Author: mascara

False Nostalgia

by Aden Rolfe

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-922146-99-1

Reviewed by BRIANNA BULLEN

‘Anamnesis,’ the first poem and section of Aden Rolfe’s brilliant philosophical poetry collection, refers to Plato’s concept of learning as a process of recovering knowledge from within.  This poem presents an initial simple supposition: “We who we are because of / what we remember,” which is then challenged and amended through Rolfe’s poetic interrogation in four sections. This poem introduces the settings—“coastlines and beaches / clearings and trails”—recurring through the collection, and the illusion of coherency, dependent on forgetting incongruities. It sets up the speaker and the addressee, their edited and untethered beings. Memory becomes “a range of values / not definitive states,” contemporary, relational, amendable, and always bittersweet. “They say we’re plural, post-memory / too old not to know / we should be playing what when / instead of / what if.’

In ‘Exchanges’ Rolfe critiques the loss of history and future in the precarious present: “We expected more from the twenty-first / century. Some direction, some push, some instruction / for living in the present-continuous.” There is failure in placing the self in relation to time, a loss reflexivity, which leads to inertia. This is strongly illustrated in ‘What have you been up to,’ its days of “discrete goals, ritual and activity / progression and reversion,” short-term focused nothingness: “but for now / nothing is happening / nothing happened / nothing is going to happen.” Moments of catastrophe and event are exceptions: “We’re drawn to / these scenes, where everything is salted and breaking / down, because it feels like the edge of something” (‘The end of things’). They search for events they can recollect later, to give a sense of having lived moments: “we try to watch the waves so that later we can say / we watched the waves” (‘We watched the waves’), going out of their way in near-pitiful attempts to find meaning. Rolfe diagnoses the millennia’s anxious condition: “The fear of missing out has been surpassed by the fear of going unrecorded, of not documenting our experience,” (‘False Nostagia’). Yet such records only contain what is crafted within them, distorting the event as it was.

There is a great deal of intertextuality, befitting a work dedicated to memory and culture, crafting connection between the personal and collective. Repetitions of photographs, photographers, forests, indistinct roads, coastlines, waves, reading on trains, wind, edges, leaves, lakes and weatherboard houses saturate the poems, recalling one another. There is a flux of representations of nature within culture, of “clearing the landscape for a set piece” (‘Mountainousness’) like gardeners and construction crews. The poet presents his figures as following stage directions, and artificial scripts, the exterior environments speaking for the interior. A road recalls a car ad, a Tarkovsky film reminds him of Lynch, although the former came first: “what comes after can / remind you of what came before. It’s about order of exposure” (On Zerkalo). Chronologies dissolve, over-layered. Personal chronology is privileged over the ‘true’ order, representation the real.  ‘We watched the waves’ takes its title from a Robert Haas poem. Figures fall into convention expected of them (“I picked up some shells, because that’s what you do in places like this” ‘The end of things’) hoping for insight into some deeper truth (“You looked for the sublime / in a box of sultanas” ‘Mountainousness’) which is revealed to be banal repetition of the same.

The second section, ‘Ars memoria,’ moves into a mythic mode, recalling Anne Carson with its interpretation of a Greek myth (Simonides of Keos) in verse. Its hypothesis is “the tale is in the retelling” ‘[Mutatis mutandis]’, a meta-textual awareness of the power of poetry and narrative.  Rolfe poses memory and myth are modes of integrating and interrogating the past. The myth involves a roof collapse at Simonides’s dinner party; all the guests are killed  and Simonides must identify the bodies by way of remembering where they sat, placing name and image to place and in doing so “inventing the art of memory” (‘[Analepsis]’): the new mnemonic device, the method of loci. This section best displays Rolfe’s humor; it also, strangely, seems the most personal, with a raw examination of the speaker’s response to his grandmother’s dementia and his own burgeoning romantic relationship.  Borges’s Ireneo Funes, a literary memory cornerstone character, remembers every moment of his life simultaneously until his death (via consumption), contrasts against his grandmother’s decline into dementia. An excess of remembrance against an excess of forgetting poignantly explores the merits of each function, its dual-process:  “What if forgetfulness were not / a flaw / but the other side of the coin. / A way to stop a surge of detail from bursting / the banks / while its twin, memory, lets us / make sense of the world” ‘[Kindness]’.

It contains two prose personal essays, one a commentary on his own poem and the other, the titular ‘False Nostalgia,’ is an analysis of an unpleasant first viewing of the Haneke film Cache remembered fondly, opinion revised through memory. Neither are straightforward essays, circling around notions of memory, composition, and revision. These essays offer pauses of reflection and variety within the poetry collection that at first seem disruptive to the whole, its different structure proliferating new meaning in its contrast of form. Rolfe goes against Weinberger’s idea of memory-time as fragmented and non-linear, his approach following narrative logic. This approach enables Rolfe to highlight the artificiality of its framework from within.

Of the two ‘A note on ‘We Watched the Waves’’ is more succinct, situating Rolfe’s work within the literary theoretical history of memory (Calvino and Proust narrative precedents) while illuminating the philosophy behind his poetic work. Exploring what happens when recollection and autobiography hinges on a false memory it presents the act of writing as one way of ordering and making sense of discrepancies.  Oliver Sack’s concept of ‘cryptomensia,’ unconscious plagiarism of an idea mistaken for original thought, runs through the collection. The subset ‘autoplagiarism,’ reproducing your own ideas as if encountering them for the first time, becomes not only the final section of the collection, but a structuring principle of the text in its restaging of scenes and phrases, integral for exploring the revision and recurrence in memory. Autobiography ultimately becomes “a theory of your life, not a proof:” its incompleteness and inconsistencies both necessary and productive to coping with the multiplicity of selves, relations, memory, and (dis)continuity.

‘False nostalgia’ puts forward the more radical hypothesis of the text: that a subpar and even unpleasant memory (in this case, watching an emotionally unsatisfying film) can become a form of pleasure in the process of looking back. Rolfe is interested in nostalgia that “looks back wistfully on moments that weren’t happy, on times that weren’t stable, on events that weren’t enjoyable.” This is the nostalgia of the present, a different kind of (bitter)sweetness, one that remembers what happens, its flaws and enduring pain, and sees in it something to celebrate. Pleasure becomes an object in past tense, achievable only creative recollection. Rolfe situates this emotion within a historical tradition of nostalgia, linked back to Hofer’s initial diagnosis of nostalgia as an illness through to its transformation into a poetic trope. Cache is the perfect choice of film to explore memory, full of hidden, unknowable and multiple perspectives, voyeurism, tapes (a key technology in ‘capturing’ memory with invisible subjectivity), and unresolved plot. Although it is a film about cultural amnesia, “guilt and responsibility and collective memory” rather than nostalgia, it opens up questions about the ethics of memory, recording, and witnessing, integral to exploring an ethics of representing nostalgia.

The final section ‘Autoplagiarism’ returns to ‘Anamnesis’, but in a cinematic experimental mode which, while stronger in technique, loses the floating philosophical exploration of the earlier section. These poems do not utilize blank space, so pivotal to ideas of forgetting, as well as previous sections, but increases the clutter, play, and humor, skewering previous preoccupations and earnestness. Things become more chaotic, temporally, with images of dinosaurs emerging onto the beach, a quasi-Schrodinger’s cat, being tied to train tracks, and fairytale wolves emerge in the forest quoting Heidegger in footnotes. Self-awareness is on high “we could go for a drive, perhaps / listen to speech break down on the radio” (‘Purge Landscape (the wolf in the fairytale)’). Liminality and divergences, previously integral, are critiqued: “There’s a difference between open-ended / and non-commital” (‘Everything all the time’). Irony and self-deprecation, lacing previous poems, capitalizes in the final poem, ‘Regression to the mean,’ which critiques not only his use of an empty feminine “you,” but also Rolfe’s methodology: “A jar, a thought, a slight breeze. Who else is tired of these props / and found objects? … the sand, the beach house, the predictable sets.”

Rolfe suggests that the problem of memory enquiry is also its pleasure: its obsession with trying to make moments whole and meaningful out of its jigsaw fragments. Moments get returned to, repeated, reset and reconfigured, and every time this reveals something new while concealing some other part of the scene. It is impossible to reconstruct the moment as it was, but there is a sense of play in the attempt that gives the endeavor meaning.

BRIANNA BULLEN is a Deakin University PhD candidate writing a creative thesis on memory in science fiction. She has had work published in journals like LiNQ, Aurealis, Verandah, Voiceworks, and Buzzcuts. She won the 2017 Apollo Bay short story competition and placed second in the 2017 Newcastle Short Story competition.

Knocks

by Emily Stewart

Vagabond Press

ISBN 978-1-922181-71-8

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

There has been an important groundswell of recent feminist poetries and poetics in Australia. As Siobhan Hodge wrote in her review of Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s anthology Contemporary Feminist Poetry, there is:

…a subtle, cresting sense of activism.

It is there too in Emily Stewart’s Knocks, through its critical, engaged and optimistic hopes that are expressed in specific poems, which together convey a notion of intersectionality conscious of gender. As Hodge herself said of the anthology:

‘There is a reassuring note of solidarity throughout the collection, but a simultaneous celebration of diversity in style, tone, theme and foci.’

One can suggest something similar in Stewart’s collection and which has been noted in different ways by Pam Brown’s launch speech in linked deletions, Amelia Dale’s commentary in Jacket2, and Melody Paloma’s review in Cordite. This dialectical relationship between acute critique and joyful celebration suggests not only that the whole of life is attended to, but also that one can oscillate, converse, play with the variety and possibility of ‘Poetry’ writ large. So what is Stewart railing against and what is she heralding? And, perhaps importantly, where is this leading us and what does it suggest?

To answer those questions is difficult, and it may be more apt to give a summary of what the collection is about in order to gesture at but never arrive at a full understanding of Stewart’s collection. Her voice is multiple, layered, various – there are erasure poems (section two); poems of multiple voices; poems in ordinary plain speech; remixed poems of heightened experiment (section three); poems of repetition (‘Today’). The references are Aussie kitsch, global pop cultural, resolutely local, Anglophonic culture industrial, fun too. This eclecticism of tone, style and reference keeps the volume entertaining, engaging, active. What that means for a reader is that one is being tested and flexed and exercised from page to page in a worthy movement from A to D to Z to B to U and back again all over and through.

There are, of course, personal favourites; poems that resonate, which each reader will find on their own. Needless to say, there are jewels in there that I like too. For example, I responded to ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’, which is a wry listing of commodities, objects, items that could be catalogued from Bunnings or Home Hardware or Mitre Ten. The poem begins:

fencestone, pavers, coloured spit rock
face blocks, colonial cornices, artificial
stone, aluminium step treads, hardwood (18)

Far from being a simple list poem, in Stewart’s hands, it becomes a rapturous sonic apprehension, not a dull rote thing but an event with music in it – ‘fencestone’ goes well with ‘face blocks’, and later on there is ‘urbanite’ with ‘expansion joints’, ‘marble veneer island bench’ with ‘brass compress’. The ordering is such that it makes it plain speech rhapsodic. And of course, one can read into it a post-conceptual politics that would take a found object, retype it and yet slantly embody it with ideological awareness – the phrasing to dwell on in the excerpt above is, of course, ‘coloured spit rock’ with ‘colonial cornices’ and so here and now, we glimpse the shadows of anachronistic Indigenous terms and the images of James Cook, which both come back to haunt the settling mode of the everyday do it yourself brigade. The last line of this poem is ‘how to fix a picket fence’ which not only circles back to the opening word (fencestone) but also allows the reader into a commentary of suburban dreams.

When read with a regard for Knocks as a whole, one notices that Stewart is an adept and able observer of contemporary life in Australia from the criticality of the mundane through to the implications of being here truly. This last sense comes through in the poem, ‘Animal Hands’, that directly follows ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’ though it is there in other, tender if welcomingly ambivalent pieces. Nevertheless it provides a direct counterpoint here, a kind of contrapuntal puncturing of the suburban critique in ‘DIY’. In ‘Animal Hands’, Stewarts writes:

I’ve been unwinding wire
         along the serrated edge
       of these paddocks for a
     long time, pulling it tight (19)

It gives us a sense of engagement with boundaries, with borders, with aging, with process, with education, with tension, and this apparent everyday thinks through feminism, anxiety, and ecology of being with nods to history, emotion and birds. The poem ends with a libidinal and touching, though never sentimental, line:

all I want is your mouth on my neck, wordless and dumb under chilly stars

That is, the knowing poet assures us, all that ‘I’ want – the mouth, object of speech, home of tongue, at the neck, vampiric, teenage, hickies and loving, while the stars, this time chilled not burning balls of gas millions of miles away witness such complicated tenderness. It suggests what might be possible by looking at our immediate surrounds.

I responded to how her gaze falls on the ordinary, the suburban, the quotidian in these poems. This is not the domestic or the everyday or the taken-for-granted, but rather the momentary interruptions of frame against a poetic that is grand, posturing, arrogant. Those moments of defamiliarisation mean we are asked to see the normal anew and that is an important task in bringing to consciousness that which is poetic in the first place. This would seem to be a possibility that Stewart herself is constantly exploring from her writing to her social media, especially her Instagram [link to it – https://www.instagram.com/emstew__/], and which offers one line of productive inquiry that I am very much looking forward to. For this keen reader, the next collection cannot come soon enough.

NOTES

1. Siobhan Hodge review of Contemporary Feminist Poetry Ed Jessica Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy  Cordite

ROBERT WOOD has degrees from University of Western Australia, Australian National University and University of Pennsylvania. In 2017–2018, He will be an Endeavour Research Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, and a Copyright Agency Emerging Critic with the Sydney Review of Books.

Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón

translated by Mario Licón Cabrera

Vagabond Press

Reviewed by ROSE HUNTER

The Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón presents the work of three contemporary Mexican poets, one born in 1968 (Bojórquez), one in 1979 (Lamas), and one in 1982 (Calderón), translated by the Mexican-born, Sydney-residing poet and translator Mario Licón Cabrera. The book begins with the work of Lamas, a good choice since his is in many ways the most immediately personable voice of the three, at least in terms of the selection represented here.

Here are the opening lines of the book:

1. Refusing to Return

While you refuse to return,
memories reach you as if from a blind well,
and that sun is a copper coin without shine.
In silence you polish its sharp edges
till the memory of the landscape hits you.
You know the sun didn’t feed its pack of dogs,
so you repeat to yourself it’s always summer there
and those are the words that bring you back. (15)

With this beginning we are drawn into a situation of receptivity despite resistance, a mood that continues throughout the selection of Lamas’ poems (which also form a self-contained sequence). One of the many enjoyable things about this anthology is how most of the poems are presented with at least a few others from the same series, providing a useful orientation for the reader as well as the potential for a deeper reading experience. Additionally, themes overlap between poets, for example, both Lamas and Bojórquez make use of the elements of desert and shadow, and both Lamas and Calderón are concerned with religion and death – to name just a couple of the many rich echoes that reverberate over the course of the book.

Smaller correspondences (also the title of Calderón’s book from which the poems in this book are taken) can be noticed as well, for example a coin opens Bojórquez’ section also:

The coin of time burns in my hand
a metal circle without a face
it burns all that I ignore of myself
all that no one suspects of me (57)

These two openings encapsulate many of the differences between the first two poets: the more conversational and inclusive tone of Lamas, and the more distant, compressed tone of Bojórquez.

Lamas’ section reads like a chapbook with a discernible situation and resolution. Throughout it, the elements of heat – including summer, the sun, dust, fire, and ashes – are prominent. The hot climate takes on the character of an oppressive person, who “chases” the narrator (28), and who will “search the cities one by one / until it finds you” (30).

Heat/fire and memory are also inextricable; here is the opening of poem V:

1. Like Something Extinguished By Fire

I remember my first childhood home
and the second
and the third.
They all are one,
ablaze. (32)

The next poem starts on the next page but is part of number V (no separate title – I like this formatting, present in Calderón as well) – and imagines all the photographs burnt, and wonders if this may have destroyed the memories as well (33). But the narrator pushes on, to find them. The narrator is recalling a literally hot climate (the state of Sinaloa I think, where the poet was born), and as well as that I think about how my older, and not necessarily totally joyful, memories feel like this – a heat in my body precedes the act of remembering, and, depending, impinges upon it or seeks to prevent it. This climate/condition/feeling is used to great (blistering) effect in the entire sequence.

Bojórquez presents us with shorter poems and more compressed imagery, and the spare quality of archetype, as well as revelation and myth. His section is divided into three parts. The one that appealed to me the most was the second, “Of Certain Deserts,” which presents the enticing scenarios of “desert birth,” “desert alive,” “desert exile,” “desert dream” – and so on. To show some of the stark and suggestive imagery on offer here, I’ll quote one of my favourite of the desert poems in full:

Desert Room

The grief of exhausted men
blazes in the desert

There is no horizon

Far beyond the view
lies the sand’s sadness

Where does the wind lift
its dress of thirst?

The dreams of shadow are born
in the heart of the desert

Everything is possible. (71)

In both Lamas and Bojórquez, the landscape (including elements such as sand and shadow) has great life, as a kind of given – “Only men are amazed by their own bodies” (“Desert Alive” 68). Truth is what is spoken in the shadows or by the shadows, which Cabrera’s useful note tells us is a reference to Paul Celan, “Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht” (a person who speaks shadows speaks truth) (77). “To speak from the shadow, be the shadow” could be an ars poetica of the Bojórquez poems translated here, even though the line does not appear in his poem titled “Ars Poetica” [rather in “To Say the Shadow” (78)].

After the terse quality of these poems, the poems of Calderón return us to a more open structure (although the voice is more fragmented than that of Lamas). Religion and death emerge as two themes, as the first poem, “Constantinople” brings us a scene in a Byzantine church, which leads later (this is another long poem, divided into sections marked only by page breaks, as in Lamas) to the description of the death of a fish, after the fisherman decides to throw it back:

Now the man has the fish
shakes the air with its body
Seagulls gather round
He throws the fish into the sky
the metallic gleam of its scales
The little eyes look at the sea the relief
just before of gaining great altitude but
suddenly a beak rips its fins
tears apart its body guzzles
in one second the remains

In secret someone was thinking of God
Cruel fisherman of men (90)

Calderón’s unpunctuated lines often allow for rich double readings. Here, for example, the unpunctuated “tears apart its body guzzles” suggests both the bird that swallows the fish, and the image of a fish writhing, taking in air/poison like a thirsty person might desperately guzzle too much water.

These poems are visceral, with frequent mention of blood and other body fluids, contagion, disease, and violence, as well as the human sacrifices of the last poem. The second last poem speaks most overtly about the political situation in present-day Mexico, a country in which 30,000 people are registered as having disappeared, and over 100,000 have died in drug trade related violence over the last decade.[1] Here is the ending of the ironically titled “Mexican Democracy:”

they open the black bag
the stench of rotten flesh:

a new born little girl (110)

I read the book engrossed in the distinct voices of these three very different poets, which is a great compliment to the translator. However, one observation about translation is worth making. Here are those same last lines of the poem “Mexican Democracy” in Spanish:

abren la bolsa negra
el hedor el moho en la carne:

una recién nacida[2]

In Spanish there is no need to do any extra work to specify the gender of the newborn; it is already communicated in the article and in the noun ending. In English, the extra word needed, “girl,” seems to weaken the ending of the poem a bit (seems to raise questions like, why a girl? Worse that it’s a girl? – questions that aren’t the point I don’t think). The gender of the newborn isn’t emphasised so much in the original Spanish, in which everything and everyone has to have a gender. This is not a criticism, just a reminder that grammatical gender is one of the issues that translation from Spanish to English must grapple with.

The pictorial and allegorical style of Calderón’s poems has prompted comparison between his work and the work of the muralist.[3] This is an appealing analogy – the “on-a-wall-like” appearance of the poems (which often run right down the page, unpunctuated and without stanza breaks until the very last, orphaned lines – a nice effect), as well as their grand themes combined with the ability to record those small details of everyday life (for example the fish lines quoted above), does remind me of the drama and scope of the revered tradition of Mexican muralism.

This is a valuable sampling of three contemporary Mexican poets. One quibble might be that there are no women represented here. Perhaps a translation of three contemporary Mexican women poets might be in the future for Vagabond’s growing international catalogue?
NOTES
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-violence-idUSKBN1782XN
[2] http://revistaliterariamonolito.blogspot.mx/2015/12/poema-de-ali-calederon.html
Here “Mexican Democracy” does not exist as a separate poem; it is the first part of the next (and last) poem featured in the book, “Piedra de Sacrificio” (“Stone of Sacrifice”).
[3] Javier Lorenzo Candel, “Las Correspondencias, de Alí Calderón.” la estantería, 5 July 2015.
https://resenariopoesia.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/la-correspondencias-de-ali-calderon/

ROSE HUNTER’s most recent collection, Glass is published by 5Islands Press. A Brisbane poet, she has lived in Canada and not resides in Mexico.

Preparations for Departure

by Nathanael O’Reilly

UWA Publishing

ISBN: 9781742589459

Reviewed by ZACHARY WARD

Preparations for Departure, Nathanael O’Reilly’s second full length collection, is an ongoing journey in which the poet enters the gaps between home and abroad, contentment and discontent, presence and absence, youth and age, the past and the present. These disparities emerge in a suite of fifty-nine free-verse poems spanning across his formative years growing up in small town Australia, to his most recent years living in America. Reflecting a life spent in diaspora, the poems transport the reader back and forth across oceans to land in cities of ruinous decay, preserved in the poet’s mind; to scenes of quiet urbanity and the endlessly silent screams which pervade; to beaches untrodden, and in which we may now see our footprints forever imprinted; the clatter and squalor of marketplaces and the drudgery of the quotidian. A constantly shifting collage of antonymous sights and sounds, these duopolies are best observed in the author’s mind.

The suite’s first poem, ‘Border Crossings’, observes the conflict of duopoly that is constantly being waged across the author’s thoughts. A round trip through Eastern Europe, O’Reilly paints scenes of post-Soviet squalor and abandonment, though always from the security of a moving train carriage. The reader is afforded a sense of detachment, as the poet is easily able to retreat to the comforts of his compartment and those offered by Western influence. When not ‘sipping a glass of whiskey’, the speaker can ‘listen to Nirvana, U2, Springsteen’, willingly flitting between the scenery outside his window, and the familiar manner of those around him. Outside is the other, the old world, different and dark, crumbling and vacant; the carriage is home to Harry Potter, iPad’s and selfies. O’Reilly is never part of the scenery, and is aware of his intrusion into this world. He is more at home among the comforts of the west, and uses the ever-moving shuttle to shield him from the realities of the world he is passing through. A further exploration of this social disparity is explored in, ‘In the Market Place’. Though not protected by the bulk and pace of a train carriage, a description of the grime and poverty of a Ukrainian concourse is delivered briefly and starkly, conveying a desire to,

… simply observe and pass by,
my needs and survival unthreatened.
To them I am a rich Amerikanski,
an alien from a golden dreamland.

The train carriage is no longer required to define and separate, for his ‘clothes and accent proclaim [he does] not belong and never will.’ Unable to escape his heritage and the legacy of his own home and his ancestral homeland, the poet concedes that ‘in three weeks I’ll be gone, back in the West … living in luxury.’

Back in the West, the author’s reminiscences of his upbringing in Australia unearth a struggle to accept age and in so doing, detach from the past. Though far flung from the shores of home, the patchwork of Australia’s sleepy suburban streets, dry crackling long grass and booming coastal shelves are never far from the author’s thoughts. As from a moving train carriage, O’Reilly can observe his youth; a series of flashing images, just beyond his reach or inclusion. Formative years spent among the quiet nature of urban Australia reveals within the fledgling poet an awareness of the world and a greater understanding of a higher culture that might only be attained by sitting on rooftops and listening to Pink Floyd, hoping to glimpse a better view, in ‘The Way We Saw Ourselves’. Being merely a memory, as intangible as the crumbling iron yards of Eastern Europe, the luxury and comforts of the coach are not present; O’Reilly clearly desires to alight here and reassume the uncertainties and expectations of his younger self,

Years ago now, those days
when the world seemed ours
for the taking, when we dreamt
wildly, full of hope
and our own importance.

O’Reilly’s sense of diaspora is not only temporal, but also painfully internal. A victim of nostalgia and an unwitting tourist in his own youth, displacement perpetually plagues the evading poet. Though still capable of marking the parameters of home in his memory, his identity as an Australian of Anglo-Celtic origin turns his sights away from the antipodean land of his rearing, and temporarily toward the British Isles. One senses the poet’s hope of finding some outcrop of ancient rock to which he may find some purchase, and carve into the old-world soil of his ancestral home his own marking among the scratchings of his literary forbears.

Migration affords O’Reilly a semblance of inclusion, extending the exploration of duality beyond the internal and the temporal; it places the speaker at a spatial variance from his thoughts. Dissatisfaction and aimlessness accompany the author’s musings as he attempts to assimilate a foreign landscape. No longer wishing to play the part of the tourist, the reader becomes acutely aware of the sudden reduction of O’Reilly’s protective barriers; the train carriage has passed and the space between the rooftop and his present self has been traversed. In ‘My Inheritance’, the recurrent invasion of the poet’s carefree childhood is once more invoked. Reminiscently wistful, the reader is escorted further down the halls of the speaker’s memory, stopping ‘by barbed wire fences, scattered with droppings and dung’ to ‘suck in the smell of the sheep and the cows, musty hay, molasses.’ These rustic images, dabbed with care upon a palette of recollections to be disturbed by the slash of the artist’s brush and splashed vigorously across his canvas, hang lovingly upon the walls of these thoroughly ventured corridors. Distanced by years and self-doubt, the reader is reminded of O’Reilly’s self-imposed exile, and the ethereality of such careless days by the abrupt return of time and space in the poem’s final stanza,

In my mind the hot north wind
still flattens the brown grass
and carries the smell of sheep
and earth across the Pacific.

The Pacific ocean evokes profundity, and the depths to which the poet plunges to salvage these images, while its vastness suggests they are forever beyond the poet’s grasp in a muddling of past and present.

The remarkably emotive poems in Preparations for Departure read lightly, yet leave deep and perennial tracings. O’Reilly, in a voice sculpted by the world he has ventured, captures the evasive and eternal nature of the wandering spirit; the constantly restless speaker leaves traces of himself across the pages, carefully crafting an impression of having just come and just gone, leaving the reader one page behind. To keep turning is to accept O’Reilly’s invitation and accompany him on his centrifugal journey forward over oceans and back across pools of thought that trickle into the past. As the speaker takes in the sights, the reader may ponder class, wealth, race and age from the not always welcome security of a temporal and or spatial distance. Though the gaps are ever widening, these poems are able to suspend and preserve observances, which continue to question inherited notions of contentment, belonging and identity.

ZACHARY WARD graduated in a Bachelor of Communications, major in Creative Writing at UTS. His fiction appeared in the UTS Vertigo magazine.

Constitution

by Amelia Dale

Inken Publisch, 2017

ISBN 9780987142351

Reviewed by TONY MESSENGER

Ben Lerner in his 2016 essay “The Hatred of Poetry” reminds us of poetry’s activist, historical participation in politics; “Plato, in the most influential attack on poetry in recorded history, concluded that there was no place for poetry in the Republic because poets are rhetoricians who pass off imaginative projections as the truth and risk corrupting citizens of the just city, especially the impressionable youth.” Sydney poet, Amelia Dale, has taken Australian poetic political agitation to a new level, with her new book, Constitution.

If the etymology of ‘constitution’ is from the Latin ‘constitutio’; regulations and orders, then Amelia Dale has launched an attack on  Australia’s political cornerstone; she has trashed the order, challenged the regulations, declinism is rife. As she says, “Being an ‘Australian poet’ with all that entails, it seems to me that the starting point has to be to try, as much as you can, to undo and damage ‘Australia,’ the nation state. This is not to say that I have any delusions that my book will enact in real terms political change. But I turned to the Constitution because to vandalise the Constitution seems like the sensible, the only thing to do.”

Constitution is constructed to mirror the format of the Australian Constitution, with all sections, chapters and parts replicating the format of the foundational document. Consisting of 128 parts catalogued into eight chapters, and with reference to  the document establishing “Australia,” it provides an activity recommended for all readers. The “Covering Clauses” in the Constitution, become “So It Is” in Dale’s table of contents or “Overwhelmingly, I Focus on the Big Issues”. In the text itself, the alignment of the political rhetoric to established clauses uses a profundity of knowledge of the defining first national document. (p xi)

Constitution is presented as official Government paper, with the royal blue and coat of arms mimicking an Australian passport, the font copying official Government documents and the paper even similar to legal tomes found in Hansard or departmental publications.

Dale takes verbatim interviews with the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, on the current affairs program “The 7.30 Report”. Having edited thousands of words of transcripts she presents these back in poetic construct. The resulting book subverts the standard media text and political rhetoric;

Well everybody knows that their prosperity depends on the prosperity of their employer. And if they’re working for business, as most people are, they want to know. You see everything we’re doing is going. And I know you don’t want me to refer to the Labor party, but I do have to note that their policies will reduce investment. Well I assume that they – I assume – well leaving aside the – the bellicose metaphors…

As Dale explains “the text is edited transcriptions of interviews with Malcolm Turnbull from the 7:30 report. There are no other speakers. It is all Turnbull. I’ve deleted some words but all the text, the weird phrases, the odd metaphors are all his.” This editing, bubbling a lyrical poetic interpretation of rhetorical political language to the surface, removes the essayistic element, confounding the reader as any good politician would do.

Australia’s current political debate about “recognition”, and Aboriginal Australia’s rejection of “constitutional recognition” in favour of a voice in parliament and a treaty, makes this a timely release. With only 8 of the proposed 44 amendments being historically made to the Constitution, the majority being administrative alterations such as Senate amendments, State debt and retirement of judges, the “bellicose metaphor”, notations, footnotes, and references provide no clearer picture on the original document; the poetic construction mirrors reality.

In the poet’s hands the 1967 amendment to section 51 (xxvi) from “the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”, to “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws” becomes rationalised by “but most importantly by what other countries were doing.” (p 22) The superficiality of these amendments and the construction of a verbose document has been well researched and defiantly debunks “a lot of naval-gazing introspection.” (p vii)

Amelia Dale says “it’s the language of cold neoliberal power” and her masterful construction highlights the confusing, circular, meaningless political speak. Using the interviewer, Leigh Sales, as interlocutor, the condescending, demeaning speak becomes increasingly obvious as Amelia Dale, uses headlines such as, “Leigh, I think you’ll find”, “Well Leigh”, and “I’ll tell you something, Leigh”. The poet explaining “We can all speculate on his own reasons for needing the buffer, for needing an interlude. I just wanted to make the convolutions of his speech visible.”

Politically humourous, Dale’s book also uses visual and textual ploys to entice her readers. The title page lampoons publication details by changing standard text, such as copyright information, and rights reserved text to political quotes;

This is a Liberal National Government. So they’ve got to – so freedom is – the key point. I mean, it’s perhaps a bit simplistic but one way you could say it – you can describe it is that the, and I could make the same point about, we believe that, so – so that’s a fundamental thing. But there are some very key priorities, Leigh, tight now. One of them, principally, is we have to ensure that, how to we maintain that? Well there’s a – with, you know, many more, and that’s very exciting. But we need to be, be need to above all be more innovative.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull advises us, in the text, “The truth is that all of us are a bit liberal and a bit conservative in differing degrees.” Our writer disagrees: “Claims for a sensible or objective “centre,” the idea that the grown-up place to start is compromise makes me nauseous. Turnbull of course markets himself as a kind of socially “progressive” left-of-right figure. We’re supposed to be happy that he doesn’t commit Abbott-level macroaggressions and not be angry that his policies kill people.”

What is next for Amelia Dale ? “I’ve determined that all my poetry for the rest of my life will be inspired by, about and against white male politicians. I’m about to move to Shanghai, so Kevin Rudd might be an appropriate muse.”

As Amelia Dale has shown us, in the current political climate, there is room for poets, passing “off imaginative projections as the truth”, let’s hope the art can continue “corrupting citizens of the just city, especially the impressionable youth”.

CITATIONS AND NOTES

1. Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016) p 25
2. private correspondence with the author is quoted in this review with the poet’s permission.

TONY MESSENGER is a Melbourne based blogger who focuses on translated literature and Australian poetry and poet interviews. He can be found at https://messybooker.wordpress.com/ and actively tweets using the handle @messy_tony

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

By Roxane Gay

 Hachette

ISBN: 978-1-4721-5111-7

Review by HAYLEY SCRIVENOR
 
 
 
Roxane’s Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is an obsessive book in many ways. It’s an obsessiveness that characterises the relationship that I, and many women I know, have with our bodies. It’s also an obsessiveness familiar to anyone who has been stuck on a past trauma or who can’t stop thinking about someone who has hurt them. The memoir centres on Gay’s body. She notes that her BMI places her in the ‘super morbidly obese’ range (9). Gay tells us early on that this will not be a book about weight loss. Hers, she warns, ‘is not a story of triumph… this is not a book that will offer motivation’ (2). It’s worth noting that a visceral account of a violent assault is something the reader will encounter if they decide to proceed past this warning.

The furore around Mia Freedman’s disappointing and insulting written introduction to a podcast where she was to discuss this non-fiction book with Gay, and the subsequent flaccid apology, is well documented outside this review. A book like this, the reaction it gets, does not exist inside a vacuum, and nor do responses to it, including my own. Freedman’s tone-deaf response reminds us how often privilege is not thinking that you have privilege. In Freedman’s case, privilege was reading and professedly loving Gay’s book, a place where Gay shares her experience as a fat, queer, woman of colour, and still carelessly humiliating Gay in a professional setting.

Gay’s memoir centres on a particular instance of horrific abuse that has left an indelible mark on her entire life. She tells us:

One of my biggest fears is that I will never cut away all that scar tissue. One of my biggest hopes is that one day I will have cut away most of that scar tissue (275).

I ran my first creative writing subject at a university in the first half of this year. I wrote and presented the weekly lecture for third year creative writing students and ran the tutorials. It was daunting. Standing at the front of the classroom each week made me empathise with Gay who throws up before presenting her first composition class (97). Gay’s fear is tied to what her students will think of her appearance, and she is relieved to survive ‘fifty minutes of being fat in front of twenty-two eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds’ (98).

Through the weeks of the course I urged my students to strip and to cut until they were left with something that said what they are trying to say in as few words as possible. The only reason any of them so much as pretended to listen to me was my position at the front of the classroom—a question of context. I told my students that they don’t get the benefit of context when they submit their stories. Their readers will not lean in until they feel there are capable hands ready to catch them. Their opening sentences need to be able to cut through the thick tread of an off-road tyre, and every word should be carefully chosen. There were pages in Hunger that I initially itched to take to with a red pen—certain words and phrases are repeated in a way that I initially found grating. Gay tells us ‘During my first two years of high school, I ate and ate and ate and I became less than nothing’ (57). Less than two pages later, ‘I ate and ate and ate at school’ (59). She also tells us ‘I did not go hungry even as I hungered for so much’ (90) and then, on the very next page ‘…and though there were many days I was fuelled by ramen, still I did not go hungry while I hungered’ (91). The words ‘good Catholic girl’ or simply ‘good girl’ pop up at least a dozen times in the text at my count (37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 49, 53, 74, 78, 86).

And yet this is largely a story about the way that the mind turns on and returns to moments of trauma. It’s a question of context. With Gay we know we are in safe hands. Those hands lift us in and out of moments of incredible vulnerability on the author’s part. The repetition of certain words and ideas that I originally found discomforting are reflective of the very thought-processes I recognise in myself. Negative self-talk is inescapable, it whispers the same words over and again. Sentences like ‘I was a good Catholic girl’ have such a huge psychic importance, Gay cannot say them once and move on. When Gay tells us at a certain point of weight loss she feels an unstoppable urge to once again make her body ‘like a fortress, impermeable’ (14) we are told this more than once, because it is something Gay herself must live again and again. It’s a cycle of hope and failure that feels inescapable. When Gay says ‘I often refer to my twenties as the worst years of my life because that’s exactly what they were’ (105) we might think that ‘The twenties were the worst years of my life’ should suffice. But there are shades of difference between the two sentences. Instead of just asserting the fact, Gay refers explicitly to the things she has told people, a subtle nod to the fact that not everything we tell others is true. This is particularly significant when we consider that Gay has not been able to tell her family about something that marked her so indelibly.

Self-proclaimed ‘bad feminist’ Roxane Gay writes not only from her position as a woman of size (her term, 272) but as a woman of colour. The strength of this book is the access it provides to the internal monologue that we otherwise don’t get to hear. It is lived experience, writ large in all its glorious and obsessive, detail. Gay leaves space for the contradictory nature of our desires in her sentences that are subtle riffs on one another, and in her equivocations. She tells us that ‘What I know and what I feel are two very different things’ (15). Gay’s use of brackets is also notable as it allows us to hold two opposing thoughts in our heads, a kind of doublethink we all experience:

I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance (15).

And:

I had (and have?) this void, this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill (44).

I saw Roxane Gay at her appearance at the University of New South Wales in the lead up to the Sydney Writers Festival. She is a funny and compelling interview subject. There are flashes of the same dry wit I saw on stage on display in her book.

Every time I watch a yoghurt commercial I think, My god, I want to be that happy. I really do (italics in original, 123).

And:

This is a popular notion, the idea that the fat among us are carrying a thin woman inside. Each time I see this particular commercial , I think, I ate that thin woman and she was delicious but unsatisfying’ (italics in original, 126).

Aside from these flashes though, the book can be tough going. The reader gets a sense of Gay’s hopelessness, of the difficulty of her position as someone who strongly believes that women are valuable beyond their bodies, while struggling to genuinely ‘feel’ feelings of positivity about her size in a society openly antagonistic to fat people. People feel entitled to comment on Gay’s body and even take food from her trolley (143), and there is the physical discomfort that is her constant companion in public space.

In the opening pages of the book, Gay tells us:

‘This is a book about my body, about my hunger and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much, wanting to be seen and understood. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow myself to be seen and understood.’ (3)

This wording reminds me of the flow of Sara Ahmed’s sentences throughout her book Living a Feminist Life (2017):

Feminism is wherever feminism needs to be. Feminism needs to be everywhere (4).

In her book, Sara Ahmed highlights the connection between remembering and sharing experiences, and the work of feminism:

Feminist work is often memory work. We work to remember what sometimes we wish would or could just recede. While thinking about what it means to live a feminist life, I have been remembering; trying to put the pieces together. I have been putting a sponge to the past. When I think of my method, I think of a sponge: a material that can absorb things. We hold it out and wait to see what gets mopped up. It is not that memory work is necessarily about recalling what has been forgotten: rather, you allow a memory to become distinct, to acquire a certain crispness or even clarity; you can gather memories like things, so they become more than half glimpsed, so that we can see a fuller picture; so you can make sense of how different experiences connect (22).

The strength of Hunger is the way in which it allows the reader to connect their own experiences with those of Gay. It speaks to the way we all feel that we are being watched with derision by those around us (which is not to detract from the very real discrimination that Gay experiences). The surprise Gay feels to discover that she really is loved, that people see her positive qualities and her growing awareness of same remind the reader to be kinder, to others but mainly to themselves. We can always empathise with the essential disconnect between the idea that we are worthwhile and are loved, and the subsequent feelings that we deserve to be punished for the incredible hubris we display in simply living our lives in ways that strive to be free from abuse. With this book, Gay carves out space for the insurmountable thoughts and emotions she discusses, allowing us to see what she deals with on a daily basis. We get to see a fragility that throws Roxane’s strength into an even sharper relief. As Gay asserts ‘I am stronger than I am broken’ (35). It sounds like a reminder, both for Gay and for the reader. It’s a reminder that we are not our bodies, but we live in them, and we could all be much kinder to ourselves and others.

WORKS CITED

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life, Durham, Duke University Press 2017.
 
HAYLEY SCRIVENOR is a writer and PhD candidate. She is the director of Wollongong Writers Festival, which runs in the final weekend of November every year.

A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work

by Bernadette Brennan

TEXT

ISBN: 9781925498035

Reviewed by JOSHUA POMARE

‘Garner has always been a boundary-crosser. Refusing the constraints of literary genre she has sought to write across and craft her own versions of them’ – Bernadette Brennan.

It is at these boundaries, the rough torn edges of art and artist that we understand our subjects best. A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan is a remarkably shrewd study of Garner’s work knitted with a tender representation of her personal life. Brennan dives into the murky grey depths that separate ‘literary critique’ and ‘biography,’ choosing instead the more ambiguous denomination of ‘literary portrait.’ This bifurcation of sub-genres might seem like literary posturing; such distinctions are often made by marketing teams as opposed to the author themself. However the language we use to segment books into genre is significant for readers and thus important to authors in terms of distribution and readership.

Finding an audience for books that exist outside of genres can prove a challenge. For Garner, this is familiar territory, early in her career she leapt from genre to genre, often landing in the areas between, and muddied the waters further by splicing non-fiction and fiction. For many readers taste determines reading preference and consequently genre. Savvy publishers seek to typecast authors early in their career to maintain a base of readers which to many is contrary to genuine artistic pursuit. The true artist has no consideration of audience, let alone the intricacies between sub genres, between fact or fiction, between form and style. Brennan’s previous book, The Works of Brian Castro, is a monograph, shelved in the recesses of academic libraries. However in A Writing Life Brennan shows she is equally as prepared to defy genre as her subject.

With over thirty pages of notes and references, it is clear Brennan is a fastidious reader and researcher however in spite of her academic background, she chooses to employ simple accessible language. At once she delves into the workings of Garner’s relationships, and reflects on the ways in which life events contextualise Garner’s work. Indeed many of the models for Garner’s fictional characters inhabited her personal life. Brennan probes the real events that inspired much of her work including the poignant and challenging relationship with her dying friend Jenya Osborne, which Garner explores in The Spare Room, and the resistance and confusion Garner faced from third wave feminism as a consequence of the The First Stone.

Garner possesses an immense self-awareness and an almost refreshing uncertainty that is absent in most non-fiction. James Wood in his profile for The New Yorker describes her is ‘a savage self-scrutineer.’ This introspection and ceaseless self-assessment allows the ‘I’ to creep into the narrative of her stories. Garner is forever querying herself and her motives, and documenting her findings. Here we find the origin of the genre fluidity she affords herself. Garner herself, as a prominent thread in the literary culture of Australia, tends to defy any delineation outside of the broadest labels: writer, artist.

Without Garner’s introspection and sincerity on the page Brennan may not have the access to paint a complete portrait. When in The Spare Room ‘Helen’ the character notes, “I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger,” a reader gets great insight into Garner’s own thoughts and feelings.  Few artists are lucky enough to encounter subjects with such self-awareness and clarity of thought, fewer still will find one honest enough to share such insights.

One does get the sense that Brennan, although meticulous in her research and earnest in her approach, refuses to employ Garner’s imbuing of the text with the ‘I.’ Brennan at times seems to approach a counterpoint to Garner’s arguments without letting the thought reach the page as it forms in her own mind. Her voice is clear, objective and sensitive at times. The subtext, two years of conversations between Garner and Brennan, rises through the text softening the edges of the moral and ethical conundrums readers familiar with Garner’s non fiction may find themselves asking as they’re whisked along the summary of Garner’s work – each part of the novel represents in chronological order both a Garner novel and the period of Garner’s life in which the novel was written. One can’t help but consider Garner’s reflection and the fallibility of memory, and how this may indirectly shape the retelling of those long past episodes. This is another blurred line. It’s impossible for Brennan to maintain objectivity when such conversations are taking place, particularly considering the private letters Garner had shared with her.

Perhaps literary portraits require this input in the same way a painter might sit a subject down and constantly refer to her. If the subject moves, or changes expression the end product becomes a sort of amalgamation. We have twelve Helen Garners in A Writing Life; in the closing pages we get a final look at this ultimate Helen Garner in an email exchange with Brennan. It is here, in the final pages, that Brennan finds herself traipsing into the narrative. Brennan asks of Garner “Do you have another tale to tell me?” Garner recalls her recent experiences with her reading group, how the group grappled with a complex text, and in the penultimate line she asks Brennan, “Is that a story?”

A Writers Life, is published by Text Publishing in Melbourne. Text happens to be the publisher of all of Garner’s recent novels. It’s clear that Brennan has gone to considerable lengths to respect the wishes of Garner and has likely worked with Text for this reason. Garner has always been quite clear that she does not want a biography, however for this reader the biographical elements are the most important. Understanding who Helen Garner was at different stages in her life, how her opinions and worldview developed and of course how her life influenced her writing deepens one’s understanding of her work. Being such a devoted Garner scholar, Brennan possesses a knack for concision, clarity and an eye for detail but unlike Garner’s work we see it all from an arm’s length. Brennan is prepared to delve into Garner’s thoughts and motivations but not her own, certainly not with Garner’s characteristic candour. In this case, the artist and the art remain for the most part distinct. However, through dogged scholarly research, analysis, unparalleled access to Garners archive in the National Library of Australia and interviews with the subject herself, Brennan has weaved a complete and comprehensible portrait of Garner and her work. This is a book not only for Garner enthusiasts but Australian literature lovers in general.

JOSHUA POMARE is a writer living and working in Melbourne. His work has appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and Takahe among others. He is also produces the podcast On Writing