New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham

Edited and Introduced by Nathanael O’Reilly

UWA Publishing, 2017

ISBN 978-1-7425892-0-6

Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD

The significance, value, and breadth of Anna Wickham’s poetry extends beyond categories of nation and resists the limitations of such categories. The category of woman, however, is central to her poetics, as both a culturally ‘inferior’ and structurally imposed designation, and as a proud personally and politically conceptualised identity, and marks Wickham’s important and consistent feminist contribution to poetry. ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (Three Guineas 197) are the words Virginia Woolf once chose to express this sense of solidarity with other women beyond national borders. Born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, in London, Wickham lived in Australia from the ages of six to twenty, later living again in England, in Bloomsbury and Hampstead, as well as living in France, on Paris’ Left Bank. Wickham is noted to have taken her pen name from the Street in Brisbane on which she first promised her father to become a poet, and the early encouragement of her creativity was to be a seed which would grow and continue to bloom despite cultural bias and personal circumstance, including the opposition of her husband to her writing, and institutionalisation. She was connected with key modernist and lesbian modernist figures including Katherine Mansfield, and Natalie Clifford Barney, whose Salon she attended, becoming a member of Barney’s Académie des Femmes, and with whom she is noted to have ‘corresponded…for years, expressing passionate love and debating the role and problems of the woman artist’ (Feminist Companion 1162).

Wickham’s poetry represents a significant achievement within early twentieth century poetry and can be described as deeply concerned with an activist approach to issues of gender, class, sexuality, motherhood, and marriage. These are all issues that address inequalities still largely unresolved, although in many ways different and understood quite differently, today. These poems may be playful, experimental, self-conscious, and passionate poems that are varied but always conscious of their position and their place in terms of both political and poetic traditions and departures from them towards an imagined better world. In the previously unpublished poem ‘Hope and Sappho in the New Year,’ Wickham boldly suggests both lesbian and poetic desire and a class-conscious refusal of bourgeois devaluation as she asserts:

Let Justice be our mutual gift
Whose every prospect pleases
And do not mock my only shift
When you have three chemises

Then I will let your chains atone
For faults of comprehension-
Knowing you lived too long alone
In worlds of small dimension.

A refusal to accept such ‘worlds of small dimension’ reiterates the inclusion of emotional, psychological and structural disparities, as have frequently been noted in her previously published poem ‘Nervous Prostration’, in which she describes her husband as ‘a man of the Croydon class’ (New and Selected 19) and in which she plainly and honestly addresses the structural and emotional complexities of her heterosexual bourgeois marriage.

In poem ‘XX The Free Woman’ Wickham outlines a moral and intellectual approach to marriage for the woman who is free, writing:

What was not done on earth by incapacity
Of old, was promised for the life to be.
But I will build a heaven which shall prove
A lovelier paradise
To your brave mortal eyes
Than the eternal tranquil promise of the Good.
For freedom I will give perfected love,
For which you shall not pay in shelter or in food
For the work of my head and hands I will be
paid,
But I take no fee to be wedded, or to remain a
Maid.

Wickham’s poetry is notable for its balanced concision and depth as much as for the expansive, inclusive, intersectional approach it takes. I am using the term intersectional to refer here to an approach which is understanding of the interconnected nature of oppression in terms of gender, class, and sexuality, although it should be acknowledged that the poems do not tend to address issues of racism specifically.

New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham, edited and introduced by Nathanael O’Reilly, brings together for the first time in print a wide inclusion of previously unpublished poems, gathered from extensive research into Wickham’s archive at the British Library. Significantly, O’Reilly’s thoughtful and careful editorship of this collection restores Wickham’s original versions of the published poems included, as well as presenting the unpublished poems in their original style and punctuation, giving the reader a clearer sense of the poet’s intention and expression. One such example is the sparing use of full stops in the poems, suggesting again Wickham’s expansive, inclusive, and flowing mode that defies the limitations of ‘worlds of small dimension’. Until this publication, readers have not been able to access these poems in print, and the majority of Wickham’s poems, over one thousand, have not been in print. Sadly, some of her writing, including manuscripts and correspondence, was destroyed in a fire in 1943. This new collection includes one hundred previously published poems as well as one hundred and fifty previously unpublished poems, making it a substantial and impressive feat. Wickham’s published collections, now out of print, included Songs of John Oland (1911), The Contemplative Quarry (1915), The Man with the Hammer (1916) and The Little Old House (1921) and she had a wide reputation in the 1930s. This expanded collection of her poetry then, is to be warmly welcomed and applauded as a timely extension of the available poems of Anna Wickham, following on from the earlier publication in 1984 of The Writings of Anna Wickham Free Woman and Poet, edited and introduced by R.D. Smith, from Virago Press, and before that her Selected Poems, published in 1971 by Chatto & Windus, reflecting the renewed interest in Wickham during the women’s movement of the 1970s.

These previously unpublished poems give further insight into Wickham’s experimentation, variation of form and style, and poetic achievement. Jennifer Vaughn Jones’ A Poets Daring Life (2003) and Ann Vickery’s valuable work on Anna Wickham in Stressing the Modern (2007) as well as that of other Wickham scholars, may more easily be expanded upon by others with the publication of this new extensive collection of Wickham’s poetry. Although Wickham’s works are now much more critically recognised than has been the case in the past, it is to be hoped that the publication this new collection will go some way to further redressing what has tended to be seen as a baffling lack of critical attention for such an important poet. Equally importantly though, the publication of this collection opens out an expanded world of Wickham’s writings to all readers and lovers of poetry wanting to engage with a poetic voice that so eloquently and purposefully brings to the fore the issues of justice, equality, gender, and both the societal and personal freedoms that remain so crucial and relevant to readers today.

NOTES

Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (Eds). The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Batsford: London, 1990.
Vickery, Ann. Stressing the Modern, Salt, 2007
Wickham, Anna. The Writings of Anna Wickham Free Woman and Poet, Edited and introduced by R.D. Smith, Virago Press, 1984.
Wickham, Anna. New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham, Edited and Introduced by Nathanael O’Reilly, UWAP, Crawley 2017.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, 1938.

KATIE HANSORD is a writer and researcher living in Melbourne. Her PhD thesis examines nineteenth century Australian women’s poetry and politics. Her work has been published in ALS, Hecate, and JASAL, as well as LOR Journal and Long Paddock (Southerly Journal).

The Lost Culavamsa: or the Unimportance of Being Earnest
about Aryan & Dravidian

a play, by Ernest Macintyre

Vigitha Yapa Publications (Colombo, Sri Lanka), 2018

ISBN 978-955-665-319-9

Reviewed by ADAM RAFFEL

In February 2016, in the best traditions of suburban amateur theatre, a group of Sydneysiders of Sri Lankan background performed a play called The Lost Culavamsa (pronounced choo-la-vam-sa) written and directed by fellow thespian and playwright Ernest Macintyre at the Lighthouse Theatre in the grounds of Macquarie University.  I had the privilege of co-directing this play as Ernest Macintyre himself was in poor health at the time. I have known the playwright for over 40 years and I was happy to oblige.  It was a delightful rewriting of Oscar Wilde’s witty comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest, about late Victorian English snobbery transplanted to an equally snobbish colonial setting in British Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the 1930s. Ernest Macintyre had created an enjoyable piece of comic theatre about mistaken identity while engaging the audience with deeper questions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’.  Macintyre has re-imagined and re-worked Wilde’s play into a satire about the absurdity of racism and communal division. A play for our times and the universality of its theme won’t be lost on audiences who have never heard of Ceylon or Sri Lanka.

However Macintyre is showing a mirror to Sri Lankans in particular.  Many of the intricacies and details of the dialogue of The Lost Culavamsa will resonate especially to Sri Lankan audiences just emerging from a 30 year civil war that concluded in 2009.  It was nothing short of a national trauma for that island and its inhabitants. At the core of the war was what it is to be a Sri Lankan.  The island’s 2500 year written history was deployed by nationalists to justify and push political agendas. The Culavamsa is an ancient Sinhalese chronicle somewhat like the Anglo Saxon Chronicle or Beowulf written in the about the same time in the 7th or 8th century AD, which was the later version of a more ancient Sinhalese chronicle called the Mahavamsa that chronicled the ancient history of the island from the 5th century BC.  These were written in poetic form like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, part history part mythology, and were “weaponised” by nationalists where ancient battles were used as dramatic props in a very 20th and 21st century civil war.  Viewed in this context The Lost Culavamsa can be seen as much needed comic relief for a war weary country with a core message of tolerance.  Macintyre has deployed the best comic traditions of English theatre to communicate this message to audiences in general and to Sri Lankan audiences in particular.  Ironically, Macintyre uses the English language in this context not as a symbol of colonial oppression, which it was at one point in Sri Lanka’s history, but as a language of unity and of liberation from the tyranny of ethnic hatred and division.  Macintyre shows that English can be a used as a link language between the communities in Sri Lanka, uniting them so they can share their stories. In other words English can be appropriated as a Sri Lankan language. So Macintyre sets his play in the late afternoon of the British Empire as a means to communicate to Sri Lankans how they once were and not to feel ashamed or nostalgic but to learn and accept that colonialism changed the country forever and in Lady Panabokka’s words (the character based on Lady Bracknell) “that humans go forward, not backwards and whether the British Empire lasts or not, it is a stage in the forward motion of civilization”.

These lines uttered by Lady Panabokka underline Macintyre’s view that history cannot be undone.  Whether Sri Lankans like it or not colonialism was a historical reality and now forms an integral part of its history. Any attempt to wipe it out is not only futile but dangerous. It is a progressive view of independent Ceylon that drew upon the playwright’s own extensive experience in Sri Lankan theatre and the arts in the 1950s and 1960s.  This was a period in the island’s history where artists, writers, dramatists, musicians, historians and architects of the English speaking elite (of which Macintyre and my parents were a part) were engaging with local Sinhalese and Tamil speaking artists in an attempt to construct a national “Sri Lankan” identity and vernacular culture that drew upon the best of European, Indian, other Asian and local Sri Lankan traditions.  The milieu, in which Macintyre acted, directed and wrote in his youth and early adulthood still has a profound influence on his world view that a nation state consists of multiple nationalities, faiths and communities and should have a national artistic culture that draws upon its local multiple traditions while being nourished by international artistic influences including that of the country’s former colonial rulers. The fact that one can place Macintyre in the English / Australian theatrical tradition as well as in the Sri Lankan one is something that he is very comfortable with.  An example of this is the first play he wrote in Australia in the 1970s called Let’s Give Them Curry a comedy about an immigrant Sri Lankan family in suburban Australia. Both Australia and Sri Lanka view that play as a part of their own theatrical repertoires.  Unfortunately Let’s Give Them Curry was his first and only play that dealt with Australia.  For in 1983 his world was turned upside down. The community he belonged to in Sri Lanka; the Tamils suffered a series of state sponsored pogroms where they and their property were systematically attacked by chauvinistic Sinhalese Buddhist mobs.  Thousands were killed and the trajectory of the country changed forever. This affected Ernest Macintyre personally as he saw many close friends and family lose their lives and livelihoods. He used his vantage point in Australia to comment on the idiocy and futility of the endless cycle of violence in the land of his birth with a series of plays he wrote starting in 1984 and continuing to the present day.  Macintyre drew upon his favourites of the Western theatrical canon – Sophocles, Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Shaw and Oscar Wilde to write satires, tragedies and comedies dealing with the subject of communal violence in Sri Lanka in order to have a wider conversation about identity.  The Lost Culavamsa is the latest in that series.

The Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) characters in The Lost Culavamsa are a carbon copy of Wilde’s English characters in The Importance of Being Earnest.  These Ceylonese characters also speak an English redolent of the Edwardian England of Wilde himself.  They illustrate the extent of British influence amongst the local Ceylonese elite in the 1930s. These elites were loyal to the British Empire where the sun was about to set very rapidly.  The Ceylonese upper bourgeoisie, however, thought that their world of tea, whiskey, cricket, bridge and tennis would last forever. Many of them thought that they were brown Englishmen and women consuming Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens treating these icons of English high art as their own and dismissing with contempt any attempt by local Sinhalese or Tamil speakers to re-write and translate works from the European literary canon.  To them Ceylon was a little England where the general population was, at best, an endless supply of domestic servants and workers to toil in their estates and at worst something inconvenient to put up with. This exchange between Lady Muriel Panabokka and James Keethaponcalan (mimicking the famous ‘interrogation’ scene in the Importance of Being Earnest where Lady Bracknell interrogates Jack Worthing as to his suitability to marry her niece Gwendolyn Fairfax) illustrates the point:

Lady Panabokka: A formal proposal of marriage shall be conducted properly in the presence of the parents of both parties, Sir Desmond and I and your two parents.  However, that is not on the cards, at all, till my preliminary investigations are satisfactorily completed.

(Lady Panabokka sits)
Ernest, please be seated. Let me begin.
James: I prefer to stand.
(He stands facing Lady Panabokka. She takes out a notebook and a pencil from her bag)
Lady Panabokka: Some questions I have had prepared for some time. In fact this set of questions has evolved, at our social level, as a standard format of precaution, for our daughters and our social level. First, are you in any way involved in this so called peaceful movement for eventual independence from the British?
James: It doesn’t bother me, Lady Panabokka, I’m happy with the status quo, the British Empire……
Lady Panabokka: Excellent.
James: But I have been made to think about it, sometimes…
Lady Panabokka: What is there to think about it?
James: That we have to lead….. double lives…..
Lady Panabokka: What is that?
James: Like, my name is Ernest, but also Keethaponcalan
Lady Panabokka: So?
James: Ernest is from the British Empire, Keethaponcalan from the native Tamil culture, something like a …a double life…..
Lady Panabokka: Where do you get such confused ideas from?
James: From a scholar I know well……I was told that sometime or other the British Empire will be no more and we will all have to think of our own historical origins….
Lady Panabokka: How far back do we have to go? To when we were apes? Before we were Sinhalese or Tamil we were all apes, hanging on the same tree and chattering the same sounds! Tell your scholar, obsessed with the past, that humans go forward, not backwards and whether the British Empire lasts or not, it is a stage in the forward motion of civilization….
James: Never thought of it like that….
Lady Panabokka: So many things you “never thought of it like that”. And there is the practical problem of the Indians. My husband Sir Desmond thinks our only real protection from the Indians is to be in the firm embrace of the British Empire.  And the Indian idea that we are of the same stock was put to the test when Sir Desmond had to visit India recently for a Bridge tournament and found that the supposedly bridging language between them and us, English, was subjected to such outlandish accents, that the game took sudden wayward turns, the way the Indian accents misled the Ceylonese.
James: Yes, I have heard that they don’t speak English like us.
Lady Panabokka: Now, what may be, a related question. Do you speak Sinhalese?
James: I’m well educated in Tamil and speak it fluently
Lady Panabokka: That is an unnecessary distraction, I asked you about Sin Halese
James: Sin Halese……well, sort of, yes, to deal with the general population and…..
Lady Panabokka: That’s why I asked, because (with a sigh) the general population will always be with us. There is no harm, though, in knowing some Sin Halese oneself, for its own sake, but one must not carry it too far.
James: Too far?
Lady Panabokka: Yes, I don’t think you have heard of this man called Sara Chch Andra, a strange name even for a Sin Halese….
James: No, I have not heard….
Lady Panabokka: I’m glad. He should remain unheard of
James: Why?
Lady Panabokka: You know, Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”?
James: I love it, I played Lady Bracknell in school!
Lady Panabokka: It is one of our beloved plays, and this man, Sara Chch Andra has debased it by re- writing it, in Sin Halese, as “Hangi Hora” [Hidden Thief], whatever that means!
James: Really?
Lady Panabokka: Yes, I got it from Professor Lyn Ludowyk. Lyn was at Sir Herbert Stanley’s garden party at Queens House yesterday, and he actually spoke about it approvingly. Sometimes I really can’t understand Lyn….why can’t these people write their own plays and not rewrite ours!

The comic irony of the line “why can’t these people write their own plays and not rewrite ours” won’t be lost on a Sri Lankan audience.  Lady Panabokka who is an English speaking Sinhalese sees no problem with The Importance of Being Earnest as “her play” and by “these people” she means the Sinhalese speaking writers who should be writing “their own plays”.  She sees herself as quintessentially English who would have graciously accepted the fact that she would not be allowed into the Colombo Club which was an exclusively whites-only club for English civil servants and administrators.  Lady Panabokka, like Lady Bracknell, sees the world as a hierarchy where everyone has their allocated place, which they should accept with grace and dignity. As Macintyre says in his introduction to his play:

So Lady Panabokka establishes early in the play, that … like Lady Bracknell, … her belief that what matters in life is social status and class. Even race maybe ignored where class prevails as it happens with many Colombo “upper class” young people, Sinhalese and Tamils …

Lady Panabokka who “supervises” this whole improbable comedy is the most identifiable of Oscar Wilde’s characters, the famous Lady Bracknell. She is transplanted. The whole plot, except for the meaning of ethnicity in Lanka which makes it a different play, is transplanted Oscar Wilde, with the colours, hues and texture of the plant growing naturally from the soil of British Ceylon.

In the final Third Act of The Importance of Being Earnest the relatively minor character of Miss Prism exposes the real identities of Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing to their respective love interests Cecily Cardew and Gwendolyn Fairfax.  In Wilde’s play Miss Prism locates the lost handbag in which she left the baby Jack Worthing twenty years earlier. In The Lost Culavamsa the point of departure from Wilde lies in how Pamela Mendivitharna unveils the identities of Danton Walgampaya and James Keethaponcalan to their respective love interests Sridevi Kadirgamanathan and Gwendolyn Panabokka.

Macintyre has transformed Miss Prism’s character Pamela Mendivitharna to a major role on a par with Lady Panabokka (the Lady Bracknell character).  Pamela is a scholar who lost the baby James in Colombo in a malla (a shopping bag made of treated palm leaves) together with a copy of the Culavamsa. She was a governess to this baby James whose biological mother was Lady Muriel Panabokka’s sister and also Danton Walgampaya’s mother who was Sinhalese (Aryan).  Pamela lived with baby James’s parents while pursuing her research into the ancient history of the Aryans and Dravidians in Sri Lanka, which was also a popular pastime of British civil servants and orientalists in Ceylon during that period.  Baby James was found by a Jaffna Tamil couple Sir Kandiah and Lady Keethaponcalan and adopted him as their own in a Tamil (Dravidian) environment. Pamela eventually traced baby James to Jaffna and found employment with the Keethaponcalans as James’s nanny.  As Macintyre says in his introduction:

Why in this story is there a copy of the Culavamsa … also inside the malla with the baby?  The Culavamsa’s part in the play is to link up this story with, arguably, character as big and important to the story … Pamela Mendivitharna, the lady who was responsible for the baby in her paid care …

While this baby [James] born into a Sinhalese family grows up as a Tamil, Pamela Mendivitharna … begins to doubt the well-held belief of the time [1930s] … that the ethnicities of Ceylon [Sri Lanka] resulted from North Indian Aryans settling in the island and South Indian Dravidians coming to the island as a different “race”.

The final denouement of the play ends just as Wilde’s.  The only difference being Pamela’s explanation to the audience that the two blood brothers were brought up in different environments and each displaying the characteristics of the environment in which they were brought up.  Her study of the Culavamsa was crucial in her realisation that “our ethnicities reveal social attributes, not biological differences.” This is where Macintyre uses Wilde’s structure to expose the fallacy of ‘race’ as an exclusively biological characteristic.  The ancient chroniclers and poets of the Culavamsa mention different groups or tribes or nationalities but they could not have had any idea of the very modern and European scientific and biological concept of ‘race’.  Macintyre’s play is set in the 1930s, a time when Eugenics and the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism were prevalent in Europe and United States in order to legitimise the odious narrative of white European supremacy.  This sort of thinking also influenced some South Asian nationalists during that time as they appropriated these European pseudo-sciences to construct their equally odious narratives of their own national origins. Later on this would have deadly consequences in the rise of fascism and communal violence in Europe and Asia.

Macintyre, however, never loses focus that this play is essentially a romantic comedy. His close following of Wilde’s structure and characters in The Importance of Being Earnest makes viewing and reading Ernest Macintyre’s The Lost Culavamsa an enjoyable experience.  Macintyre has transplanted all of Wilde’s minor characters including Reverend Chasuble who is re-created as Reverend Abraham Pachamuttu, the servant Lane as Seyadu Suleiman and the butler Merriman as Albert.  As with all great comedies whether it be the films of Charlie Chaplin or Luis Bunuel or the plays of Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw there is always an undercurrent of seriousness and even tragedy. The Lost Culavamsa is, in my mind, no different.

ADAM RAFFEL is a Sydney poet and writer.

These Wild Houses

by Omar Sakr

Cordite Press

ISBN: 9780975249277

Reviewed by BEN HESSION

In a departure from most poetry books, the series issued by Cordite Publishing features a preface by the poet, as well as an introduction by an established writer, who in Omar Sakr’s case is his mentor and tutor, Judith Beveridge. Unlike the prefaces of the other poets in the Cordite catalogue, Sakr does not delve into overarching literary or philosophical theory about the ensuing text. Rather, Sakr speaks of life experience, observation ‘It is a statement – an exploration of me and what I’ve seen.’ (xi) Indeed, compared to the other writers, it would be easy to judge Sakr as something of a naïf. But this would be to deny his real ability as a poet, which, in These Wild Houses, sees a disarming honesty matched by an acuity of poise, nuance and craftsmanship.

Sakr’s collection opens with a quote from the prominent literary critic, James Wood, who in an interview with literary website electricliterature.com, speculated that in a society without religion and a belief in immortality, that not even houses would remain, since through the death of their occupants they would remain unattended. Houses, in the collection, have many structures, some physical others figurative, but each able to induce a real response. Aptly, the first poem in the collection is ‘Door Open’ which both suggests a threshold and a chance to view the interior. Towards this end, Sakr use of enjambment breaks open sentences to reveal something very human and even sensual:

Wild houses we
live in licked brick & sun
warmed stones, in grass blood mortar
and flesh. Listen up the halls, be careful (3)

later he invites the reader to “Come inside, let me/ warm you with all I am. Mind your head/ here on the ridges of my teeth.” (3)

‘All My Names’ demonstrates that “these houses” can be the nicknames one acquires, but are less than comfortable to live inside, which become the reciprocating metaphors for McMansions and housing commission homes which people must also live within, leaving scars.

An almost prosaic rhythm pervades much of the poetry in These Wild Houses, lend a sense of the unaffected or the low-rise ease of suburban living. Suburbia, despite this apparent sensibility is also a contested space, and Sakr’s choice of rhythm serves to make pellucid the innate tensions that arise. In ‘Here is the Poem You Demand’, for example, Sakr provides a list of identity markers one might expect from a ‘queer Muslim Arab Australian from Western Sydney’ that is both a strident affirmation of lived experience, as we see in

Here is the uncouth domestic abuse & plasma televisions,
the marbled fruit of my skin. (4)

and we also see in

Here is the mosque you despise, minarets pinked
by sky. Never forget it in the foreground (4)

and an ironic statement on alterity as a source of stereotyping or tokenistic spectacle, being on demand by the reader, who might not empathise with the sense of pain or struggle that comes with that experience and its articulation

Here is the noose I hang myself with
every day. Here is the blade I trust will sever it. (4)

The couplets in this poem show Sakr’s ability to distil of his world and journeys within it into economical lyric poetry. In ‘Dear Mama’ the longer lines ensconce the prosaic feeling, as they navigate the casual extremes of the poet’s upbringing. The second stanza notes:

Your god is capricious, strikes no reason, some days (the hours
you had full gear, I later found) you’d grin and order us a pizza
in and we’d lounge about our smoky temple as your silver screen
apostles entertained us, shot & bled & fucked & spat & died
for us. Those days were the best. Others were nails-on-chalkboard (6)

Sakr then details the abuse he received from his mother, and it is here that the restraint inherent to his lyricism perhaps becomes the most salient. In stanza three, motivation is stated succinctly:

You saw my treacherous father in the closet of my skin, my face
his imprinted sin.  (6)

The line break serves as emphasis, taking over from words themselves. Economy heightens the severity of the abuse and the strength of the poet’s own resilience later in the stanza:

I remember when the locksmith came, his confusion, dawning
pity when he asked, ‘You want the lock outside his door?’ Your cash
and a small gold chain sealed my cage. How could you think walls
would hold me? If you knew how I made that cell a world, hard
but free, you might refashion yours: a hundred books, each one key. (7)

The enjambment and the use of the isolated line in ‘Harmony of Dirt’ allows a treatment of death that is not overwhelmed by the distraction of emotion, allowing rather to reader again to share in loss and its unspoken profundity:

All around him a circle of bearded men stood confronted
with finality, a father with son,

a cousin, with cousin, life with echoes.
His funeral made a Friday morning (54)

This poem marks the deep bonds Sakr has with family despite the abuse depicted in ‘Dear Mama’. Identity, as defined through relatives or community is fraught with various tensions throughout These Wild Houses. Identity for Sakr is Lebanese Australian, a hybrid of two distinct cultures that is constantly renegotiating itself. In These Wild Houses, Sakr is mapping its landscape. ‘Landing’ notes the children growing into forgetting the Arabic of their parents and grant parents; ‘ghosting the ghetto’, meanwhile, sees a sort of ersatz hajj taken to Warwick Farm in the Australian made vehicle, the Holden Commodore.

‘Call Off Duty’, examines the anxieties anticipating the poet’s coming out to a brother, who appears to be consumed by the virtual machismo of video game warfare. By implication, this might reinforce an incumbent, culturally conservative and exclusively heteronormative view of masculinity. However, the acceptance by his brother of his sexuality  – besides offering relief – also displays apparently changing attitudes within the Lebanese Australian community.

‘Botany Bay’, takes suburbia as contested space to another level – but not without humour -where Muslim Arab Australians picnic adjacent to a museum for Captain Cook, the bringer of British colonization over Aboriginal land. The poem challenges the resulting marginalization, particularly towards his, own, Muslim Arabic community, with the narrator musing over a clash between the older Anglo hegemonic orthodoxy and the newer assertion of a multicultural cosmos, with its “hijabbed sky”. (17)

‘The H Word’, which was included in Puncher and Wattman’s ‘Contemporary Australian Poetry’ anthology, again demonstrates the power of restraint shown in Sakr’s other poems. As the “H” of the title is an initial to undercut expectations as it is to help trigger signifiers. “Home” for instance, is scarier than horror or homicide; whilst “a little H” is the italicised cry for help rather than the escape offered by what might have been inferred, heroin. The main “H” word, “hood”, and its variants, is a pun on the hip-hop abbreviation of neighbourhood, with one being emblematic or stereotypical of the other. As clothing it serves as a sanctuary from the straits of the narrator’s environment. Importantly, whilst Sakr is often explicit about his background and his feelings are clear, he indulges neither self-pity nor street-wise bravado. We see, instead, the strength of silence through the spaces between the couplets, which, in turn, endow both measure and powerful nuance to the poem, particularly in its concluding lines, expressing what he would see in death:

I expect to look down and discover in my chest
A hooded heart, lying heavy and still.  (11)

While many of the poems in These Wild Houses are definitely gritty, the aim is not for a prescriptive aesthetic for Sakr. Rather, it serves to establish the profound authenticity of the poet, something which we see he takes to the United States in ‘America, You Sexy Fuck’ and ‘A Familiar Song’. In the latter poem, his situation creates empathy for the beggars around him. The nature of what Sakr has explores in the collection is probably best summed up in its closing piece, ‘A Biographer’s Note’ where he rhetorically asks the reader:

what is tragedy and how might it play
to see a life where we now recoil
from the stink of desperation? (58)

These Wild Houses has shown that Sakr has tamed the more formal aspects of poetry, rendering the extremes of his past and their attendant, potentially distracting, emotions is no easy feat. As a debut collection, it holds great promise for a relatively young poet. The recognition of his talent is evidenced by being a runner-up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and his appointment as the Poetry Editor of The Lifted Brow. Judith Beveridge, in her introduction, describes Sakr’s debut as” impressive” and says that it “announces a new and important voice to Australian poetry.” (xiv) He has invited us into his houses, most certainly, but now he has made us, his reader-guests, hungry.

References:

Paulson, Steve. ‘The Art of Persuasion, an Interview with Critic James Wood’, electricliterature.com, 1 July 2015.