Ouyang Yu reviews Bejing Spring by Pan Zijie

August 22, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments

Bejing Spring

by Pan Zijie

maninriver press, 2015

ISBN 10: 0987473352

Reviewed by OUYANG YU

Shortly after I received a copy of Beijing Spring, in Melbourne, for reviewing, I got on my way to Canberra for a visit and read the book in one go on my flight there. Immediately, a number of things, quite suggestive absences, caught my attention: there are no blurbs on the back and no author biog, things that one reads before one plunges into poetry.

Other things emerge, in the book, and, now, a few days after, from memory, without reference to the physical copy of the book and perhaps out of sequence, too: beginnings of lines or sentences that serve as high-lighted titles, some in larger font sizes than others; Beijing Spring, the title of the book, that reminds one of a similarly titled pro-democracy political magazine based in New York, known as《北京之春》（beijing’s spring）, and that is also a reference to the period of political liberalization in China in 1978 and 1979; retelling of stories in martial arts films; letters to an unknown recipient, or perhaps the poet himself, or, as suggested at Amazon online bookshop, ‘to a famous revolutionary poet’ (http://www.amazon.com/Beijing-Spring-Zijie-Pan/dp/0987473352/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456873105&sr=8-1&keywords=beijing+spring%2C+pan+zijie ) from a ‘sister’; and travels around Beijing in a ute.

But if you take it to be a book of political poems you’d be wrong although the cover photo suggests blood and flowers, symbols of revolution, when, on closer inspection, they actually are the debris of firecrackers, with the bluish smoke of blasting in the background. This book, by its very absence and anonymity, has managed to achieve the purpose of creating a mine of hidden treasures, written in poems, prose-poems, letter poems or story-poems, for the bewildered readers to dig for themselves. One I like in particular tells the story of a dream,

In another dream

you’re in an inn where
you’ve come to meet a stranger
You ask the innkeeper whether someone
is waiting for you, the innkeeper
is blunt, he doesn’t know of any
one waiting for you.
No, a lot of others are waiting for
food and wine
Why is someone waiting for you? (p. 21)

And that left me smiling wryly, at this dream that doesn’t seem a dream but that remains a dream because it’s titled a ‘dream’. Quite a number of poems feel like that and it’s an interesting, endearing quality.

There are other poems that I like, too, such as ‘She says it stinks’, ‘Pretty Girl’ and ‘Dear Brother’ (p. 65).

One was left with an uncomfortable feeling, though, when one finished reading the book. Questions keep coming up: Why is the poet so unassuming, keeping such a low profile that it almost feels like the book was written by an anonymous person? Is there a deliberate statement being made through this anonymity and suppression of one’s own identity? Why did this reader feel an affinity with the poet and his book?

I did my homework and found out about the poet. He was originally known as Zijie Ken Pan, born in 1956. Having published his first book of poetry, Vostok & This Could Have Happened to You in 2002, he did his PhD in creative writing in 2006 at Macquarie University, with his thesis titled, ‘Representations of Chinese men in Australian fiction 1973-2000: an analytical interpretation and a novella.’ A second book of poetry appeared in 2015, In Another Time. A number of poems were published in such diverse magazines and newspapers as Southerly and The Australian, though the poet’s name had changed from its anglicized version to the current Chinese pinyin version of Pan Zijie, the same way Leslie Zhao, Australian-Chinese short-story writer, on returning to China to become a playwright based in Shanghai more than a decade ago, reverted back to his original Chinese pinyin version of Zhao Chuan.

It seems to me that the poet is engaging in a process of de-Australianization, or, to put it mildly, a process of resistance, of not wanting to be known as part of all that, of wanting to go it all alone no matter what, and of connecting to one’s past with one’s own stories or poem-stories that are being suppressed or suffer the risk of suppression in a country one is a migrant in. Can I also suggest that the press, Maninriver Press (Man in River Press?), is also part of that process, being apparently, and proudly, run by Asian-Australians, or even migrants, something that I always admire and hope for as many of my books were published by migrant-run presses, such as Papyrus Publishing, Wild Peony and Brandl & Schlesinger, to name but a few?

That the word ‘Australia’ is never mentioned once in the book adds to the impression that this is deliberate and, if that is so, the strategy works well. Again I think of Zhao Chuan who, in a number of meetings we had, hardly ever mentions Australia while his work is being shown around in other European countries such as Switzerland and England.

While I looked in vain for the word ‘Australia’ in the book, I managed to find tropes evocative of the country, in lines like this, ‘to stay small harmless nations’ (p. 65), or this, ‘The winds come from the north. Always dry, in strong gusts pushing and bending trees’ (p. 60), and this, ‘Refugee may be a long way, some things will become burdens, a country, a home…’ (p. 56), ‘refugee’ being a subject Pan once wrote about in a poem, found here (http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/archives/v2/e2/panzk.htm ), although not a major concern in this collection.

The major concern, to this writer, seems to be a preoccupation with the creation of the poet’s own mini-autobiographies; about ‘us little folk’ (p. 35), be they stories about ‘Beijing Metro’, in an eerie dreamlike situation where ‘He shows a photograph of five heroes. Himself as Zhu De…’ (p. 7); about ‘toads’ whose ‘venom’ is squeezed for ‘medicine’ (p. 11); about this ‘I’ who’d ‘get a job teaching English at the Beijing Language and Culture University’ (p. 14); about stories based on the martial arts (Wu Xia) films in which nothing is said but everything seems to have been said, another impression of mine; and about letters sent by Sister to ‘Dear Brother’ in a sequence of what is known in Chinese as tongti shi (poems written under the same title).

And, last but not least is the interesting fact that Chinese words in pinyin share the same importance of English words by not being put in italics, thus not being made to look strange, such as ‘xiangchun’, ‘guqin’, ‘pipa’ and ‘siheyuan’ (p. 17), all immediately known to me, eliciting an instant smile on my face, though that may baffle the monolingual English-language speakers in this country and elsewhere. But who cares? A migrant is not a required explanation. He or she is, to borrow one word image from the book, an ‘invisible cloud’ (p. 57), that ‘drive(s) away the devils’ (p. 70).

Before I wrap up, I must quote Pan as saying, in a remark that may shed some light on his poetic presence through political absence—e.g. identity politics and etc, ‘I found myself as a person of colour who theoretically shouldn’t have been here.’ (https://twitter.com/mascarareview/status/667161990645743616?lang=en )

OUYANG YU has published over 55 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translation and criticism in English and Chinese languages, including his award-winning novel,The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002), his collection of poetry in English,The Kingsbury Tales (2008), his collection of Chinese poetry, Slow Motion(2009), his book of creative non-fiction, On the Smell of an Oily Rag: Speaking English, Thinking Chinese and Living Australian (2008), his second novel, The English Class (2010), his book of literary criticism,Chinese in Australian Fiction: 1888 1988 (2008), and his translation in Chinese, The Fatal Shore (forthcoming in 2011).

Geoff Page reviews Painting Red Orchids by Eileen Chong

August 6, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments

Painting Red Orchids

by Eileen Chong

Pitt St Poetry

ISBN 978-1-922080-66-0

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

Painting Red Orchids is Eileen Chong’s third collection in six years. Born in Singapore, she has lived in Sydney since 2007. Although her Chinese roots run deep she is also very much a citizen of her adopted city and country.

The influence of classical Chinese poetry, from various periods is strong, both in Chong’s tone and, to a lesser extent, in her content —  or so it would appear to this reviewer, judging from translations he has read over the years. Chong works with an awareness of this tradition but her particular achievement is the way she is able to be faithful to the specifics of the eras involved and yet still sound contemporary and universally relevant. There is nothing archaic here.

A fine example of all this skill occurs in Chong’s four-part poem, “Magnolia”, a monologue from the viewpoint of Hua Mu Lan who dressed as a man to take her father’s place in the emperor’s army and rose to the rank of general during the Northern Wei dynasty (386 – 536 AD). A stanza in the first part, dealing with the need to hide her menstruation, is particularly graphic: “I carry a skin of water and squat in the grasses. / Now it it safe to loosen my robes. Carefully, I clean myself. / Even in the dark, my hands are sticky with blood.” The link between this blood and the blood soon to be shed in battle is more than a little poignant.

In the second part of the sequence, Mu Lan describes her first kill, a chicken back in her childhood: “I carried her to the back of the hut, her heartbeat / pulsing in my palm. Her feathers so alive against my skin.” In the third section, Mu Lan defines her role explicitly: “Not for me the embroidered magnolias of marriage; / I give birth to nothing but blades, arrows and death.”

It is believed that, after twelve years of warfare, Mu Lan returned to her village. The poem’s last stanza reveals an interesting ambivalence: “If I were a hawk I would take off, wing towards / the west and the setting sun. I would hunt only / to survive, I would feather a nest, I would fly.” There’s a nice balance here, and throughout the poem, a rejoicing in the exploits of a notable proto-feminist and a clear sense of what she had to give up in order to achieve them.

A different, but no less convincing, Chinese element in Chong’s poetry appears in her poems about Chinese cuisine — its preparation, cooking and consumption. In poems such as “Cooking for One”,  “Xiao Long Bao (Little Dragon Dumplings)” and “Sun Ming Restaurant, Parramatta”, among others, there is clearly a relish for tastily-cooked flesh that might well make a vegan curl back in disgust. Parts of these poems, as in  “Xiao Long Bao (Little Dragon Dumplings)”, for instance, can also read like a (well-written) recipe: “Finely shredded young ginger topped / with black rice vinegar and a dash of soy / form the dipping source.”  At the end of her  dumpling poem the poet talks about the acute gastronomical response of her non-Chinese lover to what he has just eaten:  “I still remember the look on your face when you ate / your first little dragon dumpling. Sudden understanding.”

“Sudden understanding” is not, however, a resolution that conveniently arrives through another important strand in Painting Red Orchids, i.e. Chong’s poems about a break-up with one long-time lover and the beginnings of a new relationship. These poems are arranged in a cluster but also recur through the book. At the end of “Adrift”, for instance, the poet talks of how “The mussel man / clutched the paper-wrapped package / to his chest and said, Bless you, lady. / I need all the blessings I can get — / I am adrift, far from rock and shore.” In “Taboo”, shortly afterwards, she reflects: “How much did I want? / All the years, and none. // Your foot on my calf, / heavy in the dark. // Your breathing laboured, / my heart  withdrawn.”

Some sort of explanation is offered in “Split Moon”: “I said the word and broke us — / but chiselling away at our foundation / were years of the unsaid; of silences / drawn out and covered over. // Did I do it right? I do not know. / The moon does not speak. / We have divided the whole, / we are left with less than our halves.”

Poems of this kind, with slightly laborious images like “chiselling away at our foundations”, speak to an almost universal experience but are often difficult to bring off aesthetically. Almost all poets write them at one stage or another (and they can often be effective therapeutically). It doesn’t seem fair that they are not always among the poet’s best work. The injunction that the subject of Chong’s “break-up” poems calls for in “Last Leaf”is instructive. Her female narrator starts by saying: “I’d said yes / You then said no poems / A poem falls: / the last leaf of the season.” It’s possible hurt pride or her ex-partner’s need for privacy were not his only reasons for saying “no poems”.

Some of the most memorable poems in Painting Red Orchids occur when Chong’s Chinese materials or vantage points are seamlessly integrated with something more western, sometimes with a deal of surrealism thrown in. The last six lines of “Dream Fish” are a good example of what is most characteristic about this eloquent,  engaging and continually-developing poet: “We only kissed at the end, the moon watching / the old scene play out.  Mosquitoes and two people / discovering how to taste each other. In the bedroom / bright with lamps, roses shed their petals in half-arcs // around the vase. Pollen dust and the taste of musk. / You released the fish — its escape: a rapid beating of drums.”

GEOFF PAGE is a Canberra based poet and critic. He edited Best Australian Poems 2015 and his latest collection is Plevna, a verse biography, (UWA).

Nicolette Stasko reviews brush by joanne burns

July 23, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments

brush

by joanne burns

Giramondo Publishing

ISBN 978-1-922146-71-7

Reviewed by NAME

‘It must give pleasure’^[1]

It should be no surprise that I am a big fan of joanne burns’ poetry. Although brush is not a New and Selected per se, it is a excellent introduction to her work and a substantial confirmation of the poet’s talent and importance in Australian Literature.^[2] This is burns’ sixteenth volume of poetry; her first title Snatch was published in London in 1972.

burns herself describes the volume as an ‘anthology of poems… written over the last five or six years’. It is a kind of sampler of her styles/forms and themes and in its  compactness, brush is close to that wonderful rare thing—a perfect book. Divided into six sections, the ‘multifaceted’ collection encompasses the poet’s familiar preoccupations: language, society’s foibles, contemporary urban life, along with some more unusual personal recollections. These range in tone from the fiercely satiric to nostalgia ‘brushed’ with her trademark humour. Sometimes described as ‘acerbic’, burns’ work is always marked by a gentleness and compassion that understands the frailties of human beings and includes herself as one of them. There is an enormous amount of play in every poem that results in a singular lack of closure mimicking an illusive and unstable modern reality devoid of comforting truths.

Each section is made up of poems similar in theme and often similar in style. ‘brush’, the title section is subtitled ‘a series of day poems’ and each can be characterised as journal-like, although varying in line length and structure. These focus on the daily, often mundane activities that trigger various ‘epipthanic?’ observations, ‘such little things obscured in domestic/mess’ (‘verb 39). The first, ‘zip’, contains the telling line: ‘…that sweeps you into/neon’s rhetoric so what is it that you need to see in/such illumination’.‘tier’, a reflection on Anzac Day suggests ‘all you have/is what you have’ while ‘dues’, about a visit to the ‘office of births deaths & marriages’, ends with ‘lotsa death certs   but how/sweet the sleep after/though not the snore’.

There are numerous allusions to poets and writers—resonances which set up a dialogue between the past with the present: long/black with nietzsche…9 grain goethbread’; the terror of a hopkin’s sonnet’ and significantly a reference to Neruda’s Elemental Odes:

this morning
i pull my 33 year old copy of neruda
off the dusty shelf estante polvo    and turn to “oda al tomate”
where assassinated tomatoes become stars
of the earth in less than 2 pages   el tomate  astro de terra

Very few poets can do this.

burns can, for example, even make vacuum cleaning interesting and entertaining: ‘swirls of lost hair crumbs and/ missing peas/ no divining in the beige down there’ (‘frame’ 38) but she does it with aplomb—a crazy randomness of selection, odd details and her inimitable sense of whimsy.

As society seems unable to learn the lessons of the past (let alone from any of its great poets), the first section of the book, ‘bluff’, ghosts a future in which everyone, especially ma and pop investors, are doomed:  ‘you ought to be/congratulated mums and dads for feathering your nests intoned the presidential spectacles/s/ from a harbour newsroom’. At once hilarious and grim, ‘does your portfolio ache’, this section comments on the financial world where specialist terms abound familiar and mysterious as ‘hedge fund’ and ‘bull market’. burns plays with and puns on the jargon (indeed one of the longer sequences ‘corrida’ explores notions of the bull fight) inferring an impending capitalist Armageddon while the theme from Casino Royale plays in the background:

some still believed it was best
to trim the hedges some were tight lipped
about the rosy picture — and this could
wipe out any benefit from the plan to divide
the good from the bad     everyone was happy

though about the 19 billion sound rescue package
the final comment ‘we misjudged how quickly
syllables could turn around’

The central section ‘road’ is a wonderful bricolage of urban images/scenes which illustrate burns use of sound—assonance, alliteration, rhyme and half-rhyme to construct her poems.

past the front door packs
of paris hilton wannabes looking likely in sunfrocks
skim along the streets toward skinny lattes  (‘sibilance’, 49)

One of the most interesting sections ‘delivery’ is unusal for burns because of its focus on the autobiographical. The poet has always and often sprinkled personal details in her poems using a first-person ‘i’ that could be herself or everywoman. ‘a later page’ [not quite after Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’], is a wonderful take on that famous poem

there was the saturday evening post and maybe
the new yorker in the modest waiting room, nothing
to alarm me – or perhaps the wait was pretty short
at uncle bob’s

…

but those sharp eyes and mouths of racy laughter
bouncing off the walls dismissive and derisive
drill through collapsing years

‘comb’, a sequence of five poems, recalls past innocent times of boyfriends and beaches where

even the sewer outlet water, its stream
etched into the beach right down to the surf,
could not stain bondi’s ascendency

…

which was always as big as
tomorrow, or something wider
more thrilling than time –

The poems in the final section ‘wooing the owl (or the great sleep forward)’ are as one might expect, about sleep and dreams. (I wonder if there are any statistics on how many poets suffer from some form of insomnia?) The title poem asks the existential question:

to think like a pond
or a puddle

ponder this    how many
sleeps til death

Frequently reviewers revert to using definitions when they have little to say or have trouble getting started and I confess I have used this ploy in the past. But nothing  could be further from the facts regarding brush. For such a slim, compact collection there is so much to say that any review space is not sufficient to do it complete justice.

However, a look at the actual word ‘brush’ is enlightening and reveals quite a bit about burn’s methods. I came up with approximately eight definitions—brush obviously can be used as a noun or a verb—but checking in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, I found three more uses that were not known to me: colloquially it can mean ‘a girl or young woman’, a fox tail, and most interestingly ‘a piece of carbon or metal serving as an electrical contact especially with a discharge of sparks’. Now of course none of this would be a surprise to an avid reader of dictionaries like burns whose work often simultaneously holds all the meanings of a word in a poem or freely associates them to construct a kind of surreal/absurd narrative. Take ‘road’ for example from the section of the same title:

i am surprised by
my new interest in apples especially pink
ladies peak hour is not like the other peaks

burns’ work is a brilliant alchemy of objective reality and creative imagination, at times critical, philosophical or gnomic but always following Stevens’ dictum about what poetry should be:

It must give pleasure.

Notes

[1] Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, Collected Poems, London: Faber&Faber, 1966, p398.
[2] According to the media release ‘[t]he publication and promotion of brush has been assisted by an Australia Council Midlist Authors Grant, designed to showcase the writing of established Australian authors like Joanne Burns, who have made an important contribution to Australian literature, and to make readers more aware of the quality and character of their work as it has developed over many years.’

NICOLETTE STASKO has published seven collections of poetry the most recent under rats with Vagabond Press. She has also published books of fiction and non-fiction. Currently she is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney and is finalising her next collection.

Michele Seminara reviews The Special by David Stavanger

July 21, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments

The Special

by David Stavanger

University of Queensland Press

ISBN 978-0-7022-5319-5

Reviewed by MICHELE SEMINARA

This book is dedicated to the dead
who are bravely living
(and to those who wake wild-eyed in the dark)

So begins David Stavanger’s first full length collection, The Special, published by UQP as wining manuscript of the 2013 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. As the dedication suggests, this book is an unsettling read; one feels, intentionally so. The poems deal with what is dark and broken in the human psyche, informed, presumably, by the poet’s own personal and professional experiences with mental illness. This is Stavanger’s first serious foray into the world of ‘page’ as opposed to ‘performance’ poetry (a distinction he eschews), the leap between these two hotly fought over territories no doubt entailing a certain risk of the poems falling flat on the page. Yet while the book may, on first reading, appear somewhat stylistically and tonally ‘flat’, upon deeper reading it becomes clear that this has less to do with Stavanger’s poetry not transitioning well onto the page, and more to do with the nature of what the poet is trying to achieve. When exploring states of mind such as depression or psychosis, an emotionally disconnected, disjointed, or even dissociated style of poetry may indeed be the perfect mode of expression.

The Special encompasses a variety of forms such as free verse, prose poetry, found poetry, centos and some pieces which read more like flash fiction. The poems are often inspired by and allude to popular culture, drawing on newspaper articles, rock music, film and even a questionnaire from the dating site RSVP. While this lends the book an accessibility which will appeal to many who might not traditionally read poetry, it does not necessarily mean that it is an easy read. Stavanger pulls no punches, tackling challenging issues—such as mental health, terminal illness, dysfunctional relationships, the inevitability of death, the meaning of life and the meaning of even getting out of bed in the morning—head on; although he does sweeten their delivery with liberal doses of irony and dark humour. Take, for example, the title poem of the book:

I have seen enough stomachs charcoaled
to put me off life-drawing for life

one week a patient launched himself from the 5^th floor
didn’t even put his hands out
hit the concrete with his face

Sometimes the future looks brighter
if you don’t look at all
(‘the Special’, p7)

The narrator’s tone is for the most part unnervingly flat, as if he were walking through life on automatic pilot, everyday experiences appearing odd or even grotesque and requiring herculean amounts of effort to accomplish. Discordant images are juxtaposed, leaving a lattice of gaps which the reader may—or may not—choose to fill with meaning. The phrases are short, snappy, satiric and self-aware. Take, for example, ‘out of danger’, one of the many ‘list’ poems of the book:

thinking. using a microwave. drinking. not drinking. voices
from the pillow. not talking to yourself. talking to yourself.
talking to taxi drivers. parenting. going to a lecture. enjoying
it. declaring yourself a legend. believing it.
(‘out of danger’, p4)

This could be read as glib, superficial, lacking in attention to the craft of rhythm, rhyme, metaphor and line break; the sort of poetry which might sound impressive in a well delivered performance but can read like a string of clever sound bites on the page. Alternately, it could be read as an artful expression of a depressed and disembodied state of mind. The list-like nature of the syntax suggests a sentience disengaged from the world, one of the zombie-like ‘dead’ from the book’s dedication propelling themselves through life without fully entering into it. Everyday objects and events appear at once discrete and absurdly connected, the juxtaposition of images suggesting meanings which are both humorous and sinister. Strings of short sentences paired with a dead-pan delivery create a cinematic effect, as in the piece ‘home visits’, which adopts a hard-bitten, film noir style of narration:

Doorbell rings. I have driven thirty minutes south across
town. They say there is a heatwave on its way but it is already
here. Thirty-eight degrees. I ring the doorbell again. This part
of the city seems full of animals but there are no insects to
be heard and the concrete cracks when you walk on it. The
pool next door is empty. Something has gone down here and
people won’t talk about it.
(‘home visits’, p22)

As if watching a film the narrator observes his own actions and reactions, removed by dark humour and irony at a safe distance from his own experiences. The lifeless tone of Stavanger’s poems gives the effect of dissociation, but also conjures up the spectre of the odd and sinister lurking beneath the everyday. We see this in the poem ‘sleep, hit me’, inspired by the David Lynch film Blue Velvet.

c. stay in the car. hard to the wheel.
wait for my call. don’t answer the phone.
hit the horn. never break. matches lit burn.
(‘sleep, hit me’, p24)

This sense of disembodiment is reinforced by the recurring absence of the personal pronoun; many of the poems lack reference to a unifying ‘I’, merely listing the thoughts and perceptions which the absent ‘I’ may be experiencing:

Invite my father to the funeral
ask him to take the hand of a stranger
make sure that stranger is me
(‘the will’, p66)

When the narrator does refer to himself, it is often in the form of the self-consciously observed ‘you’ or ‘he’:

at the school gate
there is always another one waiting
the bag heavier when you put it down to talk
about holidays and time shares
and you could have shaved
taken off your glasses, opened with their name
(though faces evade you)
(‘someone else’s shoes’, p50)

Here the speaker is literally talking himself through life in a way that most of, at times we’ve similarly struggled to function, would be familiar with. The connection between mental health and the quality of our internal self talk is something Stavanger explores convincingly in The Special, probing the relationship between the language of inner dialogue and external experience, and also the relationship of the official languages of diagnosis and classification to our internal perceptions. For example, in the poem ‘survey’, the absurdity of multiple choice questions and answers highlights the limitations of language to contain and express our deepest and most traumatic experiences. It also suggests how a disjunction between experience and the language used to define it can cause further emotional trauma and alienation.

8. Every Monday I look forward to
a) others going to work
b) going to work with others
c) watching spiders eat birds

9. I use social media to
a) tell you how you are doing
b) show you I am doing fine
c) communicate with the dead

10. Bleeding from the nipple
a) no
b) no
c) no
d) yes

11. To be human is to
a) wear the right name tag
b) shower daily
c) give what you can’t give
d) fold back into the white
(‘survey’, p40)

When you consider that this poem is one of three in the book created in response to interviews undertaken with Mummy’s Wish, a support group for mothers diagnosed with cancer, it becomes even more poignant. How can a mental health survey ever adequately assess or express the feelings of women dealing with such challenges? The act of circling answers which in no way relate to the depth of your experience must indeed feel absurd, and Stavanger’s use of form and tone in the poem artfully evokes this.

The intense subject matter of The Special might make for heavy reading, but Stavanger’s dark humour, while it doesn’t always hit the mark and can occasionally appear pat, works well to leaven the darkness of the poems. ‘I have nothing in front of me’ the pilot flying the plane in the first poem of the book, ‘optimism’, warns us—and in many ways The Special can be read as an exploration of our human reaction to the existential spectre of nothingness. When contemplating the end, either imminent or protracted, what do we human beings do? As Stavanger does in his poetry, we often use humour as a kind of reflexive defence mechanism. This literary trope is something Stavanger’s work has in common with absurdist and existential Cold War literature such as ‘Waiting For Godot’, a literature which, like Stavanger’s,  arose in response to fear of annihilation and a vacuum of inherent meaning.

Yet it is not all doom and dark humour; there are thematic and stylistic progressions in The Special. While the poems do descend into the void, they also, in a distinctly Stavanger-esque fashion, rise up again, the narrator choosing to author his own type of meaning, especially towards the end of the book. Here, the tone shifts, growing less cynical and more engaged, the dark humour lifting as the speaker steps back into his body and his life. Referring to himself more frequently now as ‘I’, he no longer attempts to merely assemble himself into the simulacrum of a human being, but seems to actually feel like one. He also begins to reinhabit the roles of father, son and partner, referring to family members as ‘my’ and ‘we’ instead of the formerly used objectifying ‘you’.

my son tells me this stick is a bird
smiles and sets the bird free
it takes flight

we watch it soar to the ground
sweep into the afternoon
it is spring and the mothers are in full bloom
a flock of sticks lies in wait beneath the swings

my head is clear and we are singing
(‘cactus’, p74)

By the last poem of the book, ‘sky whale’, a calm — but not numb —acceptance has been reached: ‘They lied / there is no whale in the sky / the ocean is not blue right through’ Stavanger tells us. Alright, he seems to be saying, so things are not what we would want them to be, but does that mean they are nothing at all? The narrator at the beginning of the book would have answered in the affirmative and warned us that ‘there are never enough parachutes’ to go around in a crisis (‘optimism’, p3), but now we hear from a more mature voice:

I don’t care who gets angry
there have been such times of hate
this place is the last place to hide
no longing left to hang from the nearest branch
we drift dive, sleeping side by side
in the black house across the river
I wake up living
(‘sky whale’, p 77)

A book dedicated to the ‘dead / who are bravely living’ now ends with the words ‘I wake up living’. Although a tone of resignation remains, it is no longer nihilistic. While there is perhaps no inherent meaning in life, while we may ultimately live and die alone, we are at least living ‘side by side’, and there is some comfort in this. Relationships are flawed and ephemeral places to shelter, but at least they offer some kind of sanctuary, and maybe this is all we can hope for. In a book peopled with the living dead and the disconnected, the narrator has resurrected himself, consciously choosing to create meaning through connection to self and others. As Stavanger writes in one of the last, untitled pieces in the book:

In accidents the passenger always dies
I hand you the keys

 
MICHELE SEMINARA is a poet, editor and yoga teacher from Sydney. Her writing has appeared in many online and print journals and anthologies, and her first poetry collection, Engraft, was recently published by Island Press (2016). Michele is also the managing editor of creative arts journal Verity La. She blogs at TheEverydayStrange and is on Twitter @SeminaraMichele.