oeuvres of, say, James Tate or Russell Edson –

A little pony of a man with a tiny pony brain
trots up floor after floor … (42)

But unlike the willed madness of surrealism first championed by André Breton in the 1920s and taken up by Tate et al toward the end of the 20^th century, MacCarter is up to something more state-of-the-art than playing out processes capturing (as Isidore Ducasse framed it) a ‘fortuitous meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. MacCarter’s anarchic fervor is instead sustained by distinctly contemporary experimental impulses –

                        detecting blocks, an office tower
the jaundiced shade of gristle Geoffrey Smart wars, reconsiders
chews over, measures. A centre freeway oyster blade Vein

            this man’s contraptions pulsate along clot hot in kitchen space
tallying ill the zap gone microwaves serve wet tantrums
at employee-meat like a tennis star’s frippery of spectrums
re-heated from the United Colours (sic) of Benetton’s face …

            (‘Geiger-Müller Counter’ 42)

Such is the sheer quantity of chopped and mangled imagery in ‘Stencils’, and indeed throughout this book, that instead of rocket like missile-missives, these poem-vessels propagate a ‘rudiments of barnstorming’ (40) more akin to a poetics of image-as-displacement, or the recording of random detritus. Perhaps echoing Kenneth Goldsmith’s notion of ‘language as junk’, these texts are remnants and remainders, repurposed in a cut-up and readymade mode: a new spin, then, on what theorist Marjorie Perloff brands as récriture (that is, literature as recycling). And it is this that makes Sputnik’s Cousin such a difficult but welcome arrival.

Rather than staging surrealistic mayhem, MacCarter’s poems speak from a different order of assemblage; so often the poems are located somewhere between récriture and reconnaissance, played out in this collection as a repurposing of random snapshots, a mixing/ switching of registers, and the recalibrating of canonical forms. In ‘Smoke Odes’, a multiply-epigraphed suite in which a perhaps-augmented MacCarter nods to his influences (literary and elsewise), we see just how many filters overlay the viewfinder –

Oddity, your small army
of guerilla cosmopolitans and pomegranate cleverness
keeps our gossip sugary and tasteful
in forums
and under Magritte’s derby
cluster our prized ruby gems
… Neil Gaiman, Osamu Tezuka, Eddie the Eagle, Tom Baker, et al
(‘Kissing Frank O’Hara [not on the mouth remix]’ 23).

As promised on the book’s back cover, these texts ‘hum a progress charged by humanity’s witless pursuit of technology and civility’; Sputnik’s Cousin charts a progression from Darwin’s Beagle (87) to near-future potentialities and, at heart, these meditations (at times hilarious, at times confronting, at times outright confusing) promulgate a particular and peculiar worldview churned through eccentric grammar – gerunds, denominal verbs, split infinitives, subjunctives – swirling into vertiginous non-unity. Prosodically then, if after Pope the sound must seem an echo to the sense, these poems are loud expositions of a world falling to pieces.

MacCarter writes how ‘I swear at times I know’ (130), and this book is suffused with deliberately destabilised processes of deliberation. The texts are always fast-paced and straight-faced, but also cockeyed – the poet ‘will oilspill/ your salted waters’ (16), and ‘tip the cup for sip’ (16); these are not so much ‘plots of gibberish’ (125) as febrile examinations of meaning-making (and where that has got us so far, circa 21c.) by a poet who seems altogether at ease as an outsider expressing the contours of exile to his ‘fellow travellers’ (this the literal translation of ‘Sputnik’) –

corroding its circuitry, the hairdos of maniacs
cut to its verb
to be 

remains. What remains (?)
of the grammar and me
oxidize behind
arse factory
supine from its unstoppable whispering
of why?
(‘Mergers/ Acquisitions’ 93)

MacCarter is exploring expressivist possibility here, and indeed experimenting with the plasticity of his material (that is, language); this post-po/mo jongleur is a free range radical stuffing his texts with images not so much fragmented as purposefully blurred. These are snapshots of an existence undertaken at velocity where even affect is bleary, vague, and out of focus: ‘I had bang lick wow they was abject’ (134). MacCarter’s is a savvy but also risky experimentalism, and by intentionally defocussing the image he will certainly be misread by some. But the great value of Sputnik’s Cousin is that it is not derivative (despite the many references to literary influences throughout the book), but instead opens intelligent new heterotopic possibility.

Indeed, Sputnik’s Cousin is a laboratory strewn with sensible inventions, where precision seems to have been intentionally deprioritized, and the view defocused to imitate the speeds of contemporary existence. The broken syntax echoes current conditions of consciousness – multitasking, distracted, spanning surfaces without the depth-experience of connection – and these poems are plausible models, a collection of ummwhatwasIsaying sayings. When surveying the persistence of older modes of the lyric impulse, arché-Conceptualist Christian Bök tells us how he is ‘amazed that poets will continue to write about their divorces, even though there is currently a robot taking pictures of orange ethane lakes on Titan’. File Kent MacCarter’s book under ‘feral’ or ‘HAZCHEM’, and expect the dizziness that can happen when accustomed modes of understanding shift, or the vertigo of non-comprehension when a mutant genus first arrives. Sputnik’s Cousin is voicing the everyday in ways that are lyrically, indeed generically, challenging: a feistier means of having the tops of our heads taken off.

DAN DISNEY teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang University (Seoul)

Onkalo

by Bernice Chauly

(Math Paper Press, 2013)

Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE

‘Say it loud, say it silent’ (Socks)

Bernice Chauly’s Onkalo begins with an extraordinary quotation in the preface from Michael Madison, director of Into Eternity, a documentary on Onkalo, a nuclear fuel repository being built on the coast of Finland:

You are now in the tunnel. This place is not a place of honour. No esteemed deeds are Commemorated her. You should not have come here. You are heading towards a place where you should never go. What is there is dangerous and the danger will Still be present in your time, as it is in ours. Please turn around and never come back. There is nothing here for you. Go no further

This sense of a forbidden place, a place where entry will cost you, where there is no reward and only risk, is an apt vehicle for Chauly’s collection, which documents the poetic idea of bravery and risk, not in the sense of the confessional but in hard-edged reflection of decisive moments in a life; it is a place where the social, personal and political intersect. This place of intersection, this Onkalo if you will, reveals itself through the poet’s mastery of form, whether it be in the refinement of the love lyric or in the exhortation of the political cry. It also reveals itself through the apt placement of individual poems.

It is of interest to reflect on why the quality of bravery is so inherently important to an appreciation of Onkalo. In an earlier collection, The Book of Sins (2008), Chauly challenges her readers by writing with a starling lyricism of incidents of violence (This Love) to tenderness (Forgiveness). It is difficult indeed both psychologically and technically to write of what is inflicted upon us, or indeed bestowed upon us, but the poet succeeds in this regard through the concision of language and image.

In Onkalo inquiry is placed decisively in the political realm as a kind of political ecology, effectively underscoring the personal. The first long poem in the collection, Jerit, speaks to Malaysia as Ginsberg spoke to the  United States of the 1950’s in Howl:

Will you let us write of new pages by those
who in yellow-infused riotous colour
betrayed the hallowed streets of the city
in the hundreds, in the tens and tens of thousands
who fought back the tear-gassed alleys
with brave tears and Maalox

Following on from this is Still, a rhythmically concise poem questioning where ethnic divisions may lead:

When does thought become action?
Will the keris strike yellow flesh?
Will it know when it is satisfied?

The emphasis on what I have termed the ‘political ecology’ of the collection is revealed through apt thematic placement. The title poem Onkalo for instance appears straight after these two overtly political poems, and segues into an evocation of the personal at once  endangered and exposed. Onkalo, a place of ‘eternal thirst’, of ‘spent eviscerated/energy rods’ is called to rest ‘until the fiery skies/call out to you’, captures the sense of flame and risk that appears in Untitled 1 where rest suggests protection and renewal:

I am better off like this
in between the gnarled roots
the folds of black earth, the hands
of fertile leaves that are now in bloom

In Untitled 2 the city is portrayed as a site of metal, fuel and corruption, an Onkalo of now:

The city is tiresome
it vomits interminable streams
of coloured metal, engaged
on roads that toil underneath
the weight of the familiar

But it is also a place (Untitled 3) where one flames, one lives, a place you are compelled and indeed willed to inhabit:

The irreverent thrill
of a wanton evening –
on the flat road to home.

All under the gaze of a malevolent heaven:

The concrete sky
aloof, adamantine
decapitating the haze

With Signs we find an extension of a Persephonian trope, where the poet leaves the Onkalo of a landscape ‘translated by fear/ruled by pain’ to become springlike and ’green again’, ‘populated once again/like pollen’.

This is not to suggest that the collection is subsumed under this conceit. Poems of love, travel and challenge (see the brilliant The Snatch) follow their own trajectory, but with the motif recurring like a theme in musical composition. Mood and climate weave their own variation in such poems of chill winter as The Nut House and In Amsterdam, or in the love lyric Novo Tel. In the exquisite Luang Prabang, longing flows through blossoming nature in order to define what the poet must say, must apprehend:

Maybe this is enough
I tell myself – perhaps longing
is enough

As I imagine reaching out
for your hand, across the
continental drifts
across the long banquet table
pierced with white lilies,
sugared roses, the spirals of jasmine
and the scent of a new world.

The penultimate poem, Sometimes, takes us to the world of death and grieving familiar to reader of Chauly’s fine memoir Growing Up With Ghosts, and in the concluding poem, 1973, she writes:

I chose my suffering
I walked with it
I ate it with deliberation
I breathed it, I drank it all
in its brief longevity
…….

I chose my suffering
but I did not choose to see you die
I have paid grief its price
from the realm of the living
to the dead who still haunt me.

In the scoring of this suffering, Onkalo brings us the complexities of a life, the nerve of being.
 
 
JENNIFER MACKENZIE is the author of  Borobudur (Transit Lounge, 2009), republished in Indonesia as “Borobudur and Other Poems” (Lontar, Jakarta, 2012). She has presented her work at many festivals and conferences in Asia, most recently at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Myanmar (supported by the Australia Council for the Arts) and at the Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators Conference in Singapore.

Radiance

by Andy Kissane

Puncher & Wattmann, 2014

ISBN: 9781922186522

Reviewed by ANNA KERDIJIK NICHOLSON

Radiance is Andy Kissane’s fourth collection of poetry. In my view this collection is a subtle change from, but consistent with, his previous books of poetry (1).

Kissane may be setting out his thesis in the poem ‘Summer’, in which he writes:

Poets are always searching for how things might fit together,
the tongue and groove illusion, the Fibonacci sequence
that can be found in both nature and the sonnet…(61)

The Fibonacci sequence is the mathematical term given to number sequences which progress like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. You add the penultimate number to the ultimate number to get the next number. It’s applied for computer algorithms and graphs. The sequence can also be seen in biological settings, such as branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone. (2)

It seems apt that Kissane refers to the Fibonacci sequence in his work. The sequencing, the attention to lineation and homogeneous stanza lengths, and the appreciation for the organic qualities of the natural world: all these things are present in this beguiling, deceptively off-hand, careful poetry.

In ‘The Bluetongue as an Answer to the Anxiety of Reputation’, Kissane writes:

When I take the poets on a tour of the garden,
Liz comes out from under a log, a life model
unveiling for a portrait. She’s happy enough to bask
in the warm afternoon sun and soak up the attention.
Why fret about where you are in the scheme of things?
Instead, cultivate the blissful solitude of a bluetongue,
grow fat and warm on the exposed rocks
that nature bequeaths you and occasionally open one eye
to gaze at the theatrical manoeuvrings of those
whose blood is thick and cold with unfulfilled ambition.

                                                From ‘The Bluetongue as an Answer to the Anxiety of Reputation’  (36)

The documentary method brings its readers news from the world. In the book’s first poem, ‘Flight’, the poet gives a tantalising prescription: ‘take the afternoon off and head out past Kurnell/to Cape Solander. There, on the white sandstone cliffs/above the vast flood, look for humpbacks’. You are not above the sea or the ocean, you are above ‘the vast flood’ to witness ‘the corrugated whiteness of [the humpback’s] wobbly ascension,/the dark certainty and blazing glitter of its fall’.  And in doing this, even though ‘you cannot name the endangered species/growing in this headland heath’, ‘you can close/your eyes, you decide to do this simple thing,/…/ aware now of this immense, unknown life/going on around you, within you, as the buffeting,/lunging wind picks you up and gives you wings.’

As Kissane writes, these are poems made as a result of ‘A radical attention to the world’(3).

The particular Kissane quality that results from his radical attention to the world is the manner in which he shows us what he has sensed. It is conversational, deeply versed in the Australian vernacular and delivered with a light touch. The reader is never far from a gritty humour and follows the long lines and chatty everyday-ness until they are deeply, unwittingly, in the numinous, the spiritual and the wondrous. The wings the wind gives to the whale-watcher at Cape Solander appear and reappear in many guises, as ‘two tiny bumps forming/near your shoulder blades, the beginning of wings, perhaps,’(4) and ‘when I first loved you and we soared over the harbour, our wings stretched out in effortless, astonishing flight’(5).

To give context to the ‘radical attention to the world’ quote:

… A radical attention to the world
leaves much that cannot be understood, let alone described
no matter the facility with language or craft.(6)

Kissane makes a terrific fist of both. These are elegant meditations, perhaps prayers, which have a touch of magic realism—by which I mean, and probably inaccurately, a little of the sub- and un-conscious—which move us organically toward an understanding. Kissane achieves this with detailed, nuanced description:

The mist seems to lift a little and I notice a woman
wearing an ankle-length dress and a wide-brimmed hat
walking beside me on the strand. I realise that I’m out
perambulating with Virginia Woolf who is talking to me.
“What are you doing in my Cornwall diary?” she asks.
“Well, at least you’re not one of my characters.
I’m sick of the way they think they understand themselves
better than I do. But if we’re going to spend any more time together,
you’ll have to stop that infernal overwriting. What did you do,
swallow a Latin thesaurus? Perambulating? Really, it’s too much.”
I nod at Virginia while dodging an incoming wave
that’s about to soak my Converse runners, but she’s already
striding up onto the headland where she says
we might catch the purple shadow of the pilchards
as it slides across the face of the sea like a blush.

From ‘Three Visions of Virginia Woolf’ (36)

The result, as this quote intends to demonstrate, is a poetry which is revelatory, humorous and intelligent.

The persona of these poems is a man in maturity, ensconced in suburbia, driving, cooking, parenting, arguing, writing; his social conscience is not jaded, he is able to understand what it is to love the women in his life, he’s not scared of being compassionate, not scared by long-dead writers (such as Virginia Woolf) communing with him, and he is attentive to the madness, the incomprehensibility and the deliciousness of what takes place inside and outside one’s head:

…people of hard muscle and freckled skin,
friends I’ve lost contact with, writers whose work I love,
all of them clamouring for fish soup and conversation,
as we suddenly stumble on what we really think
here on the balcony within the visible and vanishing air.

from ‘Prelude: Angophora Submerged in Fog’ (24)

Kissane understands and accepts his place in the world: ‘I perform a role/crucial for adolescent wellbeing: efficient driving.’ But his place in the world is also as witness and curator. He stays at the Canterbury Ice Rink, watches as his daughter goes off in her electric blue jacket to practices her Lutz:

I can see her as she concentrates on the long backward
glide, digs her toe pick down hard into the ice, lifts
and spins into the air, striving with her whole body
to land this difficult jump for the first time
from ‘Trip to the Ice Rink’ (61)

In his curatorial role, he selects material from his ‘radical attention to the world’ and he selects the quantity and manner in which it is presented. Kissane excels at using what he calls ‘the grit and gyprock of words’ (60). He fashions the poems into elegant patterns on the page and is fond of three-line stanzas. All this apparent ease of expression, rather like his daughter at the rink, is practised and wrought. He has divided the book into four sections and each section has within it a narrative of meaning, with the poems carefully sequenced to develop the thought. Within the poems, the flowing lines have careful line endings, the words at both end and beginning of the lines selected to bear the slight emphasis of their position in the line and there is plenty of enjambment to lead you (often literally) down the garden path, past the joke to ‘suddenly stumble on what we really think’, and to radiance. This poise, this hard work in selecting and arranging, brings a subtlety and structure to this mature poetry. It makes for a very elegant book.

The final part of the collection, The Sea of Tranquillity, is a long riff on the metaphor of Kissane being married to the Moon, which he personifies effectively.

‘Like an umbraphile, I drove a pale green Corolla
up the Hume Highway from Melbourne to Sydney
with my belongings in the boot and a rolled-up futon
crammed into the back seat. Arriving at a friend’s house
in Croydon Park, The Moon opened the front door.
I saw shadow bands, a single intense diamond
and a fluttering corona pulsing around her outline.
When she stepped forward, I realised she’d been blocking
the light in the dim hallway. She smiled and her top lip
glowed with these red spots, but when I blinked
they were gone. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick.
I was launched into blissful orbit, stranded in the trackless
heavens, unsure of the right angle of attack,
how to come down to earth without burning up.’

                                                From ‘Total Eclipse’ (67)

The Sea of Tranquillity brings together the components of Kissane’s very particular style which are at work in this collection: his magic realism; his ability to describe love and adoration, warts and all; his humour; his long narrative line and his unveiling of radiance/Radiance. The collection as a whole is slender, elegant and well-constructed.

1. Facing the Moon (Five Islands Press, 1993); Every Night They Dance (Five Islands Press, 2000); Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009)
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number
3. From ‘Summer’, p61
4. From ‘Beloved’, p31
5. ibid

ANNA KERDIJIK NICHOLSON‘s second book, Possession, received the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Prize and Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2011 it was shortlisted for the ACT Judith Wright Prize and the NSW Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry. She trained as a lawyer, lives in Sydney and is on the board of the national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry.