Month: September 2015

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.

The Life of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922146809

Reviewed by ALEXANDRA MCLEAVY

The Life of Houses opens with one of the central characters, Anna, awaiting her lover’s arrival in a hotel dining room. The setting is ornate, the hour early and the space as yet unpopulated. “It had become the part of her evenings with him she enjoyed most simply,” the novel muses: “this solitude in which she felt closest to the simple existence of knives and forks and spoons” (p. 3). Immediately the domestic materials of daily life are elevated from the modesty of mere function to signifiers of deeper importance. From the knives and forks and spoons of this scene to furniture, houses and family heirlooms, objects and spaces in The Life of Houses far outweigh the matter of their substance and play a descriptive role in vivifying or devitalising the narrative landscape. More often than not their connotations are dark, with objects implying the burdens of the past and spaces rendered by their shadows and deficiencies. Though Anna awaits Peter, her lover, taking a certain pleasure in the anonymous surroundings that are “a world away from her own taste” (p. 3) it’s hardly an optimistic image: her happiness is predicated on the absence of intimacy and human connection.

Award-winning poet Lisa Gorton uses the material world to great lyrical effect in The Life of Houses, her first novel for adults. Inward-looking and psychologically specular, the book initially vacillates between Anna and her teenaged daughter Kit’s points of view. While Anna stays behind in Melbourne to weigh-up her romantic future Kit is sent to visit her grandparents and aunt in the “Sea House”, the family home in which Anna grew up and resolutely left behind. Once-grand and now rapidly decaying, “Sea House” is an antiquated memorial to the past in which her grandparents live an insular life in genteel poverty. It’s only Kit’s second time visiting yet the morning following her arrival her grandmother tells her she’ll inherit the place, an announcement that stirs little in Kit but awkward self-consciousness.

The novel eventually settles with Kit and follows her meanderings around the shadowy, dank old house and equally claustrophobic, if quaint, seaside town. This works because although Anna’s narrative offers the sharpest and most acerbic insights in the text it’s Kit who pads the halls of the house at the heart of the novel in real time. Moreover, she is the most rounded and realised of the two characters: unlike her dry and rather brittle mother, Kit is considerably more sympathetic, emotionally approachable and engaging. Readers who want to “fall in love” with characters take note: this book is unlikely to inspire great passion for any member of its cast. The Life of Houses is populated by guarded characters tainted by failure and disappointment: Scott, Anna’s childhood friend, is a talented artist reduced to running life-drawing classes in the local hall; Treen, Kit’s aunt, returned to the family home nursing a broken heart and never moved on; Kit’s grandparents, Audrey and Patrick, are overtly contemptuous of the outside world and have no desire to be part of it. Their bitterness and discontent bleeds into all relationships and an acute sense of alienation and estrangement characterises human connections in the novel, from the familial and romantic to encounters between acquaintances and strangers. Despite being a character-driven novel The Life of Houses is unrelentingly mired in the complexity and complications of human connection: all in all it’s a bleak reflection of social being which emphasises the breaches and divisions between individuals. Personally, I found this strain eventually detracted from Gorton’s rich, lustrous prose – there was a monotony about it that left me craving some glimmer of humour or hope in the darkness.

Like its characters, the narrative continually retreats inwards to the architectural security of containment and domesticity. In the opening scene mentioned Anna experiences relative happiness in the baroque dining room as she waits, alone, for Peter to arrive. But the benign comfort of her material consolation represents a potential trap for in The Life of Houses spaces inscribed by habit, routine and familiarity tend to exert a tyrannous hold on the people and families who inhabit or frequent them. There is a burdensome weight in trodden hallways, shadowy corners and the shared past; it is as if a house or a room could manifest the bitterness and discontent of those who occupy it. At one point, musing on the family home into which she’s invited her lover, Anna concedes to herself that “all that she had come to think of as belonging to the house itself she had to acknowledge lived in her only” (p. 46).

The “Sea House” epitomises this trope of oppressive interiority. In an illustrative recollection Anna, struggling to explain the family home to Peter, remembers that she and Treen “were always walking out of wide sunlight into the permanent indoorness of the house” (p. 11) as girls. In the present time the reader arrives with Kit in the dead of night: the dimly lit, depressingly fluorescent kitchen leaves a very glum first impression. Inducted by her grandfather’s historical ramblings and overwhelmed by the damp, dilapidated, labyrinthine confines of the decrepit residence, Kit longs to be outside again. The house is funereal and static and its aged, worse for wear furnishings are set on display as if in a permanent and private exhibition. Her grandparents are bound by their immovable obsession with preserving the past and self-righteously wield the narratives and artefacts of history as a kind of power. As Anna tells Peter of her parent’s inheritance “(i)t isn’t property for them; it’s history, so long as you take history to be a sort of borrowed self-importance” (p. 12). Fearful of such a burden and resistant to her family’s legacy Anna imagines bulldozers tearing down the house in a fantasy of defiance and then reflexively wonders: “(t)his house, could it be destroyed?” (p.184). Her doubt emphasises the gravity of the house, its shadow looming larger than the bricks-and-mortar fact of its existence.

The Life of Houses is heady with sensory detail and precise, exacting descriptions. Gorton’s style is evocative and fluid and carries the reader along with haunting momentum. Rather than slowing the narrative down with poetic density her keenly observational eye guides us through interior worlds both psychological and architectural. The acute prose shapes spaces according to the predisposition of the subject experiencing it so that the shadows and illuminations distinct to the characters’ impressions render each scene a kind of portrait that allows us access to the characters’ psyche. Yet the proximity of Gorton’s close focus accentuates their isolation and dwells on the shortcomings and failures of close relationships. It’s testament to her skill as a writer that the reader is left with a lingering sense of desolation and detachment upon closing the book but this coldness may leave readers like myself, who desire a connectedness in fiction, wanting.

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.

The Poets’ Stairwell

by Alan Gould

Black Pepper

ISBN: 9781876044800

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

First, a disclosure. I have known the poets Kevin Hart and Alan Gould, the “real life” protagonists of this autobiographical novel, for more than forty years. While this must inevitably intensify the pleasure I take in the work, it should not necessarily undermine my judgement that The Poets’ Stairwell is a first-rate creation which can travel well in any company. It is also something of a coup for its relatively small Melbourne publisher.

Among the work’s numerous merits is that it operates as several sorts of novel at the same time. It wears the term “picaresque” in its subtitle and there is no doubt that it comprises a journey with humorous episodes — a “road movie”, if you will. It is also, however, a novel of ideas, comparable to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in which each of the major characters cleverly embodies a way of thought popular in the nineteenth century. Given that it presents a comprehensive and searching portrayal of two very different temperaments, The Poets’ Stairwell can also be called a psychological novel. Gould’s talent is that he can keep these three potentially diverging ambitions in the air simultaneously without mishap.

At one level, the narrative of The Poets’ Stairwell is quite  simple. Two young Australian poets, Claude Boon and Henry Luck (both of them London-born, as it happens) are on their backpacking “Grand Tour” of Europe in 1976. Henry, a few years Claude’s junior, is prodigiously well-read and sometimes unbearably sure of himself — intellectually at least, if not socially. Claude, or Boon, as he prefers to be called, is the novel’s narrator and perhaps something of its Sancho Panza (though Henry Luck is a little more worldly than Don Quixote).

Together, they make a low-budget tour of Europe which includes London, Ireland, Paris, Venice, Florence, Assisi, Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Vienna, Prague and Rotterdam in roughly that order. Henry is a good deal less adventurous about accommodation than Boon but, with a few crises, they manage to travel companionably throughout. While Boon, more than a little under the influence of Nietzsche, is becoming increasingly aware of his historical muse, Luck is, in effect, converting to Roman Catholicism.

As with all picaresque tales, a cast of diverting (and somewhat emblematic) characters is encountered. These include Luck’s long-distance London girlfriend, Rhee, and her friend, Eva, a talented dancer and fervent Marxist. Another character, Beamish, the anarchist, represents a more reckless and self-destructive alternative to the relatively sedate lives the poets envisage for their later selves. A few of these characters re-appear, somewhat coincidentally, at various points in the poets’ wanderings. Others pop up for one or two chapters only.

Paradoxically, Luck, the younger poet, seems to be the more mature intellectually and perhaps even morally, having a clear (if overly precise) idea of what he wants and what he doesn’t want from life. Boon is much more  open to new experiences. Luck is inclined to close himself off from them, sometimes with disdain. He does, however, display some vulnerabilities and it is a sign of Boon’s developing maturity that he is able compassionately to take these into account.

Though there is much talk of “finding one’s muse” the adventures and aesthetic discussions along the way are of wider relevance than the novel’s subtitle may at first suggest. A sense of vocation, as opposed to a money-spinning “day-job”, is by no means a rare thing these days — though the vocation may take some years to emerge clearly (with perhaps one or two false starts along the way).

A recurrent thematic concern in this context is embodied in the Latin proverb “poeta nascitur non fit” (“a poet is born, not made”). Enough of Boon’s and Luck’s earlier lives is given to support the “made” half of the maxim while the temperaments displayed on their travels reveal a good deal about the “born” side. Clearly, as Gould makes plain, there are different muses and different sorts of poets. It is a sign of both young men’s growth that they come progressively to realise this about the other — even if that progress is not always evenly made.

Such realizations give rise to many of the more affecting moments in the novel. One is Boon’s early decision (suggested to him by a drunken, if aristocratic, Irishman) not to leave the somewhat annoying and inhibited Henry  in the lurch and go off on his own. Another, much later in the novel, is where Luck, without even trying or fully realising what he is doing, contrives to set a female American plumber, Martha, on the way to a new life and career in philosophy and academia.

Boon’s account of her departure for the U.S. is also an example of the novel’s sharply focussed yet relaxed style:

‘This has been the best day of my life,’ she managed. ‘I’ll write you,’ and showed in her notebook where she had taken down Henry’s Brisbane address. Then the door closed with a pfffft, and she was gone.

‘She seemed moved,’ Henry looked puzzled.

‘She was moved’

‘I’ve no idea what I did,’ he looked genuinely helpless. ‘ I just rattled off what any book could tell her. Why was she so moved?’

By the book’s denouement, Gould fictionally varies what is publicly known of “Henry”’s (or Hart’s) subsequent career but the twists, at the psychological level, may be insightful even so. The rather anti-climactic update on the Boon-Luck friendship provided in the book’s last paragraph is sadly convincing. Boon writes to Rhee, who has stayed in London and remained in contact with Henry long past the end of their relationship, saying merely: “If you see him, wish him well.”

Henry and Boon’s “Grand Tour” has served its necessary and important developmental purpose. There is no need for a postscript updating us on the poets’ fortunes after they emerge from the “stairwell”. The novel is sharply focussed on key events in their parallel and interacting lives as young men. Anything more would be material for other, very different novels — one of which Gould has, in effect, already attempted in The Seaglass Spiral.

GEOFF PAGE is a Canberra-based poet and critic. He is editor of The Best Australian Poets, 2015.