January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kirk Marshall is the Brisbane-born(e), Melbourne-based author of “A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953”, a 2007 Aurealis Award-nominated full-colour illustrated graphic novelette. He holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Creative Writing), with Distinction from the Queensland University of Technology, and a first-class Honours degree in Professional Writing from Deakin University. He has written for more than fifty publications, both in Australia and overseas, including “Going Down Swinging”, “Voiceworks”, “Word Riot” (U.S.A.) and “3:AM Magazine”. As of 2009, he is the editor of “Red Leaves”, Australia’s first (and only) English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal (http://www.myspace.com/redleaveskoyo). His debut short-story collection, “Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories”, will be published by Black Rider Press in 2010.
Suite of Haiku
Electricity:
a strobing head, a cut lip
My blood gloves his fist.
They hug me once as
pillows of breath are wrestled
from my lungs: farewell.
Cities capture light
and reflect them back on streets
slick with midnight rain.
Through the winter he
watches from his register:
I greet him for smokes.
Moon suspended as
she smiles into her scarf and
replaces her phone.
Wolves whine at my door –
On the beach, they chase waves and
devour turtle eggs.
I write, knowing a
succession of dead poets
expect something grand.
He is heartbroken.
She is not. She is waiting.
He is years behind.
She lies amidst reeds:
her nude back is bruised where the
ladybirds collect.
Fog hugs the king’s legs
as he forges through bracken:
a fox turns to watch.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nathan Curnow’s latest collection, The Ghost Poetry Project (Puncher & Wattmann), is based upon his stays at ten haunted sites around the country. He has featured widely on ABC and with further assistance from the Australia Council is writing a new play based upon convict stories and escape myths.
www.ncurnow.blogspot.com
Sails and Anvils
Travelling to Australia’s most ‘haunted’ house
Upon arrival I will be the working poet cocked
for inspiration, directing my hosts with a pen’s arrow
from the signs of my splitting headache. Inside
the plane the cabin of my head is rocked by
turbulence. Great sails and anvils are bright
arctic pages, the story of a doomed expedition.
This is the lesson—do not stay with poets
the night before flying out, drinking ensues
and they just want to have sex or complain
about their rejections. I left them moaning,
friends of mine, making love like friends,
bearing all but their vocabularies, competing
in wild noises. Aren’t we all falling, our egos
packed with a plastic whistle to draw attention?
If the plane lands safely there is a rental car
waiting, some compartment I can crash in.
Another brittle booth, certain to betray me
when the impact finally comes. I am cranky
this morning, hurtling toward the chapter of
my decline. But with a pen and a pose I go
to work as if spirited by questions of ‘soul’.
I just want to get off. Go, get fucked.
We are turning into cloud.
Love Note On Serviette
Inspired by an account of the ‘prisoner’ who in 1899 threw a love poem
weighted by a stone over the wall of the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum.
my own fond love
this portion find your path
I feel myself beyond myself
am able to choose this rock
to traffic these words
put your cold on me
gazing forever upward
throw me something
I love you I love you
lavender is making sense
notice the rocks
I have practiced this
promise me yourself
I found a secret passage
beneath the Peppercorn trees
it is forbidden by the Pope
instead he blessed me
with a hole in the wall
I have imagined
that you wave
much like you throw
throw me something
be my gracious garden
your voice climbs over
a lavender ladder
do you want to
hear me breathing
I am feeling myself
the stiff sin of a sinner
the Pope is always watching
The Frame Around Us
Following my night in a ‘haunted’ hearse
again my weight on the edge of your bed,
words fall like empty shells, your ticking clock is
Pinocchio’s face, hands point to always speak the truth
my up-late brainteaser, I beg you to tell me
but your body is a ruthless mime, signalling all
that you refuse to say, scared the words will turn to flesh
a shrug of your shoulders, you are locked,
it is late, I am so tired of this coming and going,
one day I will tell you of this grand adventure, what it did
and did not achieve, these long road-trips,
a night in a hearse cocooned in my sleeping bag,
I saw shadows spill over the ceiling’s canvas, slide off
above my head, slowly at first, each one fell
the way I have become my poems, retreated to
my cluttered desk, I am disappointing to meet in person
stranded by language, designed for answers,
neat squares on a page of black, filling the boxes
with crude solutions, revising, we are grubby crosswords
down and across, the hands of your clock
trim away the night, as if time decides the rules
of the puzzle, keeps changing the frame around us
just lie down, we are safe for now,
it takes more than courage and words, waiting
to tell you of all I have seen, tonight I will not budge
(These poems are published in The Ghost Poetry Project, Puncher and Wattmann, 2009) http://www.puncherandwattmann.com/pwghost.html
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alan Gould is an Australian poet, novelist and essayist. His seventh novel, The Lakewoman, was launched at The 2009 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and his twelfth volume of poetry, Folk Tunes, has just been published by Salt. Among his many awards, he has won the NSW Premier’s Prize For Poetry (1981), The National Book Council Banjo Prize for Fiction (1992), The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal For Literature, and The Grace Leven Award for his The Past Completes Me – Selected Poems 1973-2003.
Two At A Café Table
for MG
Gold estuary falling on your shoulder,
what does blonde hair do?
It’s thirty seven Aprils since
I swam in gold with you,
lay close and breathed pine resin in;
we bonked our lunchtimes through,
our syllabus was tongue and groove
and what might nipples do.
Now coffee and our fancy cakes
are lush, but snag our way.
Miraculous how natural
the things we need to say,
to find response aglitter in
the lives that we now reach,
this winter day’s exquisite calm,
this frisson in our speech.
Is it your body’s loveliness,
is it my voice alone,
is it the gesture of a hand
or curve of your facial bone,
that lift us to our form of words
healing as they renew?
How come it took us half a life
to find this rendezvous
and see the gift of person in
the flesh that we once held,
now ADG can be less gauche,
Michelle be more Michelle’d?
Thirty seven years are here
and shoppers stop to stare
where two old lovers incandesce
and golden is the air.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Carolyn van Langenburg is the author of three books of literary fiction: The Teetotaller’s Wake, Fish Lips and Blue Moon, published by Indra press. Her collection of poems was published by Picaro in 2007. She has travelled widely in Asia and resides in the Blue Mountains with her husband.
Idea for a Story
Leaves dance in the air.
Dust whirls across the park.
A dog yelps at its tail. Boys run around anything and everything.
A woman’s hands disappear, her forearms disappear. A box draws her in, and then she pulls her arms out of the box and raises her hands high in the air. They dart like pale birds, flit and swoop into the box.
They dart like pale birds…
Paper plates smeared with chocolate icing and the grainy green slicks of tabouli spill out of park garbage bins. Flip flop with chewed chicken wings and an empty pvc bottle that takes off with the wind to have a go at the dog. The dog jumps at the bottle and grovels it as if it were a bone. The bottle, too big for its mouth, jerks and rolls and whizzes.
A woman’s legs walk under a box. Do the legs belong to the woman with the disappearing hands? The dog runs at the heels of the legs. The box bobs and jerks above a body. When the dog races back to the rolling bottle, the box with legs stops.
The head of the woman with the disappearing hands appears as the whole of the woman’s body bends to pick something up off the grass. She holds the retrieved thing high, pinched between thumb and forefinger, fingers furled into the palm of her hand…
No camera can see between the soft pads of her fingers furled over the top of her palm, which they touch. She stands still, holding up something small to examine, the box balanced against her hip. She may be reading a sign. She may be one of those women who look for signs to decipher, one who pinches salt to toss over her shoulder for good luck. Caught in this part of her life, she repeats her daily routine, juggling many banal tasks to keep food on the table and clothes on her child’s back. She may look for signs of future good fortune because money is tight. She worries, or does she, about her son’s performance at school, how much television he watches and how few books interest him. Is he a slow reader? How can the camera tell us anything about the life these two live? As it is, if a camera were to pan this action, it will record that a woman dressed for a picnic in a park carries a box. Her shirt, worn under a sweatshirt, is bright red and her jeans are faded around the knees. She looks dishevelled. What significance will the camera capture in its frame? What message will be decoded by the decipherers of the visual medium of this woman who loses her hands in a box filled with party food? How will they interpret her holding high something pinched between her thumb and forefinger? Is the message portending that, as she is a mother providing a happy birthday party for her son, she will be rewarded in the future with charming gummy grandchildren? Do those who spend their lives deciphering images drive the life out of motherhood, perching it on top of sentimental interpretation that diminishes humanity?
She is a woman providing a birthday party for her son. That’s all, in a snapshot.
The wind tears a feather from the tips of her fingers…
The wind pelts the bottle with stirred up city grit. The wind smacks twigs and empty crisp bags at the bottle. The wind whips the bottle with wrappers and ripped newsprint…
Boys yell and run, dog runs and barks, bottle rolls and whistles…
The woman hoists the box, her head disappears and she stumbles. The box wobbles where her head ought to be, flips open and flap-flaps…
Add a black sky and the drum roll of thunder with a few big drops of rain working up to a downpour and the scene is set.
In parenthesis
The woman stands at a picnic table in the park. The dog noses a pvc bottle rolling near her feet. Boys cluster at one end of the table, joking about bullshit and who is full of it. The woman’s hands disappear into a box then reappear. They are transformed into birds that rise in the air, swoop and land on the table before taking off again. Her hands plunge into the box again — her hands become other things like bowls and food containers, escaping her attention. Her inattentive eyes mirror the sky that they skim. Grey, they are, with a tree blackening in front of darkening grey…
Cake rises above box.
Candles under her chin burst into little flames. Boys cheer. They yell a song about a happy birthday to you. A red-faced boy blows out the little flames. The other boys congratulate him for being full of bullshit. Hands become knife, knife cuts cake, boys stuff triangles of cake in their mouths.
The dog’s mouth is never shut.
And so the story begins:
A woman packs bowls and paper plates and empty plastic food containers into a box. She pushes chewed chicken wings and plates streaked with tabouli and chocolate icing into the park garbage bin. The wind hurls the paper plates out of the garbage bin, tosses them to the ground, whips them across the grass where an empty pvc bottle rolls. The wind and the bottle tease the dog that jumps at the bottle and grovels it as if it were a bone. The wind whips at boys, pushing them backwards when they run forwards. The sky is blackening, the clouds rapidly broiling and thickening. Big raindrops fall and the yelping boys take off towards cars parked under big trees. The woman gathers up the box of birthday party things. When the dog barks and the boys shout, her head vanishes.
The park is suddenly dark.
Thunder drumrolls.
The woman stumbles through pouring rain to one of the parked cars. Her head pops up when the box drops and lands between her breasts and the side of one of the cars.
When the drenched woman sinks behind the steering wheel of her car, she looks into the rear vision mirror. The birthday boy, two of his friends and the dog sit in a row on the backseat, grins wet, panting hard.
Question stops story: Where does dog begin and boy end?
The next thing that happens is natural. Lightning strikes the ground not far from the car and the thunder that follows is deafening. The dog howls. The birthday boy pulls the dog onto his lap and presses his hands over the dog’s ears. All the boys, lanky limbs crisscrossing lanky limbs, talk one over the top of each other about how doggy ears hurt when noises are loud like thunder.
The woman behind the steering wheel pushes at wet strands of hair and sort of smiles. She looks enigmatic, like the Mona Lisa. That’s what the camera records. Being a mother is a state of being, like being Mona Lisa. The image of her as a mother who looks like the Mona Lisa conceals her occupation. She is a writer.
She galvanises the energy to start the car, a story beginning to unravel in her head. It’s about a birthday party that ends when lightning strikes.
[Acknowledgement: Luis Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.]
An earlier version of this story first appeared in Staples, issue 7
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Between Stations
by Kim Cheng Boey
Essays, Paperback, 320pp
ISBN 978 192088 2501
Giramondo (September 2009)
Aus $24.95
www.giramondopublishing.com/index.html
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG
Kim Cheng Boey is a writer and poet who migrated to Sydney with his family from Singapore in 1997. One could call him a migrant writer. Between Stations, according to one book-description that I read online, is “his first collection of travel writing.” But such a description says very little about a book that is all about the personal and existential crisis of a writer trying to reconcile disparate cultural worlds, as well as one trying to come to terms with his past.
Beginning in India, then passing through the evocative worlds of Egypt and Morocco, Boey’s accounts of sojourns in far-flung places in the world are full of gritty anecdotes about fellow-travellers and impassioned references to famous works of art, music and literature used to magnify and universalise the writer’s constant wanderlust. As a Singaporean, I feel a connection to this ex-Singaporean’s desire to disappear into foreign spaces that resist the vicissitudes of change which are still essential to our tiny country’s survival today—as a Singaporean tells Boey at one point, “Changes are necessary. Singapore is too small. We have to move forward.”
It is easy to see why this desire prevails. The places that Boey escapes into are imbued with an imagined sense of timelessness; they are full of history, art and spirituality. What can Singapore boast of except that it has managed to succeed as a viable and prosperous nation state in just a few decades? Using photographs of long-gone locations and recounting memories about spending time in now-demolished buildings such as the Stamford Road Library, the author reveals how he is rendered distraught by change. Yet he is also quick to remember that a longing for things to be still and for the past to remain the past can be a pointless, self-indulgent exercise. In a chapter about Change Alley, a centre for corporate culture in Singapore, the writer feels “chastened” when he notes how retirees have adapted “so easily to the new Singapore.” He wonders if “the problem is me…I have never been able to be at home in the present; the only place I can feel at peace in is the past.”
A fear of the past disappearing is tied to memories of a father’s abandonment of his responsibilities. A chapter can set off from an exotic location, rich with historical significance and framed within celebrated philosophical perspectives—think Walter Benjamin on memory or Susan Sontag on the photographic image—or aligned with quotations from influential works of literature by the likes of Cavafy or Du Fu. Then the writing segues repeatedly into a memory from the poet’s childhood, full of authentic smells and sounds, in which a grandmother is cooking for the family, or in which a father is taking a walk, or a smoke, with his son. The essays turn increasingly philosophical and poetic during such shifts. They are particularly heartbreaking during moments when Boey sees himself in his own son; in such instances, the poet also sees himself as his own departed father through his child’s eyes. Past, present and future collapse, which was what the author had hoped for all along—to unify what is lost with new memories forming in the midst of the present.
Boey’s fans in Singapore would be glad to learn of the psychological and emotional back-story behind his poems, a few of which are quoted in the chapters. I was personally gripped by the author’s experiences as a counsellor in a local prison, as well as the time when he followed in the footsteps of Mother Theresa’s nuns in helping the poor. The poet-as-restless-traveller has become more three-dimensional to a reader like me who has followed his work since my junior college days. A sense of urgency grips the eponymous last chapter (“Between Stations”) when the writer tell us that as both emigrant and immigrant, he has become “adept at switching between codes:” “You become Kim Cheng Boey instead of Boey Kim Cheng…Kim Boey is accommodating…while Boey Kim Cheng has begun to try to find a way back to the old world…He is still searching for a language to utter himself into being.” Such urgency emphasises the schizophrenic state that the writer has been struggling to resolve throughout this book, particularly when this collection of essays is aching to a close.
The book ends on a plane in which the writer’s daughter is poking him awake while his son announces “Singapore” over and over. On this aircraft that is hovering symbolically and literally between stations, “between home and home,” the author longs to “dwell in an autonomous state, a resting place between memory and imagination.” In this same instant, we as readers, regardless of whether we are Australian, Singaporean, or something in between, cannot help but long for such a place too.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Paul Fearne is a poet and philosopher working and residing in Melbourne, Australia. His poems have appeared in a number of journals including Westerly, Stylus, Unusual Work and verb-ate-him. His philosophical work has appeared in journals such as Consciousness Literature and the Arts. He is currently undertaking a PhD in Philosophy and LaTrobe University, and has completed a Master’s degree from the University of Melbourne.
A Dream of Coral
let the light of our hesitation bend around the moon
and clothe the sea in memories
let the sound of the morning
sweep this cloud of butterflies
into the uncertainty of tomorrow
there is a pause in the turning of the sky
it marks the sorrow the birds feel
that the winter has forgotten its home
and the snow is reticent to melt
a sea horse searches for its past
but the future is all it knows
and in time
it will become a dream of coral
and wander further
than it ever has before
The Regrets of Dragon Flies
a clothes line whirls in the breeze
on it
sway pegged dreams
and the regrets of dragon flies
a rustling catches our ears
it is the litter of autumn
and the wandering of our fears
in a rain that has not fallen for a thousand years
the simplicity of our forgetting
curls in a gentle mist
and reminds us
that the last wish of a starfish
is all the dawn needs
to chase away the morning’s cobwebs
and their gentle intransigence
a nervous pride of clouds
(a fellowship that has never known a moments rest)
gather up our best intentions
and scatter them throughout the sea
and into the hopes of time
as she whispers the trembling names
of all those lost silences
that have kept us searching
searching for the dust of the night’s companionship
and the kind wisps of longing
that sleep in the ancient abbey
we once knew as our home
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sam is Melbourne based, obtaining her now defunct degree -Bachelor of Creative Arts (hons.) – at the University of Melbourne a fast-receding number of years ago. She runs SNAFU Theatre with her childhood friend and playwright May Jasper, and is only now learning how to dress seasonally.
The Shape
in the end,
the house empty
of course i realised
that i had dreamt of you.
a forcibly empty house
me drying my dishwashed hands
and suddenly crying,
catching myself,
and i remember dreaming
of your small warm hand
in mine.
how i had dreamt you into
my street,
how we had walked together
in the hot afternoon’s
half-light,
you as silent and content,
as i thought you used to be.
in my kitchen,
patting water on my cheeks,
i saw the largeness of
my grief for you,
breathing, living on
without us,
and all the ways i
would continue to pay.
III
It is his endless
morning glare
that hits first,
not buried beneath sheets
but encrusted to a chair
or
pouring milk into a bowl
or
slowly pushing the plunger down.
He is not expecting you
and that is his consolation.
Scraping him off,
touching the edge of the banister
you could very well not be there,
very well not be grinding yourself
into him.
*
It is four in the morning
when he gets home,
familiar through the sightless presence,
as leaning against templed hallways
he sees you, just,
a fluttering glimpse in a dimming eye
as his hands fumble
dumbly for switches and
pocket change, and he
doesn’t quite know who he is any more
when sudden light surprises the
reflection crouching in the bathroom.
Stained, searching through
mirrored gazes for eyes and
ears and the four small moles
that one day disappeared.
His body deflated into
a husk.
The moon has beaten him tonight
standing by the window, and
whether he will finish in your bed
is a question you wont ask,
as lives past are discovered
in the floorboards
the house creaking
with unexpected scrutiny.
He does not know you are watching.
Mornings were made for nights like this
as sobs and breath
not your own
numb themselves into light.
*
He drinks four glasses of water
and remembers, finally, to close the fridge door.
In this half-light
he is a unicorn, almost,
pressing his body down in
bleak inspection of what is still there.
And only one thing he can say:
No body is this here
No body is this.
Murakami
You go into a room, because the bedside lamp
is on. You don’t have to turn it off,
but you want to. You trip over
a bedsheet, but the whole time your
eyes are fixed on the lamp.
This is how M makes you feel.
You are so fixed on this idea, that
instead of seeing Brando’s tux shirt in
a Godfather poster, you think he’s
holding a soft drink container.
It takes several re-glimpses to
shatter that image.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
What Came Between
by Patrick Cullen
Scribe, 2009
ISBN: 9781921372889
$27.95
http://www.scribepublications.com.au/
Reviewed by MARIA FREIJ
Patrick Cullen’s first book, What Came Between, explores the life of three families in Laman Street, Newcastle in the aftermath of the 1989 earthquake, and following another incident with earth-shattering consequences for the community: the closing of the BHP steelworks ten years later. These life-changing incidents provide the framework for Cullen’s twelve interconnected stories, some of which have previously been published in Best Australian Stories, Sleepers Almanac, and Harvest. Cullen’s stories feature individuals at different stages in life and offer us an insight into the existence of very different characters, whose lives are, in one way or another, in a stage of turbulence, tragedy, or change. The earthquake becomes a trigger; cracks appear in the walls where no cracks used to be, or were they always present? The feeling of slippage runs like stormwater through the stories: involuntary childlessness, ageing, love, secrets, and guilt bob under the surface like the whale calf in Newcastle harbour, which, inevitably, is in for disaster when he crosses the surface. For the characters, the secrets and concerns continually approach the surface, but since what lies beneath will bring suffering if brought into the light, much remains necessarily and frustratingly suppressed.
Cullen’s characters are Carveresque in their working-class roots and minimalist depiction. Cullen eloquently balances the line between that which is spoken and that which must remain unsaid, showing great restraint in his narration. Newcastle features as a prominent character in the story as the city itself provides the ground upon which these characters have built their lives. When it is literally shattered, they lose their footing and their unravelling is inevitable:
Sarah got up, dragged a chair over beside the wardrobe, and reached up and ran her hand over the wall.
‘This wasn’t here before,’ she said, tracing her finger along a crack. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’
Paul stirred and looked up. ‘It’s always been there.’
‘Well, it’s opened up some more now. I’m sure of it.’ (p 7–8)
For Paul and Sarah, the earthquake is the beginning of a falling-apart in many ways. Just the one crack—and yet, a wealth of secrets trickle from the past into the present. Their childlessness, Paul’s previous life, and Sarah’s illness make for an intriguing depiction of the life of an ordinary yet extraordinary couple. Paul’s breakdown, though neatly restrained, means he takes time off work, his focus turned to repairing what the earthquake has shattered. As he retiles the bathroom, he is able to reconstruct the physical order of his and Sarah’s life. Still, the foundations he is trying to recreate will inevitably be affected by the lies he insists on telling his wife.
For Ray and Pam, as the closing of the steelworks leads to the suicide of an old friend, the unravelling of old lies creates a fear of loneliness and abandonment. The emotional turmoil is subtly depicted, yet the dialogue rings true: ‘Please don’t ever leave me,’ Ray says in the night, his face buried in his wife’s hair. When Ray falls ill and his estranged son returns from Sydney, some of the most human of emotions—guilt, fear, and pride—truly come to the fore, and the proud behaviour of both father and son yields to something more important as love, yet again, is proven stronger and more important.
For the young man whose grandmother, in her old age, moves from her house in Laman Street to stay with her daughter in the countryside, Newcastle is a new beginning. Indeed, his luggage is lighter than that of the street’s other inhabitants. When his young girlfriend falls pregnant, they start a new life together in the Laman Street home, and its previous owner, somewhat surprisingly and disappointingly, never features in the story again. This couple, representing the possibility of change and rejuvenation, seem less credible in actions and reactions; but this is perhaps because of the vigour with which these young people go about their existence and this, in turn, due to their youth. Still, because of the ease with which their troubles are resolved, these two characters appear least realistic: their relationship seems at threat, by the ominous owls in the attic if not by their innocence, but their love persists against the odds. It seems that in a time of chaos and uncertainty, love is still a force to be reckoned with.
Cullen’s characters’ lives are beautifully reflected in the movement around them: ‘Fruit bats crashed into the fig trees, and flapped and fought and fell away to do the same thing further along the street.’ (p 55) Cullen creates a fantastic ambience through the depiction of the city and his wonderful detail: the ‘small red figs pinballing about beneath their feet’ (p. 155) mirror the microcosm he has built, its characters at the mercy of the larger forces at hand: by the ocean, with its sprinkling of coal ships on the horizon, his characters grow apart, and come together. Cullen’s use of light and shade, in combination with the vulnerability of the characters towards the elements and nature: the earthquake, the tree roots growing into the pipes, along with these people’s love for each other and their instinct to defend their marriages, relationships, and lives make for a compelling and engaging narrative that resonates far beyond its last page.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
la, la, la
by Tatjana Lukic
ISBN 978-0-7340-4051-0
Order from: www.fiveislandspress.com
Reviewed by KERRY LEVES
Born in Ojisek, Croatia, in 1959, Tatjana Lukic studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Sarajevo, and published four poetry collections in Serbo-Croatian while she was still in her twenties. After long-brewing ethnic conflicts broke out into war in what was then Yugoslavia, Tatjana Lukic came to Australia, as a refugee with a young family, in 1992. Poignantly enough, two Serbo-Croatian-language poems of hers were translated into English for the Yale University Press publication, Cross Currents, a Yearbook of Central European Culture, in the same year.
In Cross Currents, Lukic’s poems were published with work by five other women poets from (then) Yugoslavia and the translator, Dasha Culic Nisula, identifed Lukic’s topic areas as “human relationships” and “the relationship of a poet to her craft”. Nisula did not comment on the technique of Lukic’s poems, that not only present an emotional situation, or broader life situation, through evocative details and/ or compressed but telling images, but also submit the subject matter to a detached, critical working-over. Comparison, Buddhism tells us, is always bitter; but the speaker of Lukic’s ‘Measured Units’ balances the inevitable gall (the poem closes on an image of time as “bitter honey”, dripping like water from a leaky tap) with an even-toned valuing of things-in-their-own-right, as she contrasts a poetic and a domestic vocation.
you were pregnant with a son
I was pondering comparisons
time is one
but the hours are different
your clock – a wall decorated
with a barometer, a spoon
a red box for pepper
cinnamon and salt
as a second hand
you tiptoe quickly after a man
while you quiet a child with a pacifier
I erase a title
before dawn I question: should I put a period?
you change diapers
you have your own room –
a line full of clothes
your own midnight next to your husband’s breath
from ‘Measured Units’, translated by Dasha Culic Nisula
Neither the speaker nor the object of her inquiry – sister, friend, neighbour, another self – is overtly a winner or loser; the poem leaves it to the reader to make such judgements, according to need and/or desire. One of the mysteries of the translation is whether the Serbo-Croatian for the English word “period” – denoting the punctuation device – also connotes menstruation. This ambiguity tends to leave ‘Measured Units’, good as it is, floating in a kind of bi-lingual limbo or fog. No such difficulties attend Tatjana Lukic’s new poems, all written in English.
After arriving in Australia, Lukic worked as a researcher and data analyst for various government departments, mostly in Canberra, according to some circumstantial evidence.
east row, mort st, canberra
it started just at the time of morning tea
‘no sugar for me’, one of the fleshy gods said
and emptied his spoon over concrete land
‘it’s snowing!’ at one dash
we all left our desks
and rushed to the windows
‘open, sesame, open!’
just to catch a flake
and we’ll behave well again
staring at the screens till dark
‘open now, it’s snowing!’
but there is no magic fit enough
to move the glass walls of our cell
one by one
we walked quietly back
to our chairs
and dialled
a dear one
‘it’s snowing, darling, open the window!’
recorded all answering machines
across the lake
la, la, la shows that Lukic’s technique, of which a reader gets tantalising glimpses in the Cross Currents selection, proved transferable into her new tongue. Lukic’s poems join an expressionist impulse – and a warm emotionality – to a disciplined consideration of the place, weight, value of emotion as it “looms” in the world’s “small things” (quotes here are from the book’s epigraph, taken from Euripides’ Ion). The result is surprisingly satisfying, as the “small things” that the poems attend to are actually made to connect with history. The poem ‘1959’ manages this with enviable simplicity and magnificent found surrealism. The poem launches, almost all-at-once-together, a new-born child; the Cuban Revolution; the first marketing of Barbie; a hit pop song (Rocco Granata’s Marina); the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary; and the great Australian post-war immigration boom, as if all the above were so many helium balloons with different faces.
war was freezing in the air, everywhere
lost in a purple patch of a magic land,
the grapes were ripening
when i slipped into the world
before i had time to cry
the red dust swept the olive green
off havana’s streets
the winds were playing over the seas
with a bunch of new flags of all colours
above freed lands
at the back of his new weatherboard cottage
down under, in yarralumla, where the world will end,
a young settler, an italian builder, was planting an olive tree
the earth was circling slowly
getting its strength
what for?
even a gipsy searching a baby’s palm
could not guess
from ‘1959’
Lukic goes in less for knock-out-one-liners, than for the whole poem as multi-dimensional construct. The critical distance that the poems practise towards even the most touching or tender life experience, nudges the reader into the sense that a poem, regardless of its tonal intimacies, is an artificial thing, a feat and also a fiction. The speaker of ‘to a reader’, from the final section of la, la, la, is upfront about this:
how simple it is to trick you, you dear sitting duck
a diddler master takes you for a ride just like that,
a snake in the grass, from time immemorial
grinning at your silly bookish trust
from ‘to a reader’
Perhaps this verbal flaunting and taunting merely shows that flamboyance does not begin or end with Kylie Minogue’s galactic hairdo and mirror-panel dress. Lukic’s subtler showiness makes room for wit aplenty.
fallacy
he eats roots and leaves
and that’s fine as he eats well
and then quietly walks away
this is not what i complain about
but why like a wombat?
his dull depart is saying
i would and i would not
leave you darling
or: yes i am leaving with no doubt
but see it’s not so easy for me to slide out of
this warm burrow onto loose tracks
or: i am leaving now my love
but you have a very good chance
to catch my leg and turn me back
and if you don’t
it’s not my fault
when our story comes to its tearful end
or: i am not leaving in fact
oh i never do that
i’m just sniffing out a rooty soil
while walking around
what is he trying to tell me
a chubby eater
sneaked into the myth
where i prefer to see the elegant
speedy wings
of a flying beast?
la, la, la is structured around the changes in Lukic’s life. The first section, ‘there’, is mainly a recollection of a Serbo-Croatian past, personal and historical; the second section, ‘here’, from which ‘east row’ and ‘fallacy’ come, offers broad-brush social description of Australian life; the third and final section, ‘anywhere’, contains the book’s most ambitious writing.
Lukic’s expressionism is not trapped in a box of style: it connects with others, remakes itself. ‘anywhere’ includes poems dedicated to Australian poets that Lukic encountered when she started writing again and was once more getting poems published, both here and overseas. Joanne Burns, Margie Cronin and Laurie Duggan are dedicatees of three of the book’s most unconventional offerings. Each is a prose poem: ‘crater’ (for Cronin) begins by associating the great, passionate Chilean Pablo Neruda with “turning fourteen, rosy and tender, each monday falling in love forever”. But Lukic’s speaker provocatively asks herself/ her reader: “how could i possibly love what everyone does”:
nobody ever borrowed this tome? i will, and i will fall in love with these oddballs and dudes, a moment i turned to my side of the bed, my russian lovers were shooting themselves in the head, quiet French men, holding me like a champagne glass and sucking my tongue, gazed at the time past behind my neck…
from ‘crater’
The speaker honours her sense that she is “turning fourteen for ever”; then turns the direction of the poem towards the internet, to a “petition for a crater on mercury to be named for neruda”, and to Margie Cronin, in a display of verbal fireworks that mingles postmodern playfulness and a fiercer, perhaps more durable modernist commitment to making it new. Managing a generous homage to Margie Cronin’s own complex and versatile poetics, ‘crater’ equally makes it new and plays. The prose works for Laurie Duggan and Joanne Burns likewise engage with the ways in which these writers actually write.
It may be hard for any reader to decide whether ‘there’ or ‘anywhere’ contains the most poignant writing. The first poem in the book presents the “la, la, la” title phrase as what a young mother, walking her baby in a stroller, sings to entertain/ reassure the child in a war, while bombs drop in backyards and an unknown man is seen for the first time “coming out of wires with a bullet in his chest”.
what did i sing?
about a cloud and a bird,
a wish and a star,
la la la,
yes, nothing else
from ‘nothing else’
The book’s final poem, ‘reverse’, takes up the “la la la” phrase in the context of a pleasant but coolly disengaged encounter, lunch in a peaceful land.
when the coffee arrives after the meal
we will sigh and talk about the weather
a lovely day, we need rain
la la la
i will nod and gaze
behind your shoulder
where are you?
i am here,
licking my cream
licking my sugar
nothing else
That last line sounds the note of solipsistic finality: in peacetime or war, there is no escape from the solitary confinement of self. Yet how lightly the point is made, with a flirtatiousness that mocks, even defies the rather scary recognition embodied in “where are you?”
The book’s final poems are also Lukic’s last: ‘thinking in months’ writes the aftermath of a pessimistic diagnosis.
life was like a tiny colouring book, short and sweet,
returning now to a black and white fight,
the evil cells and the good cells, a simple story
before a long sleep, the only war on terror i am in
from ‘thinking in months’
Tatjana Lukic, a poet of the inner life, but also of the ironies that attend the mind’s to-ing and fro-ing between a given world and a private view of it, has built, using English words, a testament to her life; it is spacious, generous, and as full of joy as it is of sorrow. Lukic’s distancing techniques – her multiple ways of opening a lyric poem to participation in a big, un-lyrical world – relate her to the great Central European poets of an earlier generation, to the Polish Zbigniew Herbert and the Czech Miroslav Holub; perhaps Bertolt Brecht is a common ancestor. We can regret that Lukic is gone, but rejoice that her book takes its place among some of the best cross-cultural poetry written in Australia, alongside the very different poetics of, for instance, Ali Alizadeh, Kim Cheng Boey, Ouyang Yu, Ania Walwicz and the Vietnamese-Australian Xuan Duong.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Jennifer Wong was born in Hong Kong. She has participated in various poetry festivals and readings, including the Man International Literary Festival in Hong Kong. Her poems appeared in several poetry journals in Hong Kong and overseas, including Coffeehouse Poetry, Iota, Cha. Dim Sum, Aesthetica and Oxford Reader. Her debut poetry collection Summer Cicadas was published by Chameleon Press in 2006. She graduated in English from University College, Oxford University, and is currently doing a Master’s degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, UK.
Myth
Do not talk to trees.
They have deep squinting eyes.
Long stout necks sticking out.
Rough chafing leather.
In the warm house you feel them
Inhaling and exhaling, your old furniture
Or their harmless smiles
In your child’s picture books.
It’s hard to get lost in the woods
Without meaning to.
Do not talk to trees.
At night they dance in ballet shoes,
Tell secrets to one another,
Put on a ring,
Wisdom for every year.
I Remember
Remember
Your dreams spilling
From bright red velvet?
When time feels
Free and right as memory foam.
A child puts his best things
Into his delicious pockets.
Curious and curious-er,
We poke and shove our fingers
Into every small crack or hole.
We dare to tilt
Order of anything;
Pluck cotton balls from dolls,
Turning them into clouds.
Remember how to play?
Knack
On our special occasion nights out
I enjoy her wonderful knack
For exuding grace
Carrying a toy-like satin pouch
Designed to hold a lipstick.
Her zealousness over the years
To build and expand her troop
Of uniform stilettos and pumps,
Arranging and re-arranging
Her proud kingdom,
Commands my highest respect.
Every time she drove
I longed for a built-in
TV in our mini cooper.
In the wee hours
I spent more time than necessary
Unpeeling onion skin shaping her legs, amused
But unimpressed by sheer vanity.
Drunk but not losing her wit, she teased me,
Patterned boxer shorts,
For flavours I kept
In my top left drawer.