Tag: issue 18

Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945

by Michael Farrell

Palgrave

ISBN 978-1-137-48571-7

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

Michael Farrell’s Writing Australian Unsettlement is necessary reading. It is a welcome contribution to a small field. However, Farrell’s work has several areas that are problematic and that are also symptomatic of wider issues concerning poetry and politics in today’s society. It should be seen then as a starting point, an opening up, rather than a definitive statement or end of a conversation.

Part of the modern and contemporary poetry and poetics series edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis for Palgrave Macmillan, the aim of the book is to ‘unsettle’ Australian poetics. This is taken here to mean the work of undoing assumptions, firmness, bedrock as it is currently constituted in Australian literary criticism, particularly in a nationalist canonical iteration. Farrell returns to ideas of unsettlement time and time again, giving a variety of definitions, particularly in the introduction. Somewhat later in the work he states:

The hunt is on for new, formerly useless poetries, perhaps poetries in Perloff’s terms that are ‘by other means’; other languages and genres (like diaries) that may, if not constitute a new ‘model of a national Australian literature’ at least foster new reading and writing networks of the history and the contemporary that attend to different literacies, including that of the visual. (84)

This is a book then not only about content and form, but intended as a sort of speculative methodological reading enterprise. This is through examining poetry from the colonial period from Bennelong’s letter from 1792 until various twentieth century texts until World War Two. For a review that discusses the contents of the book at length please see Matt Hall’s in Cordite.

As worthy as that enterprise is, that desire to make a ‘new’ thing, Farrell is also indebted to, if not limited by, past discourses, languages, tropes, motifs. Indeed, it is one of the ironies that he deploys the following quote from Martin Harrison early in Writing Australian Unsettlement:

Borrowed terms like ‘pastoral’, ‘urban’ and ‘landscape’ for instance, may work very differently or simply may not work at all when applied to Australian poetry. (1)

It is ironic because over the course of the book, Farrell relies, too much in my opinion, on imported, metropolitan theory, framing and quotation for legitimacy. Witness the repeated use of ‘______ says insert quote’ from Freud to Bataille to Deleuze to Sontag (117, 157, 171). These are often used without criticism – theory remains deployed rather than challenged – and one apparent result is that the observation of poetry cannot stand alone without participating in an elaborate citation ritual that only reaffirms the canon of European continental theory. To buttress the continental theory is the North American field.

Consider the following passage:

Meanwhile the critical tools have also been developed to begin to read this work, whether as ‘exophonic’ or appropriative writing, or in terms of visual prosody (Perloff); in terms that resist the dematerialisation of language and parataxis (Silliman and other language writers); through theories developed from visual poetry (Cluver, Willard Bohn); theories of space, textual criticism, and archival work that read the page as a page rather than as a hoist for a message, that recognise the freedom of handwriting and resist the hegemony of typography (Davidson, McGann, Werner and Howe); or that account for the ‘non semantic’ (Forrest-Thomson). These theories themselves draw on criticism associated with concrete poetry and works such as ‘Un Coup de Des’ as well as the histories of the avant-garde. (83)

If Europe is good for theory, North America is good for the academic work of today. Primary among these is Marjorie Perloff, who supplied a blurb on the book’s back cover and who is invoked with regularity. However, Perloff seems to me to be the arch settled and settling critic of the white American avant garde. As a node in the network of contemporary writing, one might question not only her relevance for work on colonial Australian poetry but also her politics. Witness recent criticism of her by Mongrel Coalition, Fred Moten, Kim Chen, C A Conrad and others.

This heavy quotation and reference is evident throughout. I recognise how it mocks some undergraduate idea of academic writing and enables assemblage, a defining part of the work, to be meta-commented upon. Yet this seems at odds with an independent impulse, with autonomy as a political and authorial subject position as possibly enabled by the Harrison quote early on.  This is, of course, not to establish a false binary between voice and assemblage either, or to dismiss a speculative enterprise. Paradox is, of course, not a failing in and of itself, but the implication of such importation is to undermine the importance of the local. It might appear global, but it is possibly a colonised manoeuvre. There is a lot of Australian literary criticism in the archive and reading against the paradigmatic straw man grain might have enabled a different perspective. As it stands one can find in Clement Semmler or Vincent Buckley or others, a complicated way of reading that might not be as settled as Farrell makes out. This is supported by the lack of discussion of the Australian field in general. To take only genocide studies what of important work by Attwood, Reynolds, Tatz (161)? The broader question to ask then is: why can’t we apply an unsettled reading to theory and field and not only poetic text?

This framing is despite the fact that Farrell is a very adept close reader. When it comes to the Australian poetry in and of itself there is nuance and insight. Readers should pay attention to his criticism of Norman Harris’ ‘Letter to Jim Bassett’ (104) and drover bush texts (186). This insight is there too in the section on Ngarla songs. However, in some of the Indigenous sections there is slippage that I think is symptomatic of Australian academic culture more generally (25). In one passage that talks about the democratic semiotic possibility of the equals sign Farrell writes it ‘resembles Indigenous philosophy rather than settlement sentiment’ (80). I would be interested to know how one can sustain such binarism. There are several other moments like this. This collapsing of specificity may, though not necessarily, be read as an ahistoricising gesture, for it collapses important distinctions and arguments. How should ‘we’ collapse Roe and Neidjie, Bandler and Pearson into a thing? It flattens the diversity in other words, which people on the inside of the discourse may find important. This is not, though, a defense, in a positivist sense, of linearity, or of cleanliness, just a comment on the need for consistent attentiveness to frame and context. Indeed, the heterodoxies, contradictions and complications of a thing, if it could be said to exist, called Indigenous philosophy remain submerged in Writing Australian Unsettlement precisely because the texts quoted are Freud and Deleuze not Indigenous people themselves as they exist in ethnographic and self-authored texts (see Deborah Bird-Rose, Sally Treloyn, Magabala Books (Various).

Mascara readers may be particularly interested in chapter 3, which examines Jong Ah Sing’s The Case. Farrell writes against other critics, who ‘in demonstrating their concern with The Case’s biographical and historical significance, largely treat its poetics as a barrier to truth and usefulness, rather than as a contribution to a remarkable assemblage of a new kind of English, and of a new kind of poetic text’ (66). Instead Farrell makes the compelling claim that the poetics of Sing’s work are important in and of themself and ‘how Jong’s inventive practice unsettles notions of Australian writing’ (67). It is one text I would like to seek out for myself, particularly for its visually arresting style that Farrell discusses.

Settlement as a word has currency in academic debates now, but the elasticity of its deployment in this work, undermines a politically astute and historically attentive reading. You can’t build an empire on sand, but nor can you build a humpy on water (see 157). Notwithstanding its problems, Writing Australian Unsettlement, is a major intervention in the dialectic of un/settlement and makes for entertaining and challenging reading. It is necessary for those with an interest in Australia, avant garde reading techniques, colonialism and poetry.
 
 
ROBERT WOOD has published work in Southerly, Overland, Plumwood Mountain and a variety of academic journals. He is currently completing a PhD at UWA and is a regular contributor to Cultural Weekly. His next book, heart-teeth light-bitten crownland, is due out from Electio Editions later this year.

Inside My Mother

by Ali Cobby Eckermann

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922146885

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

Since the appearance of her popular first collection, Little Bit Long Time, in 2009, Aboriginal poet, Ali Cobby Eckermann, has produced five more books including a couple of verse novels, the second of which, Ruby Moonlight, won the NSW Premier’s Prize in 2013. Along with Samuel Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, she is one of the most prominent Aboriginal poets writing at the moment.

According to its author, Inside my Mother, grew out of a period of mourning and overseas travel which proved therapeutic. This fourth collection has a core of powerful and moving poems — and a number of others which are a little less forceful. Eckermann’s family has been affected by the “taken away” syndrome for three generations and the impact of this is the genesis for quite a few poems. “First Born” and “The Letter” are just two of them.

In the latter a mission girl who is learning typing begins: “Dear Mother / The Mission is good. /The food is good. / I am good” before “ripp(ing) the page from the typewriter” and starting a new one which begins “Mummy / Where are you?” It’s all over in twelve lines. The narrative strategy is simple, as is the vocabulary, but the point is indelibly made. Mainstream readers who find this too simple altogether and who demand the “whitefella” sophistication of, say, Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery, are probably missing the point. Cobby Eckermann’s  poignant distillation here is just another thing that poetry can do well. There’s no need for a hierarchy.

An interesting, and relatively unusual, dimension to Inside my Mother is how Cobby Eckermann deals with the tensions within Aboriginal families and culture, not just the pressures from “outside”, as it were. “I Tell You True”, for instance, is a dramatic monologue from the viewpoint of an Aboriginal woman explaining her addiction to alcohol. It’s in a stricter form than most of the other poems and is modified by, rather than couched in, Aboriginal English.

The narrator’s reasons for despair, one in each stanza, include a daughter “burnt to death inside a car”, a sister dead who has “hung herself to stop the rapes” and a mother who has been killed, “battered down the creek” — a death for which the speaker herself is partly blamed by her own  family. “Their words have made me wild / I can’t stop drinking I tell you true / ‘Cos I was just a child”.

It’s significant that the speaker doesn’t disclose the race of the perpetrators. This is a further sign of Cobby Eckermann’s political sophistication; she doesn’t just keep on hitting easy targets. The poem also ranges more widely by implying that domestic violence like this is not unique to any one group or the product of a single cause.

There’s no doubt, however, about who the guilty are in Cobby Eckermann’s “Kulila”, a poem written entirely in Aboriginal English and voiced by one of the “old people” who still remember the massacres of an earlier century. “don’t forget ’em story / night time tell ’em to the kids / keep every story live // … sit down here real quiet way / you can hear ’em crying / all them massacre mobs “  Dramatic monologues like this one were the forte of Kevin Gilbert, the Wiradjuri poet (1933-1993). Cobby Eckermann (b. 1963) makes good use here of a strategy and linguistic  authenticity which non-Indigenous poets can employ only at some risk should they wish to ventriloquise on behalf of Aboriginal people.

Occasionally, as in the beginning of the book’s final poem, “Evacuate”, Eckermann’s language is not strong enough for its task. “today I shall relinquish / my body // I shall process my / dreams of tragedy”.  Although we have seen a number of tragedies throughout the book, the phrase “dreams of tragedy” remains unfocussed and over-explicit.

For this reader two other relatively minor shortcomings in Inside my Mother are the lack of a glossary for important words from Aboriginal languages and the poet’s abandonment, for the most part, of traditional punctuation, a strategy now a hundred years old and not as effective as its users are inclined to imagine.

The fact that punctuation is commonly foregone in much contemporary free verse does not, in itself, establish its effectiveness. The small, momentary confusions the reader often experiences through this convention can sometimes be a good thing artistically (analogous, for instance, to the clever use of enjambment) but it can also distract from the main thrust of the poem, a factor even more important when the poetry is political, as much of Cobby Eckermann’s work is.

This reminds us too that the role of politics in Aboriginal poetry has always been an inevitable and a difficult one. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920 —1993) admitted this when she once (inadequately) described her own poetry as “sloganistic, civil rightish, plain and simple”¹. Some of her best poetry was when she approached important problems indirectly. Lionel Fogarty (b. 1958), on the other hand, has often, in his idiosyncratic way, turned the language of the conquerors against themselves, using “ English against the English”². Fogarty has argued that the way Aboriginal poets “write and talk is ungrammatical, because it doesn’t have any meanings in their spirit”³. This can lead to a poetry of strong feeling (often anger) but which may not be as effective politically as it intends to be.

Ali Cobby Eckermann (and, to an even greater extent, Samuel Wagan Watson) steers between these two extremes and her poems, for the most part, tend therefore to work more effectively, both aesthetically and politically, than they might have otherwise done.

Inside my Mother is a worthy addition to Ali Cobby Eckermann’s growing body of work. It is packed with things that non-Indigenous Australians need to know or be reminded about — while, at the same time communicating effectively, I would imagine, with the still-disenfranchised Australians for whom she is increasingly a spokeswoman.
 
 
Citations
1. Kath Walker, “Aboriginal Literature” Identity 2.3 (1975) pp. 39–40
2. From Preface to New and Selected (1995) by Lionel Fogarty http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/new-and-selected-poems-0214000
3. ibid.
 
GEOFF PAGE is an Australian poet and critic. He has edited The Best Australian Poems , 2014 and The Best Australian Poems, 2015.

Small Acts of Disappearance

by Fiona Wright

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-922146-93-9

Reviewed by EMMA ROSE SMITH

‘I just saw Fiona Wright,’ says my friend over the phone. ‘At least, I thought it was her.’

A statement that wouldn’t be out of place at a poetry event or around the streets of the inner-west of Sydney. But my friend is not in Glebe or Enmore; she’s been sent for a few weeks, for her own wellbeing, to one of Sydney’s private mental health institutions.

‘I didn’t know whether to say hi or not,’ she says. ‘I mean, you never want to publicly know anyone from these places. What was I going to say: I like your poetry?’

This was about a year ago, before Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance was published, before any one of its essays featured in Overland or …. My friend and I had read Wright’s poetry, heard her on the radio, seen her do readings. We did not know that she was open about her condition and was in fact researching its details, contradictions, and existence in humans and literature, as the topic of her doctorate.

In one of the essays in the collection, ‘In Increments’, Wright describes the visceral experience of being admitted to a day program for eating disorders. This was years before the longer-stay program where my friend saw, but decided not to greet, her. During the program, Wright is questioned by the doctors for her garrulous attitude. She loses weight, and is kicked out. Desperate, she eats cake every day in an attempt to gain enough weight to be accepted back into sessions. She writes: “I cried a lot. ‘You’re living my dream,’ the dietician said. I smiled, though I wanted to slap her, and hard.”

Each of the essays in this collection covers a different element of illness: as it is seeded in youth; as it takes hold in uncertain times; as it is experienced as a foreigner; as it is treated by various practitioners. Wright also assesses the appearance of illness in fictional and nonfictional writings by writers such as Christina Stead, Carmel Bird, Tim Winton, John Berryman and Louise Glück. Anorexia is rendered with an honesty and humility I’ve never seen before, by descriptions of its contradictions, its inner complexities, its varying effects upon varied humans. It is seen within the context of addiction; of deception; of a desperately certain foundation amidst the life’s uncertainty. In an essay on the miniature, Wright explains the mistaken conflation of smallness with control:

This is a false and contradictory kind of command: the more control we try to exert over our eating and our food, the more our illness asserts itself and the less able we are to operate autonomously . . . We possess the world, perhaps, but in the process we are dispossessed of our own selves.

She was sick, with a denial of that sickness, for several years before the dispossession could be held apart and called what it was.

It would be irresponsible to discuss Small of Acts of Disappearance without an analysis of the societal structures that contributed towards its creation. Wright is capable of accessing healthcare treatments, despite the detriment their price tag has had upon her; however, not all who experience hunger may be able—financially or otherwise—to enter private healthcare. Australian eating disorder treatment in public systems is hard to reach, says Wright:

No state has more than about eight public hospital beds for adult eating disorder patients; these beds are all in locked psychiatric wards, the waiting lists are often up to thirty-six weeks long and only available to the critically underweight and medically imperilled. I had to fight, and fight hard, to get the treatment that I needed.

Small Acts of Disappearance is not social criticism and doesn’t claim to be; but considering the aforementioned limitations, it’s clear that institutional structures are in stark need of reform.

Wright also dissects hunger in the context of her stay in Sri Lanka, where many citizens go hungry without choosing to do so. She notes that the food she threw out in this time could have supported some of Sri Lanka’s homeless population. The disposal of resources is itself a privilege that is met with blankness by those who cannot afford waste. She writes: “In Colombo, my hunger was obscene. It was not predicated on need, on poverty or parentlessness or war, corruption or greed . . . My own denial was something as incomprehensible to my local friends as the hunger they lived alongside was to me.”

If we are to utilise intersectionality in our reading of Wright’s essays, we must ask: How do class, education, whiteness, heteronormativity, ability, and other social factors influence mental health? How do they influence our capacity to access care, and feel safe doing so? How might someone of different circumstances experience anorexia or another hunger disorder? Wright notes, but does not properly address, the myriad embodiments of hunger beyond her own. “Illness is a foreign country,” Wright declares in ‘In Group’. “We do things differently here.” And the natures of ‘hunger’ range as widely as that of the people who live alongside it.

Small Acts of Disappearance changed my ways of understanding food, vulnerability, and control. Midway through grocery shopping, I remembered Wright’s descriptions of the textures of food, “choking up in my throat, as glutinous as craft glue.” I thought twice about buying rice. I decided to try not to use the word ‘binge’ in casual conversation. ‘In Hospital’ mentions the shock Wright received encountering mainstream usages of sickness discourse, after finishing an eating program.  “A waiter brought a brownie to my table with my coffee and called me ‘naughty’.”

Wright herself had misconceptions about the control of food: “I couldn’t see myself as one of those women—I thought that eating disorders only happen to women who are vain and selfish, shallow and somehow stupid; it took me years to realise that the very opposite is true.”

I read these essays as a poet, and also as someone with lived experience of other kinds of obsession. From both perspectives, Wright’s clarity and generosity of expression contribute towards the rendering of a resounding text. Within the urge to sate curiosity, to seek causes and convenient vocabulary, the reader encounters sentences built with years of thought: “I think sometimes that the drive to hunger, the drive towards smallness, is about precisely this: we feel so uncertain, so anxious about our rightful space within the world, that we try to take up as little of it as possible.”

Wright speaks eloquently of the ways we choose hunger. As a way of exercising agency in the midst of life’s pandemonium. As a reduction of the inelegancies of the self, its clumsy inaccuracies. As a method to focus. (“I still find it so difficult to think, to write, to work, after I eat; how my thinking feels so much sharper, more vivid, when I’m hungry.”) Wright’s ending essay, ‘In Hindsight’, contains the undeniably clear announcement: “When I was hungry, I felt alert and intense and alive along every inch of my skin, and I felt unassailable.” It is not difficult to apply these reasonings to other methods that we utilise to get on with our lives: exercise, medication, meditation, sex, alcohol; any number of the superstitions and rituals that we engage in to best let our creative projects blurt out from within us. All methods are flawed; but sometimes it’s the closest thing we’ve got to something that works.

EMMA ROSE SMITH writes manic poetry, smelly-lady nonfiction, and fiction that overuses the word ‘ululate’. She is often mistaken for a vegetarian. Her chapbooks and zines, including ‘Goonbag Mystic’, ‘Fingerbang’, ‘Pull Out the Pop-Schlop’, and ‘Pink Bets’ are available from her lounge room. She is starting a collaborative literary index of events and submissions (http://spokensydneystories.tumblr.com/), and drafting her first novel.

The Hazards

by Sarah Holland-Batt

UQP

ISBN 978-0-7022-5359-1

Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO

The first poem of Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Hazards provides a fitting opening for a collection so beautiful, so cold, and so much about the coldness of beauty. The eponymous jellyfish speaker of the poem ‘Medusa’ is unapologetically cerebral—‘a brain trailing its nettles’, a mind ‘vain and clear as melting ice’. So much so, in fact, that the speaker seems to exist as a drifting organ of ‘bitter reason’, separate from the organs where the capacity for feeling and compassion reside: the nerves ‘blooming around [it]’ and the soul which ‘billows out like hollow silk’.

One might dare to read the medusa of the poem as avatar for the poet persona. In a 2014 interview with Jacinta Le Plastrier published in Cordite, Holland-Batt remarked on the importance of the cerebral in her composition process: ‘My poems are acts of thinking […] I know that this is different for other poets, who are perhaps more impressionistic and have a more Romantic conception of their own poiesis. For me, writing poetry is a wholly conscious process […]’ (1)

Indeed, the overall tone of the collection is detached, rational. The poems are technically flawless, consistently gorgeous, but often unsettling. For if the poet is the predatory medusa, and by extension, the Medusa of Greek myth who turns the objects of her gaze into stone, then the implication is that poetry-making is as brutal as the paralysis of a hapless victim—the textual equivalent of turning the living into the statuesque dead. Poetry as enacted by The Hazards is premeditated violence. So is art at large, the collection posits, as well as the creation and appreciation of the beautiful in general. And it is this quality of calculated violence, this mingling of the cerebral and visceral, that makes The Hazards so powerful, so disquieting, so moving.

The intertwining of beauty and violence is most apparent in the poems ‘Approaching Paradise’ and ‘Beauty is a Ticket of Admission to All Spectacles’. The first poem reveals that death and pain are fundamental elements of a beach paradise:

You will find paradise in a whiting
drowning in a bucket of freshwater,
in the jammed blade of a fishscale
like quicklime under the thumb.
(19)

The sublime requires sacrificial victims: ‘the bloated body washed in’, ‘bikini-clad tourists jerked out by rips,’ and ‘A shark’s slit corpse […] / its head yanked on a hook like a sacrifice. / Its shank is smooth and black as paradise.’ (20)

In the second poem, art’s beauty makes the horrific pleasurable, admitting the imagination even to that ‘you do not want to enter’: gory alternate versions of the scene depicted in Goya’s La muerte del picador in which the bull dies instead; Judith in the act of beheading Holofernes before Klimt paints her portrait. Because of their beauty, ‘[t]hese things are easy to enter’. Slaughter is made bearable, its severity diminished: the speaker remembers a crow her father shot one Easter, ‘the tyranny of its open eye, / as wild and dark as anything’ belying the reality of its defeat.

Paradoxically, entering into another’s experience facilitates disengagement from it. And it is this unexpected pairing of entry with detachment that makes the collection’s take on violence and artistic beauty more than a mere parroting of W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which suggests that emotional detachment is born of an inability to enter into the experience of another. It is by entering into the mind of the concubine in Ingres’ Grande Odalisque that the poet-speaker of ‘Against Ingres’ carries out her own unflinching objectification. There is no sympathy here for the woman, no retrieval of her humanity. Even as we have access to her thoughts—her fellow concubines, the sultan’s garden, ‘fat, lazy Nilüfer who scratched graffiti into the walls’—she remains unsettlingly object-like, inhuman:

her back patient as polished maple,
a line the colour of buttered toast
unfurling down her spine in an arabesque
to her tailbone and buttocks,
which are long and slumberous as a mare’s.
(60)

The model may turn her back on Ingres to protect her inner life against ingress. But the poet’s breaching of that inner life, its historical canvas, enables her to enact a more thorough objectification still. Even when we know the woman’s mind, we find, ‘Here there is nothing’.

‘Reclining Nude’ is troubling for the same reason. The painter’s dehumanising of his model comes from a purposeful distancing, a refusal to engage emotionally with the woman he tells ‘to crawl, spread / her legs, grind her arse like a pig’:

She has kernelled another body in her body there,
perhaps one of his, it doesn’t matter, he can’t
remember if he has had her, the point is,
she understands largesse […]
(64-65)

But the poet goes further. She shows us glimpses of the model’s passage from pink girlhood into ‘monstrous’ obesity. She walks us down the fluorescent halls of the model’s dream life. She reveals to us that behind the model’s face, most likely ‘intelligence lives, / here the rational, the sceptical’. And because she is able to access the model’s interior in this way, her cruelty to the model far exceeds that of the painter: if he portrays the woman as grotesque simply because he does not care about her inner being, the poet portrays her as grotesque outside and in, ‘rump, hog, beast’ through and through.

It is by entering that art does its worst violence. Holland-Batt reveals how the several paintings that inspire ‘An Illustrated History of Settlement’ turn the scene of invasion into nothing more than landscape suitable for a picnic: ‘sky boiled’, ‘a choppy wedge’ of water, a black man with ‘a toothpick spear’. The invaders are rendered innocuous by colonial representations: ‘heads knotted with tidy black ribbons’, ‘[f]aces fat with apple-cheeked Englishness’:

This is where the eye enters.
And often leaves.
(13)

The Hazards exposes the mechanics by which cruelty is made breathtaking; and in doing so, is itself breathtakingly cruel. But this cruelty reaches almost unbearable levels when the poet-speaker, refusing to spare even her self, turns her own person into the object of infliction. In ‘No End to Images’, it is the speaker who is invaded—by a relentless stream of memories that strip her bare, transmuting her suffering into beauty for the reader’s benefit:

No end to the hour I stood and shook
like a leaf in the shower’s privacy,
no end to my name, snagged like a burr,
no end to the body which is colossally small
with its pains and plainer longings.
No end to grief, never any end to that.
(69)

‘The Invention of Ether’ (and its telling title) gives us insight into the attractions of of numbing oneself when the heartbroken ‘I’ still

[…] cling[s] to the sting
like the slobbering octopus
I failed to rescue
from boyish torturers
on a Sicilian beach:
hopelessly suctioned, unable to release.
(84)

Aid is found in the anesthetisation of the heart. And if protecting the self from invasion is to be gained only by invading the inner lives of others—probing their interior space to find relief in the coldness of intellectual exercise—then so be it.    

‘Desert Pea’ is a sparse poem. Compact like its title, it is a mere page long, composed of ten two-line stanzas. It provides stark contrast to most of the other poems, their language opulent and luxurious and finely tuned, like clockwork nightingales. Nestled in the middle of the collection, it sets down in plain words the theme this review has spent over a thousand words elaborating: the refuge of the intellect in a world where raw experience simply cannot be borne.

I cannot stand
the certain world:

rock grass and thistle,
animal thirst

invading my eye.
Give me night, the stars

streaming past me
huge and soundless.

Give me the silence
of the mind.
(18)

Note
1. Jacinta Le Plastrier interviews Sarah Holland-Batt in Cordite, 10/9/2014

TIFFANY TSAO received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her written work includes literary criticism, fiction, poetry, reportage, and essays. She is Indonesia Editor-at-Large for Asymptote, an online literary journal specializing in contemporary world literature and translation.

Unclaimed Terrain

by Ajay Navaria

Translated by Laura Brueck

Giramondo

ISBN: 9781922146892

Reviewed by MEETA CHATTERJEE-PADMANABHAN

Unclaimed Terrain by Ajay Navaria translated by Laura Brueck, and published in Australia by Giramondo cannot be described complacently as a ‘good read’. That is not what it set out to be. The stories are provocative and unsettling. There is serious heart- rending sadness in some and dark humour in others. Angry, lyrical, passionate, and political, the seven short stories published in the almost pocket-sized book demand a different kind of reading. This is indicated in the dedication in the book which reads, ‘To the characters in my stories, who fight for their dreams of justice, and to the tradition that teaches us to struggle for dignity, equality, and freedom.’ Solidarity with the Dalit (meaning the downtrodden) is established right in the beginning. This review begins by providing an overview of Dalit literature and then looks at one short story in some depth followed by a survey of some of the stories in the collection.

Since the 1960s, the work of Dalit writers began appearing in regional languages of India such as Marathi, Hindi, Tamil (earlier works have been recorded in Tamil), Telugu and others. In most Dalit writing the personal is political.  The narrative of pain and misery, when told from the perspectives of characters in Dalit literature challenge upper caste values, the discourses of all religions and particularly, forces a reassessment of Hinduism as a peaceful religion. The national discourses of democracy and progress are also unsettled in the stories. The vulnerability of Dalit bodies, the difficult fight against untouchability, the struggle for education and access to even the most basic standards of living is painfully written into their stories. The accumulation of disturbing autobiographical details and a generous use of profanities disrupt the conventional reader’s expectations.  These attributes define Ajay Navaria’s work.

Anand’s introduction brilliantly contextualises the collection and points to elements that are vital to the understanding of the stories. ‘Suffice it to say, every name emits a radioactive signal called caste. Every name is a parade of imagined history; the announcement of privilege or the lack of it’ (xii). The stories, indeed, parade the history of an oppressed people.

My favourite story in this collection is ‘Subcontinent’.  It dazzlingly juxtaposes the past in the village that the protagonist and his family leave behind because of atrocities suffered, and the present with the trappings of middle class living made possible by a quota-enabled government job and a lecturer’s position in a city. There are a number of dimensions to the story, too intricate to deconstruct here. However, there is a glorious description of a dawn that captures with economy the trajectory of the story:

My eyes opened, and I saw a broken piece of the sky, quivering in the square of the window, trapped. An immense black cloud had seized the feeble sun and wrung it, breaking its legs. It seemed as if night were near, but suddenly a lone ray pierced the cloud like a horse and arced across the room. The whole room was a-shimmer in the din of hooves as if lit by the wavering flame of an oil lamp, unsteady but continuing to burn. Perhaps this horse did belong to the sun –the lone, seventh horse of the Sun God’s chariot.

The ‘seventh horse’ evokes memories of the famous Indian film director, Shyam Benegal, who captured the realities of the lives of victims of high caste violence.  His film ‘The Sun God’s seventh horse’ gestures towards the need to take action and the necessity of retelling stories from different perspectives. In this short story, the protagonist sets out to do just this.

The story uses flashback and techniques of stream-of-consciousness to tell the story of Nankya, the Dalit bridegroom who transgresses caste rules by riding a horse to his wedding.  A harsh punishment follows: assault, rape, extortion and a deep emotional scar that remains unhealed long after the incidents are over. The village panchayat members, the panditji (priest) and the police are the perpetrators or are complicit in the atrocious acts. Years later when the protagonist, a victim of the assault, Siddharth Nirmal, becomes a Marketing Manager and reflects on the incident, he is still unable to control his rage. He rejects his ‘lowly Hindu roots’ and embraces the slogan, ‘Jai Bhim’ to celebrate Ambedkar as his hero. The story ends with Siddharth plotting ways of seeking revenge.

Navaria uses intertexuality, as a literary technique that recalls other texts from different perspectives. In ‘Hello Premchand’, Navaria rewrites the story of Mangal an orphan, a character out of Premchand’s story.  Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) was an acclaimed Hindi writer considered to be progressive for the era he lived in. In Premchand’s story low caste characters such as Ghisu and Madhav, who are sweepers, are delineated as incorrigible villains. In ‘Hello Premchand’, Ghisu and Madhav are given dignity. The pre-determined fate that, ‘a bhangi will always be bhangi’ is dismantled in ‘Hello Premchand’. There is a twist in the tale. By refusing to be a night soil carrier and a sweeper, by gaining education and migrating to a city, Mangal lays claim to equality with the upper caste members in his village. The story signals a re-envisioning of possibilities for Dalits in modern India.

The message in ‘Hello Premchand’ is destabilized in ‘Scream’. The nameless protagonist seeks to educate himself, but the day before his secondary school exams is sodomised by thugs belonging to a higher caste in his village. Despite this traumatic incident, he finishes his education with the help of Christian priests, but is compelled to migrate to Mumbai, to prepare for his civil service exams. Instead, he becomes a gigolo, but falls in love with a woman whose husband kills him out of jealousy. It is the ghost of the protagonist who narrates the story. For me, the story is a bit contrived and misses some of the narrative possibilities that it creates. However, there are other stories that tell interesting tales with great economy and irony.

‘Yes Sir’ views the Dalit plight with sardonic humour. The Brahmin peon Tiwari waits on his lower caste boss, Narottam Saroj, Deputy General Manager, with uttermost resentment. A kind act on the part of Narottam, brings about a change in Tiwari, so that the grateful Brahmin peon, gushes about repairing the low caste Narottam’s toilet. A tongue-in-cheek role reversal is enacted in the story.

‘Sacrifice’ is a heart rending story of a little boy having to surrender his pet goat. Not only does he have to give up his pet, he is also forced to hold onto its legs as the animal is slaughtered. There is a parallel tale of a Dalit man having to give up his love to her heartless high caste relatives. The story weaves together notions of betrayal, guilt and reflections on common sense of humanity.

‘New Custom’ is a well-crafted story that examines the prejudice that a Dalit academic suffers as an ‘untouchable’. Despite being an educated man and having achieved success, in his village, he is is not allowed to forget that he is ‘untouchable’.  ‘Tattoo’ beautifully captures the anxieties of a Dalit man who joins a gym. He is mortified that the smart looking customer service officer would find out that he belongs to a low caste from the tattoo on his forearm. He is equally embarrassed about his gym shoes which he polishes endlessly but refuses to get new ones. There is an unexpected turn of events. The light hearted ending is a welcome change.

Overall, Ajay Navaria’s fascinating and disturbing collection of short stories adds to the growing body of the rich Dalit writing that exists. Dalit literature is becoming part of the curriculum in Indian universities and there is a growing interest in Dalit literature abroad. Laura Brueck’s translation captures the nuances and subtleties of Hindi very competently in English. Giramondo makes a remarkable contribution to Dalit writing by publishing this outstanding collection and a laudable service to Australian readers by bringing the collection of stories to Australian shores.

MEETA CHATTERJEE-PADMANABHAN is a lecturer in the academic language and literacy at the University of Wollongong, NSW.

Wild

by Libby Hart

Pitt Street Poetry

ISBN 9781922080387 (paperback)

Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR-JOHNSON

To say that Libby Hart’s third book of poetry, Wild, was a highly anticipated one is to take into account that her first book, Fresh News from the Artic, won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Prize, while her second, This Floating World, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Awards and the Age book of the Year Awards. In my opinion, Wild is the best Libby Hart book to date.

Wild speaks of the animals: from the whale to the horse, from wolf to fox, and especially the birds. The poems are layered in their depiction of creature as majestic singular and as creature connected to humankind, heaven and the earth. Some poems deal with humans as the ‘wild’ or nature and the cosmos as the ‘wild’, but still there is a dependency on animals. The opening poem sets us up for the interconnection:

Bear-woman,
this is where the whirlwind stops.
Right here, among dark incantation.
Look around you, use those grizzly eyes,
for soon you’ll turn polar – a bulk of light
with clumsy paws. The blood-thud of constellation
shall roar inside your ears.

The poem is called ‘Ursa Major: Ursus arctos horribilis’, referencing both the constellation (which translates to ‘larger she-bear’, part of which forms the Big Dipper in North America and the Plough in the UK) and the grizzly bear. The title is of the heavens while the subtitle is the earth-bound animal. In this poem, one cannot live without the other, thus the subject and object become confused, morphing into one and the same.

The titles of all of the poems in the first section follow this twofold rule: the main title references the poem in much the way any title of a poem would, while the subtitle gives the Latin, scientific name to add complexity to the reading. The subtitles also work, however, to consolidate and simplify meaning. Take, for example, ‘Vespers: Hirundo rustica’, translated as ‘Vespers: Swallow’:

A spell of words
then a loosening of fault line,
black miracles spill from my breast.

One hundred swallows
ravenous and open-mouthed,
each menace of wing eye-loaded apparition.

Calligraphy of wildings,
auguries of the oldest longing,
dark lessons skimming the squat field.

The line between the hearing of vespers and the watching of birds is blurred in the first stanza, allowing the rest of the poem to exist in a complemented state of beauty and spirituality, so meaning becomes complete through interconnectivity. Consequently, there is such a bird as a vesper sparrow, making Hart’s choice of swallow an interesting one.

This first section of the book is called ‘Huginn and Muninn’, after the Norse myth of two ravens that fly all over the world to bring information to the god Odin. ‘Huginn’ is Old Norse for ‘thought’, while ‘Muninn’ is Old Norse for ‘memory’ or ‘mind’. In the book’s notes, Hart writes that the ravens ‘whisper the things they have seen or heard,’ and that the poems ‘are to be read as such whispers.’ When I ask myself what it is I like so much about Libby Hart’s poetry – and this would answer to all three of her books, but especially Wild – I have to answer that it is her power to whisper. She seems to do this in every poem, whether they are in the first section or the second (the later, ‘Murmurations’, maintains the theme and character of the book but loses the subtitle and gains some urbanness).

‘Stag: Cervus elaphus’ begins and ends with the imperative ‘Hold still’. This works to capture a place of tranquility at the start, where the stag is imposing, royal, superb. The repetition at the end forces us to take in that image again, and it as if we are inhaling one last time before we finish reading the poem, before the stag disappears. The mood then, it must be said, is like a whisper.

In the title ‘And then, and then’ repetition works as well, though this time we are left with an invisible ellipses, punctuation which suggests something further, though not of a new course and not definite, either. A whisper, rather than a shout.

‘Augury’ uses the third stanza as a whisper:

I have touched the lightning-struck tree.
I have spilt salt and broken mirror.
I have watched animals flee woodland.
And every treat grew to calamity—
to veiled message, winged riddle.

All of these actions suggest, as the poem says, calamity. However the word ‘veiled’ works with transparency while ‘winged’ works with wind, so the resultant calamity is not what one would expect. It is quieter. Working with strong action verbs throughout (‘spilt’, ‘broken’, ‘flee’) and ending with no verb at all leaves us with an image, rather than a scene, suggesting, again, something akin to a visual whisper.

In ‘Buffalo’, ‘a dark hale hollers’ more than once and in return, dead things like ‘bones’ and ‘bundles of pelts’ listen. The leading verb is piercing while the ensuing is muted, the dichotomous placement encouraging the quiet to triumph.

Even the cover of the book works with a whisper’s tone: the implication of the title ‘Wild’ in great contrast with its plain text and bottom-left positioning and the predominantly blank white canvas.

As with her other books, place is important, and though Hart is a fine example of a major Australian poet, there is very little ‘Australia’ to her poetry. Wild is dominantly an ode to Ireland and the animals, the birds, the nature and the northern stars the poet encounters there. Hart once told me that she feels as if she’s in exile from Ireland, unable to live in her own spiritual home because of citizenship. Some researchers of diaspora might find fault in that, but most poets probably won’t, home becoming metaphorically, rather than historically, positioned. Poetry allows these substitutes and thus opens up definitions. What I get out of Hart’s connection to Ireland is a deep and thirsty respect coated in a thick fog of longing. Her depictions of the foreignness feel local and her references to Irish poets are many.

In fact she references many poets in her work, quoting them, responding to them and remembering them, and the range is vast, from the Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, to the contemporary Sarah Jackson. So too does she write about writing and the creative process, though these poems are subtle in their motif as they reference mythology, folklore and history – another complex layering of interconnectedness: this one between poet and who came before.

This is another fine book from Pitt Street Poetry, and Libby Hart a perfect addition to the Pitt Street poets. I hope all involved are gearing up for a long shelf-life, commendations and future reprints.
 
 
HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON is the author of three collections of poetry and a novel, Pursuing Love and Death, HarperCollins.
She is editing an anthology of poems on disability, The Fractured Self.

Haifa Fragments

by Khulud Khamis

Spinifex Press

ISBN 9781742199009

Reviewed by SELMA DABBAGH

The protagonist of Khulud Khamis’s first novel, Haifa Fragments, Maisoon, is a jewellery designer and her story resembles an assemblage on a jeweller’s worktop; a thickly strung necklace that tailors off without a clasp, several loose, coloured stones lying around and about it – glass fragments and dark shards among textured stones.

Khulud Khamis is the first Palestinian women writer with Israeli citizenship I have come across. Several of the most prominent Palestinian writers hold Israeli citizenship, being from ’48 Palestine (i.e. present day Israel); Emile Habibi, Anton Shammas and Said Kashua. Shammas and Kashua write in Hebrew. All three are male. Their gender is not necessarily relevant, as a writer who believes that it is the way that texts are read, rather than written, that is gendered. It is, however, relevant to Khamis’ work as her focus is very much the feminine, the female, the sensual and the sexual. One senses that this work, despite being fictionalised, draws heavily on her own autobiographical experience, dealing with her everyday life as a young woman of Palestinian origin living in Haifa: a Christian, an Arab, a person with a negated past, a subject of discrimination, second class and potentially a security threat. The challenge that Maisoon takes on lustily, is to not to allow any of these labels to define her. Working against the confines of family, partnerships, territorial borders, checkpoints and gender roles Maisoon emerges as a hedonistic free spirit, with an eye for beauty, a commitment to change, an extraordinary talent for design and an ability to change the perceptions of others around her, through kindness, patience, hard work and generosity.

There is no definitive plot line in Haifa Fragments. It is a late coming of age novel; an existing relationship with a man is redefined, the acceptance and love of family is renegotiated, a woman is loved, bedded and enabled to move on, with nothing but friendship and good will between the two of them, a Jewish woman supports Maisoon and learns (and profits) from the process. To reveal these steps does not spoil the book, for it is evident from the opening pages that little hardship will befall those who come within Maisoon’s orbit. Unlike most novels set in the Arab world where the female characters are romantically hung up and sexually gauche, Maisoon even forgets that there is a man in bed with her, ‘The alarm clock went off at 3:45. Maisoon fumbled in the dark, brushing her arm on something warm and hairy. Yamma! She forgot ZIyad was spending the night.’

This book is very different from one with a similar title, Beirut Fragments, (1990, Persea Books) written by another Palestinian Christian woman living across a border, Jean Said Makdisi. Makdisi’s work is sharper in observation and reportage, but her ambitions are also very different to those of Khamis. Khamis appears intent on humanizing, softening and showing beauty and hope in an ongoing situation of inequality. Said Makdisi’s book is labeled as a ‘war memoir,’ Khamis’ is no such thing.

It is not easy to avoid dates, political events and national catastrophes in Palestinian literature, but Khamis is determined not to catalogue or explain out. The work is contemporary and those who are familiar with the political background would be able to place events that are alluded to, but this vibrant novel is completely open to those with little or no knowledge of Palestinian history. It does not seek to instruct the reader, but allows them to understand how a reality can feel, how it impacts behavior, relationships and allegiances. Everything is political and yet many of the key aspects of Maisoon’s life (family, lovers, work) aren’t overtly so. There is a luxury, Khamis concedes, in having the status that she has, as a second-class citizen of a state, rather than as a subject of occupation. She can struggle to live as fully as she desires, but she does not have to struggle to survive and she appreciates the space allowed to her not to have to do so.

For all Palestinians, there was a moment in their own or their family’s history when their parents or grandparents were faced with a decision: to stay or to go. The process of dispossession is ongoing and unrelenting and many (in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem) are still forced to consider this question every day. In Maisoon’s family the last battle of Haifa is described as the time when her family had to decide whether to leave and despite the fearful ‘barrels that were rolled down from Share’a El-Jabal,’ Maisoon’s family stayed. They even stay in the same house. This potentially sounds banal, but the references to the house, its history and contents were as baffling to this reader as they were heart wrenching. In Palestinian literature houses are usually lost, confiscated, destroyed, fled from and abandoned and characters are forced to move on, move on. It is rare for them to be transferred from generation to generation, with stories as to who sat where and whose coffee table or cupboard it was. Palestinians are more used to being separated from their past to stepping into the footprints of it.

To return to the analogy of the half strung necklace, the cord in Haifa Fragments is made from recurring images central to the culture Khamis describes: shay bi naa naa (mint tea), drums, dancing the darbuka, the salu, the souk, the sea, the food. These are overly repeated, but they link in and out with the past, the present, across borders and checkpoints. Towards the end of the book the shards, in the form of scrawls of Death to Arabs! graffiti in Maisoon’s neighbourhood, references to bombs on buses and rockets falling on Haifa, are explained as are moments that come and go.

The colour in Haifa Fragments though is intense. Khamis is unusual in her rejoicing of sexuality and sensuality in a way that is more familiar to writings from and about the Arab world of the 19^th not the 21^st  Century, where the ‘Orient’ was almost wholly associated with licentious sexuality rather than bombs, religion and death. The novel also made me realize how culturally variable our approaches to personal vanity can be and Maisoon’s awareness of her own desirability to others, can be off putting.

Khamis’s work is playful and it can come across as deliberately naive. Maisoon seeks to engage with the Palestinian political situation, but she does not talk about that side of her life with her family or boyfriend. Her family have learnt to endure, to know societal ills and political injustices, but to put up with them. It is a politics of avoidance, rather than overt resistance. The situation is too precarious, they believe, for the demand for equality and a historical recognition to be made. For decades after the Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ of 1948, ’48 Palestinians were cut off from their families and former neighbours; a host of legislation made communication nearly impossible. There was a stigma of dealing with the enemy attached to those who remained, as well as not a small amount of jealousy from the majority of Palestinians who were forced into becoming refugees. It is only in recent decades, that prejudices have diminished and a new political cohesion has been sought. Maisoon is more confident than most Palestinians in Israeli society, possibly because as an attractive woman she has advantages her Muslim boyfriend Ziyyad is denied; she is a woman who has learnt to charm par excellence as well as to play a little dumb in order to break free. She is determined to live however she wants despite the constraints forced upon her, without compromising her beliefs. Khamis’ is an interesting voice; one that bears a message that goes beyond the political situation that she and her characters live under.
 
 
SELMA DABBAGH is a British Palestinian novelist, author of Out of It,  published by Bloomsbury in 2011 and 2012 (pbk). Out of It was positively reviewed in the UK, the US and the Middle East. It was nominated as a Guardian Book of the Year in 2011 and 2012. The Arabic edition, Gaze Tahta Al-Jild (Gaza Under The Skin) translated by Khulood Amr, was published by BQFP in August 2015.

Yimbama

by Ken Canning

Vagabond Press

ISBN 978-1-922181-43-5

Reviewed by BRENDA SAUNDERS

The poetry in this collection covers the full range of social and cultural conditions facing Aboriginal people today. Burraga Gutya writes of imprisonment, mental illness, domestic violence, dislocation and the injustice due to racism or ignorance. On the back cover notes to this collection, the poet explains that “some of the poems reflect my feelings of political treachery, oppression and the mental state this leaves.”… “It is important to note that while I am writing my own experiences, I am [also] writing about the First Nations People’s survival against some horrific experiences”.

These “experiences” were also the driving force behind the work of well-known Aboriginal poets from the past such as Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert and Oodgeroo Noonuccal. From time to time racism still rears its head in Australian sport, politics and public debate. This is the theme of many poems in this collection such as ‘Name Game’ the first poem. Here the poet sees racism and discrimination all around him.

You call me racist names
You call me not quite right
You call me law breaker
You call me a social disturbance
You call me a low form of life
… (9)

Repetition of word and line is used for emphasis and dramatic effect. As a political activist Canning employs the chanting style reminiscent of a street march. And again in ‘Visibility Zero’, the cry is for equality and recognition.

George street
Sydney
Any big street
any big town.’
…
I am invisible
the visible invisible
I am black
… (10)

In these poems, anger and defiance lie close to the surface. The voice is powerful and defiant, the style punchy and direct, with the immediacy of a ‘rap’ performance, a style now popular with Indigenous writers. Throughout this collection the line breaks are uneven, the lines short.

Gutya employs rhyme and half rhyme to great effect in many of these poems, for example in ‘Black Diggers’ he demands recognition and ‘visibility’ for Aboriginal ex-servicemen.

…
the strong Black Diggers
stood tall and proud
and gave honour
to all Peoples
of this land
…
some came home
to be shunned
once more
The country
you fought for,
turned its back
cowardly back
on you
the brave Black Digger.
… (56)

‘Mother Tongue’ is a lament for the loss of his native Kunja language, which for him has the power to expresses deep spiritual connections to Country and the inner emotions of his people. The short line construction slows down each word and thought. We have time to pause and reflect.

…
The english language
cannot capture
my inner being,
…
I yearn to tell
to teach
the oppressor
the richness
of my world
my sacred country
…
I try forgiveness
of mindless acts,
but every time I speak
you pierce my heart
as the words you left
are without meaning,
…(60)

The poems related in Aboriginal ‘lingo’ are some of the best in this collection. They display a humorous insight and a first person immediacy often lacking in many of the other more political poems. In ‘Old Clever Woman’, a woman recounts her journey by bus and her encounter with white people, perhaps tourists, taking photos. Here the story is told in a singular, consistent voice revealing the gulf, the ignorance and misunderstanding that sometimes exists between the two cultures.

…
click ― click alla same.
This lot take picture
put ‘em in big book.
Tell em world they good,
they just love blackfella.
click ―click― same one,
gun― camera no matter.
… (30)

And later we hear a cry for country, see the differing attitudes in ‘Tree Talk’, as the Old People confront the Conservationists and have the last word.

…
Old one Tree been talkin’
long time speak.
Them ones deaf for Tree talk
they hear only creak.
Old one Tree been screamin’
NO CHOP ― NO CUT.
Silly buggers talk wrong way
TALK TALK — CHATTER CHATTER
…
Old one Tree been talkin’
long before greenie time.
Old one Tree knows,
this one watch long time.
…(70)

Gutya calls for understanding from the big developers and miners and speaks of the need to conserve his ‘sacred country’. Its value and importance to Aboriginal communities is stressed in ‘The Mother of Love’

…
why do they not live
in your reflection,
witness your perfection.
Why they can only see
everything you are
all that’s sacred
only in a dollar way.
… (72)

Individual survival and resilience too is encouraged. In ‘Paths’ he calls to his fellow Aborigines to have confidence, to learn from the wisdom of the Dreaming stories.

…
Be aware
for you are born,
with your own special ways
Explore your own purpose
do not fear the unknown,
listen to those born
before time.
… (68)

In a series of poems, the poet confronts his own inner demons. These have titles such as “Relapse”, “Isolation”, “Psychotic Serenade” and” Rapid Demise”. They speak to Gutya’s battle with mental illness, his fear and sense of deprivation whilst in prison.

The short line breaks and the repetition of sound and word maintain an effective jagged rhythm. In ‘Rapid Demise’, alliteration and half rhymes add to the distress and urgency.

…
Renewed visions
reviewed perceptions
beating, beating, beating,
clotted.
Irrational reason
chases its prey
closing down of patterns
Remember, think, respond
the sheltered shock
… (15)

Reliving these episodes, he relates his struggles with intense clarity. The poem ‘Psychotic Serenade’ (20) speaks of the “bleakness in rhapsody/ misery in D minor/ singing the madness — ”. He tries to understand the disturbing visions he encounters: looks for reason in confusion. Relief only comes as ‘the soothers sooth/ comfort. / the seers see revelations, / Corrections of reflection (‘Relapse’ 36).

As the poet explains in the back cover notes, he was “fortunate” to “write some of these poems while he was ill” but “a gentleness survives and overcomes the bitterness”. There is a cry for understanding and acceptance and a more playful word pattern in ‘We Said’

You said, I said, you said
that I should, you should — I
You did, I did, you did,
we both didn’t
LISTEN
To what
You said. I said, you said.
We both said instead,
…
Neither of us did,
understand —
… (92)

and in ‘Reflect’ there is a gentler voice welcoming the reader to join as one in accepting Aboriginal culture.

You must first learn
to walk the path
of those tracks
commenced at the dawning.
Planned by spirit ones
in the Dreaming.
…
maybe just maybe
you will find answers
To live in a way
of harmony, to survive
the mistakes of the past.
… (93)

“Sharing” is the last poem in this collection and in these lines the poet offers the hand of reconciliation. He invites us to go with him on a “journey of soul /carried by wind spirit” for “tranquility — /to exist in my place”.

This collection reflects the writer’s convictions and his awareness that the political struggle goes on. Many of the poems speak of the anger and frustration felt by many Aboriginal people deprived of a voice. In the final poems the poet offers the hand of reconciliation, asking the reader to listen and learn the great lessons of Aboriginal culture.
 

BRENDA SAUNDERS is a Sydney writer and artist of Wiradjuri and British descent. She has published three collections of poetry her work has been published on the web and in literary journals here and overseas and she has read her poetry on Awaye and Poetica ABCRN. Brenda was short-listed for the David Unaipon Prize in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards 2011 and she was awarded the Varuna Dorothy Hewitt Poetry Fellowship for 2012. Her most poetry collection The Sound of Red was published by Hybrid in 2013. She recently returned from a Resident Fellowship at CAMAC Arts Centre in France where she worked translating her poetry into French.

The Boy from Aleppo who Painted the War

by Sumia Sukkar

Eyewear Publishing

ISBN: 9781908998460

Reviewed by TESSA LUNNEY

The main character’s name looks grey, which mean I won’t like him. Gustave Aschenbach is a very dark name; he must be bad. I don’t want to finish the book in case it upsets me. Thinking about it forms hexagons in my mind with bees roaming around the shape, stinging. He is certainly a bad character then. Just the thought of reading on scares me. (p13)

These were my feelings on reading this book. Not because I was scared, but because I was moved. The naïve voice of the main character Adam, his sensual rendering of pain in colour, the misery of the war in Syria – perhaps I have read too many war novels, perhaps I have read too much news, perhaps it was the end of a cold, dark, and difficult winter, but sometimes I wanted it to stop. Adam’s clear voice is too direct, his emotional use of colour, his literal reaction to cruelty and its effects, involved me in a way that my PhD years reading trauma theory could never do.

Adam has Asperger’s Syndrome, a fact made clear by the cover blurbs and the essay that ends the book. What we see is a teenage boy who is sensitive, intelligent, easily overwhelmed, and literal-minded. Written in first person, we travel with Adam through the beginning of the current war in Syria. As the war breaks out around him and every routine is broken, as people disappear and others appears in their place, as they die and break down, Adam’s coping mechanisms are tested as much as those around him.

‘Why do you always paint war?’

‘Because it’s filled with endless painting possibilities, and the range of colours is so wide.’ (p17)

His main coping strategy, and the one that is most moving in the book, is that he gives his emotions colour. His favourite family member, his sister Yasmine, is a ruby red colour when she smiles, but changes colour as she becomes angry, defeated, scared and sad. As people smile or shout colour pours from their mouths, they shimmer and glow and ooze. Adam’s language is simple but his use of colour is sophisticated, making a scene that might have been cliché or repetitive vibrant and visceral. He paints his life, then he paints the war, when he has no food left he eats his paints to become the good colours, when he needs to paint again he paints in blood that he collects from the corpses at his doorstep.

He told me that blood is the substitute of paint. How can blood replace paint? But now with the blood in front of me, I have a part of me that is pushing me to take some blood and paint. So I do. (p152)

Each sentence is simple and direct, without irony or sarcasm. He eats his paints because he must eat. He paints in blood because he must paint. His childlike thought patterns combine with common impulses of desire or fear to devastating effect.

The progress of the plot is not what ‘happens’ in the book. These events are awful and the family suffers and suffers. But if you have read the news in the last three years, you can piece together what they do – their story must be one of thousands. What makes this book worth reading is how Adam understands the war, how he copes with its chaos, how he relates his understanding to us through his sensitivity to smell, taste, touch, sound, and of course, colour. He can say the obvious without it appearing out of place – This war is unfair, there are no uniforms or clues (p89). His reactions are physical, he wants to vomit or shake, he is fascinated and repelled by the smell of blood. His naïve intelligence comes straight to the point.

In some ways, his autism protects him. Life was already overwhelming, so he has an arsenal of coping strategies; he understands all things literally, so he does not drown in emotional subtext; he has no need or impulse to fight, as his brothers do. In other ways, of course, he falls apart just as his family does, rocking and spitting and finding himself unable to breathe. His frame of reference is constantly shifting – what frightened him in the beginning of the book is nothing by the end. His reaction to the absurdity of wartime life is particularly vivid. After a bomb blast, he finds an ear on the ground and pockets it.

It’s an ear! It’s an ear! Oh my God! Does it belong to the man with his brain on the ground? I want to walk back to check if he has his ear but I am scared of feeling sick again. I clench my heart and grab the ear again. It feels just as disgusting as the first time but I hold my breath and wipe the blood on my trousers. It looks beautiful. I didn’t know an ear could be this beautiful. I put it in my pocket and walk on. (p267)

He says what we might think but never say – the odd beauty of a disembodied ear, or not wanting to view a corpse simply because it’s frightening. Then he does what we might imagine but never do – he begins to talk to the ear, when he is lonely, whenever his family is too sick, injured, or preoccupied to talk to him. Who doesn’t want to bend an ear in times of trouble? But for Adam, his ear is literal. This literality also shows the reactions of those around him to be absurd. His father and cousin refuse what is happening and retreat into fantasy, they believe the dead are still alive and call for them. Adam’s confusion means the madness of their actions remains startling.

The only wrong note, I found, was when the voice switched to his sister Yasmine. Adam’s voice had a lightness that could be funny and sweet even while the events around him were horrific. Yasmine has none of this interest, and the plot of her chapter is unrelentingly dark. Her part of the story is important, but it is Adam who can carry us through these events. Yasmine’s resilience is rendered heroic through his eyes, but her own voice does not have his sensual playfulness.

But Yasmine has only two chapters. The rest is Adam’s rollicking voice as his family tries to hide, then desperately flees Aleppo for Damascus. Sukkar is British writer of Syrian and Algerian ancestry and her own family’s story informed the action. Read this book but be warned – you’ll need your comforters beside you.

…I lie down opposite Ali and take the ear out. It is now clean, I think the blood rubbed off in my pocket. There is still dry blood where the ear was cut off but it isn’t a lot. I pull it up to my mouth and start whispering about what I dream of doing in Damascus. (p270)

 
 
TESSA LUNNEY has a Doctorate of Creative Arts on silence in Australian war fiction. In 2014 she was the recipient of an Australia Council ArtStart grant. She has had her poetry, short fiction, and reviews published in Southerly, Cordite, Mascara, and Contrapasso, among others, as well as Best Australian Poems 2014. She lives in Sydney. www.tessalunney.com

Kin

by Anne Elvey

5Islands Press

ISBN 978-0-7340-4897-4

Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY

Val Plumwood wrote, “the ecological crisis requires from us a new kind of culture”. She was of course referring to the set of human/nature dualisms that underpin the contemporary West, and which “promote human distance from, control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere of nature as the Other”. Unprecedented anthropogenic climate change and ecological degradation threaten not only the survival of our species but myriad others: we must reevaluate our definitions of our humanity or “face extinction” (Environmental Culture 4-5).

Researcher and writer Anne Elvey’s first full-length collection of poetry, Kin, shortlisted for the 2015 Kenneth Slessor Prize, emerges out of this need for “a new kind of culture”, exploring human identity in relation to, in relationship with – what Elvey has described as – “ecological networks of kind, otherkind, country, air, sea and cosmos” (Plumwood Mountain). At her best, Elvey observes human embeddedness within complex, vibrant, non-human spheres with keen linguistic control and playfulness. It is a pleasure to return to the crisp imagery, and trim, silvery music of lines such as, “the cool acreage of canary light” (12); “All at once, bees fill the flowering gum. / Seed pods tick their dry rain / on the ground” (24); “he dips his finger into a font / to wet your tongue” (72). In “Romancing the creek” (39)

                                         a lizard slips
where the rock face
                                    shears from the earth
and stone stands
                                    stacked like crates
against the sky.
                                    Moss probes
a gap with serried
                                    tongue…
                                    …Weeds
pick out a corner
                                    and an edge.
                                    …beside the track
a rusted bike,
                                    a guitar past
playing and
                                    a frail skin
to toss over a lamp…
…the rock wall
                                    pulls the creek
up to its chin.

The human presence – in the form of our detritus, as well as the more subtle presence of the speaker  – is decentralised within a sphere of other-than-human, interconnecting lives. Lizard, rock wall, moss, weeds all have their own agenda and agency. The poem bears witness to ecologist Barry Commoner’s observation that “everything is connected to everything else”: there is no “away” to which rubbish can be thrown (19-20).

Even within the highly-developed context of the highway in “Over Eastlink” (37) – where, as Judith Wright wrote in her poem “Sanctuary”, “only the road has meaning” (139):  the “wide-winged body” of a pelican “steps / down the air, hangs / at each turn as if at a landing”, and perches “high up on [a] tollway light!”. The poem captures the bird’s strength and agility, its “gravity”, as well as its utter disregard for human demarcations: the pelican is a palpable, powerful presence, “surveying the traffic” with a will, that disrupts the human-centrism of the urbanised landscape. Everything is in relationship: “the cup” of the bird’s “under- / beak / shapes [its] silhouette against / the sky”; the human speaker “drive[s] on” only because she is “neither fish nor water” to the bird.

Elvey’s acute attention to these “ecological networks” means Kin also bears witness to their degradation, to profound loss, including as a result of colonialism. We see this in poems such as “Ecos echoes” (42), which addresses Australia’s extinction crisis. The poem’s disjunctive line signals brokenness: how “(earth things)” are “(riven from) / (the well world)”. In the repeating, dirge-like refrain cataloguing the losses: “gone the eastern hare wallaby / gone the pig-footed bandicoot / gone the silver mulga”, we hear echoes of the last lines of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s famous poem, “We Are Going” – “The scrubs are gone… /The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. / The bora ring is gone. / The corroboree is gone. / And we are going” (78) – which hint at the ties between cultural and ecological losses.

Explicitly and more subtly, Christian symbolism and ritual permeate the ecopoetic framework of Kin. From the description of Elvey’s mother in “The honour of things” who “told the beads” (19), to the “nails / hammered on a Friday” in the powerfully poignant “Nanoq” (48). Significantly, Elvey’s opening poem “Sheet Music”, begins with two line’s from Kevin Hart’s “Mud”: “We met there, Dark One, all those years ago / You smelled of mud” (11). “Mud” is one in a series of poems by Hart which address the “Dark One”, who, as Davidson points out in Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry, “is undoubtedly God” (203). Given Western Christianity’s influence on contemporary Western secular thinking (White 1204-1205), and its culpability in the human/nature dualisms that not only underpin the ecological crisis but have authorised colonialism and its violence (Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature 88-89; 41-68) – perhaps engaging with its tropes is part and parcel of the ecopoetic task.

In her essay “On (not) speaking about God ecologically”, Elvey writes that in addressing “patterns of domination and alienation” which “Christianity and the biblical images on which it draws have in part at least supported…[w]hat may be needed is to hold our Christian faith story loosely, not necessarily to turn away from it, but to be open to a mode of attentiveness to Earth and its atmosphere…as part of an ecological spirituality attuned to the community of more than human others with which we are intimately interconnected and interdependent”. In many ways, Kin shapes itself in these terms: not necessarily seeking to scrutinise these “patterns of domination and alienation”, but rather considering ways aspects of the Christian tradition might be re-imagined or reinterpreted to encompass an “ecological spirituality”. This proves both ingeniously dynamic – offering inclusive alternatives; and problematic.

In “Bayside Suburban”, Elvey deftly re-imagines the Eucharist as a ceremony in which everything – humans, gulls, possums, light, wind, sea – takes part. The poem, divided into five parts, is not presided over by the ceremony. Rather, the ceremony is gently inferred in the fabric of everyday goings-on of “Port Phillip” – in the “old / meals the gulls enjoy…the refuse of blood / and wine, the suburb’s flesh, the greasy joes”(61); in the “sand…thin / and brittle as a wafer. The skin…the tongue / to which it clings” (63). We see those who eat and drink are not only human. Everything is implicated in an ongoing sacrament of relationships, exchanges, communions: “A soft light traces the shore’s / length. The wind pushes southward along / the beach. A dog romps and a woman / dressed in rough wool casts a line. Banksias are sculpted against the sky” (62). The passing of time, the rhythms of natural systems and of human and non-human activity inform and open out the ceremony. The poem concludes: “Strewer of a communion march, the day / empties its apron of blossom… / …The sacrament is celebrated slow / with gulls like restive children… / …the tide arrives with the bounding-sea, the soul-fetching night” (63). This inclusive re-visioning of the Christian service of bread and wine engenders a sense of the “radical equality” of all “members of a larger earth community” that Plumwood called for (“Tasteless” 71); or of Mary Oliver’s “citizenry of all things within one world” (34). Here Elvey is indeed “hold[ing] [her] Christian faith story loosely”, allowing other-than-human presences and systems, and our relationships with these, to move through it and develop it.

This re-visioning stumbles in “Claimed by country 3”, the last of Kin’s “Claimed by country” set. The speaker of “Claimed by country 2”, observing how colonialism is an ongoing process as she “com[es] into, out of / country”, asks, “is this / the colonising moment / once again?”(65). In “Claimed by country 3” (66), one has the troubling sense that this is indeed the “colonising moment”, that the land and its inhabitants are being co-opted into a “Christian faith story”. The opening declaration, “This is the rose on the gum”, seems to deny, or seek to supersede, the agency of an already storied land. The rose’s religious connotations, its association with Christ’s five wounds as well as the blood of the Christian martyrs, are heightened in the context of the poem’s other religious imagery. Superimposed on the gum, it not only has the effect of “put[ting] the flag” (Munnganyi qtd. in Rose 24) – a kind of colonial staking of land, but it also converts the tree into a cross, sublimating the tree’s “own meaning”. Similarly, in the lines –

And here,
where rocks shift to wallaby

and edge toward the altar,
the congregation stirs as
by degrees, a full moon

climbs the far side
of the range. With vested
hills, the dancers and the priests

attempt a fugue of ways…

…Insects light upon my

hair and on my skin.
We stand. We sing.

We give a peace
that takes a breath.

– we see country converted into a church; it’s inhabitants into a “congregation” and “priests”. All the complexity of the land’s “own meanings”, the agendas and agencies, the interactions and relationships are reduced to, are described as being in the service of, a very particular kind of worship.

While the closing image of the speaker, who “by the iconographer’s / grace” is “a smudge of white / in the corner of the frame”, acknowledges the smallness of the human element in larger systems, it also literally and figuratively flattens out the dimensionality of country into a religious painting – an image intensified by the metaphor, presumably, of falling sunlight at the beginning of the poem: “the fragile leaf of gold’s / applied to the ground”. Ultimately, the poem lacks the suppleness and expansiveness of other poems such as “Bayside Suburban”.

Despite one-offs such as “Claimed by country 3”, Kin’s strength is its awareness of poetry’s potential to step outside of presiding cultural and social paradigms, to imagine more ethical and compassionate ways of being with each other and our other-than-human kin. As Elvey writes in her poem “Recycling the possible”: “tear into / pieces / the possible /…feel for a place / in the grain and start / writing” (74-75).

Though Kin emerges out of the trauma of ecological crisis, ultimately it gives voice to hope: that through attentiveness to our deep kinship, to our inextricable entanglement with the other-than-human, we are capable of embracing another mode of life on earth.

WORKS CITED

Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology. New York: Knof 1971. 19-20.
Elvey, Anne. Editorial. Plumwood Mountain. Volume 1 Number 1 (2014). Web. 26 Aug. 2015.  <http://plumwoodmountain.com/editorial/>
—. “On (not) speaking about God ecologically: Ecofaith conference presentation 23-25 May 2014”. Leaf Litter – Anne Elvey’s research and poetry blog. Web. 26 Aug. 2015. <https://anneelvey.wordpress.com/on-not-speaking-about-god-ecologically/>
Davidson, Toby. Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry. New York: Cambria Press 2013. 203.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge 1993. 41-68; 88-89.
—. Environmental Culture: The ecological crisis of reason. London and New York:  Routledge 2002. 4-5.
—. “Tasteless: Towards a Food-based Approach to Death”. PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature. Number 5 (2008). 71.
Oliver, Mary. Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Cambridge: Da Capo Press 2004. 34.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal. My People: A Kath Walker Collection. Milton, QLD: Jacaranda 1981. 78.
Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission 1996. 24.
White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.” Science. Volume 155 Number 3767 (1967). 1204-1205.
Wright, Judith. Collected Poems. Pymble NSW: Angus and Robertson 1994. 139.

DIMITRA HARVEY has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from UWS and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her poems have been published in Southerly, Meanjin, Mascara, the Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman Prize anthology Long Glances, and speculative poetry anthology The Stars Like Sand. In 2012, she won the ASA’s Ray Koppe Young Writer’s Residency.
 

Home After Dark

by Kavita Nandan

USP Press. Fiji

ISBN 9789820109216

Reviewed by SUMEDHA IYER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stories of Sydney

Ed by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Seizure

ISBN 978-1-921134-26-5

Reviewed by REBECCA ALLEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drones and Phantoms

by Jennifer Maiden

Giramondo

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

Reviewed by MELINDA BUFTON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blind Man With The Lamp

by Tasos Leivaditis (trans. N N Trakakis)

Denise Harvey

ISBN 978-960-7120-32-8

Reviewed by ANDY JACKSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citations

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

Captives

by Angela Meyer

ISBN 978-0-9875401-2-6

Inkerman & Blunt Publishers 

Reviewed by EUGEN BACON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are you lost?’ asked the pregnant woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CITATIONS

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

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

Almost Sincerely

by Zoe-Norton Lodge

ISBN:978-1-922146-85-4

Giramondo

Reviewed by JESSICA YU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Told World

by Angela Gardner

Shearsman

ISBN 978-1-84861-371-3

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

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

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

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

Consider ‘Half-Light’ in which Gardner writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Net Needle

by Robert Adamson

Black Inc

ISBN 9781863957311

Reviewed by FIONA SCOTNEY

In many ways the collection Net Needle is a logical continuation of Adamson’s recurring themes of love, loss, birds and the Hawkesbury region. It is very Adamson. It has the traits readers have perhaps come to expect and admire from his last few collections. It is dedicated to his partner Juno, his ‘heart’s needle, soul’s compass’, it opens with a poem about birds and the title comes from a poem about fishermen. What could be more Adamson? Yet there is nothing staid about this collection. He returns to familiar subjects and makes us look again and in doing so we gain a new understanding and a new level of appreciation. This is Adamson doing what Adamson does best.

This poetic craft is most evident when reading ‘Net Makers’, a poem which balances the delicacy of memory and weaving with the immediacy of tobacco stained fingers and fish guts. The poem contrasts the hardness of the men with the softness of their bent bodies and practiced movements. There is a sense of boyhood wonderment and admiration in their craft of mending and at the same time their ability to ‘cut the heart clean/ from a fish with a swipe of a fillet knife.’ The weaving of the nets in the poem is mundane, pragmatic and performative,

They stitched their lives into my days,
Blue Point fishermen, with a smoke
stuck to their bottom lips, bodies bent

forward, inspecting a haul-net’s wing
draped from a clothes line. Their hands
darting through mesh, holding bone

net needles, maybe a special half-needle
carved from tortoise shell. Their fingers,
browned by clusters of freckles

and tobacco tar, slippery with speed –

We are invited into an intimate space of memory, reflection and repetition as ‘they wove everything they knew/ into the mesh, along with the love they had,// or had lost, or maybe not needed.’ This is men’s work located in a domestic sphere; the backyard by the clothes line of Adamson’s childhood home. In the poem there are the subtle tones of the tortoise shell needles, freckles and tobacco tar set against the action of stitching, inspecting, draping, darting and mending.

As in The Goldfinches of Baghdad and other collections, Adamson has drawn on Mallarme’s idea of a book as a ‘living composition’, where each page becomes a stanza in the poem of the whole book. In this collection there is a four part structure which brings cohesion. The poems are grouped by observation, recollection, homage and finally death and transformation. Part one is characterised by observation, by poems that turn our attention to the otherwise unseen miracles in the mundane, as in ‘Net Makers’ and ‘Via Negativa, The Divine Dark’:

On the table a cicada, flecked with flour,
opening its dry cellophane wings.

The cat flies across polished space illuminated by the
Kitchen’s energy-saving light bulb,
A Philips “Genie.”

Here the divine dark is lit by stars and an eco-light blub. The via negativa, a way of describing God by negation, takes form in the tree-ferns, mist and banana trees, as well as breezes, watermarks and stars. It is not Wordsworth’s pantheism, but rather Spinoza’s recognition that all things are God.

Morning turns its back on the sun;
gradually, night arrives. In the skylight,
stars appear through the smokescreen from burn-off,
         brilliant pinholes.

Stars are clustered tress, hung in the night sky.

Here and in other poems in part one of this collection, observation mingles with metaphor and personification to create interesting juxtapositions. In ‘Garden Poem’ for Juno where Adamson writes, ‘At midday/ the weather, with bushfire breath, walks about// talking to itself’ and ‘a breeze clatters in the green bamboo and shakes// its lank hair.’ These simple yet beautiful lines when considered become profound and masterful. In the first example he combines the observation of midday with the metaphor of ‘bushfire breath’, with personification the weather which ‘walks about// talking to itself’. Such lines show the complexity of Adamson’s craft.

Part two of Net Needle is comprised of redrafted poems from Shark-net Seahorses of Balmoral: A Harbor Memoir (2012), a collaboration with artist Peter Kingston which produced a hand printed limited edition artist book,. These poems are based on recollection and tell stories about Sydney, the harbor and the rivers. They are not simply nostalgic reminiscing, but rather poetry as memoir, as Adamson looks back over moments of his life that span his childhood to his time spent in Long Bay prison. In this section a focus on narrative tends to replace the more image-driven poetry of the first part of the collection. I wonder if this is in response to the collaborative process of creating the artist book, which responds to Adamson and Kingston’s shared memories of Sydney, albeit at opposite sides of the harbor, Kingston at Vaucluse in the east and Adamson at Neutral Bay in the north. Both were born in 1943 and the art book chronicles some of the history of the area, as well as Adamson’s personal history.

Sometimes there is an emotional distance in these poems, as in ‘The Long Bay Debating Society’ which begins with the dispassionate line, ‘I spent my twenty-first in Long Bay Penitentiary.’ The poem recalls the pacing in the prison yard through the day and his reading of novels and poetry at night. It records Adamson’s early ambition to be a poet,

Sometimes an education officer
Would turn up and ask
What are you going to do with your future?
I’d tell him I wanted to be a poet
He would shake his head
And comment that I was being insolent
After weeks I convinced him
We wanted to start a debating team

The poem takes an unexpected turn from Adamson reading and wanting to be a poet, to convincing the officer about his desire to start a debating team. As it moves from the general to the specific, the poem shifts to the subject of the poem, the debating society. ‘It took a month to convince the Governor/ Finally the authorities agreed/ We could form a debating society’. This new freedom is still bound by the control of the authorities, as the ‘crims’ read and research in the prison library and organise an outside team to debate with, they are undermined by the Governor’s choice of topic, ‘(it was the summer of 1964) our topic/ “Is the Sydney Opera House Really Necessary?”’

Other memories are captured with a mix of facts and observations, as in ‘The Green Flash’ where Adamson recalls walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge with his mother, and going to the ‘Pylon Lookout’, ‘There was the café, where mum bought/ my first Devonshire tea.’ The South West Pylon lookout was open to the public at weekends from 1932 -1981. ‘This was the spot my father took/ my mother on their first date; he always/ knew how to impress people.’ The strength of these poems is in their ability to record personal and public history and memory with location.

Part three acts as homage to other writers, the poems reference or are dedicated to other poets and writers including early influences on his writing including Francis Webb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend Michael Dransfield. These poems provide a reminder of the sociability of poetry. The act of naming other poets creates textual relationships, the names become tropes, poetic devices that can represent a mode, or style of working, or gesture to interpersonal connections or relationships. These poems also speak of the longevity of Adamson’s vocation as a poet. Since the publication of his first collection in 1970, Adamson has published over 20 books of poetry. He has devoted much of his life to poetry, not only as a poet, but also an editor, mentor and teacher.

Adamson is one of a number of Sydney and Melbourne poets who emerged in the late 1960s and have been seen as part of a loose school or generation of poets characterised by their explicit break with existing poetic practice, their adaptation of American models, and their shared opposition to the Vietnam War. John Tranter’s anthology, The New Australian Poetry (Makar, 1979), announced this new generation, the ‘generation of ‘68’, and presented the twenty-four poets included as representing a ‘commitment to the overhauling of poetic method and function’ and a ‘serious attempt to revitalise a moribund poetic culture.’ Adamson, like Dransfield, was included in the anthology and they are often referred to as key figures of the “generation of 68.”

Part four of the collection can be characterised by themes of death and transformation. ‘Death of a Goshawk’ is a haiku with an untraditional syllable count which reaches its dénouement in the last line facilitated by its title,

White goshawk
Hovering on sunlight and air –
A boy’s trigger finger.

Other poems about death include ‘A Proper Burial’ about the death of a pair of tawny frogmouths beside a highway, ‘The Whiting’ where the poet is visited by the shadow of a fish he has killed and ‘The Great Auk’ for Charles Buckmaster, a poem which references another ‘generation of ‘68’ poet and friend of Adamson’s who died aged 21 in 1972. Not quite elegy, this poem recalls fondly Buckmaster’s poetry magazine The Great Auk and his contribution to the Sydney and Melbourne poetry scenes.

Charles spoke of auk bones
discovered in Massachusetts, fragments put
together by the archaeologist of morning, kingfisher
of poets. Charles wrote for the lost forest
and opened new pages as he
walked the streets of Melbourne,
writing back the great auks, speaking branches
to sing from; as the growth rings
thickened our lives, he stretched himself imagining
pilchards in massive schools
turning oceans silver with auk food –
auks returning in poems, swimming from the heads
of poets, into the tides of our words.

The final poem in the collection is ‘The Kingfisher’s Soul’ for Juno. It is a redemptive poem, where the ‘you’ in the poem, presumably Juno, brings new knowledge and discoveries to the first person speaker, ‘Your breath blew a thicket of smoke from my eyes’, ‘You taught me how to weigh the harvest of light’, and ‘You brought along new light to live in’. The poem ends with a final transformation, ‘I preferred the cover of night, yet here, I stepped/ into the day by following your gaze.’

Net Needle sees Adamson return to recognisable themes and influences in a way that is at once familiar and rewarding. For this reason, it is also a wonderful introduction to his work for new readers.

FIONA SCOTNEY recently completed her PhD at the University of Queensland titled ‘The New Australian Poets: Networks and the Generation of 68’. She has previously been published in Cordite, The Australian Poetry Journal and Southerly.