January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rodney Williams has had poems published in various journals, including Overland, Blue Dog, Five Bells, page seventeen, The Paradise Anthology & Tasmanian Times, along with Poetry New Zealand and Antipodes. His haiku and tanka have appeared in a range of periodicals in Australia and America, as well as in New Zealand, Austria, Ireland and Canada. Also publishing critical pieces and short fiction, Rodney regularly performs in Spoken Word events, with readings broadcast on radio. A secondary school teacher of English and Literature, he has led workshops at regional writers’ festivals. In collaboration with painter Otto Boron (twice named Victorian Artist of the Year), in 2008 Rodney Williams produced the book Rural Dwellings – Gippsland and Beyond.
From Muir Woods to Walhalla
A triolet for my son Rohan
in a fresh forest stream – headwater-clean –
our blood-folk close, in a united state,
you once spied a crawdaddy no one had seen;
in a fresh forest stream (headwater-clean)
you find fingerling trout now, kingfisher-keen,
just as your sight’s clear, when kindred debate;
in a fresh forest stream, headwater-clean,
our blood-folk close in – a united state
First Aid
for Hazel
our mother was superintendent
to a red cross service company –
no mere charitable collectors
her crew staffed the local blood bank
while every winter weekend
in their tin booth at the netball
they’d patch up bitumen grazes
staining knees with gentian violet
soothing sobs with reassurance
from calico we kids would fashion
slings not sipped in Singapore –
as a hearthside cottage handicraft
we’d fabricate injuries in maché
stiff as splints on limbs still slender
sporting wounds in livid enamel
with bones jagged in card protruding
compound fractures if not interest
money tight as snakebite tourniquets
at ambulance first-aid courses
my sisters and I played patient
well schooled in all our symptoms:
a car wrecked out on the roadside
could host a training exercise –
when the fire brigade held a back-burn
our mum might stage a mock disaster
with her offspring cast as victim
a role we’d each learnt all too well
father had no drinking problem
if he’d another glass to drown in –
with her marriage past resuscitation
mum was made citizen of the year
likewise honoured by the queen:
filling a host of poorly paid positions
the old girl kept us kids together
the greatest service to our company
her toughest first-aid exercise of all
Black Betty
a Wilson’s Promontory Myth
Black Betty, settlers called her –
a fiery piece but not half bad
on my rounds of Wilson’s Promontory
coming back from Sealer’s Cove
as park ranger I spot a hitcher
bare skin dark as any full-blood
her thumb more down than out
I’ll drop her off at Tidal River
some decent clothes we’ll find her
no one over there she’ll bother –
as I wind down my window
pretty Betty starts to speak
whitefella whalers, redhead sealers
rank with blubber, sperm and steel
all foul breath and sickly chests
rummy heads and scabs undressed
my eyes despise them still
not enough to take our hunting
they forced their way between my legs
till like harpooned meat I bled
then with a blade made for flensing
from my trunk they docked my head
leaning against this ranger’s truck
I lift my noggin off my neck
to place my block upon his bone –
vanishing yet I haunt his sight
as white folk vouch by campfire light
Black Betty, he still called me –
did I send the wrong man mad?
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
Stephen Edgar has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent being History of the Day (Black Pepper Publishing), which was awarded the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize for 2009. “The Fifth Element”, from which three sections appear in this issue of Mascara Literary Review, is one of three interlinked narrative poems at the heart of his next book, Eldershaw.
Photograph by Vicki Frerer
The Fifth Element
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
Philip Larkin
December 1945. Isabel. Earth
Her tread, light as it is, disturbs a floorboard
And sends the footnote of a seismic shiver
Up through the kitchen table, registered
By a faint tinkling of the beads that weight
The doily on the milk jug she left out.
It’s probably gone off. Those words of his
Set up their tremor too among her thoughts,
The faintest ringing, practically too low
To be recorded in her consciousness,
At least until the day’s competing noises
Had quietened and left her clear. The moon,
As big, it seems, as earlier the sun
Which weighted down the sky’s opposing quarter,
Sheds the revers of that illumination,
As though she looked again at the same scene
The other way, as though the sky turned round
And showed her from behind its silver stitching.
She’s left him sleeping—Isabel assumes
That Evan’s sleeping—and slips quietly
Away through this interstice of the dark
To think it out. One more reversal, this,
It now occurs to her: four years ago,
She’d slipped out briefly on their wedding night
To say goodnight (at that hour?) to her mother,
Though really, if the truth were told, to pause
A little longer in that strained abeyance
Before the feared requirement of the flesh
That she must answer. Was it a mistake?
Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Not
The least of this war’s fateful dislocations
Was speeding sweethearts to the marriage bed
Who might have thought again, given more time.
But who can unsay love? And she would not
Have seen him off into that conflagration
From which he very well might come no more
With nothing but the memory of a wish
For what had never been to set beside
His everlasting absence. She at least
Could call herself his widow, no small thing
To salvage from the ruins of the world.
But there. He had survived. He did come back.
And she had met him at the Quay to end
The long hiatus between consummation
And married life, and they had come down here
To have a few days’ quietness alone,
The two of them, before their lives should start.
And maybe he had died in any case.
He seemed a body uninhabited.
Late in the afternoon on the veranda
They’d sat out looking at the gentle hills.
A little way below, where the land sloped down,
A stand of gum trees gathered to itself
Such greens as summer nourished, while, beyond,
The paddocks muzzily laid out their grasses,
Parched in the faded memory of colour
The heat had left them, shifting separately
And different ways as you looked here and there.
The air seemed thick with powder, not a dust,
But some particulation of the light
Applied across, or rather through the miles
Between here and the faint blue hazy sky,
In which the sun, a smouldering orange disc
Behind a screen, was sinking gradually
As though the air resisted its decline.
How beautiful she thought it. “I don’t know,”
He said at last, “it all looks dead to me.”
December 1978. Luke
The lassitude of Christmas makes a dull
And heavy progress through him like a drug.
Is it the season or the humid weight
Of air, or their perverse coincidence
That always settles on him when he visits?
Or is it that? His simply visiting,
Which, like the signal that a hypnotist
Implants, brings forth at once its cued behaviour?
“You can’t go home again.” Well, yes, and no.
He thinks of yesterday’s transparent rage
That Isabel and Evan stared straight through,
Oblivious. When Isabel recounted
How round at Angela’s Craig slapped their son
For some slight naughtiness not worth the notice—
More than one slap, and hard, which left him howling—
Evan, all indignation, had exploded
And called Craig all the names under the sun
For such brutal reproof. Jesus, Luke thought,
Look who is talking. He remembers well,
If Evan can’t, being summoned by his voice
Out to the dark street of a Sunday night
When, under television’s new enchantment,
He stayed too long a few doors down the road.
He stood beneath a street light, friendly-seeming,
And when Luke reached him, up his right hand rose
And down the strap flashed, curling like a whip
Around his legs—imagined more than seen,
Felt more than both—again, again, again,
To send him screaming home, where there was more
Considered application. Called to the bathroom
To have the red welts on his backside soothed
With ointment, in his terror he believed
More strokes were yet to come. Nor was that night
Uniquely memorable. Such violent
And such incontinent fury, where did they
Break out from when they took him? Who was he?
“What are you looking so self-righteous for?”
Evan barked savagely at Isabel
On one occasion when she glanced at him
Her pale unspeakable reproach. Those words,
They’re scored like strap marks in Luke’s memory.
To know all, as the old saw glibly has it,
Is to forgive all. Who can know so much?
Blocked by such banked-up anger and resentment,
Luke bit his tongue and let the moment pass.
Later he wanders up to the garage
Where Evan’s pottering. A peaceful and
Companionable mood rises between them
In idle conversation, punctuated
By silences that almost seem like touching
And say as much as words, especially
Since both of them know perfectly what subjects
May not be spoken of. “Here, hold this, mate.”
Luke grips the fishing rod and keeps it steady
While Evan winds the twine, eyelet by eyelet,
With single-minded care, one of those tasks
Of shared participation which enlarge
But don’t drag out the moment that they make.
Evan sings snatches of old prewar love songs—
Who can know so much?—in his expressive,
Beautiful and untutored baritone.
April 1945. Evan. Fire.
At some point in the flight, inevitably,
The Oxford would begin to sputter and stall,
No matter how precise were his instructions,
How clearly and methodically delivered,
How dire the consequences, should they not
Be followed faithfully. Up here in August,
The sky an excerpt from a pastoral
In watercolours, soft blue smudged with clouds,
And spread below, all stitched and hemmed with hedges,
And here and there the crocheted clumps of woodland,
Those meadows of unrealistic green,
So concentrated a viridian
You’d think that it would wash out in the rain
Like dye and stain the footpaths—floating here,
You wouldn’t know there was a war at all,
Not, certainly, a war that you were in
And might well die of, not so far away.
Amazing, with a little altitude,
How far his vision went—the width of England
All the way from the Wash to the Bristol Channel.
Too bad he could see across but not ahead.
And now the nose had dipped and down it went
In whining plummet, the white-faced trainee
In panic trying to regain control
Before that field, impossibly remote
From here, you’d think, reached up and through the glass.
Evan, who’d seen all this—oh, he’d lost count—
Dozens of times, was perfectly relaxed
And in good spirits. He secretly enjoyed
This part the best and usually turned,
As now, to tweak the trainee’s fear a notch,
And looked back ruefully with shaking head
At those exalted heights they’d fallen from,
Or down towards the cruel end that loomed
Below them. Judging to a nicety
The last safe moment, Evan snatched control
And pulled the plane up from its fatal dive.
That pastoral was over. In the war’s
Last months he does what until now he’s only
Been training others, and himself, to do.
What hand of destiny had chosen Bonn,
His favourite composer’s natal city,
For his first bombing mission? “Thus fate knocks
At the door,” Beethoven said of those four chords.
He played that mighty music in his head.
Hannover. Magdeburg. Each time a friend
Or more would disappear. Wiesbaden. Mainz.
At first you steel yourself not to return.
Eventually, though you don’t lose your fear,
You step aside, you step outside of it
And move in some dimension parallel
To life and sense and self. Each one of them
Was both unique and interchangeable,
Each death was every death. Stuttgart. Mannheim.
How tempting to persuade yourself that you
Are destined to survive. Don’t think of it.
Then fearful March. Berlin. Bremen. Erfurt.
Berlin. Berlin. Berlin. Berlin. Berlin.
The cold cramped cockpit and the juddering frame,
The searchlights calling you to come to them,
Scouring the sky for you, the rising fire
That seems to climb as high, the abrupt thud
Of guns that shake you sideways, and the fighters
That, thank Christ, a Mosquito can outrun.
And down there Germany, a starlit sky
As though the Milky Way has come to earth.
Each chosen city angry as a star
Burning with energy enough to make
Whole worlds. He doesn’t know, or cannot now
Allow himself to think, as one more night,
Delivered of his sole four-thousand-pounder,
He flies away, how that pure stellar heat
Is melting lives from bone and boiling blood,
Volatilizing screams from a thousand mouths,
Setting the corpses of Vesuvius
In charred arthritic postures underneath
The buildings burst around them—if they’re not
Calcined from history—sucking out the air
From cellars where the people cower, their lungs
Emptied and burnt out by the vanished breath.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ghostmasters 
by Mani Rao
Chameleon Press, 2010
ISBN 9789881862310
Reviewed by AMOS TOH
Mani Rao has donned many hats – TV executive, visiting fellow, scholar, critic and performer – but she is perhaps most at home as a poet. Tellingly, her poetry has spanned over more than a decade, leaving a “ghostly trail of a narrative thread about the dynamics of a relationship and a corollary questioning of the self” in its wake (Cyril Wong, QLRS Vol. 3 No. 4 Jul 2004). Like her past collections, Ghostmasters evidences an effortless kineticism and a tactile grasp of the language. However, there is also a sense that her restless journeying through love and loss, death and desire has come to fruition.
While Rao’s latest poems retain the freshness and immediacy of her penultimate collection, Echolocation (Hong Kong: Chameleon Press 2003), it also finds deeper satisfaction in the processes of questioning and undermining. Rao’s candid and sometimes acidulous perspective tugs insistently at the pretence of reality so that it tears away to illuminate a world of isolation and oblivion. Her hard-earned revelations enable the poet to shed past obsessions – the oft-romanticised “lovers of the moment” in “Choose”, “the hourglass of my body” and the “fat satin of gluttony” in “Grand Finale” – so that she may come to peace with “the memory of that knowledge by / which we continue to regard as true what we have known to be true” (“q”).
Rao burrows deep into the cacophony of human desire and activity to reveal their transience and therein their futility. She observes, with startling clarity, how want leaves us wanting:
If everything is impermanent why do you want it
I don’t want anything for ever
You will disappoint everyone
Then you will be free
(“Classic”)
Death and its associations of finality and salvation are similarly probed. The uneasy decorum and “polite timing” of a passing succumbs to the hunger of the living in “Shorts”; however “well-dressed” and “neatly folded”, death still marches to its pointless, facetious conclusion when “the family finds out who gets what / you are finally understood”. Immediately, the next poem “Duet” speaks of an apparently different subject matter but reaches starkly similar conclusions, finding little solace in the musings of wary lovers desperate to feel alive:
Next time check with me first
Drop in any time even if you are not around
You too phone when you have nothing to say
Each utterance struggles to come to terms with the suffocating stasis of a relationship that carries on in spite of itself and a future gone cold.
These are poems that provide neither sentimental consolations nor easy answers, probing the vagaries of love and loss with an unflinching eye to reveal our deepest natures and most intractable fears. Rao’s reflections become intensely personal in “Choose”, where a moment of whimsy while cleaning her ancestors’ graves leads the poet to contemplate the power to bring someone back to life. How quickly she discards her list of nominees – family, lovers, children – is reminiscent of American poet Louise Glück’s customary candour and dark wit:
Father of sacrifice needs no help to draw my pity
That is piteous
Mother of passion reigned over me
I resent that
Brother of empire I would re-instate
But why
Sister of sullenness I feel for
And ignore
Lovers of the moment I cannot deny
But they did not wait for me
Rao’s bathos is more mordant than trenchant, purging herself of the emptiness of self-righteous sacrifice and self-pity, as well as a love that is ultimately unloving.
Nevertheless, even as life falls away in “lumps and gravy” at the hands of a tyrant (“Pol Pot”) or crumbles to leave “one ragged wing banging in the wind” (“Shorts”), the poet finds something redeeming in the rediscovery of “the opening softening wood of my body”, as well as its retelling. Human emotions and experiences, already in themselves figments of language, are recast as new verbs, directions and destinations:
Pain is a Verb
Death is Not
Wrong is a Place
Love has No Opposite
Perfection is a Being
(“q”)
Rao refutes the absolutist perception that “love”, “pain” or a “wrong” can be ascribed boundaries of meaning or any particular ideal. To be sure, this does not mean her poems endorse “the pit of relativity…comparing this truth with that” (“Writing to Stop”). Instead, they reflect that there is nothing so virtuous or grand that cannot be flipped onto its back to reveal its hypocrisy:
That I think it is not to be feared does not mean I don’t fear it. I used
to be someone. I placed so much value on it I acted humble,
prefacing the admission of my fortune with ‘undeserved’. How
low an opinion I had of myself that I became satisfied.
(“Worker”)
The poet is now content with merely being, seeking solace in knowing “she is mere / Reflection” that “Stays with the metaphor / Some respectful distance from the sun.” (“Haul”). Writing may provide catharsis, yet that is no certainty in a topsy-turvy world where “language is language and gives away no clues” about its destinations (“Writing to Stop”). However, little does this faze the poet who is no longer afraid to linger on the threshold between desire and the desired, between the dying and the dead. Fittingly, she asks, “If we don’t stop writing love poems, how can we be loved?”, as if defying the irony. This is a poetry that reminds us to stop arranging our lives as a means to an end so that we may start living. It is little wonder then that Rao dedicates Ghostmasters neither to us nor our existence, but appeals instead to our sense of “presence”.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
Denis Gallagher was born in Sydney in 1948 and now lives in Blackheath NSW. He wrote his first poem as a student at Normanhurst Boys’ High School, and recalls that it included the word “shibboleths”. His enthusiasm for poetry continued whilst a student at The University of Sydney in the late 1960s, but it wasn’t until several years later while sharing a house with Ken Bolton and Rae Desmond Jones in the inner-Sydney suburb of Glebe that he became actively engaged with the writing of poetry, which lead to his first collection, International Stardom, published by Sea Cruise Books in 1977. He is the author of three other collections of poetry and a contributor to Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets, edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones (2009).
Istanbul
On the Bosphorus from Eminonu to Uskudar
An old man built me a memorial of words
In tribute to the poet Yahya Kemal
How his heart like incense permeates the years
An old man built me a memorial of words
A monument to loss, regret, huzun
How his heart like incense permeates the years
Another ferry departs
A monument to loss, regret, huzun
Hidden in the eyes of every Istanbullus
Another ferry departs
A dream, as though within a dream begins
Hidden in the eyes of every Istanbullus
The aimless, lost street dogs’ search
A dream, as though within a dream begins
Ataturk’s bronzed eyes look west
Aimless, the lost street dogs search
Where once the pasha’s grand mansion stood
Ataturk’s bronzed eyes look west
Still let me dream my country is unchanged
Where once the pasha’s grand mansion stood
If death is night upon some foreign shore
Still let me dream my country is unchanged
On the Bosphorus from Eminonu to Uskudar
Two Dogs of Blackheath
I heard later
Those little dogs
Were Po and Mo
Chihuahuas
Of Prince George Lane
Quiet on the lounge
Alert at the window
Under the curtains
Chewing the air
Their mistress
The barmaid
Told me their names
Short for Poetry
And Motion
Her twin darlings
Abreast
Of the moment
She’d pulled a beer
We laughed
At ourselves
Looked at the floor
Over and over
That memory
Comes back
Every time
I walk
Up
Every time
I walk
Down
Their mistress
At home
Asleep on the lounge
I laugh again
At the thought
PoMo alert
Watch me pass by
Lost in the moment
Writing on air
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Iran: My Grandfather .jpg)
by Ali Alizadeh
Transit Lounge, 2010
ISBN 9780980571745
Reviewed by ANGELA MEYER
Iran’s fascinating, in parts beautiful and in parts horrific history is worthy of account: the contextual conflict; religion versus progress; and all the complex in-betweens. So many good intentions, misinterpretations, capitulations, and fluctuations has this country endured. Its citizens have swayed with vicissitudes, standing up and being beaten down, feeling that one thing is right until it goes too far, feeling that the other thing is not right at all. And then big, shadowy players like England, Germany, and the US have entered with their devastating and oft confusing (for the citizens, for the reader) interferences.
Ali Alizadeh’s Iran: My Grandfather, is the history of Iran through the lens of the author’s grandfather Salman Fuladvand. From Salman’s birth in the democratic Iran of 1905, through to his death as a disenchanted man attempting to find peace as a Sufi poet in the ‘70s, Salman witnessed the rise and fall of revolution, injustice; and knew that terror, in the form of the reactionary rise of Islamic fundamentalism, would become worse after his death. Having never been a Muslim, by the time he died, Salman had stopped believing in progress.
Alizadeh begins the book with a moving but not entirely necessary explanation of his reasons for writing the book. All his points are valid: ‘I have read many accounts of what went wrong in Iran, the trouble with Islam, and the like, and yet I am left bored, unsatisfied and disembodied’ (p. 5), but the main, novelistic narrative of the book speaks for itself. The (albeit justified) forthright anger of this front section might alienate some readers – the kind of readers who, perhaps, should be reading this book, the better to understand Iran’s rich history and the bold, destructive interference of Western powers.
The end of this chapter explains why Alizadeh has chosen his grandfather as the lens, and it becomes more evident, throughout the book – as his grandfather’s life was absorbing, privileged and vital, spanning many eras. He writes: ‘His life is not a crystal ball but a mirror. I’d like to see myself, and also you, reader – you and humans like us, in the mirror’ (p. 7). The book is not just a history, it’s an exploration of belief and error, of passion and disappointment, of individual and collective fate – fate sometimes autonomous, and on many occasions forced into shape by some external force.
The main, effective body of the book is written as historical fiction – the author’s grandfather’s life-story is intertwined with the life of the country. The book is never dull or dreary, but passionate (without being as forceful as the prologue.) It’s absorbing and informative simultaneously.
When the Qajar monarch was deposed in 1925 and Reza Khan took over as Shah, Alizadeh’s grandfather, Salman, became a policeman and was required to undertake military training. His pregnant wife, Tahereh, disagreed with the new Shah’s plans for modernising Iran. On p. 35, they argue over baby names. Tahereh wants an Iranian Muslim name, but Salman says: ‘Stop being so melodramatic, sweetheart. I think we should choose original Persian names. Names that Iranians used before the damn Arabs and their Islam invaded us.’ This micro-conflict is representative of the simmering differences throughout the population through many tyrannical, or short-lived, well-meaning, rulers over the following decades. One of the Shah’s impositions in 1935 was the banning of the veil for women, which Salman agreed with – his mother was a feminist and he himself believed women should be emancipated. But an incident is depicted which is very strong in the way it portrays the confusion of the clash between forced ‘freedom’, and choice: A woman refuses to remove her veil and Salman, as is his duty, must remove it by force.
‘He hears the woman whimper as he grimaces and, without looking directly at her, first tears off her face mask and then the long black fabric of her chador. She shrieks as though he were raping or stabbing her. Startled by her reaction, Salman lets go of her. She falls to her knees and starts beating herself over the head.’ (pp. 62–63).
Such a scene is frightening and difficult for the reader. Salman is our hero, and yet, we feel much empathy for the woman, who cannot contemplate Salman’s reasons for baring her – she cannot comprehend the law. This scene is also an emotional precursor, in microcosm, to later violent uprisings against secular laws and secular rule, or any kind of rule or aid that is not Islamic. But of course – there are reactions and then there are outrageous and terrible and fanatical reactions. And Alizadeh lets the reader make up their own mind, or allows them to contemplate the complexity of the chain (and loop) of actions and reactions in Iran’s history.
The ‘Great’ Reza Shah’s ideas and his hunger for power became larger, and as is always the case in these situations, opinion against power was quashed. Salman, in the 1940s back in his hometown as Police Chief, was certainly beginning to question the leader he once looked up to. A Prince being held in the jail of his district is killed without a trial, and Salman asks his Sergeant: ‘Do you think [Reza Shah] is steering the country in an ethically and politically viable direction … Or do you think, as I do, that his modernism is giving way to totalitarianism?’ (p. 80). Indeed the Shah and Nazi Germany were in cahoots, and Salman lost an eye standing up to a German scholar whom he suspected of using construction funds to buy Iranian archaeological treasures for museums in Europe.
After the Shah finally stepped down and Iran was taken for the Allies, the new Shah proved his mettle by publicly doing justice to the ‘perpetrators’ of the last regime. In this, Salman was falsely accused of the murder of the Prince who had been in his custody. He was sent to Qasr Prison – where, over the ensuing chapters, he undergoes much change and resolves himself to accepting a kind of powerlessness, passing through madness, to a shaky kind of peace. The story follows the family’s destiny until Alizadeh himself left Iran with his family as a teenager. It describes the rich, first world Iran of the 1970s, the Islamic uprising, the US involvement in bringing the Ayatollah into power. It suggests why the Ayatollah was accepted as an alternative voice to the people – tired of their megalomaniac Shah and in the absence of leftist/intellectual voices, and it references the Iraq/Iran war, with its horrific death toll. When Salman’s voice has passed, Alizadeh himself becomes the ‘mirror’ for the reader.
The writing itself is absorbing and polished. The structure works, in particular the intertwining histories: the microcosm of a grandfather’s life and the macro narrative of the country. The narrative is also peppered with aptly cryptic translations of Sufi poetry – which is something Salman was comforted by in prison. The complexity, the abstraction – these are things Salman can understand, not reason nor faith. ‘The rose that does not assume the heart’s colour/Shall be mired in the mud of its quintessence’ (p. 165).
One comes away with a feeling of heaviness, sadness and a sense of hope – for the understanding of people, for a diminishing role of greed, for countries of such rich and scarred history to one day be ruled as independently and fairly as possible, and for more books like this to be published and widely read.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in French, English and Chinese. Her books include Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010) and Silhouette/Shadow (co-authored with Gao Xingjian, Contours, 2007). Co-director of Vif éditions (www.vif-editions.com), an independent Parisian publishing house, and one of the editors at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), she is also a zheng (ancient Chinese zither) concertist. Her CD, In One Take/Une seule prise (with Guo Gan, erhu) will be released in Europe this fall. Her translations of Hai Zi’s prose will be forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012, and she is currently completing a French critical monograph on Gao Xingjian’s dramatic literature. She lives in Paris, France and New York. Visit www.fionasze.com
Rendez-vous at Pont des Arts
After Brassai
You’ll find me at Pont des Arts
where water remains water
till it moves between tolling bells
while your light feet carry speed,
you chase after disappearing bistros,
then find me at Pont des Arts.
In my bed on Rue de Seine,
we whisper and you touch my cheek,
charting out time with your fingers.
At my window on Rue de Seine,
I light a candle to look into your eyes
which find their way to Pont des Arts
without compass, without map,
as the bridge arches into time,
charting history across two banks.
Days connect years, years become places —
you travel over dreams or on bicycle.
Will I find you at Pont des Arts?
Moon crossing bridge in vanishing stars.
Fragile
The sea under our bed
holds immensity for sleepless
hours that belong to last night.
I am moon fishing while
waiting for you to open
your eyes and cry for light.
Crawling in the sheets, I fear
burying you in my dreams where
your tears drop as water
trickling from the sky, and I am
that instant of devastating white.
My Grandmother Waters the Moon
Ingredients: 1 pound red azuki beans, lard,
sugar, salt, white sesame, walnuts, flour
First, she imagines an encrypted message,
longevity in Chinese characters,
ideograms of dashed bamboo and mandarin
ducks. Grains of red beans churn in her palm,
their voices a song of cascading waters.
Rinses every seed warm to her touch, a blender
crushing them until they are sand
soft enough to waltz once a finger dips in them.
Jump, of course they jump!
As she splatters them over steamy lard, little
fireworks in the greasy wok. Stirs until
a crimson bean paste foams. Let it cool.
Now, the mutation. Meander white dough
into miniature moons, pert peering hollows
waiting to be parched with spoonfuls
of bean paste. Throw sesame. Or slices of walnuts.
Just more dough is not enough to seal each moon
with mystery — molding her message on top
of each crust, she now gives it a mosaic look.
War strategy? Emperor Chu Yuan-chang
performed the same ritual. He who’d construct
a new dynasty, slipped espionage notes
inside mooncakes. Soldiers lacquered their lips
over them, tasting bitterness of each failed revolt.
In 1368, they drove the Mongols north,
back to their steppes. Here she is in 1980.
About histories, she is seldom wrong.
Time to transform the mooncakes golden —
oven heat for thirty minutes. Her discreet
signature before this last phase: watering
green tea over each chalked face. What is she
imagining again? That someday grasses
sprout with flowers on the moon?
All autumn she dreamt of stealing
that cupful of sky. A snack
to nibble for her granddaughter, the baby
me, wafts of caked fragrance
a lullaby, tucked in an apron, sleeping on her back.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jen Webb lives in Canberra, and is the author of a number of works including the poetry collection, Proverbs from Sierra Leone (Five Islands Press, 2004).
Bête à chagrin
a thin morning, Canberra cold, and the cat
is sleeping outside, he’s dozing out there
dying in the sun, not knowing it, he thinks
perhaps how sunlight feels on skin, how birds’ wings
sound the air, he tastes the drugs on his tongue
this is the matter of his life
a life of feeling not thinking. Of being not might be
a human heart can’t be: I am want, he is satisfied with is
for him an easy death, for me old words
like chagrin come to mind, and I
must make the call, rule the line
he purrs again, I stroke his staring coat
he’s metaphor of course; all cats are, all loves
he blinks, dying in the sun
I can’t find the gap between want and ought
now might be shifts into will and don’t becomes yes
the sun the only bright spot on a hard-edged day
Outside Euclid’s box
the cyberworld has given up the fight: space is still solid,
time remains a mystery, the fundamentals still rule – that
geometry of one and three, time and space, that box our world
but you know, and I know, time is sometimes now, sometimes then
or when: outside Euclid’s box it folds like a paper crane, taut
surfaces hiding what Euclid could not know;
tug the paper wing and time is squeezed in here, stretched out there
the walls shift, the tremble takes its time, one wall falls, three
remain – height and length and width – they shudder
as space shifts like a tale; as there is folded onto then
as where is drawn out beyond what seemed to be its end –
what remains?
the story arcs from me to you, time trembles, and space,
the walls fail: when does far away become
just here, or then become now? When
does that old arc thread
here to there, the line from then to now,
the story, the trembling tale?
Wednesday morning
So here we are again, back at the tipping point
poised between stop and go
Another Wednesday lifts its blinds to check the day.
Sun, again. Blue sky.
A flotilla of clouds heading this way
morning light of course on leaves.
Below the tree three birds stand, eyes on the sky
where the hawk takes his thermal ride
the little birds describe his flight
then freeze as he turns their way.
The tree falls still; even time hesitates: the clocks run
to and fro
confused by the unlikely sky
Janus scratches his head, looks to
and fro, defers the day
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born in 1935 in Limlingerode, a hamlet in the formerly East German part of the Harz Mountains, Sarah Kirsch is considered one of the most luminous figures on the reunited German poetic horizon. She has written several collections of poetry, and has been critical of socialist regimes and anti-semitism. Her awards, include the Georg Büchner, the Friedrich Hölderlin and the Petrarca Prizes; her credo is to live like a poem.
Raben
Die Bäume in diesen windzerblasenen
Das Land überrollenden Himmeln
Sind höher als die zusammengeduckten
Gluckenähnlichen Kirchen, und Wolken
Durchfliegen die Kronen die Vögel
Steigen von Ast zu Ast kohlschwarze Raben
Flattern den heidnischen Göttern
Hin auf die Schultern und krächzen
Den Alten die Ohren voll alle Sterblichen
Werden verpfiffen schlappe Seelen
Über den Wurzeln und ohne Flügel.
Atempause
Der Himmel ist rauchgrau aschgrau mausgrau
Bleifarben steingrau im Land
Des Platzregens der Dauergewitter
Die aufgequollenen Wiesen die Gärten
Verfaulen und Hunden sind übernacht
Flossen gewachsen sie tauchen
Nach jedem silbernen Löffel der
Aus dem Fenster fällt wenn augenblicklich
Behäbige Marmeladen bereitet werden
In Küchen bei gutem Wetter durchflogen
Von Bäurinnen Heu im Gewand Dampf
Im Hintern auf Rübenhacken am Mittag.
Süß langt der Sommer ins Fenster
Süß langst der Sommer ins Fenster
Seine Hände gebreitet wie Linden
Reichen mir Honig und quirlende Blüten, er
Schläfert mich ein, wirft Lichter und Schatten
Lockige Ranken um meine Füße, ich ruh
Draußen gern unter ihm, die Mulden
Meiner Fersen seiner Zehen fülln sich zu Teichen
Wo mir der Kopf liegt polstert die Erde
Mit duftenden Kräutern mein eiliger Freund, Beeren
Stopft er mir in mein Mund, getigerte Hummeln
Brummen den Rhythmus, schöne Bilder
Baun sich am Himmel auf
Heckenrosenbestickt er den Leib mir – ach gerne
Höb ich den Blick nicht aus seinem Blau
Wären nicht hinter mir die Geschwister
Mit Minen und Phosphor, jung
Soll ich dahin, mein Freund auch aus der Welt –
Ich beklag es, die letzten Zeilen des
Was ich schreibe, gehen vom Krieg
|
Ravens
the trees in these wind-blown
skies rolling over the land
are taller than the churches
hunched up like clucky hens, and clouds
fly through the tree tops the birds
move from branch to branch coal-black ravens
flutter down onto the shoulders
of pagan gods and croak up
the elders’ ears all mortals
dobbed in weak souls
above the roots and wingless.
Breath Pause
the sky is smoke grey ash grey mouse grey
lead grey stone grey in the land
of sudden showers of continuous thunder
the bloated meadows the gardens
rotting and dogs during the night
have grown fins they dive
after every silver spoon that
falls from the window when instantly
portly marmalades are being made
in kitchens flown through in fine weather
by farmers’ wives with hay in their pants
steam in their bums on turnip fields at noon.
Sweetly summer reaches through the window
Sweetly summer reaches through the window
His hands spread out like lindens
Serve me honey and spiralling blossoms, he
Puts me to sleep, throws light and shade
Curly tendrils around my feet, I
Love resting under him outside, the depressions
Of my heels of his toes are filled into ponds
Where my head lies the ground cushions
With aromatic herbs my hasty friend, berries
He stuffs into my mouth, tigered bumble bees
Buzz the rhythm, fine images
Build up in the sky
He embroiders my body with wild roses – oh
I’d love to not look up from his blue
If there weren’t brothers and sisters behind me
With mines and phosphorous, young
Am I to leave, my friend, the world too –
I lament the last lines of what
I write run to war
|
Landaufenthalt
Morgens füttere ich den Schwan abends die Katzen dazwischen
Gehe ich über das Gras passiere die verkommenen Obstplantagen
Hier wachsen Birnbäume in rostigen Öfen, Pfirsichbäume
Fallen ins Kraut, die Zäune haben sich lange ergeben, Eisen und Holz
Alles verfault und der Wald umarmt den Garten in einer Fliederhecke
Da stehe ich dicht vor den Büschen mit nassen Füßen
Es hat lange geregnet, und sehe die tintenblauen Dolden, der Himmel
Ist scheckig wie Löschpapier
Mich schwindelt vor Farbe und Duft doch die Bienen
Bleiben im Stock selbst die aufgesperrten Mäuler der Nesselblüten
Ziehn sie nicht her, vielleicht ist die Königin
Heute morgen plötzlich gestorben die Eichen
Brüten Gallwespen, dicke rosa Kugeln platzen wohl bald
Ich würde die Bäume gerne erleichtern doch der Äpfelchen
Sind es zu viel sie erreichen mühlos die Kronen auch faßt
Klebkraut mich an, ich unterscheide Simsen und Seggen so viel Natur
Die Vögel und schwarzen Schnecken dazu überall Gras Gras das
Die Füße mir feuchtet fettgrün es verschwendet sich
Noch auf dem Schuttberg verbirgt es Glas wächst
in aufgebrochne Matratzen ich rette mich
Auf den künstlichen Schlackenweg und werde wohl bald
In meine Betonstadt zurückgehen hier ist man nicht auf der Welt
Der Frühling in seiner maßlosen Gier macht nicht halt, verstopft
Augen und Ohren mit Gras die Zeitungen sind leer
Eh sie hier ankommen der Wald hat all seine Blätter und weiß
Nichts vom Feuer
In the Country
Mornings I feed the swans evenings the cats in between
I walk over grass pass by the ruined orchards
Pear trees grow in rusty ovens, peach trees
Collapse into grass, the fences have long surrendered, iron and wood
Everything rotten and the woods embrace the garden in a lilac bush
There I stand with wet feet close to the bushes
It has rained a long time, and I see the ink blue umbels, the sky
Is spotty like blotting paper
I’m dizzy with colour and smells but the bees
Stay in the hive even the gaping mouths of the nettle blossoms
Don’t pull them over, perhaps the queen
Suddenly died this morning the oaks
Breed gall wasps, thick red balls will probably soon burst
I’d love to lighten the trees but there are too many little apples
They effortlessly reach the crowns and cleevers
Grab me, I distinguish reeds and sedges so much nature
The birds and black snails and everywhere grass grass that
Moistens my feet fat-green it squanders itself
Even on the tip it hides glass grows in broken mattresses I flee
onto the artificial cinder path and will presumably soon
return to my concrete city here you’re not in the world
spring doesn’t let up in its bottomless greed, stuffs
eyes and ears with grass the newspapers are empty
before they arrive here the wood is in full leaf and knows
nothing about fire
Peter Lach-Newinsky is of German-Russian heritage, Peter grew up bilingually in Sydney. His awards include the MPU First Prize 2009, Third Prize Val Vallis Award 2009, MPU Second Prize 2008, Second Prize Shoalhaven Literary Award 2008 and the Varuna-Picaro Publishing Award 2009. He has published a chapbook: The Knee Monologues & Other Poems (Picaro Press 2009). His first full-length collection is The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems (Picaro Press 2010). Peter grows 103 heirloom apple varieties in Bundanoon NSW.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kelly lives in Perth, Western Australia. She has a BA Arts and a Postgraduate Diploma (Creative Writing) from Curtin University. Her poetry has been published in print and online journals. Her first collection of poetry, People from bones (with co-author, Bron Bateman) was released in the UK and Australia in June 2002 (Ragged Raven Press, UK.) Her poem, “Venus of Willendorf” was selected for the anthology, The Best Australian Poetry 2009.
Evolution Fail
A mule is the hybrid
result of the doomed pairing
of a male donkey and female horse.
The challenge for every mule
is to live a life with an uneven
amount of chromosomes.
Knowing beyond anything else
their legacy to this world
will never be borne of them,
but that their parents were revolutionaries.
Dance of the Seahorses
The parade has begun
his belly plump to exploding
water steed prickles
and prances before his maiden.
She takes his tail in hers, curls tight,
hangs on as they stretch
necks long and supple,
rising together in a rush of love-sick blood
to the idle surface.
Ever so deftly, he opens his pouch,
she delivers, releases and is gone.
Perspective
At a distance the photo
appears like a parachute of red and yellow,
laid upon the ground with dancers, long and lean,
limbs quivering on the centre podium.
A closer inspection reveals stamens and pistols
and pollen thrumming in the breeze, keeping time.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
A Slant of Light
by Paul Kane
Whitmore Press
Reviewed by Michelle Cahill
Paul Kane’s collection of Australian poems, A Slant of Light concerns itself with motion and matter, the visible spectrums. In this slim, modest volume, poems from Work Life, and the earlier Drowned Lands, as well as new poems are luminously arranged by dialectic turns. There are so many influences and traditions underpinning this work, yet it speaks to a reader with simplicity and clarity, so that one comes not merely to enjoy, but to value its irony and its philosophical refinement.
The physical and metaphysical properties of light and its objects thematically link these verses. At least two themes familiar to readers of Emily Dickinson are inferred by the book’s title: the circularity of truth and the disquiet of death, of loss and mourning. It is the “internal difference/Where the meanings are” which forms disturbing tensions that lie beneath the surface of poems about landscape, travel, friendship, family and loss.
“South Yarra,” the book’s opening poem, distinguishes light from shadow, reality from dream, as it describes the passing of time in the speaker’s study. Like doubt, the light takes no form of its own, other than objects it falls upon. The speaker’s book is illuminated, “the cyclamen luxuriates,” a blank wall is “blinding.” Materiality is evident in the careful choice of diction; the optic process of “accommodation” renders possible the gaze, but also there is a syllogistic inference being made about the waking experience and the dream, both of which in their shared similarity lay claim to reality. The apparent simplicity of the poem belies its lyric ability to unravel complexity.
Kane’s choice of “Plastic explosive on Toorak Road’ to follow the opening poem reinforces to the reader that his concerns are with quantities that can be measured. Here the charge that alters matter is scandalous but the object is simulacra: the scene, depicting a mannequin being dismantled in a Toorak shop and voyeuristically watched by a young man, evokes an unexpected emotion in the saleswoman:
She begins dismembering:
first an arm, then another, lies on the ground.
With a tenderness that perplexes her, she holds
a head in her lap. She could almost cry.
(2)
Intimacy, vulnerability and cruelty are eclipsed by an intentional ambiguity in the scene. The poem is subtle yet deeply disturbing, giving force to feelings beyond the armoury of appearance, hinting too, at dissatisfaction with the simulated world. That the speaker is somehow complicit in this, yet twice distanced, watching the watcher, deepens this fissure.
Kane’s poetics test the tensions between abstract and real matter, between external and eternal, and what that word might mean. His interest in landscape, place, in the physical nature of appearance situates a modernist aporia, “an alien shore,” an impasse in which truth and knowledge may be questioned rationally, or empirically, or with transcendental idealism rather than through deconstruction or mystic leaps. A poem like “In the Penal Colony” outlines the constructions of normative ethics, which oversimplify our existential restrictions
We are everywhere in chains, long before
this bondage confirms it
(7)
An unsentimental taking of terms, which extend beyond colonial or philosophical demarcations, is used to define entrapments “ beyond mere justice or injustice.” There is hardness and tenderness entwined, as “we tend to these machines lovingly.” Here, as elsewhere, salient use is made of the third person plural pronoun to imply a shared consciousness, in which nations and stories might converse. Kane’s unadorned style is beautifully wrought as a masculine music relying on assonance, puns, repetitions and a matter-of-fact tone:
The writs, by all rights, are the very terms
we endure with our bodies, upon our bodies.
We will be free one day, when we are as nothing.
(7)
If a Platonic or pre-Platonic ideal is imaginatively tested in this poem, other poems are more skeptical of knowledge. “Black Window” adopts the more Kantian perspective that only through appearances can we know ourselves:
we half-believe and half ignore.
Turn again says the room, but this time
vanish into what you are doing
that you may be seen for what you do
(25)
So the disparate elements of reality remain unreconciled, hope appearing like a sign, “a narrow band of light” in the existential darkness. Kane executes his prose poems very beautifully; one can observe traces of Romantic introspection in the movement as description leads to meditation and colloquy. But he makes this unique, tempering it with a critique of the light to which he alludes:
Were it not for all our cruelty,
we might live in grace, as hatred is darkness,
and darkness the absence of light.
We cannot get behind this world, only
deeper into it, until at last inside out its strangeness
is revealed and every prospect, every certainty
we thought we knew, turns foreign to us,
and fresh, like that band of light and those
rising clouds.
(22-23)
This, from “Hard Light in the Goldfields,” seems to convey recognition that self, object and phenomenon are entwined. Despite the poem’s intellectual discipline one is aware of intuition, the poetic ego being subordinate to that incident between inner and outer worlds, which drives the poem towards passion.
Correspondences are drawn between aesthetics and ethics, that “grace” which eludes us. I read this as a secular slant, traces of which are found in many other poems. One delightful verse, “An Invitation,” evokes a hierarchy in terms of situation and conduct, from the low lying lands of Talbot to Mt Glasgow where the future “presides,” and where the reader is invited to join for coffee and lemon cake. The harshness of rural life, of drought, solitude, and desperation provides metaphysical reflections, which are eloquently voiced, rather than being maverick in language or compacted in craft. The wilderness is stark in “Kakadu Memory,” where ekphrasis establishes an anti-pastoral space from an abstract landscape:
The bleakness has yielded up desert colours
and the emptiness fills with bird song.
(15)
Nostalgia is replaced with despair; even the grasses “desperate…/ for moisture and forgiveness.” Menace is frequently hinted at; and in a poem like “On the Volcano” the biological order is metonymic of social hierarchies, and their implications of power:
I wouldn’t want to be a rodent on this
mountain, or anything low on the food chain.
We live among elements, any one of which
could take us in a moment.
(24)
Here, as in Emily Dickinson’s poems, ambivalence, the distinct angle between verbal style and subject creates strong psychological realities. A resisted threat is suggested. Such tonal manipulations are the hallmark of Kane’s poetics. A metaphysician who entertains ethics, and who at times employs theological tropes, his wit is a sign of his attachment to the world.
Transition, the relativity of time, the diurnal cycle, the Augustinian circle, the wave properties of light, are the physical principles on which Kane bases his eulogies. There’s a distillation informed by Emerson’s understanding that
The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the object it classifies.
(92)
The eulogies leave vivid and unassuming images of a person’s life. Some, like “Third Parent” and “Dear Margie” praise close relatives and friends, while others like “Dawn At Timor” are addressed to poet friends. Jahan Ramazani has described the transhistorical and transcultural sources of elegy, a genre steeped in formality, ritual and convention, pastoral and Puritan. Ardent yet plainly poised in their contemplation, Kane’s elegies insert a cross-cultural episteme into a national context. Movement bids the poet to “alien shores,” to “foreign seas,” where the perspectives he encounters are both a “common ground,’ and then, in mourning, “all the circumference/ of a life without the centre.” These perspectives, which intersect the local with the timeless, are relevant not merely for Australian readers but for a ‘transnationalist’ poetics, dare I mention that dangerously porous term.
And yet, the diasporic identity seems essential for the particular, inventive space of a poet who probes the disparities between reality and abstractions. For the diasporic or expatriate writer the absence of home or place may exert equal if not greater force on the imagination than home or place itself. Such liberal perspectives in Australian literature are valuable for their alterity and their cultural difference. They shed light on the way in which we see ourselves, re-classifying our literary identity.
Not strictly a modernist, not merely a Romantic, nor a transcendentalist, Kane’s work eludes easy classification. His poetics remind me of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, grounded as they are in historical and philosophical awareness, ironic and polished in their forms, yet without the scaffolding of craft or the density of thought. Pleasing for their clarity, eloquence, and fine modulations of tone these poems are gentle in their ethical suggestions. They bring to our Australian landscapes new and vital physical and metaphysical reflections.
WORKS CITED
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Portable Emerson, “The Transcendentalist.” Bode, Carl & Cowley, Malcolm, Eds. NY: Penguin, 1979. 92-93
Kane, Paul. Drowned Lands University of South Carolina, 2000
Kane, Paul. Work Life. NY: Turtle Point Press, 2007
Ramazani, Jahan. “Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Poetry Of Mourning.” The Oxford Handbook Of The Elegy Ed Karen
Weisman. NY: OUP 2010. 601-619
MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry and fiction, which has appeared in Blast, World Literature Today and Transnational Literature. She graduated in Medicine and in the Humanities, and she is an editor for Mascara Literary Review.
