Caroline van de Pol reviews Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark by Catherine Cole

December 12, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark

by Catherine Cole

ISBN 9781742589503

UWA Publishing

Reviewed by CAROLINE VAN DE POL

‘The Brain – is wider than the Sky -,’ wrote Emily Dickinson revealing our capacity to expand our mind beyond experience to imagination. Acclaimed American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson recently recapped this magical opening of the mind that comes with reading when she wrote an article describing what it’s like for an author trying to find the right word. I was reminded of this image again when delving into a new collection of short stories from Australian writer and academic Catherine Cole. In diverse and joyful ways Robinson and Cole remind me of what I love about reading (and writing), of what I learn from books through that open invitation to go beyond a closed door, to find my way around the darkness and relish the light that shines through even the saddest of stories.

In this impressive collection of short stories, Cole finds those exacting words to reveal glimpses of life that fill you with love and compassion and leave you yearning to know more. It’s easy to see why her story ‘LOVE’ was chosen as part of the narrative for the Yes campaign for marriage equality. Anyone who reads this, who really listens as mother and son share the moment of disclosure, who feels the lump in the throat when she says ‘Mothers do know these things’ will understand the message for affirmation on marriage equality much more than from some of the distressing ignorance and bigotry flooding the media.

Cole, in writing that is both poetic and purposeful, selective, and at times, sparse, expands our minds and encourages the reader to look more closely at the detail and the ordinary lives of ‘others’. While some characters and places are more familiar each possess their own authenticity and truth. While many, on the surface, appear lonely and even suffocated by their longing, they are also, at times, comforting in their intimacy. There’s Dorrie on the ferry to Manly dreaming of her childhood, Ruth on her daily trek to the shopping mall and pet shop, Bert on his way to Villawood with gifts for the detainees and Willem preparing for work when all around him are partying. Often Cole’s characters feel like family or friends we know well, struggling to find their place. A recurrent theme of movement towards understanding prevails as we learn more about the many connotations of ‘home’ and what having a home means.

At times the memory of childhood or first love is evoked so provocatively that you can find yourself believing you might know ‘Little Kerrie’ or, in ‘Plenty’ you might find yourself wanting to slap James for his smugness and lack of compassion. In other stories Cole gives prominence to the environment and the external stimuli take over our senses as we hear the call of the furious ocean, taste the scratchy red dirt in the hot wind and feel the cracks in the ground of the outback ‘excoriated, open to whatever memories you might want to plant’ in ‘Steers’.

The stories of this collection resonate so well because of what Robinson calls ‘that movement towards essentials’, the removal of the extraneous to explore themes around love and pleasure in ‘The Navigator’ and loss and pain in ‘Hell Comes, Hell Goes’.

While enjoying the collection, I’m struck by that contradictory feeling of wanting to rush through the book and the stories, devouring each page in the way I might with a Raymond Carver or Alice Munro collection while also wanting to savour them and make my enjoyment of everyday escapism last longer. And it can be a hard to know where to begin because short stories, unlike a novel, offer the capacity to move in and out of the organisation at your pleasure. Should I read them in order, from the beginning, or dip in and out choosing on title or length?

Cole shows how to embrace and relish the short story, a sometimes-overlooked literary genre, while Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark would make an ideal study for teachers in how a collection of short stories can offer a sense of connectedness with its provocative themes and repeat characters, not unlike Tim Winton’s Minimum of Two.

CAROLINE VAN DE POL is the author of Back to Broady (Ventura Press/Peter Bishop Books); her first memoir. She is a writer and university lecturer in media and communication. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Wollongong and her articles and creative work have appeared in journals including Text and New Writing. Caroline has worked as a journalist and editor for newspapers and magazines including Melbourne’s Herald Sun. She has published two nonfiction health books on pregnancy and parenting. Caroline grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and she now lives in regional Victoria.

Dominique Hecq reviews A Personal History of Vision by Luke Fischer

November 21, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

A Personal History of Vision

By Luke Fischer

ISBN 978-1-74258-938-1

UWAP Poetry, 2017

Reviewed by DOMINIQUE HECQ

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand, O to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of being—R. M. Rilke

Luke Fischer’s second collection,  A Personal History of Vision, published earlier this year in UWAP’s Poetry Series, firmly establishes him as a pyrotechnician of language. This is Fischer’s second collection, and like the first, which was commended in the Anne Elder Award, it brings a dazzling range and depth of experience to his writing. Fischer’s ‘Augury?’, included in Paths of Flight, won the 2012 Overland Judith Wright Prize. Fischer is also a scholar of Romanticism, and this informs his poetry in unexpected and delightful ways. He has learned from Rainer Maria Rilke that an attentiveness to language enhances our understanding of things and therefore intensifies our vision. Like Rilke, his purpose is ‘to say [words] more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of being’.  In that, he goes further than Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, in his Treatise on Logic, famously wrote: ‘it is words, names, or, if images used as words or names, that are the only and exclusive subject of understanding. In no instance do we understand a thing in itself’. In the poem ‘Why I write’ Fischer lists, and dismisses a number of reasons he might write for. He settles on the following:

I write for the expansion of the present
vital as breath to an empty lung,
for the garden that grows around me,
whether I’m in the city or on a mountain—
an invisible garden of fruit trees, hanging
wisteria and vines, honey bees, angophoras.

In these deceptively simple yet finely wrought lines, we recognise the path taken by the poet who, in Goethe’s formulation, ‘sees the universal in the particular’.  We also make out the point at which the path forks out into three romantic traditions through specific images, and we hear echoes of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Novalis, Lamartine, Nerval, Baudelaire, Coleridge and Rilke. There may be more. Or less. (I may be seeing and hearing things). This is to suggest how Fischer’s verse conjures up a singularly-layered poetic world that produces a richness of tones and references.

Fischer’s poetic world is formal, philosophical, historical and, to a lesser extent, ecocritical in engagement and the concurrent romantic vision of the redemptive possibilities of art. His domain is ‘Nature’s Temple’ as immortalised in Baudelaire’s credo, ‘Correspondences’. In it, there is wonder, but also the anguish of melancholy, solitude, grief, suffering, dispossession and death. However, against these his poetry essentially offers life-affirming opportunities for delight—delight in the image-making magic of its own plays upon perception and language and, through these, in the multitudinous variety of nature, culture and art. Often cemented in an aesthetic image, or work of art, many of the poems collected in A Personal History of Vision express concern and empathy for the dead, grieving, lost and afflicted, for isolates driven inwards by their own perceptions. Answers are often gestured towards with empathy, and glimpses of the sublime, but they are more often than not cut short, leaving it to the reader to cope with the affect delivered by the last image. In ‘Waiting for the Train’, the sublime takes on surreal qualities on closing as the protagonist is compared to a fly caught in a spider’s web irrevocably breaking free.

Because of the collection’s lingering melancholy, I first wondered if ‘Deadwood’ might be emblematic of Fischer’s method. Behind the poem which evokes Rimbaud through reference to his limp and poetic vision, is ‘a verse that once set me on fire’. Here, the poet sees himself as a fire thief whose ‘text / looks like a poem’ yet ‘is a torch’ and the poets ‘way/into the heart’s subterrane, / a wavering illumination  / of its resistant textures’. Here is Prometheus, classical fire-stealer, the characteristic figure held up by the Romantics (especially Rimbaud and Shelley) as symbol of heroic rebellion, the imagination and poetry. The lessons taken from Rilke are integrated in the poem: acknowledgment of time and experience, facing up to dejection as instructive and potentially ennobling, respect for selfhood in all its particularities, paring the language, finding inspiration in the here and now, and allowing sublime intimations to emerge from the profane.

Each poem in this book is an exploration of the creative possibilities of the poem as self-sufficient construct and affecting world. Each poem strives to bring forth contradictions and resolve them through a controlled expansion of imagery along specific paradigmatic axes  rather than an accumulative proliferation of random images, which ends with some unexpected juxtaposition or reversal. The ekphrastic poems in particular, display this kind of aesthetics, focusing as they do on lines of flight. Thus despite his interest in paring back the expression to perceived essentials, in toughening the poem’s fibre, there is no doubt that Luke Fischer is above all an image maker. This comes with a distrust of adjectives and yet a paradoxical reverence for quaint or obsolete ones such as ‘subterrane’ and ‘halcyon’, which conjure up other languages, other traditions, other dimensions. This is the case in the third poem of the collection, ‘Horizon of Alps (K)’, in which ‘halcyon’ refers back to classical poetry via the French Romantics. This poem in fact introduces a whole cortege of allusions and shows Fischer is at his best: the theme is fully developed, the vision complex yet sustained, the convergence of poetic traditions surprising and the philosophical inferences sophisticated. The poem deserves quoting in full:

Horizon of Alps (K)
At the Château de Lavigny, Switzerland

Always at the boundary of vision, of thought
even when we look the other way. Though
often concealed in cloud and mist
veiled in haze, we know they endure.
Seemingly impenetrable matter
we sense a hidden truth, that they are minds
absorbed in contemplation.

On halcyon mornings Lac Léman
almost renders them as they are
in an image on diaphanous depth.
Their peaks shorn of vegetation, sheer faces
of stone, absolute architecture, prefigurations
of the crystals they hold.

Frozen tsunamis, primeval modernists
their abstraction rises above the lake and
its scattered sails—white chips in blue paint—
above the foothills’ sprawl of villages, the tangle
of forests and human lives, above emotion.

Resembling a heterodox order of monks
great mathematicians, geometers whose bible
was Euclid, their enlightenment consisted
in continuous meditation on the axiom
of axioms, the formula of themselves.

With a sister order they communicate
in antiphon. Snow imparts: Out of moisture
air and cold we make your structures light,
lighter than the empty bones of the tiny birds
that nest in your pockets. They reply:
We keep you from dissolving, lend
you a feeling of permanence.

At times dark clouds envelop the summits,
tense as the disputes at the First Council of Nicaea.
On holidays the iconostasis opens
revealing Mont Blanc, the hooded high priest,
as censers spread their smoke
around the lower pinnacles.

Still epics, skeletons of mythic creatures, crystal skulls
pure forms, the moral law, metalogic, consonants
isolated from vowels. Your secret name:
the voiceless occlusive
k

In a gesture reminiscent of Shelley, Fischer answers the old suggestion that poetry is associated with primitive, indeed ‘primeval’ perception and declines with the advance of civilisation. The poem echoes ‘Defence of Poetry’, where Shelley claims an interrelationship of language, perception and poetry such that poets as contributors to civilisation in all manners aesthetic and philosophical are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (1821). Lingering here is the romantic emphasis on the imagination, truth, beauty and pleasure allied with Shelley’s provocative definition of the relationship between imagination and morality in the form of the good. The poetic faculty creates ‘new materials for knowledge’ and engenders the asynchronous desire for their rearrangement and presentation. Through the emphasis on the paradoxically ‘voiceless occlusive’ in the French ‘blanc’ Fisher deftly suggests that, as Shelley puts it, poetry ‘is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge’ here epitomised by the Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. He also, and not without irony, suggests that poets are authors to others ‘of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory’. The irony pertains to the fact that ‘k’ at the heart of ‘Luke’ is indeed far from voiceless. Besides, after Kafka, the letter ‘k’ is loaded with connotations antithetical to the good.  In this poem, the letter ‘k’ goes beyond anchoring metaphoric play: it highlights the classical idea of eternal forms, including the form of the good endorsed by philosophy. It does so only to question and subvert this idea. This is achieved through interplay of semantic binaries.

Diverse in their range and reference, arresting in their statement and wordplay, the poems gathered in this collection are, as ‘Horizon of Alps (K)’ demonstrates, very carefully constructed. Fischer uses the short line and variable stanzaic form with dexterity. The result is a poetry that is conceived with sharp attention to detail, joy in the possibilities of language, and self-consciousness about the seriousness and exhilaration of perception and apperception. This is equally true of the longer questing poems, of the extended ‘Elegy for the Earth’ with its personification of earth as a sleeping woman, and of the shorter inquisitive lyrics such as ‘Glance’, ‘Scene in music’, ‘Anonymous’ and ‘Labyrinth’.

In the poem ‘Certain Individuals’, Fischer ponders what draws us to some people by invoking images rather than traits of character. He begins his meditation proper with the question: ‘But isn’t it that / in one person we sense a clear glinting waterfall / refreshing to sit beside, in another something mysterious / as a fallow field at dusk? I could not resist attempting to qualify his poetry in analogous fashion. Were it a prose poem, or proto-poem, it would be:

Water cascading through a gorge, a pattern of cross-currents forming beneath, around and above stones, causing sudden changes to the water’s flow. The lap and splash of images, nuances, cadences, subliminal rhythms. The attentiveness to form, language and speech: the shapes of words, letters, lines, stanzas. Their resonances, uncanny silences. The larynx’s response to what is heard, recalled and felt, reforming patterns of speech and sense. In winter the snow erases images and emptiness beckons. Calls from the depth of its stillness. Calls for understanding.

With Fischer, the romantic legacy is still with us, whatever modifications are made by changes in cultural perceptions, social institutions, aesthetic preferences and work patterns. In deference to art and in acknowledgement of the metaphoric possibilities of language, imagination allows here for a dialectical interplay of opposite categories that yield a third register.  This register bears Novalis’ aphorism : The separation of poet and thinker is only apparent and to the disadvantage of both…’ Here lies the irresistible brilliance of A Personal History of Vision.

NOTE: “The separation of poet and thinker is only apparent and to the disadvantage of both…” –Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) is the key, as it were, that opens Luke Fischer’s website.

DOMINIQUE HECQ is a poet, fiction writer, scholar and literary translator. She grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium and now lives in Melbourne. Her works include a novel, three collections of short stories, five books of poetry and two plays. Hush: A Fugue (2017) is her latest book of lined and prose poetry.

Robert Wood reviews Knocks by Emily Stewart

November 20, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Knocks

by Emily Stewart

Vagabond Press

ISBN 978-1-922181-71-8

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

There has been an important groundswell of recent feminist poetries and poetics in Australia. As Siobhan Hodge wrote in her review of Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s anthology Contemporary Feminist Poetry, there is:

…a subtle, cresting sense of activism.

It is there too in Emily Stewart’s Knocks, through its critical, engaged and optimistic hopes that are expressed in specific poems, which together convey a notion of intersectionality conscious of gender. As Hodge herself said of the anthology:

‘There is a reassuring note of solidarity throughout the collection, but a simultaneous celebration of diversity in style, tone, theme and foci.’

One can suggest something similar in Stewart’s collection and which has been noted in different ways by Pam Brown’s launch speech in linked deletions, Amelia Dale’s commentary in Jacket2, and Melody Paloma’s review in Cordite. This dialectical relationship between acute critique and joyful celebration suggests not only that the whole of life is attended to, but also that one can oscillate, converse, play with the variety and possibility of ‘Poetry’ writ large. So what is Stewart railing against and what is she heralding? And, perhaps importantly, where is this leading us and what does it suggest?

To answer those questions is difficult, and it may be more apt to give a summary of what the collection is about in order to gesture at but never arrive at a full understanding of Stewart’s collection. Her voice is multiple, layered, various – there are erasure poems (section two); poems of multiple voices; poems in ordinary plain speech; remixed poems of heightened experiment (section three); poems of repetition (‘Today’). The references are Aussie kitsch, global pop cultural, resolutely local, Anglophonic culture industrial, fun too. This eclecticism of tone, style and reference keeps the volume entertaining, engaging, active. What that means for a reader is that one is being tested and flexed and exercised from page to page in a worthy movement from A to D to Z to B to U and back again all over and through.

There are, of course, personal favourites; poems that resonate, which each reader will find on their own. Needless to say, there are jewels in there that I like too. For example, I responded to ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’, which is a wry listing of commodities, objects, items that could be catalogued from Bunnings or Home Hardware or Mitre Ten. The poem begins:

fencestone, pavers, coloured spit rock
face blocks, colonial cornices, artificial
stone, aluminium step treads, hardwood (18)

Far from being a simple list poem, in Stewart’s hands, it becomes a rapturous sonic apprehension, not a dull rote thing but an event with music in it – ‘fencestone’ goes well with ‘face blocks’, and later on there is ‘urbanite’ with ‘expansion joints’, ‘marble veneer island bench’ with ‘brass compress’. The ordering is such that it makes it plain speech rhapsodic. And of course, one can read into it a post-conceptual politics that would take a found object, retype it and yet slantly embody it with ideological awareness – the phrasing to dwell on in the excerpt above is, of course, ‘coloured spit rock’ with ‘colonial cornices’ and so here and now, we glimpse the shadows of anachronistic Indigenous terms and the images of James Cook, which both come back to haunt the settling mode of the everyday do it yourself brigade. The last line of this poem is ‘how to fix a picket fence’ which not only circles back to the opening word (fencestone) but also allows the reader into a commentary of suburban dreams.

When read with a regard for Knocks as a whole, one notices that Stewart is an adept and able observer of contemporary life in Australia from the criticality of the mundane through to the implications of being here truly. This last sense comes through in the poem, ‘Animal Hands’, that directly follows ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’ though it is there in other, tender if welcomingly ambivalent pieces. Nevertheless it provides a direct counterpoint here, a kind of contrapuntal puncturing of the suburban critique in ‘DIY’. In ‘Animal Hands’, Stewarts writes:

I’ve been unwinding wire
         along the serrated edge
       of these paddocks for a
     long time, pulling it tight (19)

It gives us a sense of engagement with boundaries, with borders, with aging, with process, with education, with tension, and this apparent everyday thinks through feminism, anxiety, and ecology of being with nods to history, emotion and birds. The poem ends with a libidinal and touching, though never sentimental, line:

all I want is your mouth on my neck, wordless and dumb under chilly stars

That is, the knowing poet assures us, all that ‘I’ want – the mouth, object of speech, home of tongue, at the neck, vampiric, teenage, hickies and loving, while the stars, this time chilled not burning balls of gas millions of miles away witness such complicated tenderness. It suggests what might be possible by looking at our immediate surrounds.

I responded to how her gaze falls on the ordinary, the suburban, the quotidian in these poems. This is not the domestic or the everyday or the taken-for-granted, but rather the momentary interruptions of frame against a poetic that is grand, posturing, arrogant. Those moments of defamiliarisation mean we are asked to see the normal anew and that is an important task in bringing to consciousness that which is poetic in the first place. This would seem to be a possibility that Stewart herself is constantly exploring from her writing to her social media, especially her Instagram [link to it – https://www.instagram.com/emstew__/], and which offers one line of productive inquiry that I am very much looking forward to. For this keen reader, the next collection cannot come soon enough.

NOTES

1. Siobhan Hodge review of Contemporary Feminist Poetry Ed Jessica Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy  Cordite

ROBERT WOOD has degrees from University of Western Australia, Australian National University and University of Pennsylvania. In 2017–2018, He will be an Endeavour Research Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, and a Copyright Agency Emerging Critic with the Sydney Review of Books.

Zachary Ward reviews Preparations for Departure by Nathanael O’Reilly

October 19, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Preparations for Departure

by Nathanael O’Reilly

UWA Publishing

ISBN: 9781742589459

Reviewed by ZACHARY WARD

Preparations for Departure, Nathanael O’Reilly’s second full length collection, is an ongoing journey in which the poet enters the gaps between home and abroad, contentment and discontent, presence and absence, youth and age, the past and the present. These disparities emerge in a suite of fifty-nine free-verse poems spanning across his formative years growing up in small town Australia, to his most recent years living in America. Reflecting a life spent in diaspora, the poems transport the reader back and forth across oceans to land in cities of ruinous decay, preserved in the poet’s mind; to scenes of quiet urbanity and the endlessly silent screams which pervade; to beaches untrodden, and in which we may now see our footprints forever imprinted; the clatter and squalor of marketplaces and the drudgery of the quotidian. A constantly shifting collage of antonymous sights and sounds, these duopolies are best observed in the author’s mind.

The suite’s first poem, ‘Border Crossings’, observes the conflict of duopoly that is constantly being waged across the author’s thoughts. A round trip through Eastern Europe, O’Reilly paints scenes of post-Soviet squalor and abandonment, though always from the security of a moving train carriage. The reader is afforded a sense of detachment, as the poet is easily able to retreat to the comforts of his compartment and those offered by Western influence. When not ‘sipping a glass of whiskey’, the speaker can ‘listen to Nirvana, U2, Springsteen’, willingly flitting between the scenery outside his window, and the familiar manner of those around him. Outside is the other, the old world, different and dark, crumbling and vacant; the carriage is home to Harry Potter, iPad’s and selfies. O’Reilly is never part of the scenery, and is aware of his intrusion into this world. He is more at home among the comforts of the west, and uses the ever-moving shuttle to shield him from the realities of the world he is passing through. A further exploration of this social disparity is explored in, ‘In the Market Place’. Though not protected by the bulk and pace of a train carriage, a description of the grime and poverty of a Ukrainian concourse is delivered briefly and starkly, conveying a desire to,

… simply observe and pass by,
my needs and survival unthreatened.
To them I am a rich Amerikanski,
an alien from a golden dreamland.

The train carriage is no longer required to define and separate, for his ‘clothes and accent proclaim [he does] not belong and never will.’ Unable to escape his heritage and the legacy of his own home and his ancestral homeland, the poet concedes that ‘in three weeks I’ll be gone, back in the West … living in luxury.’

Back in the West, the author’s reminiscences of his upbringing in Australia unearth a struggle to accept age and in so doing, detach from the past. Though far flung from the shores of home, the patchwork of Australia’s sleepy suburban streets, dry crackling long grass and booming coastal shelves are never far from the author’s thoughts. As from a moving train carriage, O’Reilly can observe his youth; a series of flashing images, just beyond his reach or inclusion. Formative years spent among the quiet nature of urban Australia reveals within the fledgling poet an awareness of the world and a greater understanding of a higher culture that might only be attained by sitting on rooftops and listening to Pink Floyd, hoping to glimpse a better view, in ‘The Way We Saw Ourselves’. Being merely a memory, as intangible as the crumbling iron yards of Eastern Europe, the luxury and comforts of the coach are not present; O’Reilly clearly desires to alight here and reassume the uncertainties and expectations of his younger self,

Years ago now, those days
when the world seemed ours
for the taking, when we dreamt
wildly, full of hope
and our own importance.

O’Reilly’s sense of diaspora is not only temporal, but also painfully internal. A victim of nostalgia and an unwitting tourist in his own youth, displacement perpetually plagues the evading poet. Though still capable of marking the parameters of home in his memory, his identity as an Australian of Anglo-Celtic origin turns his sights away from the antipodean land of his rearing, and temporarily toward the British Isles. One senses the poet’s hope of finding some outcrop of ancient rock to which he may find some purchase, and carve into the old-world soil of his ancestral home his own marking among the scratchings of his literary forbears.

Migration affords O’Reilly a semblance of inclusion, extending the exploration of duality beyond the internal and the temporal; it places the speaker at a spatial variance from his thoughts. Dissatisfaction and aimlessness accompany the author’s musings as he attempts to assimilate a foreign landscape. No longer wishing to play the part of the tourist, the reader becomes acutely aware of the sudden reduction of O’Reilly’s protective barriers; the train carriage has passed and the space between the rooftop and his present self has been traversed. In ‘My Inheritance’, the recurrent invasion of the poet’s carefree childhood is once more invoked. Reminiscently wistful, the reader is escorted further down the halls of the speaker’s memory, stopping ‘by barbed wire fences, scattered with droppings and dung’ to ‘suck in the smell of the sheep and the cows, musty hay, molasses.’ These rustic images, dabbed with care upon a palette of recollections to be disturbed by the slash of the artist’s brush and splashed vigorously across his canvas, hang lovingly upon the walls of these thoroughly ventured corridors. Distanced by years and self-doubt, the reader is reminded of O’Reilly’s self-imposed exile, and the ethereality of such careless days by the abrupt return of time and space in the poem’s final stanza,

In my mind the hot north wind
still flattens the brown grass
and carries the smell of sheep
and earth across the Pacific.

The Pacific ocean evokes profundity, and the depths to which the poet plunges to salvage these images, while its vastness suggests they are forever beyond the poet’s grasp in a muddling of past and present.

The remarkably emotive poems in Preparations for Departure read lightly, yet leave deep and perennial tracings. O’Reilly, in a voice sculpted by the world he has ventured, captures the evasive and eternal nature of the wandering spirit; the constantly restless speaker leaves traces of himself across the pages, carefully crafting an impression of having just come and just gone, leaving the reader one page behind. To keep turning is to accept O’Reilly’s invitation and accompany him on his centrifugal journey forward over oceans and back across pools of thought that trickle into the past. As the speaker takes in the sights, the reader may ponder class, wealth, race and age from the not always welcome security of a temporal and or spatial distance. Though the gaps are ever widening, these poems are able to suspend and preserve observances, which continue to question inherited notions of contentment, belonging and identity.

ZACHARY WARD graduated in a Bachelor of Communications, major in Creative Writing at UTS. His fiction appeared in the UTS Vertigo magazine.