January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Matt Hetherington is a writer and musician who lives in a flat in Melbourne with a really good bath. His most recent collection is I Think We Have (Small Change Press, 2007) http://www.smallchangepress.com.au/. He is also on the board of the Australian Haiku Society http://www.haikuoz.org/
For Davids
“The cage opens. The canary closes its eyes.”
~ David Stavanger, “Everyday Magician”
the canary sings like a canary.
it dreams of flying through the morning without moving;
its claws clutch at the perch,
but it is the yellow light only that rushes past,
and it sits almost still, tasting nothing.
within the darkness of the everyday coalmine’s heart
it falls into sleep with its black beak open,
seeing only caves of night
which suddenly bloom into fields of yellow air.
it warbles of false dawns in the lives of happy families
which sound like early morning warnings;
it rises like a puff of cigarette smoke,
and drifts over crumpled fields and the need to wake up;
it skims over seas of yellow clouds
inside which perhaps are sleeping the hooded dead.
a drop drips from the ceiling.
a candle flickers in the draught the open door left.
someone has left the gas going.
gravity is holding on.
the canary sings like a canary.
the cage closes.
the canary opens its eyes.
Starving Girl, Calcutta
acting or not, it didn’t matter
she didn’t need
to pretend
to be
desperate or debased or beyond despair
what she was
could not be hidden
i was only trying to leave the country
now trapped in the back of a taxi
in a midday traffic jam
she clutched at me
through the open window
sobbing, chanting, imploring, wailing
not even in english
(why didn’t the driver do like he did with the others
and tell her to go get lost?)
i felt for coins but had none
so (keeping my notes for the next stage to the airport)
as if it could help
i blessed her repeatedly
and for a whole two or three minutes
we stayed there
stuck in the spokes of the hideous, sacred wheel
at last the traffic moved forward
and she returned to her tribe under the plastic sheeting
while we drove upwards
onto the rabindra setu bridge
Lone Bird Collecting Twigs
“ Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
How good, how good, does it feel to be free?
And I answer them most mysteriously
‘Are birds free from the chains of the skyways?’ ”
~ Bob Dylan, “Ballad in Plain D”
in the middle of anywhere
letting its song waft where it does
the contours of its mouth a tree to climb cliffs of falling from
i frown gratefully into the horizon’s setting
to see a baby looking
like she makes mandalas and angels with her eyelashes
below clouds like the brows of a father who cannot cry
below the moon like a large clump of dirt
below a jet-black eyeball staring through our ashes
yet while i give my own sight to the screen
and it takes it
there is rarely a bad day
i have a craving for earlobes
and want to write a poem without nature
as lazy as the rain as usual
or maybe more like an el salvadorian gentleman
who must eat even when not hungry
and cannot sleep even when he is tired
still through the voice of the indifferent wind
a question comes asking “is it fair to love clouds
more than the sun, but less than sunlight?”
the answer is ‘yes’ if you don’t ask the question
but this one
teaching me how to breathe
again
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Angelina’s publications include short stories in Muse and AntiTHESIS, an article in VWC Magazine. Three hour book shortlisted for the 2009 Lord Mayor Creative Writing Awards. She is a recipient of the Eleanor Dark Varuna Writing Fellowship and Rosebank Residency. Angelina is a member of the ongoing Novel Writing Masterclass with Antoni Jach, Creative Writing PhD candidate and sessional tutor. Christos Tsiolkas is currently mentoring Angelina with her novel Disobedience.
Sad Clown
Most people have imaginary friends when they’re kids, especially if they’re lonely kids like Christopher Robin. Mine was a wet cement imaginary enemy.
I met Sad Clown when I was in Grade Five.
Sad Clown watched me through the window. His face was an ivory white canvas with huge black holed eyes swallowing me. Sad Clown never listened when I told him to leave. He’d just stand there crying stainless-steel tears that dried into scratches. Sad Clown waited in the bathroom, my bedroom and at the school bench near the drinking taps. He was so quiet no one except for me ever noticed him. His body was long, his shadow swallowed me.
Sad Clown’s clothes remained like a hot air balloon blackening the sun. He had special powers so I could see him with my eyes open and closed. His bent figure had explodable arms and legs dangling from my eyelashes. Other times he stole my concentration by dancing in front of the blackboard where I once answered the question one times one incorrectly. The class laughed. Sad Clown loved the way my face went red and for the rest of the term he continued to laugh for being the dumbest person he’d ever met.
I don’t know why Sad Clown chose me for a friend because I hated him. He followed me everywhere and stunk of egg wet clothes. He used to hug me all the time when I was busy watching The Gummi Bears, The Smurfs, and The Care Bears. Sad Clown left metal splinters in my skin, so I often spent afternoons in front of the TV scratching them out. Sad Clown smiled cause it hurt when Mother covered me in Dettol and Mickey Mouse and Friends bandaids.
When I started high school Sad Clown came with me. He was more excited than I was. From the very first day he sat next to me on the train. Every morning at the station he’d adjust my hair so it covered my face exactly the way he liked. Then he’d tie a string round my neck with a black balloon attached to the other end. Floating above my head everyone knew not to make friends with me.
I used to see Sad Clown everywhere. He was in the mirror at Gran’s house; eating my popcorn at the movies, vomiting on my homework, breaking the numbers on my calculator and always asking me if my school uniform made him look fat. Sad Clown had dark magic powers if he wasn’t next to me he was looking at me through every window or reflecting off every shiny surface.
I was in Year 10 when I stopped sleeping with my clothes on at night. I never wanted to get undressed with Sad Clown in my room so I never changed into my pyjamas and often avoided showering til it felt worse than being naked. To strip I had to steal some of Dad’s five litre red cask wine, skull it, and wait for it to do its thing before undoing my clothes. It didn’t matter how many times I checked the doors were locked even if it was only for a second it was hard to unbutton my own pants and take off my own bra.
At night every night Sad Clown would walk in circles round my bed with family photos in his hand. Mother always blamed me for stealing them from her photo albums. I told her it wasn’t me. She didn’t care she just wanted an image of her family back. She never believed anything I said. Mother always told me it’s not my fault I can’t tell the difference between truth and tales. She said it’s from Dad’s side of the family. Mother could never have her Kodak moments back because with the photos Sad Clown stole, he’d cut out the people he hated and set their faces on fire. My face was always the first to be cut out and burned.
Sad Clown spoke to me in rhyming couplets. He listed all the ways in which the other girls at school were so much better than me. In the bathtub full of cold water I never dared to turn the hot tap water on. One wrong move made all the difference. Sad Clown spent hours echoing my thoughts, going through every painful moment of my day. I tried not to think. I tried not to remember but I couldn’t trick Sad Clown, he had a better memory than I did.
Whenever I went to the shops or the library he came with me. He didn’t want anyone to see me so he’d throw black jellybeans at me and laugh until I dissolved in his shadow.
At home, when no one else was around, Sad Clown locked the bedroom door while he painted my face black and white. There was never any point fighting him, I’d learned very early on it was always better to let him do as he pleased. Inside the highlighter-blue walls I’d scrunch my face closed as Sad Clown rearranged my face til it got lost.
Whenever the phone rang Sad Clown pounced on my hands. Sitting beneath his warning eyes I listened to the phone, hammer by hammer hitting each ring further into my eardrums til the noise couldn’t be beaten in anymore and finally rang out. Sad Clown hated me talking to anyone. Each time the phone rang the cream Telstra handle black, the noise screeched louder in my ears, Sad Clown’s forbidding eyes grew, year by year, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute larger, darker, hungrier he ate all my colours. I watched the red in my veins turn bruise purple-blue and die black before Sad Clown gave me permission to move.
After I got my first period something inside me changed. Everyone said I was a woman and maybe that was what made it easier for me to start pretending Sad Clown didn’t exist. Even though Sad Clown continued to follow me for a few more years after I’d became a lady, there was always a distance between us. It was like an imaginary line had been drawn and it was more powerful than Sad Clown and Uncle Santo put together. I don’t know where this line came from or how I knew it was there cause I couldn’t see it. I don’t even know what colour it was but whatever that line was made of, neither Sad Clown nor Uncle Santo could cross it.
Sad Clown taught me about the safety that lives inside the colour black and silence, the only place to hide in. Sad Clown never said goodbye or made a big deal about leaving when the doctor adjusted her spectacles and handed me my first prescription for making sadness go away. Day by pill-stilted day, month by pill-paralysed month, gradually, Sad Clown stopped watching me through the window. More months went by, I swallowed more pills and stared at the mirror watching Sad Clown and I dissolve together, a little pill-induced further each day, til we both faded and blended into some kind of sleep-world. Once I stopped taking all the different types of medication, I ended up swallowing over the two years,
I began to wake up
Sad Clown doesn’t even breathe in his sleep.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Judith Beveridge has published four books of poetry: The Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lightning Press, 1987), Accidental Grace (UQP, 1996), Wolf Notes (Giramondo Publishing 2003), Storm and Honey (Giramondo Publishing 2009). She has won many awards for her poetry including the NSW Premier’s Award, The Victorian Premier’s Award and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature. She is currently the poetry editor for Meanjin and teaches poetry writing at postgraduate level at the University of Sydney.
The Herons
Then the path wound down
to a browner place, to a river
where rain-grey herons slender as rushes
drifted off like camp-smoke.
I’ve only seen their colour
in a few opals baked deep in clay country.
When they stared, it was as if
their eyes carried on
through emanations.
One stood so peacefully
as if it saw and heard the single
far off, crystal note;
slender, rag-thin bird we called
blue Gotama. We crumbled a mushroom—
all we could call
sacred, yet common:
but they looked past all hungers.
So we trod quietly back,
left them sitting above the long
brown earthworm of the river
and our pile of useless
vegetable soil. They were
beautiful as blue veins in the wrists of monks
fasting for perfection.
The Caterpillars
On the headland to the lighthouse,
a brown detour of caterpillars
crimped end-to-end across the road.
Poke away the pilot and the line
would break up, rioting,
fingering for the scent.
Put him back, they’d straighten.
You could imagine them humming
their queue numbers.
I’ve only seen such blind following
in the patient, dull dole queues,
or old photos of the Doukhobors,
the world’s first march of naked people.
I watched over the line for hours
warding off birds whose wings, getting close,
were like the beating of spoons
in deep bowls. I put a finger to the ground
and soft prickles pushed over,
a warm chain of hair.
This strange sect, wrapped in the sun
like their one benefit blanket
marched in brotherhood and exile.
Later, a group of boys
(their junta-minds set on torture)
picked off the leader.
Each creature contorted,
shut into its tight burr.
I could only stand like a quiet picket
and watch the rough panic.
I remember them, those caterpillars,
pacifists following their vegetable passion—
lying down in the road and dying
when they could no longer touch each other.
Occasions of Snails
1
They slide out of the light
leave a chrome stain through shade on the brickpath.
Their excreta are milled like censer ash
as they wander aisles, scented paths,
crawl over ageing grasses,
bask in warm mud like the terribly poor.
They wander the earth
as if looking for St Francis of Assisi.
2
So many anonymous buds—
a bucketful from the lettuces and roses.
The colour of autumn’s loose litter—
they are aimless, evicted,
itinerant for the velvet luxury
of the orchid and lily.
3
The evening is cool, a cricket’s call
fills the ground like a slow cistern.
I bend close to the earth, watch a tiny snail
rock in the crib of a leaf.
A trail just visible where spiders are tooling lace.
It works the abrupt edge.
It is a couturier cutting away.
It will quickly feather this leaf.
4
As a child I squinted for their script.
I searched the vast twin prayeryards
of sunshine and wind.
I watched for their headlines
as if they were notices for the arrivals
and departures of angels;
as if they were the proof—
beautiful and brief—of anonymous flights
scrawled across the house-walls, down ditches,
on uncut grasses, on a splintery fence;
as if they were the tinsels of a local moon.
5
Now I am a gardener.
I make their landscapes deadly.
I make Golgothas in the garden.
And I have laid my poisons—
the mockery of diced stems.
6
I have pressed them to the earth.
I have trowelled them into the soil.
I have riveted their pastel to the bricks.
I have denied them soft altars, plush roads,
these trackers of unattainable softness,
these evacuees of needle-thin tracks
who never look back on their painstaking silver.
7
But look how they go—
beseeching the deities Gloss
and Lightheadedness; how they stroll
amongst mucilage and essences
as if in mystical consortium
with nasturtium and rose—
how they find the sane bewilderment
of a child wandering in her garden
with a rose in her head.
She curses her brothers
who drop them on cactuses,
turn them into sludge
and laugh them into sad weak bubbles.
Still, she remembers the hiss
of so many tossed into the ash.
Those winkled from their sockets by twigs.
8
Sometimes, when I hold them,
when they are immured
and smelling of lavender;
when they turn their dibbled heads
from my palms, I remember
those soldered paths
and this world’s exotic itinerary.
Again, I track their rubbled passages
(to the roses, to the compost).
They have crawled into eggshells
as if into temples, as if into light.
How to Love Bats
Begin in a cave.
Listen to the floor boil with rodents, insects.
Weep for the pups that have fallen. Later,
you’ll fly the narrow passages of those bones, but for now—
open your mouth, out will fly names
like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then,
listen for a frequency
lower than the seep of water, higher
than an ice planet hibernating
beyond a glacier of Time.
Visit op shops. Hide in their closets.
Breathe in the scales and dust
of clothes left hanging. To the underwear
and to the crumpled black silks—well,
give them your imagination
and plenty of line, also a night of gentle wind.
By now your fingers should have
touched petals open. You should have been dreaming
each night of anthers and of giving
to their furred beauty
your nectar-loving tongue. But also,
your tongue should have been practising the cold
of a slippery, frog-filled pond.
Go down on your elbows and knees.
You’ll need a speleologist’s desire for rebirth
and a miner’s paranoia of gases—
but try to find within yourself
the scent of a bat-loving flower.
Read books on pogroms. Never trust an owl.
Its face is the biography of propaganda.
Never trust a hawk. See its solutions
in the fur and bones of regurgitated pellets.
And have you considered the smoke
Yet from a moving train? You can start
half an hour before sunset,
but make sure the journey is long, uninterrupted
and that you never discover
the faces of those trans-Siberian exiles.
Spend time in the folds of curtains.
Seek out boarding-school cloakrooms.
Practise the gymnastics of wet umbrellas.
Are you
floating yet, thought-light,
without a keel on your breastbone?
Then, meditate on your bones as piccolos,
on mastering the thermals
beyond the tremolo; reverberations
beyond the lexical.
Become adept
at describing the spectacles of the echo—
but don’t watch dark clouds
passing across the moon. This may lead you
to fetishes and cults that worship false gods
by lapping up bowls of blood from a tomb.
Practise echo-locating aerodromes,
stamens. Send out rippling octaves
into the fossils of dank caves—
then edit these soundtracks
with a metronome of dripping rocks, heartbeats
and with a continuous, high-scaled wondering
about the evolution of your own mind.
But look, I must tell you—these instructions
are no manual. Months of practice
may still only win you appreciation
of the acoustical moth,
hatred of the hawk and owl. You may need
to observe further the floating black host
through the hills.
Death
Something’s dead in that stand of trees.
Vultures circle and swoop.
Flies fresh from the herds
hum around my head.
I watch the maggots rise, cooking up.
Ants in tiny rows keep convoying
skin, tissue.
Even the moon can’t keep itself clean:
soap soiled by a dung-collector’s hands.
The carcass is a spotted deer’s.
Only yesterday, perhaps,
it was grazing among the trees,
its hide so much the colour of the trunks,
it would seem to be hardly there.
How many years have I journeyed?
Time. So much its own colour.
Death in every stand of trees.
In the Forest
So long in this forest—I hardly remember
my home. Though sometimes when I see
the pink reach of lotuses—I remember
the underside of my mother’s hands.
And sometimes, when I see a scorpion
jack up the green stinger of its tail,
do I think of my father’s lithe thumb,
gesturing. Sometimes the wing of an
insect, weighing no more than two
layers of lacquer, will make me count
how often I saw Yasodhara’s face
under the sky’s veneer. I’ve seen so
many lives born outside of reason; little
antennas poking through their cocoons.
Now, a praying mantis strokes the air
with a casual feeler, then tenses its legs
against the weather. How long will it sit
folded in upon itself, brave petitioner?
All day I bow to these creatures—
those who wait their cycles out more
devoutly than moons. But sometimes,
watching a butterfly emerge, I sense
my own eyelids flutter in the strange
puparium of a dream. O, I don’t know
if I’ll ever wake, changed, transformed,
able to lift on viridescent wings.
But as I watch, I feel my mind enter
a vast space in which everything
connects; and a grasshopper on a blade
of grass listens intently with its knees.
The Lake
At dusk she walks to the lake. On shore
a few egrets are pinpointing themselves
in the mud. Swallows gather the insect lint
off the velvet reed-heads and fly up through
the drapery of willows. It is still hot.
Those clouds look like drawn-out lengths
of wool untwilled by clippers. The egrets
are poised now—moons just off the wane—
and she thinks, too, how their necks are
curved like fingernails held out for manicure.
She walks the track that’s a draft of the lake
and gazes at where light nurses the wounded
capillaries of a scribbly gum. A heron on one leg
has the settled look of a compass, though soon,
in flight, it will have the gracility of silk
when it’s wound away. She has always loved
the walks here, the egrets stepping from
the lute music of their composure, the mallards
shaking their tails into the chiffon wakes,
the herons fletching their beaks with moths
or grasshoppers, the ibis scything the rushes
or poking at their ash-soft tail feathers.
Soon the pelicans will sail in, fill and filter
the pink. Far off, she can see where tannin
has seeped from the melaleucas, a burgundy
stain slow as her days spent amongst tiles and
formica. She’s glad now she’s watching water
shift into the orange-tipped branches of a
she-oak, a wren flick its notes towards the wand
of another’s twitching tail. There’s an oriole
trilling at the sun, a coveted berry, a few
cicadas still rattling their castanets. She loves
those casuarinas, far off, combed and groomed,
trailing their branches: a troupe of orang-utans
with all that loping, russet hair; and when
the wind gets into them, there’s a sound as if
seeds were being sorted, or feet shuffled amongst
the quiet gusts of maracas. Soon the lights on
the opposite shore will come on like little
electric fig seeds and she will walk back
listening to frogs croak in the rushes, the bush
fill with the slow cisterns of crickets, her head
with the quiet amplitude of—Keats perhaps,
or a breeze consigning ripples to the bank;
the sun, an emblazoned lifebuoy, still afloat.
The Shark
We heard the creaking clutch of the crank
as they drew it up by cable and wheel
and hung it sleek as a hull from the roof.
Grennan jammed open the great jaws
and we saw how the upper jaw hung from
the skull. We flinched at the stench of blood
that dripped on the fishhouse floor, and
even Davey – when Grennan reached in
past the scowl and the steel prop for the
stump – just about passed out. The limb’s
skin had already blanched, a sight none
of us could stomach, and we retched
though Grennan, cool, began cutting off
the flesh in knots, slashing off the flesh
in strips; and then Davey, flensing and
flanching, opened up the stomach and
the steaming bowels. Gulls circled like
ghouls. Still they taunt us with their cries
and our hearts still burn inside us when
we remember, how Grennan with a tool
took out what was left of the child.
Hooks
I’m sorting out the hooks in Grennan’s big old tackle box.
I pick one from the box. It has a sliced
shank, a rolled-in sports point, a wide gape and long bite.
I like the ones too whose points lie offset from their shanks
and those with sinkers like fisheyes
moulded onto them. This hook with a corroded point
and rusting suicide barb I name wild-beaked bait-giver.
This hook looks like the neck
of a little egret when the wind lifts a wisp of feathers
from its nape. This hook has a kinked shank and sickle
curve, so I call it ibis leaning
over the shallows. These two forged-silver, light-wired
bait-holders brazed together beautifully I call greenshanks
in flight. I know Grennan and Davey
would think I’m silly naming these old hooks, but what
else is there to do when you’re stuck in a boathouse, no fish
running, when the hooks’ real names
Sproat, Sneck, Big Bend, Model 20R are just not poetry.
Appaloosa
I have always loved the word guitar
David St. John
I have never been bumped in a saddle as a horse springs
from one diagonal to another,
a two-beat gait light and balanced
as the four-beats per stride become the hair-blowing,
wind-in-the-face, grass-rippling,
muscle-loosening, forward-leaning
exhilaration of the gallop.
And I have never counted the slow four-beat pace
of distinct, successive hoofbeats
in such an order as to be called The Walk.
Or learned capriole, piaffe, croupade in a riding school,
nor heard the lingo of outback cattle-cutters
spat out with their whip-ends and phlegm.
I have never stepped my hands over the flanks
of a spotted mare, nor ridden a Cleveland Bay
carriage horse, or a Yorkshire coach horse,
a French Percheron with its musical snicker,
or a little Connemara, its face buried
in broomcorn, or in a bin of Wexford apples.
I have never called a horse Dancer, Seabiscuit, Ned,
Nellie, Trigger or Chester, or made clicking noises
with my tongue during the fifty kilometres
to town with a baulking gelding and a green
quartertop buggy. Nor stood in a field while
an old nag worked every acre
only stopping to release difficult knobs of manure
and swat flies with her tail. And though I have
waited for jockeys at the backs of stables
in the mist and rain, for the soft feel of their riding silks
and saddles, for the cool smoke of their growth-stunting
cigarettes, for the names of the yearlings
and mares they whisper along with the names
of horse-owning millionaires – ah, more, more even
than them – I have always loved the word appaloosa.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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B N Oakman writes poetry that has been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers in Australia, the UK and the USA. An academic economist, he lives in Central Victoria and has taught at universities in Australia and England.
Universal Pictures
Creature From The Black Lagoon hangs
on a wall of the room where I work,
and on the other side of this wall
an analyst swims in unfamiliar waters,
encouraging diffident charges to paddle
in shallows before executing cautious dives
in quest of Auden’s ‘delectable creatures’,1
seeking acquaintance, perhaps tentative union
in depths unplumbed, then cautiously,
when these disavowed beings seem less alien,
stroking closer and closer to the surface.
But my poster displays a misbegotten thing,
a slime-green hybrid of fish and man
grasping a young woman in webbed claws,
oddly careful not to scratch her as he drags her
down to a subterranean lair, deeper, darker,
her soundless screams just little bubbles from red,
wide-open lips while the creature stares into her face
with great limpid eyes, tender almost, watching
her writhe in its scaly embrace, sleek
in a tight white swimsuit, but not doomed,
for in the movie her male friends spear the fish-man
and she surges up to the light in her lover’s arms,
never again to plunge into the black lagoon.
Also in my room is The Invisible Man
who imbibes chemicals to make himself vanish,
becoming discernable only by his garments,
for if he goes naked he seems not to exist,
though he may be present in every other sense,
perhaps even in a room like this, crammed
with paraphernalia, my books, furniture, papers,
posters, pictures – and should the analyst,
glistening from her immersions, decide
to walk through here, she, of all people,
ought not be fooled by such disguises: transparent,
murky or opaque – for these are Universal Pictures;
it even says so on the posters.
1W H Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud, stanza 26
Delusional Moments before my Cell Phone
One occurred in Rome, in a small pensione close by
the Campo dei Fiori, when the slumberous morning
was torn by shouts, shrieks of motor scooters, swearing –
a brawl in the laneway two floors down. Alongside me
a woman was asleep, black hair swept across a pillow,
bronzed flesh stark against the white sheet;
and I lay quiet, content to watch the Roman light
infiltrate the wooden shutters and stroke the sparsely
furnished room with bars of black and gold, to listen
to the row subside and wait for Italian commerce
to stir and climb slowly, irresistibly, towards
its daily crescendo. My passport was in order,
I had money, sufficient to last a few days,
and trunk calls were expensive. And I imagined,
I cannot say for how long, that I knew how to live.
The other, years later, was in Naples, by the docks,
waiting for a bus after a choppy crossing from Capri,
most of the passengers sick. I was standing in the tepid
rain with my arm around a woman, both of us soaked,
drops of rain forming on her face and glistening
in the streetlights like diamonds splashed wantonly
upon her beauty. Nearby a newsstand screamed
of murders and around us cars snarled everywhere,
anywhere, no place safe. My passport was in order,
I had money, sufficient to last a few weeks,
and trunk calls were expensive. And I imagined,
I cannot say for how long, that I knew how to live.
Since then I have never again imagined, even
for a moment, that I knew how to live, although
my passport is still in order, I have money, sufficient
to last several years, and these days I have a cell phone.
Eulogy for a Matriarch
the notices proclaim
you taught us how to live
laud you irrepressible
lament you irreplaceable
but the falling years
have struck you
silent
as when children cried
for you to speak
blind
as when children cried
for you to see
deaf
as when children cried
for you to hear
polished is your casket
a fine veneer
brilliant are your fittings
plastic disguised as silver
consider your lilies
purest of whites
cultivated for show
not perfume
you detested scent
from crushed flowers
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Benjamin Dodds is a Sydney-based poet whose work has recently appeared in the pages of Southerly, Etchings, Cordite, Harvest and at the brilliantly named Chickenpinata.com. He maintains a weblog at http://benjamindodds.blogspot.com/
Pig
There’s a pig in the grass
and broken bricks
and caked pads of sawdust
piled up behind the gun club’s rifle range.
It’s only slightly buried beneath it all.
The punk-rock haircut of subversive green
is healthier than any lawn in town,
and the white smiling teeth,
top set only—the lower ones lie in soil,
could sell Colgate on TV.
After its rest, it will stand
and shake the turf
and building rubble
from its lightly downed back
and prance down the mound
on pretty, pointed trotters
or so I tell my nephew
who reaches to prod
the balloon of belly
with a bent, spent welding rod.
Wrested
Splayed out like Vitruvian boys
on the concrete cap
of the raised water tank,
they draw a day of hoarded heat
through buttocks and backs.
The rude, familiar honk of an approaching car
and a wholesome hello launched
through the kitchen window below
shatter their world completely.
Screaming drifts of galahs,
as pink and grey as the sky that holds them,
signal the death of this hot-blooded day.
One last protracted clasp of hands,
and two monkeys skim
down the parchment-smooth skin
of a convenient branch.
On the anaemic lawn, two country mothers
smile over a quick cup of tea
at the reluctant arrival
of their perfectly normal sons.
Subcutaneous
since it happened
I have been waiting
for this other event
for the crust to form
for the thin weeping to slow
and for you to move within me
I have seen it in my head
your white fingers fumble
with curve-pointed scissors
as you slip one blade under
and snip the thread at a point
beside the precise black knot
I feel a sudden slackening
just beneath the surface of my flesh
and the anticipated slide
of scrupulous slicing nylon
at a depth whose nerves lie dormant
all times but this
I sit ready tonight
and see you sense a mood in me
that seems incongruous to you
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Greg McLaren is a poet, critic, editor and amateur risotto genius who lives in Sydney. His books are Everything falls in, Darkness disguised and The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead.
After Basho
Kek kek kek kek kek –
startled on the edge of a deep sleep
by panicked plovers.
The commerce student
looks up from his PS2
at the crescent-moon.
Enraged by poetry,
I circumambulate my flat
like Frank Webb in CallanPark.
The raven vanishes
into the under-storey of brush
across the Hawkesbury.
Walking around Petersham
under the full moon –
what? it’s dawn already?
In the thunderstorm,
mid-arvo, currawongs gossip
between the lightning.
Horse and cattle bones
in the overgrown paddock –
the grass and cutting wind.
I walked for miles
and when I stopped,
red frangipani blossoms.
Hugging my knees,
squat on the ground, grieving
for my friend the priest.
The raven on the wire
all day in Petersham,
pining for Petersham.
Chinese poems After Han Shan
(from Burton Watson, 100 Poems by the T’ang poet)
2.
A bedsit is home for this country boy:
cabs and buses rarely drop off passengers:
the street-side trees so still that crows roost here,
the gutter full of cigarette butts and frangers.
I go chocolate shopping on my own,
smoke joints in the park with my girlfriend.
And in this little flat? Books piled high
on my bedside table with the Chinese landscape print.
16.
Fark! Bookshop wages and a constant cough,
stuck alone without friends or family.
There’re hardly any potatoes for the pot
and I boil dust in the Coles brand kettle.
Cracked tiles in the roof drip tumours of rain,
my bed sags in the middle – I can’t sleep.
And you’re surprised I’m so thin?
A mess like this would send anyone spare.
30.
I slaved my arse off over Joyce,
poring stupidly over Finnegan’s Wake.
I’ll be checking bookshop stock figures til I’m 80 –
a mong scribbling away at invoices and returns.
When I ask the I Ching, it says, Look out –
my life’s dictated by bad horoscopes.
If only I was like the river red gums,
a pale shade of green even in drought.
38.
I was born more than forty years ago.
Ten thousand or more miles, I’ve been driven,
alongside rivers thick with willows,
across the reddened border of South Australia.
I drank Jim Beam in hope of acceptance,
read the poets, and Manning Clark’s History.
But now, I’m back here in Kurri, head
on an old pillow, fouling my ears with home.
59.
Last year, when I was so poor,
I counted money for cretinous brothers.
So I decided to work for myself
digging out crystals or something.
A smiling foreign critic wrote to me
and wanted to laud me in his Review.
I offered him only what I could,
Mate, you couldn’t afford poems like these.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carol Chan is Singaporean. Her writing has been performed and published in Singapore, Edinburgh and Melbourne, including Meanjin, WetInk, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She’s currently researching her honours thesis in anthropology at the University of Melbourne.
Two Drifters
There is no room for adventure
now, you say. Everything
has been discovered. There is nothing left
that hopes to be found; we were born
too late to be heroes now.
But the British were not the only dreamers
and explorers; only think
what India must have known
before the British claimed this knowledge
as their own. This history was lying
there all along, safe in the precious day.
India was not an imagined country,
nor have we invented the other.
What I’m trying to tell you now, love,
is that there is still room enough
for us to be heroes yet.
Getting to Vienna
The night we missed our flight to Slovakia, we lay
in Edinburgh, thinking of the still pair of empty seats
on the plane that has always been leaving;
those two unslept beds that will never know
the weight of ourselves;
the unwalked streets, unembraced cold of Slovakia
in the morning that will come.
That morning came. We caught another flight to Prague
instead, not to get to Prague, but to find ourselves
on the Vienna-bound train, back on track,
why we meant to go to Slovakia at all.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
It is only now that we remember who creates the world
by the second. This train moves no-one but our bodies
towards a place of our dreaming.
This world, these possible worlds, are in our hands,
at our feet. On the moon. Somewhere,
a phone is ringing, and the news depends
on whoever there is to answer it.
What We Talk About
How to brew coffee. With a kopi-sock,
or a press-pot. What a press-pot is.
In winter, we talk about winter.
Anthropology. Poetry.
Suppressed sentiments in Bedouin desert tribes.
Identify these in our own.
We talk about scientists trying
to make things work, though not so much
the trying. How we brew coffee.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Belonging is longing, a longing. For migrants to live in a land they have chosen to settle themselves in, to be(long) or not to be(long) is a crucial question. It depends on what they long for: Is it a temporary abode for short-term benefits before packing up and going home, a permanent enclave on its own or a (second) home where they feel they truly belong or want to be long in? This paper seeks to examine issues of belonging for first and second generation mainland Chinese migrants in a post-malticultural Australia where the idea of multiculturalism is being rendered increasingly obsolete, becoming almost ‘mal’ as in the sense of malfunctioning. The discussion will be based on three books, Wang Hong’s novel, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots), Shen Zhimin’s novel, donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) and Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan)’s photographic novel, he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You).
‘I should never have come to Australia, I should never have left my country’
Wang Hong, born in Shanghai in 1962, is a Chinese woman novelist who stayed and studied in Australia from 1990 to 1992 before her return to China in 1993. Apart from this, there is little biographical information on the dust jacket except a curious little note at the end of her Chinese novel, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots), published in September 2002. The note goes, in my translation, ‘Sixth draft 2000/12/8’. One can work out from this that it must have taken her seven years and six drafts to finish writing the novel; further, it must have taken her about two years to find a publisher and get the novel published, nine years after her return to China. It wouldn’t be a far-fetched conjecture that the novel bears some parallel to her own life in that the main protagonist, Ma Lan, returns to China after her failed attempt to stay in Australia through a fake arranged marriage, first with an Italian, then with another man of unidentified nationality by the name of Ma Er Fu (Marf?). True to the synopsis on the back cover of the book, the novel has a ‘wonderful sense of poetry’ and, in my view, presents a haunting image of Chinese student lives as if caught in a time warp, a vacuum created as much by their own blind, obstinate attempts to stay as by Australia’s indifference towards their fate, and worse, by Australia’s philistine acts to make a buck by fraud through the performance of characters like Ao Lie Fo (Oliver) and his family.
jile yingwu is a painful novel to read. It traces Ma Lan’s short sojourn in Australia as grape-picker, orange-picker, lemon-picker, cleaner and hospice-carer, in places ranging from Red Cliffs on the South-Australia and Victoria border to Westfield in Sydney. In China, this university graduate ‘tried her best to learn English…in order to chuguo [out the country, meaning going overseas] one day.’ (23) After she finishes her studies in Australia, she has to extend her visa but lacks the money to do it. In order to stay, she borrows money to pay Oliver to secure her a partner in a fake marriage. When this does not work, she enters into an arranged marriage with Ma Er Fu in an attempt to stay but decides to leave for China after she aborts her baby. The day she leaves, Ma Er Fu says to her:
You are right. Why must you live in this country in the southern hemisphere? There’s no reason why. I can’t see any reason. I understand you. Like you, I also suffer from homesickness….I have left my home far too long. I feel that my inner heart has lost this strength. Living is a habit. The past has been severed and so it is impossible now. I am not living. I am only surviving and hoping that one day I may live better. If I were you, I would perhaps do the same. As long as you believe that huiguo [return country or returning to your home country] makes you happy, you should huiguo.’
In the extreme circumstances in which she finds herself, deep in debt from both her own family in China and the Oliver family, Ma Lan has to scrape a living by doing the hard labor as a fruit picker, getting paid 0.39 cents for 10 kilos of grapes picked (6). When she marries Ma Er Fu she has only ten dollars in her account (98). She has to rely on superstitious belief for solace. For example, when Oliver’s mother dies and is about to be shipped back to her gutu [native earth or native land], Ma Lan thinks aloud to herself:
One person leaves Australia.
One person enters Australia.
The matter of the world is indestructible. This person who enters should be her! (14)
She also willfully persists in her other superstitious belief that she is somehow from the Jewish stock that is ‘distinctly different from hanren [Han people or Chinese people]’ (20) and that it is because of her ‘unresearcheable ancestry-Jewish or tujue [Turkish] merchants’ that she has ‘come ten thousand li at the end of the century to the southern hemisphere to tie the knot of marriage with someone originally from there’ (187), that someone being Ma Er Fu.
All Ma Lan ever manages to do in Australia, though, is, as she says, ‘living abjectly-for a green card’ (175), a life that is ‘finished, dead’, and she feels that if she does not sum it all up, ‘what shall arrive is only an extension of death’ (176). Here, one can’t but recall Ouyang Yu’s contemplation that ‘living in australia is living after death’.
Other Chinese students fare hardly better than Ma Lan: Yang Fan does not speak English, thus rendered deaf and dumb ever since his coming to Australia (94); Lao Yan writes a letter containing his first-time payment of 100 Australian dollars that will never reach his wife in China (27), which act repeats itself to a painful degree; and Qin Yue foolishly persists in her fantasy that only by studying hard could she somehow hope to change her fate (71). Their names are ultimate symbols of irony and terror, Yang Fan meaning ‘setting sail’ and, as part of the phrase, yangfan yuanhang, implying he’s someone setting sail for a distant voyage with great hopes; Lao Yan hinting at Old Devil; and Qin Yue, Qin Moon, a woman from one of the oldest stocks of the Chinese civilization, right back to the Qin Dynasty (BC 221-207). The place names are also imbued with a sense of the macabre as the Murray River is transliterated as mai lei he (Wheat Tears River) or deliberately mis-spelt in an English poem written by Ma Lan as ‘Marry River’ (85).
Added to this is a host of other characters, most of them immigrants whose nationalities remain undisclosed, including the fraudulent Oliver family who lose two members in 10 days, giving false hope to Ma Lan and Qin Yue; Ma Er Fu whose Jewish or Turkish stock is vaguely alluded to and who wonders if he should ever have come to Australia (284); and Steven, an Australian-born Hungarian who plays the role of a Chinese in a play in which no Chinese are allowed (225), the only one who does not have a guishu gan [a sense of belonging] when he goes back to Hungary. He says, ‘when I look at them [Hungarians], I am looking at completely foreign people. Secretly, I even think people there look ugly’ (225). The interesting thing here is that Ma Lan does not identify with Steven. She ‘looks at him, without curiosity, without polite concern’ and ‘her silence bears out that his appeal is rather affected’ (225).
Throughout, there is not a single mention of words like racism or multiculturalism. Only in one scene, Liz, an Australian patient, is heard to speak sharply to Ma Lan and Xiao, a Pacific Islander. ‘ “You, you Asians get out!” The old lady tells them ferociously. “Get out of our country!” ’ (275). What follows is a quite unusual musing about happiness by Ma Lan when Liz’s son in a ‘fine’ suit asks her where she learnt her ‘good’ English:
Ma Lan’s voice sounds flat. She goes out of the room. She is weary of the way others look [at her]. Nothing will change because of the conversation. He wears a fine suit and thinks he can take pity on her because she speaks English with an English accent. She is a civilized person from an ancient, savage land. She has given all her life to learn English. However, here it is the air everyone breathes. If she had learnt something else, if she were a senior staff member in a transnational company, would her life be worth more? When she worked in a big company in guonei [inside country, meaning China] and also wore a fine suit, she didn’t feel superior to people, she didn’t feel happy.
Happiness is so rare it can only come from the inner heart (276).
Where does Ma Lan belong in Australia? One can only gauge by where she situates herself in relation to Australia. In Sydney, ‘she feels like walking on the edge of this city, this city on the edge of the ocean, the continent that this city belongs to being surrounded by the blue sea water, turning around the edge of the planet in which they were born’ (258). Australia means nothing to her. At best, it is a place for her to be ‘walking through’, ‘without leaving a trace (278)’.
Interestingly, in an unlikely place, Rose, Tom’s mother in Tony Ayres feature film, Home Song Stories (2007), has said the same thing as expressed by Ma Lan that she ‘should never have come to Australia’.
san yuan se: the three original colors
When Shen Jiawei, normally known as Jiawei Shen, the Australian-Chinese artist, did a portrait for John So, Lord Mayor of Melbourne, he combined three major elements in the painting: John So’s Chinese face and his Aboriginal attire dealt in oils, an artistic style that originated in the West, read white. Interestingly, more than a decade ago, prior to this portrait executed, in the early 1990s, when The Ancestor Game by Alex Miller was published, there is description of a harmonious relationship between Chinese, Irish and Aboriginal people, as exemplified by Noonan, Feng and Dorset, which was actually based on a goldfield painting by Joseph Johnson, featuring a Chinese, an Irishman and an Aboriginal person playing euchre that was supposedly a reflection of early harmony existing among these very different peoples before racism set in and wrought a havoc that has cast a long shadow over Australia. It may sound exclusive towards people of other nationalities and ethnicities but this concern with the three original colours has been an age-old one with people from as diverse backgrounds as Scottish (Hume Nisbet), Hungarian (David Martin) and white Australian (Xavier Herbert), to whom Chinese play a linking role between the black and the white. In donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) by Shen Zhimin, the combination of the three original colours forms the basis of the novel, in which an Aboriginal boy, a Chinese boy and a white Australian boy go hand in hand in search of Australia’s Aboriginal origin, symbolized by the shangxin zhi di (heart-broken place or heart-breaking place) where a massacre had taken place 200 years ago involving many Aboriginal deaths (227), and, in the process, discover themselves. It is a much happier novel than the ironically titled, Extremely Happy Parrots, in that the three boys choose to live an outcast’s life by roaming the country, casting their sense of belonging to the four winds.
The stories of these three boys roaming the country in search of treasure, spiritual and otherwise, are less important than the idea that lies behind the construction of the novel. This idea reflects a significant realization, albeit limited, on the part of the author that the key to racial and cultural harmony in Australia is a blending of the three primary colours and it is based on this realization that Shen assigns roles for the three boys to play. What is more intriguing is the fact that two of the boys come from disreputable family backgrounds, tang mu si (Thomas), illegitimate son of a conservative MP who commits suicide after his affair is exposed and Gao Qiang [meaning High Strong], son of a corrupt Chinese company director. When these family tragedies occur, Thomas and Gao Qiang become homeless, straying into Redfern where they befriend tu gu [meaning Earth Valley], the Aboriginal boy, and fight together against the police in the Redfern Riots. It is obvious that an echo to Australia’s convict past is implied in the family background of Thomas and Gao Qiang in that both have come from a disgraced family background and a defiance of Australian police, symbol of state control and power, is shown through their fight in the riots. Despite rather stereotypical portraits of the three boys, e.g., Tu Gu as someone who does not care about money (89) and who identifies strongly with the wandering spirit of an eternal traveler ge lan te (Grant) (125), Gao Qiang as someone overwhelmingly concerned with money (89, 129) and Thomas as someone ‘the most brainy’, full of intelligent ideas (135), the novel nevertheless reveals a darker truth about Australia as a place not fit for Chinese to stay. After all their adventures involving fights against a rascal si di mu (Steam), their musical band going places and their search for gold, etc, Gao Qiang ‘is going back to China’ (318). The novel ends with Gao Qiang saying, in response to the questions from Tu Gu and Thomas as to why he is going back, ‘You forgot. Didn’t I say that I was going to run a trading company and come to Australia to do business? When I make money and make a fortune, I shall invite you to have fun in China.’ (318)
It is worth noting that, by comparison with Wang Hong, Shen’s message is upbeat about his three fictional boys, as reflected in a remark made by Grant, an erstwhile bank manager who gives up on his work in favour of traveling alone, having been traveling on the road for 25 years, without family or kids. He says that after he gets on the road, he ‘thinks of wanting to go home less and less’ (125), that it’s only on the road that he ‘feels whole’ (127) and that, for him, ‘there is always a home by the side of roads’ (128). What I can recall from this is the story James Chang (Zhang Zhizhang), a Taiwanese-Chinese writer, told in the 1994 Chinese-Australian Arts Festival of an old overseas Chinese who said that the minute he sat down in his seat on a plane he felt at home and that’s where he belonged.
There is an early echo to Dynamic Treasure Trove in Shen Zhimin’s novella, titled, bian se hu (The Colour Changing Lake), which I published in Otherland (No. 2, 1996) as editor. In that story about the difficulties Chinese students have when they first arrive in Australia, it is Aborigines who befriend them, not white Australians. In fact, white Australians are terrible racists. When Jiang Hua, the name meaning River Flower or River Chinese, the protagonist, is playing erhu in a small town, a ‘tall white woman’ rushes in and tells him off, ‘like yelling at an animal’; she calls Jiang ‘a beggar from the East and a heathen’. Jiang has to leave even though he thinks that ‘their behaviour does not correspond to God’s spirit.’ When Jiang Hua is detained by the Immigration officers, it is niao (Bird), an Aboriginal elder who comes to his aid with his men and gives the officers and policemen a talking-to, ‘We have been living here for hundreds of years thousands of years tens of thousands of years. We are really master of this land. We should decide who is or is not an illegal immigrant. This Chinese is my friend. He can stay as long as he likes. It’s got nothing to do with you. If you don’t like it, you can go back to Sydney or elsewhere. Or you can go back to your old home in Europe.’
In Shen Zhimin’s novella, there is almost a visible determination not to give whites their due but to insist on a healthy dose of ethnic mixture. None of his heroes or heroines are white Australians. Born of an English dandy father and a Gipsy mother, Weiduoliya (Victoria) is a street artist who becomes Jiang’s friend. Bird, the Aboriginal elder, is of Aboriginal and Chinese parentage because his grandfather was a Chinese gold-digger who escaped from ‘white persecution’ to live with Aborigines and married an Aboriginal woman, Bird’s grand-mother. Even the two Immigration officers bent on taking Jiang prisoner turn out to be migrants themselves, one a Jew from England whose father had escaped there from Poland in the Second World War and the other is originally also an illegal immigrant from Yugoslavia. It is these ideological underpinnings that made Shen’s novel and novella read more like political fables than truly realized fiction.
Possibly related to Australia
he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You) is not an Australian novel; it is written by a hyphenated Australian. Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan) has indeed lived for many years in Australia since 1990 but, after he became an Australian citizen, he decided to return to Shanghai in or about 2000, coming back once every year, according to him, to lodge his annual tax return. In this roaming novel, interspersed with photographs, from Madrid through Saville, Bacelona, Napoli, Sicily, Rome, Florence, Venice, Geneva, Paris, Avignon and London, enacted entirely between ni (you) and wo (I), through a series of email letters or interior monologues, Australia is virtuely non-existent. The only Australian is a girl by the name of da fu ni (Daphne) that ‘I’ met in a Shanghai-based art exhibition (61), who grew up in a Melbourne beach town and is a girl of ‘innocent and natural Australian qualities’ (66). When they meet in Barcelona, Daphne asks ‘I’, ‘You go out alone this far. Do you want to escape? How far do you want to go?’ (66). ‘I’, who does not have a name, says in a philosophical remark that sounds like Grant in donggan baozang, ‘Travel seems to give me more opportunities to catch things that almost drift past my body’ (67).
A novel of lacuna in which Australia does not exist, by a Chinese-Australian who now prefers to make his home in Shanghai, ‘the most Westernised city in China’ (19), is perhaps more telling than otherwise, more Australian than un-Australian, or should I say, more Australian in being un-Australian. What is not expressed in the fiction finds expression in the non-fiction, in the houji (Postscript), in which Zhao Chuan describes why he wrote the book. ‘The reason why I had that desire to write is probably related to my having lived for many years in Australia. It is a migrant society where people from different cities and different cultural experiences have to live together. We are curious about each other; our mutual interaction is ongoing but is never somehow fitting. We live closely together: working in the same place, separated by buildings or walls or we scrape our shoulders as we walk past or are even sleeping in the same bed. However, our memories are probably far apart, hard to be pulled together (230).’
More than Leslie Zhao’s novel, Hongchen jie (Doomed to Red Dust), a recent novel by Ying Ge, based in Australia since 1989, completely abandons Australia in its narration, featuring instead a Chinese-American in Lin Wenlu, who gives up his well-paying job in an American company and chooses to stay in Beijing. It is not hard to find that this homeward bound attachment has already been foreshadowed in his first novel, chuguo weishenme?—laizi dayang bi’an de baogao (Why Go Overseas?—report from the other side of the ocean), in which an old Chinese man muses on the significance of overseas Chinese in these words:
Wherever I go, I remain a Chinese in other people’s eyes. Chinese are a heavy nation. (339-340)…But, I think, whatever circumstances in which they find themselves, Chinese people have a thought that co-exists with their hearts. That is: I am born on yellow earth, I am a Chinese, I should do something for my zuguo (ancestral nation or motherland) and I should do something for my nation….(341)
This is of course didactic but didactic in a way that makes sense. If multiculturalism is meant to keep peoples apart, so that ‘one cannot possibly dance the Russian ballet to the accompaniment of Aboriginal instruments nor can Western ways of singing match Asian folk tunes’, they cannot but keep harking back to their zuguo (ancestral nation) as their only way out, as Ying Ge says on the back of his first novel, ‘However far they go, they remain sons and grandsons of Yellow Emperor, born on Yellow Earth.’
If there is any home to belong to, it is perhaps in the fiction that Zhao Chuan creates, one that is ‘ready to get lost, to encounter strange crowds and to turn into another direction after an exchange of a few words’. (231)
The most poignant remark is made in a recent editorial in huaxia zhoubao (The Weekly Chinese) newspaper, in Melbourne, in celebration of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (25/9/07) when the editor says, after describing Australia as a ‘migrant country’ full of peoples from all over the world, ‘You’d be dead wrong if you think this country is like China where there are “fifty six nationalities, fifty six constellations, fifty six flowers and fifty six brothers and sisters that all belong in one family”. Respecting each other like guests is all superficiality, formality, politeness, distance, strangeness and non-intimacy; it is hard to mix like oil and water.”
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Indran Amirthanayagam was born in Colombo. He migrated to London and then to Hawaii with his parents.
His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States. His poem "Juarez" won the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Mexico in 2006. Amirthanayagam has written five books thus far: The Splintered Face Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, March 2008), Ceylon R.I.P. (The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2001), El Hombre Que Recoge Nidos (Resistencia/CONARTE, Mexico, 2005) El Infierno de los Pajaros (Resistencia, Mexico, 2001), The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, 1993).
Amirthanayagam is a poet, essayist and translator in English, Spanish and French. His essays and poems have appeared in The Hindu, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, El Norte, Reforma, New York/Newsday, The Daily News, The Island, The Daily Mirror, Groundviews (Sri Lanka). Amirthanayagam is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow and a past recipient of an award from the US/Mexico Fund for Culture for his translations of Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia. Translations of poet Jose Eugenio Sanchez have appeared online. Two other Spanish collections and a collection of poems about Sri Lanka are under preparation.
Bomb Picking
My friend says
that where ashes
fall from the grill
nothing grows,
not even weeds,
for a year. Imagine
recovering land
from artillery
shells, cluster
bombs shattered
and multiplied,
the sheer slow
picking up
of signals
with metal rods,
mistakes,
explosions.
I heard today
that removing
the world’s
unexploded bombs
would take
five or six or ten
thousand years,
I don’t have
the exact number
–an elusive target–
don’t know how
many more devices
will drop in 2009.
Smoke Signal
The sense
of a life,
dousing body
in gasoline,
ablaze
before Lake
Geneva,
brought back
to London
for burial,
sacrifice
conducted
in exile,
a funeral,
valued
news item,
drawing
attention
to burning
of family
in Vanni
while
numbed,
comatose,
Tamils
wake up
abroad
to light
stoves
to make
coffee
and read
about
their pyre
burning
crisply
in Swiss
air
outside
UNHCR
The Big Eye
When Orwell wrote that war is peace
literature may have solved hypocrisy
once and for all, and new generations
of politicians learned his lesson
in their graduate programs, or on the job,
paying heed as a result to eyewitness
accounts of atrocities committed
by the good army liberating
the Vanni from Tiger devils.
The fact that the same eyewitnesses
speak of convoys of wounded
and dying blocked by the devils
gives their accounts an appearance
of impartiality, seriousness,
but as the man in charge
in the capital said, there are only
four of these international observers
and the rest are locals and all
are subject to Tiger pressure.
Locals certainly cannot be trusted.
They speak Tamil and live
in harmony with cousins
in Chennai and are suspicious
of detention camps where
we welcome entire families
to eat and live, watched,
protected, in peace.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Aria
by Sarah Holland Batt
University of Queensland Press
2008
ISBN 9780702236754
http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/index.php
Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY
Poetry is about finding the image that will suffice, that will embody the complex of emotion and thought possessing the poet’s body and soul. It is about finding concrete details that have a special resonance, and creating from a few particulars an entire mood or landscape. Sarah Holland-Batt possesses this gift in abundance. She has the attentiveness for the telling detail, and the mastery of making magic of familiar things. In poems of startling freshness and immediacy, Holland-Batt bridges the quotidian and visionary worlds in vivid acts of seeing, and reminds us of poetry’s power to renovate, to restore delight in ordinary things.
In an age where there are so many poems and poets flaunting their postmodernist opacity and reducing language to a vaguely apprehensible vaporous flow until nothing remains in the reader’s head, it is refreshing and heartening to encounter a young poet who values lyric clarity, and who, though gifted with art of seeing and turning ordinary things into arresting metaphors, does not disdain to use plain speech to say the most profound things. This gift is evident in the moving “The Sewing Room,” a tribute to the poet’s mother, its tactile touches reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s elegies for his mother:
My mother measured the margins
of my known world there:
a sunlit annex where the lines converged,
wrist to shoulder-blade, hip, ankle, waist;
maps I would only outgrow
charted in painstaking tailor’s chalk.
The image and moment are precisely delineated, and the iconic figure of the mother working her Singer wonderfully captured: “sometimes a foxtrot, sometimes a waltz,/ she treadled the pedal with a pianist’s touch.” The concluding sestet echoes the last lines in Robert Hayden’s father poem “Those Winter Sundays” (“What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?”):
What did I know of making then,
rearranging a few sad odds and ends
under my mother’s pinned smile,
her teeth interspersed with ersatz test?
The overlocker zagged on like a lie-detector test.
I kept watch. It never leapt.
The affection, the mother-daughter bond is never stated but conveyed through the telling details, the terse sentences in the last line contrasting poignantly with the preceding aggregate of subordinate clauses, noun and preposition phrases to suggest the inadequacy of language in expressing the mother’s selfless love.
Holland-Batt reveals a Keatsian apprehension of the world around her that yields up refreshing physical details. In a few weaker poems, this silts up the movement of the lyric, but when this rich vein is balanced by a Chekhovian spareness, Holland-Batt reveals a mature mind that makes her one of the most compelling poets to emerge in recent years. This balance is most apparent in the family portraits, where the precision of detail works hand in glove with lyric cadence and restraint to create deeply poignant tributes. In “Exhaustion” the little concrete details piece together a whole life:
One afternoon I went into his silent study
and found, behind the tiny compartments
of paper-clips, rubber bands and push-pins,
an old, red tin – the relic of my grandfather’s oils,
wedged at the back of things. Horse-hair brushes,
graphite stubs, a frayed bit of string. And nestled in
the smudged stippling of china white and cerulean,
a solitary tube of cobalt blue, its crimped end
folded over and over until nothing was left.
The last detail resonates endlessly in the reader’s mind, as a lasting emblem of the grandfather’s life and memory. There are other moving familial poems that echo Robert Lowell (Holland-Batt acknowledges her debt in “Letter to Robert Lowell”), but Heaney is a more palpable influence in the portraits of the father, in “Atonement” and in “The Woodpile,” which is inspired by the figure of the poet’s father splitting “rounds of wood”:
Nights were cold; my father’s breath,
blue as exhaust while he chopped, stunning each
block in two with the blade’s glottal stop
although the cold kept coming on no matter
how hard he struck.
The sensuous weave of alliterative and assonantal sounds and the use of vivid kinetic verbs are Heaneyesque, marrying memory and lyric form in a reverential gesture.
Poem after poem in the collection exhibits a Keatsian sensuality, an alert eye and ear that capture all the nuances of emotion and thought through physical detail. “Circles and Centres” is unabashed in its use of adjectives, the long train of images breathing rapture:
You are being called. All the garden
around the house is as planets in orbit,
its slim persimmons and cumquats, their shocks
of rind, the pumpkins viridian and grooved
like distorted grenades, plump wattle in sprays
rattling its sweet dust into your eyes and nose.
Heaney is again audible in the digging motif and vivid verbs:
You are digging, digging against it,
possibly for an end; going around the perimeter
of you plot, wielding your ability to crimp
and cinch and singe like a new addition
to your vocabulary.
The poem locates a liminal instant between the outside and indoors, between the self and other. It digs deep into the moment, and while the language is beautifully evocative, it is one of the few poems where the gift for imagery runs aground on its own excess.
Holland-Batt, like Jane Hirshfield and Linda Gregg, has the ability to tune in to the mystery of ordinary things. There is a Zen-like attentiveness, and the ego disappears in a concentrated moment of seeing:
Will you come back from the other side?
No, but the world will still know me.
And how will it know you?
In the black cricket’s song.
In the throat
of all things burning.
There is a remarkable precision and economy of language, and a haunting acoustic, a captivating music that holds up the visual image.
Music, as theme and metaphor, permeates the work. The longer poems that with musical motifs – “Rachmaninoff’s Dream” and “Aria for a Painted Dancer” – stumble and lose clarity, the rich word-hoard cluttering up the movement, but “Misery and Pizzicato” delivers that ominous chord in Mahler’s tragic oeuvre memorably:
Morning, thinking of Mahler
in nineteenth-century Austria,
who was told Jews were not welcome
at the Vienna Opera – composer or no.
He turned Catholic, and joked.
‘I have just changed my coat,’
then went home and marked the violins
in his seventh symphony ffff, with a note:
pluck so hard that the strings hit the wood.
Again the economy and exactitude are impressive: in a short lyric Mahler’s life and work are compellingly captured.
Aria offers many poems in which the words achieve the condition of music, to quote Pater. Reading a Holland-Batt poem, one is compelled to listen to the resonance, the silence, the meaning that echoes at the end of the last line. There are a few poems of strained epiphanies, and a few others where the eye for imagery goes uncontrolled, and but overall it is a collection to keep, one to re-read for its luminous detail and knowledge, and its tender, compassionate imagination that is always “Letting the ordinary become the last.”
