Everyday Static

by Toby Fitch

Vagabond Press

16 pages

Reviewed by ASHLEY CAPES

There is a fascinating tension in Toby Fitch’s Everyday Static, where beauty is wrung from points where the cityscape and the natural world intersect. On one hand the city is a great provider of poetry for Fitch, both through its parade of objects (especially objects of transit, like trains and cars, even shopping trolleys) and the way it stars in many of the poems within. At the same time he presents the city as a place accented by the images and hints of the natural world, where it presses in and survives, in mountains beyond busy harbours, in rain, in clouds, sunbeams and the moon.

The opening poem “On the Slink” embodies this idea, where the owls are placed beside wires, alley cats beside bottles in gutters

Sobering up, a breeze –
if I cast a stone up through the air,
between the wires, the tooting owls,
beyond the rooftops
into the twisting funnel of stars –
I could almost crack open the night

and swig

Set against the natural world is the street, with its traffic jams and stoplights and gutters, like a great, frozen urban river. An undercurrent to the collection is the theme of movement suspended, or even denied. Fitch places the reader inside the car in poems like “Tangents”, “Everyday Static” and “Junction” or within adjunct spaces, beneath lampposts and walking the streets, effectively trapping us in the narrative. It reveals a real disappointment when such movement is denied, a place of potential that has become but a place of traffic jams and bottlenecks. We look through his windshield and feel the same city

Driving along alone
between unforgiving buildings,
raindrops flicked up by tyres,
airwaves breaking

like rain on a windscreen

from “Everyday Static”. In “Junction” we see traffic “piled up in the rearview mirror/like a whitewash of words/none of which can tell me the right way.”

But in the street, in the jam, in the collection itself even, water is often a saviour. A titular poem “Everyday Static” exemplifies this, where the crush of routine and being trapped with flat tyres and tired windscreen wipers, is challenged by the water, which holds the potential for escape:

the world at water level as we pulled up
and gazed out into the harbour,

mountains and rain dissolving in lumpy waves

and in “Reaching Out” where we might

scale the ocean’s abyss,
soar up, above,
beyond the last port of call
and leave behind
a thousand thoughts,
a hundred hearts,
ten nicknames

Fitch’s poems possess strength of imagery and metaphor, one that lies often in their unexpectedness within the context of a given poem. In fact, it’s really pleasing to see such inventiveness, such surrealism at times, in the pieces. Perhaps my favourite stanza in the collection (from “The River Seine”) reveals this skill best “you can see the horn-sounds/as colour above the river.” “Floe” is another example, we are given an ocean liner wedged in “fat” ice within a “skull full of hard rain” or the “wheezing stars” from “Irritations” and in closing poem “Winded on a Trampoline” an explosion of colour:

I clutch at clouds, burn my brow on sunbeams, lick blue moons with a rainbow scythe.

“Meanwhile”demonstrates the same stunning imagery, where falling snowflakes are “emptying the sky of stars” which are later thrown like “great shooting snowballs.” “Meanwhile” is one of the poems in the collection, which stands out, partly because we catch a glimpse of Fitch in a more relaxed frame as a writer, and the poem is beautiful in part due to this lessening of tension.

Everyday Static is cohesive collection of fourteen short poems that develop an undercurrent of struggle between movement and stasis, city and natural landscape, one that impresses not just with the narrator’s role within the themes, but with its attention to image, juxtaposition and metaphor.

Felt

by Johanna Featherstone

Vagabond Rare Objects

14 pages

Reviewed by ASHLEY CAPES

Johanna Featherstone has collected an intimate group of (mostly) short poems in her chapbook Felt, poems that explore the personal and universal with a welcome attention to detail.

Take the opening poem “Expectant”, which reveals that attention to meaningful or evocative detail that is a hallmark of the entire collection. It offers a gentle beginning on a beach where “boats nose the horizon” and small hands collect objects hurled up by the deep. The short poem is like a film or an experience, where we as readers see a clean moment in time without having it described to us. It is this deft touch that I enjoyed so much throughout the collection, a touch that draws memory from the reader, linking it to the poetry.

Featherstone’s imagery is often an effective mix of the abstract and the beautiful or the innocent and the worldly. “Argyle Diamond Mine”, “Toyko Metro” and “Bedside Table” are but three which rely on such juxtaposition. The miners in “Argyle Diamond Mine” for instance, hide walls “stuck with glow-stars and fast-car posters” but are also presented as dealing stoically with the realities of adult life, where “…each man de-underpants/for the shower, swaying as he shaves and soaps free grit/from under the hood of his penis.”

In the meditative “Bedside Table” we see the world around a nursing home described most convincingly, through Featherstone’s use of colour, enjambment and her haiku-like eye for detail

Waking up in the same space teeth

brush after teeth brush, from below, a
gentle snare drum swish,

the ground is being
patted and brushed in ‘shhh’

steps: fluorescent green vest of a mammoth
council path sweeper, against

a newly popped orange rose.

The other great strength Felt possesses is its heart – making ‘Felt’ an apt title. The autobiographical elements of the chapbook are not self-indulgent; they balance personal remembrance and universal detail. They reveal a poet aware of language’s power to stir emotion, especially when it is used to describe objects which take on new and different meanings after momentous events, like the beautiful portrait of “Woodwork Classes” or “After the Funeral”, which hits hard

Toiletries, wallet things,
collected from the hospital, weigh down the single bed
that recently held his butterfly body…
…Fuzz settles on rubbish bags
packed with his clothes, ready for the tip.

A sense of loss and the sharpness of memory are themes returned to throughout the collection, usually as they can be applied to immediate family groups or friends. In “Mother looking into her son’s bedroom” the idea of loss is many-fold, but most interesting is where Featherstone includes the heartbreak associated with lack of mobility. The poem touches on the struggle associated with ‘care’ and weaves through memories that heighten the loss

After decades of friendship, he remains bedridden. Once, with a surfer’s frame, he’d ribbon through Bronte’s tides. Every Saturday, with friends, fry eggs on hot, waxed boards.

Featherstone places my favourite poem “Toyko Metro” toward the end of the collection. This compact but richly poetic piece stands out the context of surrounding pieces, by nature of its subject matter. It does not deal directly with family, but rather places familiar people within a snapshot of Japan’s train system; schoolgirls, “palm-sized grannies” and “loyal businessmen.” Here, as elsewhere, the poet’s descriptive skill holds attention

Toyko Metro

Thigh-high in uniforms, a posse
of pigeon-toed girls flirt through text
messages & languid blinks

palm-sized grannies fold into bows & nap
alongside loyal businessmen who store
years of sleep in bags beneath their eyes

everyone dreams between stops
on these overpopulated trains,
silent as chopsticks on rice.

The poems in Felt are refreshingly free of conceit to my eye, poems written with care and respect, wasting no syllables and punctuating for clarity. It would be interesting to see how Featherstone might bring the strength of her economy, restraint and tact to longer narrative pieces.

This Woman

by Adrienne Eberhard

Black Pepper Press

ISBN 9781876044725

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

As the collection’s title suggests, This Woman is a book of poetry situating the poet within her world. It is female poetry, confessional poetry, celebrating motherhood, children, love, nature and its fecundity and, above all, the significance of place, “where what matters is/ something other than us” (p.66).

The prevalence of Tasmanian landscape in the poems is strong, and conjures up an awareness of the island’s history and geography. “Littoral” links the present, encapsulated in the figures of the poet’s sons, with her own responses to the coastal landmarks:

These two, mushrooms under the faded indigo
of their hats, are the sign posts of her days,
the far-reaches of her paddock marked by
their small figures running……………………

…………………………………………………………
histories, pulling her
like the way they lift their heads to watch
the finger-winged passage of a sea eagle sailing the air,
its territory marked by the nest of young and the far gum tree.
(pp.9-10)

The sequence “Mt. Wellington Poems” goes further back into the past, 10,000 years and more, to the time of Gondwana land’s  geology and plants: “This could be airy ground in Africa,/ the cloud-capped Mountains of the Moon” (p.61). A response to the Mt. Wellington Festival of 2002,  in collaboration with poets and scientists, the sequence teaches respect for the native flora and an awareness of its history: “This mountain’s history is collection: flanks scoured,/ plants sampled, examined, described and stored” (p.59). The concept is extended and deepened, both literally and metaphorically, in “Managing the Mountain (or Mapping Time”:

yet mapped, on the table before us, the mountain shrinks,
reduced to kilometres of fire-trail, to the homogenisation
of trail head, sign, specification.
What’s being mapped is impact,
the scars of over-use.
(p.66)

A further poem celebrating landscape and its links to the human condition is “Mt Field.” Here the only scars are created by nature, and we are given a glimpse of a prelapsarian world. Death and life, whether of seasons or snowgum limbs, are natural processes in this poem. While the scenario is beautifully evoked, the end-point of anthropogenic destruction is not touched upon, as it might well have been in the contemporary climate. Likewise, “Recherche Bay” pays tribute to the conceptual fecundity of Lahaie’s garden and the imagined response to it of ship’s steward, Louise Girardon, but makes no mention of the Government-approved road and logging project that threatened the site of the garden as a historic feature in 2005.

Two poems, however, might be said to go beyond the idyll of nature undisrupted and extend their horizons in the direction of ecopoesis. The first and most important of these is “Trust,” dedicated to the poet’s husband, his adolescent naming of fish and fauna elevating these to “friend,” a passion later shared by his sons. Now, in an endangered world:

He reads the latest reports, insists they only fish
in waters swept by Southern Ocean currents,
while each day, his sons salvage bones and fossils,
shells and starfish to line their bedroom window sill,
pulling the river one wave closer each time
until at night it laps at their ears and they sleep,
their world too small yet for pollution, poison, extinction,
knowing only renewal, their trust huge in his hands.
(p.20)

In “Owls,” “the insolent slow flap/ of an owl across the bitumen’s sinuous curve” assails the persona driving home at night

she has not seen owls here for three years
their haunting of the dead gum a memory she links
to a time when the future was a bowl of blue sky
and infinity was the rest of their lives

………………………………………………………

tonight a second owl launches into the night in front of her
and she understands she has not lost the future or the past
it is here      this feather-claw-beak moment
that she has found
(p.30)

Notable also, by its near-absence, is the issue of Aboriginality in Tasmania’s black history. There’s a reference to a rock-wall hand imprint on p.1, to “native women in this Edenic/ world” (p.57), but neither the harmonious relations between the d’Entrecasteaux expedition and Lylueqonny natives in 1792, nor the horrific massacres of 1824-31, receive a mention.

When it comes to invasions of the landscape of the human body, however, the poet is more confronting. “Breast Strokes” provides a fine commentary on the representation of women’s breasts by traditional  male artists, with a contemporary bombshell in the closing stanza on Rembrandt’s contribution:

a silent time bomb: her breast − a million breasts − flowering
with deadly beauty, the cells that lie, tucked
and hidden, shaping the future into which, oblivious, we sail.
(p.29)

Almost a conceit, the poem progresses through repetition of key words, through images of flowers and sailing, to a conclusion which powerfully reverses their expected significance.  The centrality of these images is continued in the title sequence, “This Woman”:

                                            She’s not interested
in figureheads, their breasts and tresses
a form of treason, it’s more the way a yacht lies under sail,
its ability to displace, and sometimes plane,
as astonishing as flight.

………………………………………….

A boat knows its own destiny;
this is the most disturbing thing of all,
that in its relentless fracturing
of the blue meniscus that surrounds her,
a boat is more certain of the futurethan she can ever be.

(p.33)

There is the starkness of recognition, encapsulated in spare, hard-hitting language:

                                     The surgeon will take his knife
and chase the trail of spoor, cut and probe, then sew
and rectify. Her breast will follow the knife’s hollowing,
all pertness spent in the sharpness of steel,
falling into itself, as if trying to salvage something.

(p.35)

and the images of violation: “nothing has prepared her for this…blood cells bones clawing each other/ civil war,” followed ultimately by defiant hope: “belief, in everyday miracles;/ anything, the paper nautilus tells her, is possible.” Reliant on the importance of ‘the small personal voice,’ “Breast Strokes” and “This Woman,” taken together, provide one of the strongest poetic statements in this collection. By contrast, “Maze” is an afterthought, its frame of reference from legend and fairytale unconvincing.

Eberhard works best when re-creating the reality of her world, on its own terms. The poem “Vision,” about her son’s colour-blindness, provides an example of this technique. Images and metaphors arise naturally from the subject-matter:

In my son’s classroom the children’s postcards
line cupboard doors, each asked to draw
what they see: 28 blue vases holding flowers,
the 29th, pink.

…………………………………………………………….

the cones of his retina
white-washed into seeing the world awry.
In his drawings, he’s a stickler for detail
as if in its sharpness and accuracy

his brain balances out chroma-deficiency,
allowing 3D perspectives, upside-down views,
a vision unfettered by distance and the quotidian.

(pp.75-6)

Technically, the poet exhibits a penchant for sequences which allow her to explore different aspects of her subject-matter. Some of the images that arise are startling, metaphysical in their implications (“Walking in the wind, it seemed/ as if the world was a knotted/ ball of wool unravelling,” p.3; “This hut is a harbour, hooked to the mountain,/ scoparias and waratahs burning red candles,” p.68; “This rib you found, leached like driftwood/ and light as pumice stone,” p.70). Many are maternal, based on her awareness of the female body and its responses (“the net the fishermen pull/ is full of grief: the stilled voice/ of a new-born child,” p.21; “it’s a journey into time, when the mountain/ was a child sleeping in its mother’s womb,” p.66). Sometimes, this approach results in over-contrivance (as in the poem “Maze”) or the possibility of a clichéd central concept (“Setting Out,” “Bird Song,” “Seeds”). Overall, however, language in the collection is wielded with style and  precision, contributing to the shock of recognition that is poetry’s function:

                                      Some words
are like this: when you come across
the right ones, their electric stab

is like stepping into the ocean,
being broken and made whole again,
drawing a body to a different realm

where uprights and verticals are gone,
where sky and water stream in,
jettisoning all the mind’s freight.

(“The Words,” p.43)

Margaret Bradstock has five published collections of poetry, amongst which are The Pomelo Tree (awarded the Wesley Michel Wright Prize), Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). She has recently edited Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white poetic responses to “settlement” (Phoenix, 2011). Margaret was Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University in 2003 and co-editor of Five Bells from 2001-10. She is now on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry.

Not Dark Yet

by David Walker

Giramondo Press, 2011

ISBN 9781920882655

Reviewed by IPSITA SENGUPTA

Despite its humour and ebullience, Not Dark Yet has a Beowulf frame of loss, death and violence. Shadows of the author’s memory, his sight and familial love are played out in a mediterranean climate. Not all of the eighteen chapters of this “personal history” are located in Adelaide or other South Australian settlements, though David Walker hails from that state, from where he explores his ancestry. Family anecdotes seamlessly blend into the macro-history of Australian nation and nationalism. Allusions to the British Vanguard and American culture rehearse traditional Antipodean links, which define the sense of self at personal and national levels.

Yet Asia is a recurrent presence, from the opening line’s reference to Frederic Prokosch’s The Asiatics: A Novel, to David Walker’s charisma as the Israeli Ambassador in a Canberra-based film which redefines Australians as “We Asians”. Asia models various roles, both intimate and atrocious throughout Not Dark Yet.

Luke Day is an affectionate Chinese father to his adopted British daughter, Molly Day. A relative, and Colonel William Light who planned the layout of Adelaide had a Malay mother. For Walker, Japan remains a complex memory resisting easy classification. The Japanese had brutally murdered his uncle Laurie during the Second World War. Yet Japanese culture remains the source of exquisite hobbies like bonsai and dry arrangements for his family. His ancestors source their imports from Japan, along with Europe. In his travels, Walker encounters an exquisite Japan of geishas and tourist-enthusiast schoolgirls; he’d already fallen for the complex, elegant and mannered Japan discovered in translated novels.

The book does not domesticate or arrange Australian responses to a looming Asia; they are presented as tangled contradictions. While The Advertiser describes intruders like rabbits or Chinamen as ready targets for annihilation if White Australians aspire to keep the continent to themselves, Sir Phillip McBride succeeds in securing for Luke Day an old-age pension.

Travel remains the other leitmotif through the text. If Asians, as forbidden outsiders, have trickled into the Australian land and national psyche, how could the new settlers remain home forever? The World War disperses Australians in all directions across the globe. Walker’s relatives translocate between continents during the war. Laurie is posted at Darwin and Ambon in the Netherlands East Indies, Alan at Canada, the UK and Europe, Eric at Tobruk in Libya, New Guinea and Borneo. Walker’s quiet and respectable parents became Frommer-inspired independent world-travellers, journeying through Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Cairo, Athens and Italy. Though ready to admire and record in travel diaries and photo slides the unfamiliar territory of their oriental destinations, unease and danger await them. Bewildered by the chaos of Hong Kong, they take refuge in tours. In Cairo they are troubled by hostility and the fear of contamination of ‘flea-bitten & moth-eaten’ guides and thugs. On a smaller scale, but no less pioneer style, are the interstate family travels.

Blindness and memory are described as cultural as well as personal. The troubled journey into darkness of an Alzheimer’s patient eludes the reach of her family. Walker, an Australian historian, had resisted family history before turning to this genre, when macular degeneration blurs the distinctions in reading, writing, seeing:

“When I became legally blind, I had to rethink the kind of history I was able to write. I had to find another, more personal voice and another way of writing. The mix of the historical and the personal seemed promising.” (124)

Not Dark Yet is a quiet discourse on Australian nation and history, its fears and myths, like that of the Lasseter’s Lost Reef, a mighty gold deposit which had eluded early explorers. The author engages with Vance Palmer’s model of nationalist literature with its affiliation to bush-honed brawn; historians of Australia like J.A. La Nauze and Keith Hancock are characters in his story. He engages with various national obsessions in the early decades of the century, such as physical culture and the mission to breed a fit race as custodians of a continent.

War and its impact, civic and private, are structurally central to the book. Walker devotes several chapters recasting the horror of the taboo death of Laurie and narrating disturbed or distant responses to war, by his two surviving uncles. This parallels representations of Australian war strategies on a broader canvas during the Second World War, while reinstating Laha as an Australian war-shrine inexplicably neglected. Violence and derangement seethe in episodic undercurrents. Oswald strikes his wife, when he is unhinged by the confirmation of his son’s beheading. The Olympic water-polo semi-final between Hungary and the Soviet Union erupts into wild riots of Cold War hatred.

The book is a shrine and museum, not merely of innocence, but of an era to which his elusive, polite, hat-wearing father is “an enigmatic visitor”. It seeks to salvage what Walker’s memory and vision permit from the chronicle of his losses. His father’s horticultural pursuits are lost, as are the Burra of his ancestors, Cadell and Freeling of his childhood, his mother’s self and his world of books. Many buried links are unearthed, some accidentally, like Alan’s long-lost fiancée from Wales or Laurie’s comrade and friend from Ambon. Among the buried links in this history of nation and family, the author succeeds in confining himself to a role of Shakespeare’s fool, omniscient of the plot yet reluctant to narrate the self.

That a veteran historian like David Walker should conquer his reluctance for a personal genre and narrate some very difficult stories makes this a remarkable book. It is national history from a fresh perspective of family documents, photographs and remembered quirks. And it seems to be a profoundly ironic, though finally accepting vision, of the dominant version of this history. War is accorded a pivotal position and it is indeed the crux of these stories. Walker’s father may never have been ‘the red-blooded Australian male that Palmer sought to mythologise’, but he is surely no deviant with his rabbit-shooting skills and the heart of a country boy.

Tiresias was blind, a metaphor for the searing vision that enabled him to know and speak the unspeakable crime and guilt of innocent Oedipus. Certain versions of Shiva with his eyes almost closed and the third eye open re-play that metaphor of access to depth dimensions. Though macular degeneration is a loss beyond words for a scholar like Walker, devoted to books and writing, his outwardly shrinking universe and timeless solitude permit this erudite and disturbingly intimate comic elegy.

IPSITA SENGUPTA is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at South Calcutta Girls’ College, Calcutta University and a PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, researching Australian encounters with India during the colonial period. She was awarded the Australia-India Council Fellowship in the 2009 round. She has published nationally and internationally on Australia-India connections, most recently on the Indian Mollie Skinner in Southerly (2011).