The Two Rivers of Granada Descend from the Snow To the Wheat/Los Dos Rios de Granada Bajan de la Nieve al Trigo.

by Juan Garrido Salgado

Reviewed by JANET GALBRAITH
 
On opening the envelope that contains Juan Garrido Salgado’s latest offering of poetry: The Two Rivers of Granada Descend from the Snow To the Wheat/Los Dos Rios de Granada Bajan de la Nieve al Trigo, I initially experience this collection as felt rather than seen.  It is the texture of the thick paper against my skin that I notice first.  Like this handcrafted book, these are not flimsy or flighty poems; they are layered with felt histories held in bodies, in countries, poetry and waters that connect across cultures, languages and time. The cover images, photos taken by the poet whilst on his travels in Spain and Greece are of the old bridge that crosses the Guadalquivir river at Cordoba; of a fissure between two rocks that lead to the sun; of Granada, and of the poet clasping his notebook (or is it dictionary) standing on the ancient bridge that crosses the water way.  These images wrap the poems almost as though they are folding in on each other.  I cannot open this book in the same way I would most others. It requires a different approach.

I allow the poet to speak
To write
To sing and cry
‘who will say that water bears
A vain fire of screams’
(Federico Garcia Lorca)
(5)

Water and the indefinable character of it pervades this collection. Even the layout of the  longer poems seem to flow. The text is aligned to the right.  Bordered by a straight line they meander to the left. They are not contained by the borders of what I, as an English reader and writer expects.  I am reminded of the notebooks I have received over the past years, hand written in Farsi or Arabic, read right to left, from people who have become political prisoners of the current Australian regime, writers and poets seeking asylum in an era obsessed with the making and remaking of borders.

The title of Salgado’s collection is taken from Lorca’s poem ‘The Little Ballad of the Three Rivers’ and, I suggest, can be read as an ‘intimate dialogue’ not only between Lorca, Salgado and the river but between a present history, between Spanish and English as they lie beside each other, between Chile and Australia and as an intervention in the making of borders that demand closure. Rather than framing the collection – providing a beginning and an end – Lorca’s poem is embedded throughout the book.  It speaks to the reader as the memory of water, like the ‘verses and wounds’ that Salgado finds ‘drowned’ in The River Guadalquivir in Cordoba :

‘Federico was killed’
The water is telling me
Now when my eyes channel its lament.
(3)

Here is the body of the river, the body of poetry, the body of Lorca, of history present.  Salgado continually brings the reader back to this, not allowing us to indulge in a nostalgia that would recall a static and disembodied past. ‘The river is not a Museum’, begins the first poem ‘The River of Guadalquivir in Cordoba’.

The bridge is only survival
Screams of wind and birds of death in 1936.
(3)

The horror and sadness of Lorca’s execution near the river in 1936, the Spanish Civil War and White Terror are immediately present and the deep abiding sadness of this saturates collection in a way that creates a sense of suspension.  That is, the poetry immediately connect the reader with the lived effects of history without the possibility of endings and resolution.  The poetry, like the river, holds these wounds that will ‘wait until/ five moons embrace the sky and earth again/And no longer tyranny be part of life’(5).

The space in which Salgado writes is concerned not with consolidating borders but in witnessing the spaces between.  He writes in his final poem Waiting for the Train to Granada: ‘we are stuck between the border’(15).  This poetry inhabits this space between, inviting the reader into to some uneasy spaces.

I find you poet
I read your verses
From the translation of Ernesto Cardenal.
You find me Marcial
…We are between the fruits of Gods and water.
(6)

:

These uneasy spaces are often where history sits in the body.
His poem Toledo opens

An ancient gate to enter and exit the city
Our steps were wandering.
Steps that led me to history
Then goes on to speak of the city as a maze that seems to embody a living history:
death whispering colours…
rivers of pods and holes…
walls of shootings…
Habitual solitude…
inquisition of sight and flight…
And finally a space is opened where the visceral presence of  history is firmly placed:
In a corner of absence a verse flowers within me
A shot falls deeply into the animal skin pain.

(15)

Salgado is a poet living on Ngarrindjerri land in Adelaide whose lived experience has been defined by borders and spaces between.  He was formerly a political prisoner of the Pinochet regime in his native Chile, arrived in Australia as a political refugee, and works as a poet exiled from his homeland, at the same time attaching to and finding a space for himself in this land where First Nations people are also experiencing exile from their own lands.  It is an uneasy space he occupies but made all the more important as he is able to articulate it, own it and create a dialogue through which more space is opened. ‘Our adaptation to a new life in Australia has remained unfinished ever since we met its Ngarrindjeri people’.

Throughout this collection I am reminded of the unfinished business of violence. These wounds are not healed:  ‘This locomotive is a sick animal(15)’. Salgado returns again and again to the reality of the continuity of violence, especially State based violence. The poem Death Sentenced Republic cascades from 1937, White Terror and the Spanish Civil War,  to 1973, the killing of Allende and the rise of Pinochet in Chile, and finally to present day Australia: ‘In Australia asylum seekers detained/at Manus Island/ & Adriana Rivas a Former Secret police Agent/ And torturer’ of the Pinochet regime that has imprisoned and tortured this poet, now living in Sydney ‘as a citizen’.

Our wounds are reopening
Our wings of eternity have a name: dignity and courage.
Our flight is timeless.
(11)
’.

When I send this poem to a man incarcerated in Manus Island Detention Camp his slow reply seems to echo the river’s lament: ‘Our sadness.  Our sadness

Language of water
Falling from the soul of the three cultures
In this wheel of centuries
That feeds us.
(8)

Salgado stands on a bridge between two pieces of land, looks out at the reader inviting us to enter this intimate dialogue between country and water, language, history, violence and bodies.

I am sure Guadalquivir is an old poet
reading the rain within the fish dream
at Cordoba last night.
(3)

Rich with cultural and historical reference, written in Spanish and translated into English, The Two Rivers of Granada Descend from the Snow To the Wheat, invites us into unfinished spaces where bodies and histories matter.  At a time when the refiguring of borders continues to close some in and others out; when the sacrifice and torture of particular people for politics and profit is further normalized; when publishing companies bow to sales and state-sanctioned stories, this  handmade book, a limited edition of poems is a nourishing intervention.

NOTES

1.  Juan Garrido-Salgado ‘I have Three Wounds: of Live, Love and Death, Cordite, 1 November 2012. 
2. Name withheld

-Janet Galbraith

The Deep North

by Bronwyn Lea

Braziller

Edited by Paul Kane

ISBN 978-0807616260

Reviewed by ANTHONY LYNCH

Think of the north, and in Australia we might think of Queensland, in particular the far north of that state. Or, we might think of the northern hemisphere – Europe, North America. Or Australia’s most immediate northern neighbour, Papua New Guinea. The north also suggests extremes of heat or cold. Having lived in Queensland, the United States and Papua, with time also spent in Europe, Bronwyn Lea has inhabited parts of all these geographic and cultural spaces. The Deep North comprises selected poems predominantly from Lea’s two major collections to date, Flight Animals (2001) and The Other Way Out (2008), but includes also a number of poems published subsequent to the latter collection. This ‘Selected’, the second volume of Braziller’s series of Australian poets (the first was Robert Gray’s Daylight Saving), draws heavily from Lea’s time in these various locations.

We need not of course read Lea’s title so literally. The title after all plays with an inversion, given we more popularly associate ‘deep’ with the south, particularly in a North American context. The north here represents a range of imagined ‘elsewheres’, physical and mental. But Lea’s poems do derive strongly from engagements with place and the people and relationships that have occupied her. Reading poems as ‘personal’ can be fraught (as well as nostalgically humanist), but certainly Lea offers in part a confessional mode while never lapsing into the maudlin rumination this might suggest.

Despite including poems written over a ten-year period, this selection pursues certain themes. The superb opening poem, ‘Born Again’, sees the narrator’s/poet’s ex-husband arrive out of the cold desert in North America – a visitor less welcome than the sparrow nearby scratching for seeds in snow. After a year’s absence he has returned, having found god who ‘forgave all of his trespasses’, though the narrator has not similarly forgiven: ‘My heart has a long ledger.’ The ex has come to collect the couple’s daughter. The narrator gathers a few belongings for the daughter, makes him wait outside. When she comes back out, her ex is kneeling in the snow, which has collected on his shoulders, the backs of his shoes, his upturned palms. The moment brings an unexpected ‘intimacy we never shared’. The poem closes: ‘Sometimes grace / comes like that, it falls like snow.’ (3).

This poem lays the groundwork for others that follow. The figure of the former lover in particular, recalled with tenderness and wit, recurs. ‘The Photograph’ retrieves the same setting (in an earlier period) as the opening poem, the narrator and man on the ‘dusty porch’, dog curled at the man’s feet, the couple’s fingers entwining as they reach for their beers. There’s a rare hint of nostalgia, and of rue: ‘In the photograph / we don’t ever let go.’ (32).

Such a subject can easily lead to a voice of bitter regret, vindictiveness, or maudlin self-pity. Lea resists all of these, and writes instead with mature reflection on the nature of intimacy and of memory itself. In this, she shares common ground with Tracy Ryan, whose Unearthed (2013) also measuredly, assuredly, addresses a former spouse. Lea shows how language is both helpmate and obstacle in conducting a relationship and in conveying its provenance. ‘Driving into Distance’ is a meditation on the tension of between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ and the strange beauty of ‘little losses’ (67).

Lea’s is very much a poetry of what’s observed and felt ‘in the moment’. There is no particular indication here that Lea is a self-declared Buddhist, but aspects of Buddhist philosophy – observance of the present moment and of the natural world, acceptance of change and adversity, the retrieval of grace in small acts – are often present. The selection in fact ends with ‘Hand of the Bodhisattva’, an observation of a first century AD Indian statue, and perhaps a gently ironic counterpoint to other poems dealing with feet – the most playful of which is ‘Standing in Bette Davis’s Shoes’, composed of lines delivered by Davis from her most famous (and famously feisty) roles.

Lea is also on the front foot in ‘Orthograde’ and the sequence ‘Seven Feet & Where They’re From’, the latter responding to John Forbes’ ‘Four Heads and How to Draw Them’. Reflecting on the position of feet in cultures including Greek, Chinese and Aboriginal Australian, this sequence is also an eloquent metapoetic play on the foot (we might of course think of metrical feet in verse), most strongly in evidence in the seventh poem, ‘The Etymological Foot’, in which the foot’s place in adage is gently subverted.

Most poems are told from an implicitly or explicitly female point of view, but ‘The Cairn’ and ‘One of the Horses at Marly’ are told from non-human perspectives. Both cairn and horse address humans who are moving from one place to another but barely able to locate their own selves let alone navigate their environment. As series editor Paul Kane observes in his introductory note to this ‘Selected’: ‘Travel, of course, is always displacement and it functions here as an image of inward dislocation’ (ix). Or, in the words of the horse from Marly: ‘O // human too dizzy to see, you shoot / an arrow & it stabs you in the back’ (56). By the end of ‘The Cairn’, we discover the one being addressed is ‘Bronwyn’, continuing the exploration of self that began earlier with the poem ‘Bronwyn Lea’, in which the arrow is as much emblem of injury as it is of Cupid’s love: ‘My name fits me perfectly as the arrow fits its wound’ (9).

The wound is a recurring though not overworked motif in this collection, most often manifesting as a sense of loss following the absence/departure of the lover. Longing, including sexual longing, is a hallmark of absence, but, as in ‘Found Wanting at Zen Mountain Monastery’, female longing is often experienced differently to its male counterpart:

Desire or craving, he says
(he means to say thirst),
is the cause of all suffering.
(He is the one who will not remember me more,
the one who lets my face fall
without shock like vapour
from his mind.) (72)

Not that, thankfully, the female is a victim without agency:

So the woman fired up her motorbike,
rode through the hills to the monastery,
left her credit card with the office monk
and walked into the zendo. (73)

Many of the poems, including those dealing with the past, are written in the present tense, giving personal history an immediacy. Lea also demonstrates her quiet attention to form, moving from free verse to unrhymed couplets, tercets and quatrains, with occasional forays into haikus, most notably in the excellent ‘A rush of butterflies’, which deftly builds on themes addressed earlier in the book:

By my foot, a skink
fixes an eye on me – more
devoted than you. (77)

Longing and loss never manifest as self-indulgence. As Kane notes: ‘Lea has that capacity to imagine and identify with the other, even (with “fierce tenderness”) those who have caused her pain’ (xi). And absence, as experienced by the narrator or others, can be sensual:

as the Japanese woman
turns her nightgown inside out

to dream of her absent lover –
constructs of seams and loose threads

facing the world, the seeming seamless
elision of silks against her flesh

in daylight she watches her body age (‘The Nightgown’, 26)

‘The Poet’s Bed’ might remind us of Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’, sans lover:

The sheets have been changed
since she lay here, maybe even the mattress,
but the frame remains the same: (27)

And sometimes the abandoned marital bed is a liberation, as in ‘Women of a Certain Age’ who are:

waking to the sound
of their breathing …
… The dawn will be theirs to hold
a little while – its lightness – they will forget
some of what they have experienced
and remember what they were born with, (12)

In the deep north of memory, Lea nevertheless recalls, with eloquence and tenderness, some of the experience she has gained. And, without bitterness, some of what she has lost.

ANTHONY LYNCH is author of the short story collection Redfin and the poetry collection Night Train. His reviews have appeared in a various publications, but most often in The Australian and Australian Book Review. He is the publisher for Whitmore Press (http://whitmorepress.com), which specialises in poetry.

Open House

by David Brooks

UQP

ISBN 978 0 7022 5352 2

Reviewed by NADIA NIAZ

How can we
Be so arrogant, to think that our
souls are worth so much?

David Brooks poses a cogent question and one that has often been asked by writers. Surely the act of writing is one of arrogance, the act of preserving our own thoughts an act of egotism. Expanded to the way modern humans interact with their environment the question remains valid, even essential. But the question of our value is not just an interrogation of our arrogance as a race – it is also a vital component in creating and re-creating ourselves, in understanding not just who we are, but how.

There is a meditative quality to the poems in Open House that seeks to answer these questions, but gently. There is through much of the book a sense of a breath held for a moment of contemplation and then gently released. It is the kind of book one must read slowly so that each poem, each line, may sing itself into being and back, and us with it.

Some readers may find the length of Open House daunting – most books of poetry published today are fairly short and self-contained and may be read in an afternoon. And yes, this book does demand a lot of attention, but it is also the sort of volume that you can come back to in a quiet moment, the sort that you can dip into the way we do into our favourite music albums, and revisit the bliss of its music.

Open House constitutes a poetic, and sometimes actual, journey. Each of the five sections that comprise this volume has its own distinct character while also retaining a logical relationship with the others. The poet’s voice rings out clearly through each, carrying the reader from poems about place, history, and loss all the way to the last section, which conveys a quiet wonder and delight at life and existence.

This is not to suggest a linear progression so much as a development of interconnected interests. While the first book is more solidly grounded in history, the present exists in it as well, and while the last book feels more about the present – or perhaps just conveys more presence and immediacy – the past is given its due.

‘A Place on Earth’ interrogates the poet’s sense of belonging, truth, guilt, and the quest for peace and meaning. Themes as disparate as Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, looking back at one’s youth, night trains, and quotidian intimacy, sit comfortably side by side and often flow into each other. There is a historicity to these poems – a sense of things observed and absorbed, but not let go. Perhaps, as in the blood from ‘The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto’ and the dust coating all things in ‘Dust’, it is history itself that persists in holding on.

This changes considerably at the beginning of ‘September’. Suddenly there are images of abundance, ripeness, pulchritude, and a relaxing of sorts. This is however quickly juxtaposed with images of sexual abuse and a grittiness that shakes the reader out of the trance of plenty. The poem ‘Nona’ may be the best encapsulation of the nature of this section. In it, Brooks describes an old woman as carrying the history of the town (and perhaps, by extension, of the nation), “a kind of midwife to the day” (32) performing such tasks as are necessary to transform it into a place where travellers may find comfort. With her death, “another part/ of the village/will flap untended in the Boria, another/ house lose its hold.” (33). There is a great noticing, as Rilke might phrase it, of people, things, animals and birds – the smallest creatures are given attention. In contrast, the reduction of ‘pederast priests’, to two words seems an act of righteous contempt.

‘Open House’ brings the reader back to Australia. The title of the section (and the book itself) suggests an inspection, which in turn implies an invitation to come in and browse, assess, and judge what one sees. However, as with actual inspections and open houses, much of what we are shown is curated and translated and so it is here. As in the rest of the book, each poem is crafted with great thought, attention, intelligence and feeling. Brooks seems a poet entranced by life in its variety. The opening poem, ‘In the Kingdom of Shadows’ sets the tone:

In the Kingdom of shadows, world without end,
slugs traverse the prairies of the soul,
mice enter the pure land,
cockroaches conquer the valleys of death.

In the Kingdom of shadows, dominion
of cats and sugar gliders,
moths are mastering the constellations, spiders
whispering their histories to the stars.

In this section, the quotidian and ordinary are made as evocative as the lofty and philosophical because he has understood that both must exist for there to be life.

‘Report from Blue Mountains’ is another shift in mood. It is less contemplative and more direct. The rest of the book seems more the ‘report’ and this section its defense as the poet seems to be in communication with others for much of it. This does not diminish the poetry, but rather adds an element of the conversational to a book comprising mostly soliloquy thus far. It is not that there are no other people in the book – indeed there are many and they are well described characters or beautifully rendered spectres – but that the poet seems to talk to as well as about them here. Here the poet seems to be stepping out more fully into the present world rather than examining it from afar.

The final section, ‘Reading to the Sheep’ repeats the now familiar themes of nature, the observation of creatures, domesticity, but in it the poet seems even more present than in the previous section.

If I’ve regrets
whose life is without them?
If I have debts let the creditors come.
The rain this morning
was like the first rain,
the sun in your eyes the first sun.
(‘Birthday Poem’, 146)

Unsurprisingly, sheep appear rather often in the poems and although they may not seem the most poetic of animals, their solidity and solemnity, their presence in the immediate moment, is effective. This feels like a good way to close this meditation on life and place and belonging, this journey through not just looking at things but seeing them and experiencing them by being open to them. The observer necessarily changes the observed, but seldom is the observation so gently and yet thoroughly presented. This is no aggressive investigation but rather a letting be that echoes concepts of mindfulness and meditation. Muck like the best haiku, the poems feel both complete and resonant.

Brooks is not a strongly political writer, but his views on animal rights are evident. Politics and poetry – particularly in English – can be an uncomfortable fit, so it is further evidence of Brooks’ mastery of the form that these poems often have an odd sweetness to them despite the brutality they describe. Brooks knows to turn the lens onto himself and his own actions and let the message grow from that presentation where lesser poets focus instead on the message to the detriment of the poetry.

Brooks not only captures the minutiae of life and turns it into poetry that makes the reader catch her breath – finding poetry in the mundane is almost the mission of the modern-day poet and writer and many do it well – but also takes the frankly anti-poetical and weaves it into poems that remains accessible and open as well as multi-layered and tantalising.

The quiet, unassuming nature of his poetry that comes through even though each poem is brilliantly structured and considered is what places Brooks in the league of the greats. You don’t so much read these poems as hear them sing themselves into being in your mind, as if they were always there, waiting to be awoken.

NADIA NIAZ is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne where she teaches Creative Writing.  Her work has previously appeared in TEXT, Strange 4 and The Alhamra Literary Review.