April 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
April 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
After Gilgamesh
by Jenny Lewis
Mulfran Press
ISBN 9781907327100
Reviewed by ROBERTA LOWING
It would be easy to categorize After Gilgamesh (1) as a missed opportunity or a token memento. This 64-page paperback is a record of what is billed as the “unique contemporary music theatre production” (2) After Gilgamesh, which was performed in March 2011 by the Pegasus Youth Theatre Companies, comprising of the Pegasus Youth Theatre, Dance and Production Companies. (The paperback, here known as ‘the text’, was sold as a ‘special programme’ at that performance and can be ordered on-line, via the website www.mulfran.co.uk).
While it has little to interest a poetry purist, the UK-published text is a pointer to the possibilities of poetry in the digital age, notably in the intersection and dissemination of poetry and performance art. After Gilgamesh is definitely worth a look by the committed poet activist and/or those reader/writers who believe that poets are not only the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” (3) as per Percy Bysshe Shelley, but also George Oppen’s statement that poets are “the legislators of the unacknowledged world”. (4)
The published text’s amalgam of poetry and Iraq War subject matter also has the potential to be used as a teaching aid for high school students, in both poetry/English courses and contemporary and ancient history classes. (5)
It would be churlish to begin by commenting on the text’s omissions so let’s focus on After Gilgamesh’s strengths. The play was written by English poet Jenny Lewis who, as she notes in the text’s introduction (6), became fascinated by The Epic Of Gilgamesh, the nearly 5000-year-old story which, as Lewis summarizes, is thought to be the oldest piece of written literature in the world.
Lewis had been researching her Welsh father’s WWI Army experiences in Mesopotamia (now part of Iraq). Commissioned to write what she describes as a verse drama, Lewis collaborated with Iraqi playwright Rabab Ghazoul and theatre director Yasmin Sidhwa. The result is a four act play (with interval) which cuts between the experiences of a British soldier in Iraq after the 2003 American Army invasion, and the Ancient World setting of Uruk, 2700 BC, which follows the bloody adventures of the Uruk king/god/tyrant Gilgamesh and his best friend, the ‘wild man’ Enkidu. The journey-of-discovery structure finds the obvious parallels in the issues of conflict and humanity, best summarized by the query printed on the book’s front cover: ‘War, leaders, life & death – what has changed in 4,000 years?’
The play’s dialogue, as recorded on the page, is a mix of fictional prose, adapted news reports, free verse, rhyming couplets, slant rhymes and – arguably the dominant poetic form in the text – quatrains with an ABCB rhyme. On the page, the latter emphasizes the play’s sing-song (no pun intended) approach. This is presumably designed to appeal to younger audiences; something enhanced by the slang used throughout (“Don’t even go there”) (7); the broad humour (‘Let’s kill him off with some disease/ … Perhaps bubonic plague, I’ve got some fleas”) (8); war satire (“It was those evil Commies” “… wrong war, General”)(9); and the presence of an ‘Afro-pean’ Chorus, which spans both eras (“Count your blessings, Gilgamesh/ The simple things in life are best;/Enjoy your family, avoid stress,/This is the way to happiness./”) (10)
Interestingly, all of the above read better than you might think on the page: the slang, farce and satire add vitality. The almost vaudevillian aura evoked by the boisterous market-place Ancient World scenes – and the inclusion of black and white photos of the crew and young cast in rehearsal (11) – gives you a sense of what the play might have been like on the stage.
On the page, the poetry lover’s best rewards come from the incorporation of classic texts, such as the delicately resonant lines (lineated as below):
Who can climb the sky?
Only the gods dwell forever in sunlight.
As for man, his days are numbered,
whatever he may do, it is but wind.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Tablet III of the Old-Babylonian version. (12)
Also evocative are the excerpts (too-brief for poetry purists) from the work of 13th century Persian poet Rumi (“Beyond right and wrong there is a field. I will meet you there.”) (13) It was an inspired decision to sample, near the end, what is movingly described in the Scene Notes as “a collage of loss” (14): The Gaza Monologues which, as the Production Notes by director Sidhwa explain, were “written by young people from Gaza of a similar age (14 to 19 years old)”. (15)
Inevitably, though, there are problems with presenting a play-as-text. The play may only span 35 pages but – even if text readers have the luxury of being able to double-check the cast list – it is still hard to keep track of the 30-plus characters who zip in and out of the often-brief scenes.
Another notable drawback for the reader is the omission of music. Writer Lewis notes that the reason why the lyrics for the songs used in the 2011 performance were not included in the text was “to give future producers a free hand in interpretation”. (16) However, her tantalizing references (17) to “a driving heavy metal piece” and “the haunting ‘Alaiki mini salem’ for the first dance sequence … (sung) in Arabic” emphasize the unfinished feel, or sense of absence, in the published text. (18)
As someone who volunteered in a not-for-profit co-operative for four years – as producer-director of an environmental television programme – I have enormous sympathy for the constraints of no-budget productions. However, limitations can lead to creative solutions. Yes, it would take money (but not a great deal) to record a performance of After Gilgamesh and include it with the published text, either as audio only (on CD or digital file) or audio-and-visual (DVD/digital file). (19)
No visual or audio excerpts appear to be currently available on the publisher’s or the writer’s websites although clips of the play may be elsewhere on the internet.
However, watching only on computer could affect both potential audience numbers and the visual quality of the production. That would be a shame because After Gilgamesh is a text that hints at the possibilities for poetry performed and distributed in the 21st century.
NOTES
1. After Gilgamesh by Jenny Lewis (Mulfran Press: Cardiff, 2011).
2. ibid, p.13.
3 & 4. Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2008), p.1. This is an effortlessly readable and intelligent summary of the key issues affecting modern poetry, from the influences of past masters to a discussion of traditional forms and poetry’s political engagement in the modern world. Thoroughly recommended.
5. It would be nice to see After Gilgamesh use its play script as a starting point for deeper discussion. A more ambitious idea would be to imitate books such as Duras By Duras (City Lights Books: San Francisco, 1987): a journal of essays and comments by The Lover novelist and the Hiroshima, Mon Amour scriptwriter Marguerite Duras, and other French writers and intellectuals, on Duras’ script for the 1974 film India Song. This posits the film’s shooting script (a copy of which is included in the text) at the centre of a discussion about inspiration, films, language-as-politics and Duras’ career.
6. After Gilgamesh by Jenny Lewis (Mulfran Press: Cardiff, 2011), p.9.
7. ibid, p.32.
8. ibid, pp.41-42.
9. ibid, p.59.
10. ibid, p.63.
11. ibid, pp.16-25.
12. ibid, p.27.
13. ibid, p.29.
14. ibid, p.60.
15. ibid, p.12.
16. ibid, p.10.
17. ibid, p.9.
18. Anyone who saw George Gittoes’ engaging 2005 documentary Soundtrack To War, which explored the music being played by both locals and foreigners in Baghdad during the American occupation, will appreciate the irony that an occupied city often becomes a crossroads of civilizations. The variety of music being performed by the inhabitants in the film – whether it is singing gospel (the Americans) or playing heavy rock (the Iraqis) – is an often poignant reflection of the stresses experienced by those inhabitants.
19. The crucial component here is sound: humans will happily watch low resolution images if the audio is acceptable but they will quickly switch off if they cannot hear clearly. Frankly, though, in these days of digital recording there is no excuse for not being able to produce – at low cost – a plainly framed but audible record of the production.
ROBERTA LOWING‘s poetry has appeared in journals such as Meanjin, Overland and The Best Australian Poems 2010. Her first novel Notorious was shortlisted for the 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the Commonwealth Book Awards. Her first collection of poetry, Ruin, about the Iraq War, was co-winner of the 2011 Asher Literary Award.
April 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Authentic Local
by Pam Brown
Papertiger Media, Soi 3
ISBN 9780980769517
Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON
In Pam Brown’s latest book of poems, Authentic Local, she asks
who are we now?
a tricky question,
and a hopeless one.
(‘Alibis’)
It is the same question she has been asking for almost forty years, and so it must be tricky as the earth shifts and has epic consequences and the global community grows closer together; even trickier as she neglects the ‘I’ in the question and focuses on the ‘we’ so that she must find her place among a hugely diverse population and insist there is a commonality that binds us together as mere humans on a single spinning planet. When I pick up the book – when I pick up any of her books – I find great comfort in knowing what to expect: a continuation of the question ‘who are we now?’ So in twenty-five books I am not so sure she has been through much of an evolution as a poet, but more so a tweaking. As she writes in ‘Self Denial Never Lasts Long’,
very busy here
finishing up a 900 page epic poem I’ve been working on
off
& on for
25 years!
I don’t question this statement. Her style is one of movement forward and so we are always in the present. And yes, our landscape changes, and of course, Brown – the woman – has changed (to suggest she hasn’t is as ridiculous as saying her poems are a true reflection of her life), but her poetry, perhaps, is the one constant in her world. A nine hundred page epic poem spanning a quarter of a century is highly plausible with Pam Brown and, what’s more, ‘Self Denial’ may just be two pages of it, Authentic Local one small section.
Sentimentality is not favoured in Authentic Local. There are some poems about absent friends and ruminations on death, but still it is a measured emotion Brown brings to the page. Though there are strong overtones of ecopoetics in her writing, nor does nature pluck at her heart strings; no metaphors in the wind. Nothing romantic about her treeless plain, for example:
for me, it’s useless
imagining
a treeless plain,
then describing it
continually changing landscapes
are way too much
sickly yellowing weeds,
bogged gullies,
cracking surfaces
pesticides
ruining pristine reefs
and so on
(‘Dry Tropics’)
Her landscape rather lies in the urban, where even amid
a wide broom stroke
of vomit and
puddles of piss
under the bus-stop bench
we see her fascination with
piles of shiny
coloured
exercise balls
illuminated to mesmerize
in the Fitbiz window
(‘City Lights, 6 am’)
In ‘Polka Squares’ she writes
over 300 photographs
lost from my iPhoto
slide show –
there go the traces
of late 2002 to
midway through
2004
So memory, too, is tied up in electronics and gadgets, taking the idealism out of nostalgia and smashing it to bits. The closest we come to ‘romantic’ can be found in her musings of poetry and other poets, and the occasional artists and their worlds. It infiltrates her poetry with such persistence that it is no surprise Pam Brown is one of Australia’s most prolific poets. My favourite poem is ‘Day and Night, Your Poems’, which she has dedicated to Ken Bolton. In it she emulates his style, which is partly her own, to try to locate her absorption in reading poetry (his), thinking poetry, and in writing poetry. But even poetry is a slave (albeit a willing slave – so then not a slave – a ‘companion’ perhaps?) to technology, and is there romance in that? In ‘News & Sports’ she writes
poetry is like
tv’s live coverage and if you change
a particle you can arrive at an elegant result
via electronic properties and, probably,
high conductivity in an electrical storm,
but the computer is down and so am I –
my bad handwriting taxes my energy,
how does my brain put up with it?
(who am I to ask?)
When the handwritten poem causes migraines, dreamy connotations of the poet’s relation to poetry needs to be redefined. The next poem in the book, having the book’s title, ‘Authentic Local’, follows on with
bun crumbs in the keyboard,
the poet writes the whiteness
of the city
as if not only does productivity in art revolve around the computer, but life is lived around the computer.
There is a certain amount of cynicism in a thematic sense but not so much in Brown’s presentation. I don’t feel a harshness of approach to modernity, nor even a flashing warning, however dull it may be. And to say her tone is ‘matter of fact’ is to say there is a certain dryness to the poems, which I don’t believe is present either. Brown presents us with an acceptance of a fast-paced world which blinks with lights and buzzes with electrical currents, which multiplies cell by cell by cyber-cell and does not wait for us to catch our breath and smell the flowers. There are no flowers. And she is okay with that, just as she is okay with having lived in thirty-six homes. Clearly she has found balance and can embrace a materialistic world as easily as she can write poems on a computer.For longer than some of her readers have been alive, Pam Brown has consistently tried to pin down the impossibility of pinning down in her poetry. But not in an existentialist BIG way; rather in a meandering ‘humph’ way. Has Authentic Local gotten her any nearer to a grounded understanding of a cosmic legitimacy? At this point in her career I don’t think we should be questioning it. I think we should trust in the ticking away of her brain and the furious tapping of her keyboard and relax into her style on page one of this or any future book she will write. It’s a journey – a Pam Brown journey – and if you’re looking out her window, there is such a lot to see.
April 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Surface to Air
by Jaya Savige
University of Queensland Press, 2011
ISBN 9780702239137
Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL
There is a dazzling quality about Jaya Savige’s second collection, Surface to Air, though if the poems are rapid and rippled in their dialectic, their wit is matched by complexity. Savige’s virtuosity accommodates an impressive range of poetic forms, from the lyric to the narrative, from the sonnet to the visual and the elegy. His subject matter shifts from real to hyperreal, from technologies of the personal to the political in scenes refracted through the lens of historical and mythic relativities. This said, the ethical intention of Surface to Air seems more probing than in Latecomers. Despite the supreme assurances of tradition, logic and erudition, there are undercurrents of cultural doubt and disembodiment fragmenting the identity of speaker-subject to the point of vulnerability. It is at such thresholds that Savige’s most convincing poetry performs.
The parabolic argument in Surface to Air is evidenced by the structure of its sections. There’s a movement from the organic contingencies of physical existence in “Snorkelling Lessons” to the transcriptive poems of “Circular Breathing,” the ballistic, reflexive tropes of “A Brief History of Risk,” to the final sequence “Memory Card” in which nostalgia and rhetoric, reason and progress are mediated. It’s an ambitious arc informed by awareness of the uncontrolled relativism of postmodern challenges to the body, to coherence, temporality and space. That the self is in crisis is sensed from the opening poem, “Sand Island”, which evokes, with anatomical precision, the perceptual disruptions of leaving and clinging, mystery and experience. In the search for “common knowledge”, even the sea must be sundered:
What cleaves each muscle of wave
from its bone of ocean?
Hear the snap
of its ligaments
Listen to the severing tendons.
(3)
The poem seems intentionally to echo the opening poem of Latecomers with the poet being in “two minds”, though now the sense of a distant destination lies beyond an antipodean or utopian reach. It is not merely home or the body that the poet is called to renounce, but language and its tradition. Savige effortlessly melds the diction of geek-speak with various lyric forms throughout the collection, yet he seems most at home in the natural world, as this poem shows in its evocation of themes:
This morning a stingray
seeking a poem
of its own
strayed into the estuary
of this one.
Crestfallen, it turned
at my dismissive gesture.
(5)
The phrasing is flawless, truncated; the personification creates pathos. There are undercurrents of regret in this and other poems. “Circular Breathing” describes a scene in which the poet expatriate, hearing the didgeridoo being played in a Rome piazza, is faced with his own neglect and disconnectedness from home:
I want to bolt up the stairs of the fountain
and claim that sound as the sound of my home—
but stop when I recall how rarely I slow to hear
the truer player busking in King George Square.
Memory kinks my measured walk into a lurch.
My stomach fills with fire. Far above cold stars wheel
around the spire of Rome’s oldest Christian church.
(25)
Despite the free verse stanzas the plain, unaffected tone of this poem strengthens its authenticity, providing a human face to a more general theme of colonial inheritance. This sensitivity is appealing to the reader. We encounter it in poems like “Elegy for an Old School Friend” and in the dramatic climax of “Riverfire.” Vulnerabilities are exposed as the poet questions class privilege and cultural assumptions and yet there are distinct sources of conservatism in Savige’s lyrics. His rhymes and puns can be reductive, his registers at times are anachronistic, though they exercise humour as they parody and invoke Elizabethan rhetoric. The repetition of “hum,” “sum, “fun and Om” in the penultimate stanza of “Circular Breathing” strives for a wholeness, that is undone by the closing stanza’s paradox of psychological incompletion.
Juxtapositions arise in tone and image, between the conventional and the new, creating complexity and richness. Savige is the consummate metaphysician, armed with a volley of conceits ranging from gaming, astronomy, love, speed. Space for the poet is a cyber field, where language implodes on the physical surface. Many poems reference the culture of technology, its frames and tropes suitably materialized in a cosmos where “spry grandmothers compose text messages”, where Raphael’s Galatea is a 16th century Paris Hilton, “statuesque on a jetski” with her “skimpy cosi slipping from her hips” and where, according to Wikipedia, the Iliad is an e-book device. “The Iliad” is a witty reflection on the derivative intertextuality of late capitalism which trashes history, dumbing down the Homerian epic to an attractive product. At the same time, it’s a response to the crisis in print. The poet takes up the gauntlet, reversing the assault on language with sweet revenge. It’s an art to extract lyric essence from cultural jargon and I admire his success in poems such as this. Another of my favourites is the sexy, savvy “Disconnect ” with its
Pale wireless mermaid
washed up on the shore
by bright pixeltide.
(43)
Here, the conventionally addressed lady of courtly lyrics is busy booking cheap flights, surfing the net, persuaded by the poet to come to bed, to “close down windows.” and “zip the file.” Reminiscent of Donne or Marvell, Savige renews convention with agile associations of thought, with clarity of image. His variations in rhythm and tone are pleasing. Other poems like “First Person Shooter” are more protracted in their technique, and more contrived theoretically.
There’s no doubt that eschatological concerns run as a sinister theme through the collection, as it questions the auguries of innocence and experience. I found strange Blakean echoes in the poem “Crisis”:
Once I was entrusted with a planet
I was a child in a sweltering house.
All the world’s peace was up to me,
Quiet, cross-legged before the mouse.
(33)
The seemingly naïve child-subject playing a Nintendo PlayStation or Atari game is solely responsible for the planet’s “cinereous grey”, its missiles and “coughing creatures.” Disturbingly, the child’s passive absorption of violence, is imbued with Cold War psychology and the militarisation of space. The emergence of this virtual consciousness, implied by the book’s title, seems informed by experience as much as by theory. It brings to mind Baudrillard’s social philosophies, particularly those concerned with the West’s technological and political global expansion, the way in which the simulacra are seductive. We hear echoes too, of Foucault’s technologies of the self, connecting the microrelations of the subject in space and time with the macrologic of power.
Savige argues that in blurring the distinctions between self and technology, the simulacra have social consequences. In “Missile”, the player will ride to the Pleiades in search of blue jewels, with the trick being
to avert your vision, look off
to one side, allow a less abused
section of the retina to drink
in the distant emanation.
Alterations in tone from awe to nihilism in these shorter lyric pieces create an impact sometimes lacking in the longer poems. While the syntax is conventionally ordered, the diction is restless, the language layered with adjectives and nouns used as verbs as in “zip”, “swing”, “sticky”, “spark”, “out-yoga”, “bail”, “jink”. This action invigorates poems that might otherwise be burdened with logos, jargon or social theory. A recycling of poetic personas and their personal dramas is refreshing in poems like “26 Piazza di Spagna” (Keats’ death place) or the translation of ‘La notte bella” by Ungaretti. “The Minutes” rarefies Auden’s separation of poetry from the world of finance, with the poet recast as fiscal secretary, taking the minutes in the business of illumination. It’s a humourous, though somewhat flat description, symptomatic of the poet’s audacity to address any subject he chooses.
For me, some of the most beautiful poems in this collection are those in which one senses not speed but stillness, when the moment is distilled and thought, emotion and experience are entwined. “Summer Fig” for instance, captures a brief reprieve from “the impossible/puzzle of light, cut by hot oscilloscopes.’ If nature abounds, the simulacra of a crow’s silhouette awaits the poet’s attention, while technology’s shadow is perilously cast by the ‘giant fig,/downloading gigs of shade onto the fresh, cut grass.”
Personal crisis is constantly present, beautifully evoked amidst the civic in “Public Execution”. In “Desuetude” the poet, overwhelmed by life’s economic demands has “fallen outside of the habit.” Yet, constraint is obliquely resisted in the scatological “Posture.” Its edgy rhythms and attitude liberate the poet from political correctness:
“Your voice is so handcuffed
is how it looks to me, every
tremulous bubble frisked
for sense.”
(68)
And in the shapely “Stingray” the marine creature is like a “thought” barbed in the “sea’s mind” “patrolling the palimpsest” where paradise is the antithesis of clarity.
For a second collection it’s an ambitious constellation, which yokes together disparate images and tropes. The poems are layered, skilful, postured and probing. Their permutations operate in versed and free verse forms. Personal crisis is juxtaposed with historical and social contingencies, and yet the collection turns a full circle by its closing poem, “Riverfire”. By taking the statue of Oxley, a 19th century Queensland explorer, down from his pedestal and imbuing him with diverse cultural elements, by giving voice in his last stanzas to a Murri woman who has witnessed a shooting star, Savige turns his gaze from our colonial past to the future. Certainly he has the capacity for such manoeuvres. Savige is a privileged tenant of the “eternal city” whose conservative values are wholeness, resolution and tradition. In Surface to Air he strafes the frontiers of language where power and consciousness are at odds; where risk is mediated.
MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry, fiction and essays and serves as editor for Mascara Literary Review. Vishvarupa is her most recent collection of poems.
April 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Seven Studies for a Self Portrait 
by Jee Leong Koh
Bench Press
Reviewed by CAROL CHAN
Poetry is worth something, but there are more important things. In his essay ‘Art vs Laundry’#, the American literary critic Stephen Burt challenges poets and readers to confront the tension between feeling that poetry is inconsequential, and that it is the main thing– i.e. poems “matter” and can change the world. This unaddressed tension haunts Koh Jee Leong’s second anthology, ‘Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait’.
Aptly titled, this is an obsessively curated volume of free verse poems, riddles, sonnet sequences and ghazals; it comprises seven sections of seven poems each, save for the divan of forty-nine ghazals. Each section interrogates the self through a different mirror: through responses to art, the third person narrative, riddles, abstractions, translations of the Other, emotional landscapes, conversations with the self and appeals to a lover. Perhaps due to the ambition of its premise and intended scope, this anthology unfolds like a series of scientific experiments that don’t quite take off, save for a few and the rewarding title section ‘Seven Studies’.
In search of answers to the limits of language and words, Koh turns to seven artists renowned for their self-portraits (‘Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait’). Arguably the more ‘difficult’ of his poems, these seven Studies are among the most illuminating and rewarding of the anthology. Here, Koh succinctly invokes artists and deftly recreates their art in ten lines; Koh the poet and artist simultaneously unfolding as the poems develop. Where idea and execution do not meet in the other parts of the book, Koh’s precision in words and imagery here carries the tried-and-tested conceit through. For example, with a well-placed line break, Koh evokes van Gogh’s struggle with the Church in the same breath as he skillfully introduces the physical and psychological themes of the artist’s work:
God sank a mineshaft into me for a reason
I could not see in the coalmining district.
Coal dust ate the baby potatoes and beer.
(‘Study #3, After Vincent van Gogh’)
Not a word is out of place- the gravity and bleakness of much of van Gogh’s work immediately translates onto the page with the apt word (“sank”) and vague, ubiquitous detail (“coal dust”).
Koh’s ear for image is pitch-perfect in these poems; the reader unfamiliar with these artists would still be able to appreciate the desperation and restlessness of “Skinny arms kink round my back/ but can’t kill the screeching itch./ The hand can’t scratch its bones” (‘Study #4: After Egon Schiele’), or the energy, wit and irony in Study #2 and #6 (‘After Rembradnt van Rijn’, ‘After Andy Warhol’).
The poems in this collection reveal a critic or academic at work; however, for the most part, this translates into the suppression of poetic instinct behind the lines. Koh’s ‘head suspicious of the heart’ (‘A’), he frequently makes the wrong bet, falling in love with the idea of a poem, the idea of art. And ideas do not a poem make, take for example, ‘Bulb’:
When we unbutton
our skin, our whole
body slips through
and leaves behind
more fleshy skin
for unbuttoning,
and skinnier body
for slipping through
the shrinking hole.
The rounded life.
An onion. A mouth.
‘Bud’, ‘Leaf’, ‘Stem’, ‘Tuber’, ‘Root’ and ‘Fruit’ accompany ‘Bulb’ in the section ‘What We Call Vegetables’. This extract can be read and interpreted several ways. Even if we put aside the issue of what the poem is about, and who these poems are for, the images are weak and awkward, the execution clumsy. This is verse that resembles a poem- it looks like a poem, it sounds like a poem (yes, the sibilances, consonances and assonances recreate aurally the acts of ‘slipping’, ‘unbuttoning’); the rhythm and narrative seem to be leading us to an epiphany or conclusion the reader is expected to be surprised by. The reason ‘Bulb’ exists is that it accompanies an idea, is part of an experiment- the section ‘What We Call Vegetables’ apparently explores/presents explicitly the relation of parts to a whole, etc. But I’m not quite convinced there is any substance here, in the sense that A.C. Bradley employs the term in his 1901 lecture, ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’#.
Bradley argues that the poetic is that which satisfies the reader’s contemplative imagination. A poem convinces the reader of a particular world or moment it inhabits; both substance and form work together seamlessly to develop the poem’s meaning, creating that poetic experience. What frustrates me about Koh’s poems is that there is subject, there is form, but the moments where both dance together in this collection are few and far between. In ‘I Am My Names’ and ‘A Lover’s Recourse’, for example, the form distracts from the subject and my engagement with it. I think I could imagine the rationale behind his choice of the ghazal in his meditations of unrequited/lost love, and the riddle to explore responsibilities and definitions of the self- but I only understand these decisions intellectually. Visually, and read aloud, the riddle only almost works- the declarative answer at the end of each poem (“My name is Mystery. I am a homosexual.”; “My name is Double. I am a lover.”) hints at pretension in the poet’s claim to universality, such as in ‘A’:
Each day revises the day before,
The riddle begun by baby talk,
The walk advanced by toddling aims.
The hands grow quicker than the eyes,
the head suspicious of the heart,
the body’s ardor into age.
My name is Anon. I am a father.
Putting aside the fact that this conjures parodies of Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult film ‘Princess Bride’, this is not a bad poem, only that it is an adequate knock-off of many who have come before him, who have explored ageing, change and rebirth in more sophisticated, surprising ways. I quote this as an example of Koh’s hubris- his inclination towards the cerebral, literary. While his love of form and structure serve him well when there’s something inhabiting the space, so to speak, his intellect is also the source of his carelessness and complacency.
And so, exceptional lines are hidden within the forty nine ghazals, another example of Koh selling himself short for a neat idea (of symmetry- forty-nine being the seventh multiple of seven). Here, as in elsewhere, one gets the sense that Koh is writing for the sake of writing, because he has to fill up the pages, with throwaway lines (“Time is a river. That is if you are a fish./ If you are a sunflower, time is a fire”) and ghazals. ‘The square root of minus money is a movie’, ‘He has not called or written for more than a week’, ‘I see I am the last man drinking in the bar’, ‘The body drives so deeply in desire’s cave’ are some that might be better left out of the collection, filled with clichés (think caves, windows, train stations), dull prose or awkward imagery (door as apple’s skin?).
All of this creating and striving, however, is the result of Koh’s attempt to continually marry his identities as poet, lover, queer, son, to find a new way of expressing love through the physical/sexual or ‘obscene’ in the same breath as the emotional, the pure:
Stop making a big scene about your broken heart.
Put it back in your pants, the soft and weepy heart.
…
The obscene is a view Jee finds congenital.
Between a poem’s legs is found a poet’s heart.
(‘A Lover’s Recourse’)
This risky, admirable attempt to find a new language for poets works best in ‘You smell your fault as readily as you hear a bell’. In each couplet, the bell is variously a metaphor for the poet’s ego, conscience, sexual desire, poetic voice and critic. The bell is presented via a different voice- a command, a musing, an irritation, an action, an effect. These voices and situations work with the central image to develop the complex tensions in desire, thought and action, rendering the abstract ‘bell’ in the final couplet all the more meaningful and powerful in light of the lines before:
The fading is a fault but silence is an itch.
Most unendurable, Jee, is the unrelenting bell.
(‘A Lover’s Recourse’)
However, Koh is best when he speaks the language of frustration, fear and despair. His thoughtful sentiments frequently lapse into cliché, and his efforts at poeticizing ‘cock’ doesn’t always translate on the page. Hence ‘Translations of a Mexican Poet’ and ‘Bull Eclogues’ stood out for me in this collection, reminding me why I looked forward to ‘Seven Portraits’ when I first received it, assuring me this was the same voice behind the modestly confident Equal to the Earth (2009):
At home it makes a smaller sound, the grief.
The click of a light switch. No mercy
in the darkness or the light the house repeats,
but hiding for a time, however brief,
in me, as in my den, I hear the plea
of an unfired bullet in the drawer firing.
(‘The Cave’)
In these lines Koh takes us through a raw psychological landscape in his take on the eclogue. Here, the poem presents to us “in its own way, something which we meet in another form in nature or life”#. Koh’s specific shade of grief is “the click of a light switch”, startling, acute, blinding, immediately omnipresent; this is poetry- an experience composed of but cannot be reduced to that purée of sound, image, rhythm, substance. Confronted with the impossibility of escape, of existing purely on its own, the self that imagines the plea of the “unfired bullet” experiences itself not just as criminal and judge, but simultaneously both: pure crime and punishment.
A relief! Here is a poet that means, not a Poet that much of the anthology presents us. I’d hoped to encounter a Jee that confronted his demons instead of ignoring them; despite the evident musicality in his writing, clumsy lines (“an empty noose that hanged straight by its weight”, “a bus handrail is sticking in my uterus like a huge thumbtack”), unrefined metaphors and images, bad puns (leaves, speed) still puzzlingly appear in this book more frequently than in Equal to the Earth. In his risk and reach for the ‘bigger picture’ (meta-narrative and intellectual coherence of the collection), it seems that Koh has not quite come to terms with the value of poetry (as Burt reminds us) – what poetry is for, why we write.
But here is a poet clearly earnest about challenging himself, pushing the limits of contemporary poetry, willing to take risks, even if not all of them pay off. For all of my unease and disappointment with this collection, Koh has taken a worthy risk with ‘Seven Portraits’, in context of the Singapore poetry scene. Perhaps this book can be read as his response to “politeness/ or fear or disbelief”; his irreverence, versatility with form and voice, and willingness to experiment thoughtfully creates new spaces for discussion in a maturing literary community. Koh writes, “I hope perfection does not lie in quietness”. I believe so, and find myself hoping for more beauty among the ruins in his future work.
April 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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).
April 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems
Ed Michael Byrne
Ginninderra Press
ISBN 978 1 74027 650 4
Reviewed by ED WRIGHT
The American poet Charles Simic once commented in Verse magazine that “Writing a prose poem is a bit like trying to catch a fly in a dark room. The fly probably isn’t even there, the fly is inside your head, still, you keep tripping over and bumping into things in hot pursuit. The prose poem is a burst of language following a collision with a large piece of furniture.” Having emerged through the rebellious anti-formalism of late-nineteenth century French poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the prose poem has maintained a sense of the unconventional, and of the enigmatic given that it exists in the slippery spaces around what might be poetry and what might more aptly be described as prose.
An anthology of Australian Prose Poems is a neat idea, so power to Michael Byrne for getting this one together. There are some tremendous poems here; ones that have eschewed the lines of verse in favour of the sentence and paragraph, but still manage to shift the readers’ angles of thought as all good poetry should.
Stand-outs include Joanne Burns’s dramatic monologues, most notably ‘marble surfaces,’ which takes us into the inner world of a butcher; John Scott’s extracts from the longer work, ‘Slippages,’ and Peter Boyle’s fragments of fantastic logic, such as ‘Philosophers and Other World Leaders.” Other big guns of Australia’s poetry are to be found here too. The poems by John Forbes and John Tranter are great, as is Tom Shapcott’s ‘Concert Arias.’ Poems of lesser known poets such as Tatjana Lukic’s ‘Sleepless in Canberra, or George Huitker’s ‘The Soccer Coach Gets Philosophical’ are also worth discovering.
While Byrne brings to our attention some great poems unfortunately, as an anthology, this collection is something of a letdown. The great problem is its sheer unrepresentativeness. There are far too many baby boomer poets, and too many works from lesser practitioners within this set. A gender division doesn’t seem apparent since gender division since Ania Walwicz, Vicki Viidikas and Anna Couani are all included in the volume, but of the 43 poets represented, 36 are boomers. Of course the new Australian poetry of the late sixties is known for its championing of the form. However, even if Gary Catalano was the sixties poet known specifically for his prose poetry, he is not a strong enough poet (despite Les Murray’s panegyric) to warrant ten outings in this rather slim 150 page volume.
Worse still is that some of the included here read more like misplaced paragraphs than prose poems. Deprived of the space created by verse lines, some become afflicted by a dense banality. Tim Metcalf’s ‘The Airman Rolls’ away begins for instance:
‘I have always found conversation a little stifled when wiping clean the papery skin of the incontinent. First my potential partner in conversation is rolled away with their back to me; and second trying to hold my breath disrupts the natural flow of words and the pauses in between them. So I say little, mouth breathe to avoid the smell, and ask myself the same question over and over again: ‘where is the poem in this?’
Others are reduced to reading like . . . regular prose. There are stray travel observations that resonate little. Geoff Page’s “Cathedral in Castile,” for example, or Gary Catalano’s ‘Theatre,’ which is set in Paris. Perhaps the problem here is that these poems are anchored in an era when travel retained its rarity. When to name such places cast an aura and granted their invokers absolution from a still extant cultural cringe. However, other poems based on travel reminiscence, notably Phillip Hammial’s ‘Pygmies’, with its witty self-awareness, and Judith Beveridge’s ‘Flower of Flowers’ with its sheer sensuality transcend their localities and linger in the mind.
Some of the weaker poems in this anthology are cute but ultimately throwaway thought pieces. Catalano’s ‘Books’ is one example. It starts off “Books must prefer their own company to those of human beings, who rarely use them in the proper or appropriate way.’ The cuteness of the idea comes a cropper in the execution of it, particularly through the clunkiness of using both “proper” and “appropriate,” and in the extension of a small idea into a conceit.
If Byrne had cast his net a little wider, he could easily have found more memorable stuff, more variety of it, and this anthology would have been much improved. Given he is not a babyboomer himself, it’s hard to understand why he hasn’t done this.
Another problem with this concentration is that it denies the Australian prose poem a sense of its own narrative or development. The only pre-boomer poet included here is Bruce Beaver, and while this reflects the emergence of the genre in the sixties, Byrnes’s selections give little idea of how this sub-genre may have developed in the almost fifty years since this seminal cultural moment. Placing the poems in an obvious chronological order may have helped the idea of such a narrative, especially as the included work of younger poets feels scattered and arbitrary.
Alternatively, Byrne might have narrowed his criteria and restricted the anthology to the sixties poets. Then it would have worked as a particular distillation of a generation. But to present this as “the (Indigo) Book of Australian Prose Poems” is to infer limits that don’t exist. While he must be commended for retrieving so many excellent poems and putting them together in the context of their genre, it’s hard to be satisfied as a reader when you are left thinking that this anthology could have been so much more.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
warming the core of things
by Nora Krouk
Hybrid Publishers
ISBN: 978192166543
Reviewed by BROOK EMERY
Over the last few months, while all the wise futurists have been forecasting the decline of the book and the ascension of the virtual word, I’ve been thinking about why I’m so attracted to books, specifically to poetry BOOKS, to collections of poetry. I’m not much good at reading poems on the web and I often feel dissatisfied when I read single poems by various authors in journals and anthologies, even in hard copy, even in canon-making anthologies such as The Norton. To me, in these formats poems seem to be isolated, un-contextualised, orphans. I find myself reading one poem after another subconsciously saying things like ‘Oh, that’s not bad’, ‘Yeah, I quite like that one’, ‘There’s not much in this one, is there?’ and flipping (or scrolling) to the next one without really engaging with the poems or feeling involved. I find myself hanging out for a book of poems by the one author so I can get some sense of narrative and coherence, a feeling that the poems speak to each other and enrich each other, a sense of the voice, and personality, and world experience behind the poems.
These considerations came back to me strongly as I was reading Nora’s warming the core of things for the first time. This is a book which invites you to enter and share a life. It is a book which, poem by poem, builds into a unified and challenging consideration of what has been observed and experienced over many years. It is a book in which the overwhelming feeling is ‘warmth’, literally and metaphorically. Such warmth is doubly attractive and welcoming at a time when a lot of poetry is cool, detached, clever, and sometimes seems to have lost touch with that really basic responsibility of poetry to reach out, to connect, and to explore what it is like to be human in our thoughts and feelings.
Warming the core of things is a book which is intimate, confessional (if you like). It celebrates the personal, the familial, and the emotional, it concerns itself with the relationships between people over time. It makes me think of lines from Jack Gilbert’s poem, ‘Highlights and Interstices’ where he writes ‘… our lives happen between / the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual / breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about / her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.’ Like Gilbert, but in a very different way, Nora raises the everyday to moments of insight and appreciation. And like Gilbert, despite what he says about himself, Nora does remember both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Two of the things she and Gilbert remember and feel acutely are love and loss.
The first section of Nora’s collection is titled ‘In Memoriam’ and begins with a delicate poem to her husband Efim who died in 2008. The poem ends with the simple, dignified statement, ‘I miss you’ but this section is no simple, romanticised portrait of a long marriage and the death of a partner. It is clear-eyed, emotionally honest and vivid in its realism. It notes the tensions and ironies and ordinariness in lines such as, ‘she hates to leave him alone / yet itches to step outside’ (‘They are together most days’), in the white chair that waits ‘brazen with coloured cushions’ (‘Slumped in a chair’), in the ‘bare bottoms and other bits’ and the ‘inmates with anguished eyes / [who] search for themselves / [and] stumble over the shards’ (‘Ward 15’). The section expands to take in other deaths, other inevitabilities, and below the surface of them all are the perennial human questions, ‘Why?’ and ‘Couldn’t it have been different?’ Usually the questions are implied but sometimes they are explicitly stated as at the end of the poem ‘Blue Doona’ when Nora asks, ‘Couldn’t you just live?’ It is worth remembering that question from an early poem when you come to the last poem in the book. I’ll say something about this later because it reveals a great deal about Nora’s vision. These poems, these wishes, are moving, touching, but Nora doesn’t live in fantasy, she knows that what happened has happened and nothing can change it or take away the grief because, as she writes in ‘Birthday’, ‘Love is the most pitiless feeling of all’. To really understand the import of this statement, to unpick the relationship between ‘pity’, ‘pitiless’ and ‘love’, you not only have to read the whole poem but the whole collection. Only then will you appreciate the wisdom and emotional intelligence of this collection. Nora is a participant in these poems but she is also the thoughtful observer and interpreter. These are poems in which the border between life and art is more porous than is often the case. It takes courage, assurance and depth to be able to write, ‘My dearest dearest difficult / husband My love’ (‘What should I do’).
The capacity for love leads to an indignity at injustice, especially the injustice done to the individual by the impersonal forces of history. It is there explicitly in some poems and is the context in which the personal happens. Nora has lived a memorable life and she remembers and can see, at this distance, things as they were, that ‘The good times in Shanghai / [were] a 20th century masquerade / as the world burned’. Nora also sees, for example in the poem ‘For Leon K’, how the effects of not knowing – ‘What did they do / before his boots were filling with blood’ – can reverberate through the decades and continue to hurt, even cripple. Nora is witness and rememberer of a father who had to break with his Polish past, of a mother ‘buried in Chinese soil / without a headstone / during the Cultural / Revolution’ (‘A short visit’), of massacres in China, experiments on humans in Harbin, of atrocities committed in war. That the personal is the political is a bit of a silly phrase but Nora’s poetry reminds us that we are all part of events that seem to have happened ‘over there’ or ‘back then’ or to ‘someone else’. Reading these poems we are reminded that no man (no woman) is an island.
Warming the core of things changes gears somewhat in the second section which is called ‘Renewals’. Here the warmth and love which were manifest within the sadness and grief are expressed in a sensual joy in beauty and in a determination to appreciate the bounty of nature. Here the poems are overflowing with wisteria, lavender, roses, gardenias, asters, food, friends, and the warmth of the sun. In the first poem ‘A smile is hovering over our street’ (‘A young woman’), in another ‘this day is / a glob / of honey / a pouring warmth’ (‘Dust on the silver chimes’), in another ‘ Like that butterfly / drunk / on sun / I claim it all: My sun!’ (‘Like that butterfly’), in another Nora is ‘… grateful to Fate / for landing in the sun’. (‘Memory’), and in ‘Shanghai Sydney’ Nora is ‘moving through an amazing puzzle / picking a piece / here on my palm / wishing I knew a psalm / or a prayer of thanks // For everything’ (‘Shanghai Sydney). This section of Nora’s book transforms as well as renews.
If warmth and wisdom are the two dominant qualities of this book, it is the voice of the poems which makes them so attractive. Nora often jokes that her Russian typewriter mischievously makes syntactical or idiomatic mistakes in her poems or, perhaps, even writes the poems without her intervention. I don’t quite believe her because I hear her voice in so many of the poems, in little statements and questions, especially questions. I constantly hear Nora asking herself what she knows, what she has learnt, what she then believed and now believes, what she can do about fate, the inevitable. This is most notable in the third section of the book, ‘Transitions’ in which Nora has a number of conversations with God, humorously wonders about chaos theory and deals with a number of more or less philosophical issues. So many of these poems have a quality of consideration and reconsideration which is made explicit, appropriately near the end of the book, in the poem ‘Once I could plan or act’. This is not dogmatic poetry but the book does grope towards tentative, provisional answers. This testing of ideas can be seen, for example, in Nora’s identification with the sasanqua in ‘Sasanqua in May’
Gold tipped unblinking lashes
in floral faces
focus determination
to bloom to hang on
through alternating currents
of chill air
tucked in the permanence
of green leaves
over the strewn wax petals
trampled to death
they cling to relevance
to celebration of
Here and Now
without blinking.
I know the feeling.
A similar hard-won understanding or, at least, acceptance occurs in the poem, ‘Discussions about God’ where she writes ‘My slender beautiful / jacaranda comes / into bloom slowly / It blooms and sheds / sheds and blooms // Is this the answer?
For me, a baby boomer born and raised safely in Sydney who has not known depression, revolution, war, dislocation, internment, expatriation or, on the other hand, the high, fashionable life, who has taught history but didn’t live it, these poems make me realise how little I know, how little I understand, how little I have experienced.
Here is where you have to remember that early poem.The last word in Nora’s book is ‘live’ with an exclamation mark and that feels appropriate and significant to me. As does the epigraph to the last section of the book, a Ukranian saying, ‘Wishing you good health, warm bread, and peaceful skies’. In its entirety, warming the core of things is full of life; it endorses and celebrates that Ukranian saying.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Out to Lunch
by Andy Kissane
Puncher and Wattmann
ISBN:9781921450204
Reviewed by ANDY JACKSON
Among other things, Andy Kissane’s poetry in Out to Lunch focusses on suburbia, public transport, family, television, the beach and sausages. So, why am I surprised to be moved? And, not only moved, but challenged?
That the visceral, emotional experience of this collection is accompanied by such a sense of surprise is to me a reminder of how much I have still unconsciously bought into the myth of novelty and obscurity. Kissane writes accessible, unpretentious, often humourous, subtly thoughtful poems. They use language that isn’t a long way from the vernacular, what you might overhear at the food court or the pub, eavesdropping. But it is a language carefully calibrated to heighten the sense of the momentous within the everyday. Not to eclipse the everyday, but to attend to it – something like the effect of a film slowing down, heightening the meaning of small gestures, glances and events. It is a deliberate effect, sure, but it’s entirely unforced and natural – as in “Visiting Melbourne”, these are poems seemingly “sung / by lungs that never pause to think of breathing”.
This comes out intriguingly in “The Earlwood-Bardwell Park Song Cycle”, his ambitious and accomplished response to Les Murray’s “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” (which Kissane rightly reminds us is itself a response to the Wonguri-Mandjigai Song-Cycle of the Moon Bone). Whereas Murray’s poem is an attempt to fuse Aboriginal storytelling with a European-Australian attachment to country attuned through annual holiday-making, Kissane takes a more modest and respectful tack. It contains something of the same grammatical structure and heightened attention to place, but it maintains Kissane’s characteristic clarity and light touch. His “Song Cycle” is the Australian suburban world as it is lived day to day. It begins “the long holiday is over”, and flows through all the regular movements of traffic, work, home, shopping, crime, birdlife, the small epiphanies gained and missed. Near its climax, the poem speaks “of the people who gave Gumbramorra Swamp / its name, the Gwiyagal people, who were here first and are still / here, who fished and lived and moved in this place, here”. In this, it is not only a revision but a critique of Murray’s epic reach, baulking at a presumptuous appropriation of an indigenous worldview.
Most of the poems in Out to Lunch are structured in a taut and concentrated casual way, reminiscent of Robert Hass or Billy Collins, yet arguably even more deceptively casual. I say ‘deceptively’ because very often the sensation of a Kissane poem is of someone sitting beside you to tell you what has happened to them, and just as you’ve entered into that familiar world, something twists or jolts you into somewhere exhilaratingly unexpected, though on second glance intuitively connected. For instance, “Falling through the Hoop” contains a string of scenes and memories that touch on the life of “Heinz”. It moves from an image of skinny-dipping at Elwood beach, to “a suspension bridge across a ravine”, then to Heinz’s sudden suicide. At this point, Kissane, as he often does at moments like this in his poems, recedes into an admission of ignorance – “some moments / resist, no matter how you worry / at them, or pound them, they will not / answer, they will not come back”, aware that the reader will understand that these “moments” are also the people who he has lost.
To me, this is one of the most intriguing aspects of Out to Lunch. Many of its best poems, while rooted in autobiographical specifics and a familiar suburban milieu, grapple honestly with the suffering of others, and with the limitations of that grappling. The poet is clearly aware of, and uncomfortable with, global inequalities, and acutely aware of the great distance between his own life and the lives of others. His poems apprehend political complexities through the very intimate lens of empathy and imagination. The very real dilemma of attempting to integrate global realities with daily routine is vividly evoked in “The Colour of Starvation”. Here, Kissane remembers watching as a teenager a documentary set “somewhere in Africa or India, where many people / were poor and starving” and his subsequent anger at his family’s material comfort, acknowledging how easily an awareness of the other slides into self-consciousness. The poem weaves this story into a meditation on William Morris, 19th century artist, textile designer and socialist; the poet’s desire to write about sweat-shop labour from the comfort of his desk; and the pleasures of food, beautiful objects and sunlight. The poem leads us towards a familiar, uncomfortable compassion and refuses to provide solutions. As these juxtapositions build through the course of the book, as a reader, I begin to want the poet to attempt some leap towards resolution or provocation, but Kissane eschews definitive answers in favour of the clarity of the poem’s evocation of reality. Or, to put it another way, he overtly recognises the relative impotence of the poem to directly affect injustice – thereby allowing it to have impact in the affective field.
Throughout Out to Lunch there are small, concentrated statements of poetics, either implied or in the case of “Joy and a Fibro Shack” overt. The poem begins with an exploration of poetry as “like the difficulty of building a house / without a plan, a wood, a hammer”, moving further into the metaphor, until the deliberately prosaic lines “Is a poem a palace or a humpy? / I prefer humpies, furnished from a daggy couch / reclaimed from the council clean-up”. If this was the extent of the poem, it may feel underwhelming, but it shifts gear, as Kissane often does, through memory into a secondary metaphor that is just as clear and subtle, while also refusing resolution. It ends with the poet “up at 3am, / walking the kitchen, walking the hallway, walking / the lounge room, holding a baby / who would not stop, would not stop, / just would not stop crying”. We know that the poet is in control of this poem, but at its closure, we are left also with his awe at the wildness and hunger of poetry.
The question is, what holds this collection together? How could it be said that these poems are out to lunch? This is perhaps my only serious qualm with the book – the title. The suggestion of daydreaming in Out to Lunch certainly alludes to the shifts and leaps which provide much of the energy and surprise of the collection. And it also hints at the “Meat Matters” series of poems, where meat in its various cuts and recipes is given centre stage (which is sometimes quite funny and memorable, but also left this vegetarian a little cold) . But the idiom to me is too much rooted in the negative or apologetic, bringing to mind someone who instinctively wants to escape from the everyday with their imagination, someone unconcerned with the world as it is and their responsibility to it. This is not Kissane.
This, of course, is a minor issue. Kissane is a great craftsman, the writing finely shaped yet always fluid and naturalistic. Out to Lunch was deservedly shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize – the poems are warm, subtly complex and humane. Its peculiar and ongoing resonance comes from its full immersion in reality and memory, where moments of detail remind us of the constructed and limited nature of the poem, moments that foreground ignorance, that imply that life goes on through not knowing.
Leaving Home is to my mind perhaps the highlight of the collection. It epitomises Kissane’s ability to fuse the quotidian with surprise and understated emotion. From a domestic family scene where –
The oven door was permanently ajar,
hanging by its last hinge, when my mother
crossed the kitchen and planted a kiss
on my father’s bristly cheek…
to a magical, yet matter-of-factly stated transformation –
‘At last’, she said to herself, ‘I have managed
to get my priorities right’ – and with that
the feathers sprouted from her scapula
and her dentures dropped, orphan-like,
from her lips…
ANDY JACKSON’s collection, Among the Regulars (papertiger media, 2010) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. In late 2011, he will be an Asialink resident at Chennai, India. He blogs at amongtheregulars.wordpress.com
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
amphora
by joanne burns 
Giramondo Publishing, 2011
ISBN 9781920882631
Reviewed by IVY IRELAND
quadrillions of singing atoms: joanne burns’ amphora
joanne burns’ most recent collection, amphora, could almost be a gold-bound book of saints, if it weren’t for the utterly human myths also seeping through its pages. The collection’s amphorae are filled to brimming with hagiography, angelology and quite a bit of effortless nostalgia. In fact, burns’ well-loved quirks and smarts flood out of this collection, unable to be contained by the ancient vessels of the title. Dipping into the overflowing liquids of the ceramic jars, the reader discovers not only the holy waters of poignant scientific enquiry, but also the pink lemonade of PopThink. There is a great sense of questing after the divine threading throughout these poems, even if it is the divine discovered in such suburban tasks as trimming the unruly Bougainvillea or sucking on lifesavers during rosary.
What strikes me most when reading burns’ work is her tenacious grasp on the humble quotidian, her understanding of the layers beneath the hours and her willingness to unravel the cosmos into quarks and photons without losing her grasp on self and home. “streamers”, burns’ collection of koans, koannes, give the most intimate examples of this:
weigh the rice before you boil it
how else can you catch up
with yourself
“rung” is, to my thinking, the stand-out poetry sequence of the collection. The ladder is the subject of this humble, yet unrelenting, enquiry into what goes up and what comes down. Jacob, Yeats and Miro feature here, of course, but it’s burns’ own nostalgic reflections that contain the best clue to the importance of this everyday tool:
great thorny branches of bouganvillia leap and lurch
towards the sky; junglegreen and purple riot in the air.
i try to prune them. cut them back into some kind of
order no topiary, after my father dies; his ladder is my
ladder now
And yet every lofty, perhaps enlightened buzz-moment, such as:
yeats knew the disloyalty of ladders
the vanishing of rungs in the windy spaces
of old minds; who end up after all those heady
moments back down on hands and knees across
familiar rubbled ground, small hearts picking through
the rags and bones of diminished time;
is craftily snatched away again by simple memories from the human psyche box:
but me. i look for an easier solution. enough of biblical
endurance and ordealism. i climb down the ladder
of memory.
Throughout amphora, burns tackles even the most typical Christian icons, such as saints and angels, with her witty, playful antennae intact. The opening poem (from the aptly named “angles not angels” section) of the collection, “pitch,” claims:
… i don’t want an angel with huge wings
that rustle, i need someone quiet who likes to dust and shop and
vacuum while i recline and dream up poems and skim through
dictionaries and roget’s there is something about the sight
and thought of those angel wings in most religious art
that makes me shudder
suggesting that it is the typical domestic joys that truly keep the divine (and the poet) afloat in this sea of the extraordinary. And this book of poems is awash with the extraordinary, simply packed to the brim with mini-insights that eek out of the “pleroma” and into the mind of the sage sensitive enough to capture them and distil them down for the everyday reader. Even the almost-accidental, scattered and observational poems of the final section of the collection, “this week next week the week after” contain snippets of insight that can only be described as near-mythological or Zen-instructive:
you can’t rely on the sky
to help you sort it out it just hangs
there like a lout sucking on a milk
shake and letting it all happen the burning years
and again:
the poems are running
running away running from
that dread of having to explain
themselves, those lists of
food ingredients they’veread on the back of packets
instant noodles for example;
The blurb on the back of burn’s book states that “from… common things, from familiar words and phrases… burns draws attitudes that define a way of living – gladness, openness, curiosity, acceptance and above all sensual delight.” Indeed there is a delightful gladness skipping throughout the pages of amphora, even in the midst of the most sardonic observations. Yet I would add that, even through all of this all-consuming openness, there’s a sense of mocking the openness, as through nothing is sacred because everything is. Everything is, thus, worthy of the air-knives of burns’ observational skills because the simple holiness contained within these mocked saints and abjured louts will act as their own necessary shields.
amphora is a mini-world of quarks and paradox, dissecting gods and saints alongside the contents of a school lunchbox. And the variations in theme are almost equivalent to the variations in form. burns’ trademark prose poems are still to be found here, yet she seems to play a lot with lineation in this collection also, as evident in “raft”:
i dream of the Gnostic pleroma
before the light and dark fissure,
the superstitious rifting: eternal hymn
Throughout amphora, however, nothing remains in stasis. It is a book of changes: mercurial, honest, undoing itself at every turn. Even the glorious realisations contained in these stanzas of undulating internal rhythms and rhymes are undone in the next instant:
…pleroma,
foremost world of fullness; did the gnostics eat
grated carrot?
Reading through amphora repeatedly (and consider yourself warned: this collection will need second and third reading), I discover that, for me, it’s not the vast, eclectic field burns is plucking her poetics from that packs the most punch (though I must say I am wowed even by the neologisms). Instead, the true magic lies in the intimate realisations, in the nostalgic, expounded memory-shards that unfold from these poems. These snippets of insight into the specific journey of one human psyche, such as this image from “relief,” truly sing:
the smell of that old school chalk. how time slips
away but the smell doesn’t. smell of your teenage
slip singeing after you wrapped it around your
bedlamp late at night on a school day, anxious to
conceal your awakeness from your mother while
you devour ‘the picture of dorian grey’. giving the
gods of reading lust the slip as a burnt offering.
I feel certain that the great gods of reading lust will accept joanne burns’ latest offering with all the zest it deserves.
IVY IRELAND is a part-time cabaret performer, creative writing tutor, harpist, magician’s assistant and Ph.D candidate. Ivy was awarded the 2007 Australian Young Poet Fellowship, and has had her poems published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Ivy’s first solo poetry publication came out in 2007 and is entitled Incidental Complications.
This Woman
