Ouyang Yu: To Be(long) or Not to Be(long): Issues Of Belonging In A Post-multicultural Australia

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Belonging is longing, a longing. For migrants to live in a land they have chosen to settle themselves in, to be(long) or not to be(long) is a crucial question. It depends on what they long for: Is it a temporary abode for short-term benefits before packing up and going home, a permanent enclave on its own or a (second) home where they feel they truly belong or want to be long in? This paper seeks to examine issues of belonging for first and second generation mainland Chinese migrants in a post-malticultural Australia where the idea of multiculturalism is being rendered increasingly obsolete, becoming almost ‘mal’ as in the sense of malfunctioning.[1] The discussion will be based on three books, Wang Hong’s novel, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots), Shen Zhimin’s novel, donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) and Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan)’s photographic novel, he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You).

‘I should never have come to Australia, I should never have left my country’[2]

Wang Hong, born in Shanghai in 1962, is a Chinese woman novelist who stayed and studied in Australia from 1990 to 1992 before her return to China in 1993.[3] Apart from this, there is little biographical information on the dust jacket except a curious little note at the end of her Chinese novel, jile yingwu (Extremely Happy Parrots), published in September 2002. The note goes, in my translation, ‘Sixth draft 2000/12/8’.[4] One can work out from this that it must have taken her seven years and six drafts to finish writing the novel; further, it must have taken her about two years to find a publisher and get the novel published, nine years after her return to China. It wouldn’t be a far-fetched conjecture that the novel bears some parallel to her own life in that the main protagonist, Ma Lan,[5] returns to China after her failed attempt to stay in Australia through a fake arranged marriage, first with an Italian, then with another man of unidentified nationality by the name of Ma Er Fu (Marf?). True to the synopsis on the back cover of the book, the novel has a ‘wonderful sense of poetry’[6] and, in my view, presents a haunting image of Chinese student lives as if caught in a time warp, a vacuum created as much by their own blind, obstinate attempts to stay as by Australia’s indifference towards their fate, and worse, by Australia’s philistine acts to make a buck by fraud through the performance of characters like Ao Lie Fo (Oliver) and his family.

jile yingwu is a painful novel to read. It traces Ma Lan’s short sojourn in Australia as grape-picker, orange-picker, lemon-picker, cleaner and hospice-carer, in places ranging from Red Cliffs on the South-Australia and Victoria border to Westfield in Sydney. In China, this university graduate ‘tried her best to learn English…in order to chuguo [out the country, meaning going overseas] one day.’ (23)[7] After she finishes her studies in Australia, she has to extend her visa but lacks the money to do it. In order to stay, she borrows money to pay Oliver to secure her a partner in a fake marriage. When this does not work, she enters into an arranged marriage with Ma Er Fu in an attempt to stay but decides to leave for China after she aborts her baby. The day she leaves, Ma Er Fu says to her:

You are right. Why must you live in this country in the southern hemisphere? There’s no reason why. I can’t see any reason. I understand you. Like you, I also suffer from homesickness….I have left my home far too long. I feel that my inner heart has lost this strength. Living is a habit. The past has been severed and so it is impossible now. I am not living. I am only surviving and hoping that one day I may live better. If I were you, I would perhaps do the same. As long as you believe that huiguo [return country or returning to your home country] makes you happy, you should huiguo.’[8]

In the extreme circumstances in which she finds herself, deep in debt from both her own family in China and the Oliver family, Ma Lan has to scrape a living by doing the hard labor as a fruit picker, getting paid 0.39 cents for 10 kilos of grapes picked (6). When she marries Ma Er Fu she has only ten dollars in her account (98). She has to rely on superstitious belief for solace. For example, when Oliver’s mother dies and is about to be shipped back to her gutu [native earth or native land], Ma Lan thinks aloud to herself:

            One person leaves Australia.

            One person enters Australia.

            The matter of the world is indestructible. This person who enters should be her! (14)

She also willfully persists in her other superstitious belief that she is somehow from the Jewish stock that is ‘distinctly different from hanren [Han people or Chinese people]’ (20) and that it is because of her ‘unresearcheable ancestry-Jewish or tujue [Turkish] merchants’ that she has ‘come ten thousand li at the end of the century to the southern hemisphere to tie the knot of marriage with someone originally from there’ (187), that someone being Ma Er Fu.

All Ma Lan ever manages to do in Australia, though, is, as she says, ‘living abjectly-for a green card’ (175), a life that is ‘finished, dead’, and she feels that if she does not sum it all up, ‘what shall arrive is only an extension of death’ (176). Here, one can’t but recall Ouyang Yu’s contemplation that ‘living in australia is living after death’.[9]

Other Chinese students fare hardly better than Ma Lan: Yang Fan does not speak English, thus rendered deaf and dumb ever since his coming to Australia (94); Lao Yan writes a letter containing his first-time payment of 100 Australian dollars that will never reach his wife in China (27), which act repeats itself to a painful degree; and Qin Yue foolishly persists in her fantasy that only by studying hard could she somehow hope to change her fate (71). Their names are ultimate symbols of irony and terror, Yang Fan meaning ‘setting sail’ and, as part of the phrase, yangfan yuanhang, implying he’s someone setting sail for a distant voyage with great hopes; Lao Yan hinting at Old Devil; and Qin Yue, Qin Moon, a woman from one of the oldest stocks of the Chinese civilization, right back to the Qin Dynasty (BC 221-207). The place names are also imbued with a sense of the macabre as the Murray River is transliterated as mai lei he (Wheat Tears River) or deliberately mis-spelt in an English poem written by Ma Lan as ‘Marry River’ (85).

Added to this is a host of other characters, most of them immigrants whose nationalities remain undisclosed, including the fraudulent Oliver family who lose two members in 10 days, giving false hope to Ma Lan and Qin Yue; Ma Er Fu whose Jewish or Turkish stock is vaguely alluded to and who wonders if he should ever have come to Australia (284); and Steven, an Australian-born Hungarian who plays the role of a Chinese in a play in which no Chinese are allowed (225), the only one who does not have a guishu gan [a sense of belonging] when he goes back to Hungary. He says, ‘when I look at them [Hungarians], I am looking at completely foreign people. Secretly, I even think people there look ugly’ (225). The interesting thing here is that Ma Lan does not identify with Steven. She ‘looks at him, without curiosity, without polite concern’ and ‘her silence bears out that his appeal is rather affected’ (225).

Throughout, there is not a single mention of words like racism or multiculturalism. Only in one scene, Liz, an Australian patient, is heard to speak sharply to Ma Lan and Xiao, a Pacific Islander. ‘ “You, you Asians get out!” The old lady tells them ferociously. “Get out of our country!” ’ (275). What follows is a quite unusual musing about happiness by Ma Lan when Liz’s son in a ‘fine’ suit asks her where she learnt her ‘good’ English:

Ma Lan’s voice sounds flat. She goes out of the room. She is weary of the way others look [at her]. Nothing will change because of the conversation. He wears a fine suit and thinks he can take pity on her because she speaks English with an English accent. She is a civilized person from an ancient, savage land. She has given all her life to learn English. However, here it is the air everyone breathes. If she had learnt something else, if she were a senior staff member in a transnational company, would her life be worth more? When she worked in a big company in guonei [inside country, meaning China] and also wore a fine suit, she didn’t feel superior to people, she didn’t feel happy.

Happiness is so rare it can only come from the inner heart (276).

Where does Ma Lan belong in Australia? One can only gauge by where she situates herself in relation to Australia. In Sydney, ‘she feels like walking on the edge of this city, this city on the edge of the ocean, the continent that this city belongs to being surrounded by the blue sea water, turning around the edge of the planet in which they were born’ (258). Australia means nothing to her. At best, it is a place for her to be ‘walking through’, ‘without leaving a trace (278)’.

Interestingly, in an unlikely place, Rose, Tom’s mother in Tony Ayres feature film, Home Song Stories (2007), has said the same thing as expressed by Ma Lan that she ‘should never have come to Australia’.[10]

san yuan se[11]: the three original colors

When Shen Jiawei, normally known as Jiawei Shen, the Australian-Chinese artist, did a portrait for John So, Lord Mayor of Melbourne, he combined three major elements in the painting: John So’s Chinese face and his Aboriginal attire dealt in oils,[12] an artistic style that originated in the West, read white. Interestingly, more than a decade ago, prior to this portrait executed, in the early 1990s, when The Ancestor Game by Alex Miller was published, there is description of a harmonious relationship between Chinese, Irish and Aboriginal people, as exemplified by Noonan, Feng and Dorset, which was actually based on a goldfield painting by Joseph Johnson, featuring a Chinese, an Irishman and an Aboriginal person playing euchre that was supposedly a reflection of early harmony existing among these very different peoples before racism set in and wrought a havoc that has cast a long shadow over Australia.[13] It may sound exclusive towards people of other nationalities and ethnicities but this concern with the three original colours has been an age-old one with people from as diverse backgrounds as Scottish (Hume Nisbet), Hungarian (David Martin) and white Australian (Xavier Herbert), to whom Chinese play a linking role between the black and the white.[14] In donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) by Shen Zhimin, the combination of the three original colours forms the basis of the novel, in which an Aboriginal boy, a Chinese boy and a white Australian boy go hand in hand in search of Australia’s Aboriginal origin, symbolized by the shangxin zhi di (heart-broken place or heart-breaking place) where a massacre had taken place 200 years ago involving many Aboriginal deaths (227), and, in the process, discover themselves. It is a much happier novel than the ironically titled, Extremely Happy Parrots, in that the three boys choose to live an outcast’s life by roaming the country, casting their sense of belonging to the four winds.

The stories of these three boys roaming the country in search of treasure, spiritual and otherwise, are less important than the idea that lies behind the construction of the novel. This idea reflects a significant realization, albeit limited, on the part of the author that the key to racial and cultural harmony in Australia is a blending of the three primary colours and it is based on this realization that Shen assigns roles for the three boys to play. What is more intriguing is the fact that two of the boys come from disreputable family backgrounds, tang mu si (Thomas), illegitimate son of a conservative MP who commits suicide after his affair is exposed and Gao Qiang [meaning High Strong], son of a corrupt Chinese company director. When these family tragedies occur, Thomas and Gao Qiang become homeless, straying into Redfern where they befriend tu gu [meaning Earth Valley], the Aboriginal boy, and fight together against the police in the Redfern Riots.[15] It is obvious that an echo to Australia’s convict past is implied in the family background of Thomas and Gao Qiang in that both have come from a disgraced family background and a defiance of Australian police, symbol of state control and power, is shown through their fight in the riots. Despite rather stereotypical portraits of the three boys, e.g., Tu Gu as someone who does not care about money (89) and who identifies strongly with the wandering spirit of an eternal traveler ge lan te (Grant) (125), Gao Qiang as someone overwhelmingly concerned with money (89, 129) and Thomas as someone ‘the most brainy’, full of intelligent ideas (135), the novel nevertheless reveals a darker truth about Australia as a place not fit for Chinese to stay. After all their adventures involving fights against a rascal si di mu (Steam), their musical band going places and their search for gold, etc, Gao Qiang ‘is going back to China’ (318). The novel ends with Gao Qiang saying, in response to the questions from Tu Gu and Thomas as to why he is going back, ‘You forgot. Didn’t I say that I was going to run a trading company and come to Australia to do business? When I make money and make a fortune, I shall invite you to have fun in China.’ (318)

It is worth noting that, by comparison with Wang Hong, Shen’s message is upbeat about his three fictional boys, as reflected in a remark made by Grant, an erstwhile bank manager who gives up on his work in favour of traveling alone, having been traveling on the road for 25 years, without family or kids. He says that after he gets on the road, he ‘thinks of wanting to go home less and less’ (125), that it’s only on the road that he ‘feels whole’ (127) and that, for him, ‘there is always a home by the side of roads’ (128). What I can recall from this is the story James Chang (Zhang Zhizhang), a Taiwanese-Chinese writer, told in the 1994 Chinese-Australian Arts Festival of an old overseas Chinese who said that the minute he sat down in his seat on a plane he felt at home and that’s where he belonged.

There is an early echo to Dynamic Treasure Trove in Shen Zhimin’s novella, titled, bian se hu (The Colour Changing Lake), which I published in Otherland (No. 2, 1996) as editor. In that story about the difficulties Chinese students have when they first arrive in Australia, it is Aborigines who befriend them, not white Australians. In fact, white Australians are terrible racists. When Jiang Hua, the name meaning River Flower or River Chinese, the protagonist, is playing erhu in a small town, a ‘tall white woman’ rushes in and tells him off, ‘like yelling at an animal’;[16] she calls Jiang ‘a beggar from the East and a heathen’.[17] Jiang has to leave even though he thinks that ‘their behaviour does not correspond to God’s spirit.’[18] When Jiang Hua is detained by the Immigration officers, it is niao (Bird), an Aboriginal elder who comes to his aid with his men and gives the officers and policemen a talking-to, ‘We have been living here for hundreds of years thousands of years tens of thousands of years. We are really master of this land. We should decide who is or is not an illegal immigrant. This Chinese is my friend. He can stay as long as he likes. It’s got nothing to do with you. If you don’t like it, you can go back to Sydney or elsewhere. Or you can go back to your old home in Europe.’[19]

In Shen Zhimin’s novella, there is almost a visible determination not to give whites their due but to insist on a healthy dose of ethnic mixture. None of his heroes or heroines are white Australians. Born of an English dandy father and a Gipsy mother, Weiduoliya (Victoria) is a street artist who becomes Jiang’s friend. Bird, the Aboriginal elder, is of Aboriginal and Chinese parentage because his grandfather was a Chinese gold-digger who escaped from ‘white persecution’ to live with Aborigines and married an Aboriginal woman, Bird’s grand-mother.[20] Even the two Immigration officers bent on taking Jiang prisoner turn out to be migrants themselves, one a Jew from England whose father had escaped there from Poland in the Second World War and the other is originally also an illegal immigrant from Yugoslavia.[21] It is these ideological underpinnings that made Shen’s novel and novella read more like political fables than truly realized fiction.

Possibly related to Australia[22]

he ni qu ouzhou (Going to Europe with You) is not an Australian novel; it is written by a hyphenated Australian. Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan) has indeed lived for many years in Australia since 1990 but, after he became an Australian citizen, he decided to return to Shanghai in or about 2000, coming back once every year, according to him, to lodge his annual tax return. In this roaming novel, interspersed with photographs, from Madrid through Saville, Bacelona, Napoli, Sicily, Rome, Florence, Venice, Geneva, Paris, Avignon and London, enacted entirely between ni (you) and wo (I), through a series of email letters or interior monologues, Australia is virtuely non-existent. The only Australian is a girl by the name of da fu ni (Daphne) that ‘I’ met in a Shanghai-based art exhibition (61), who grew up in a Melbourne beach town and is a girl of ‘innocent and natural Australian qualities’ (66). When they meet in Barcelona, Daphne asks ‘I’, ‘You go out alone this far. Do you want to escape? How far do you want to go?’ (66). ‘I’, who does not have a name, says in a philosophical remark that sounds like Grant in donggan baozang, ‘Travel seems to give me more opportunities to catch things that almost drift past my body’ (67).

A novel of lacuna in which Australia does not exist, by a Chinese-Australian who now prefers to make his home in Shanghai, ‘the most Westernised city in China’ (19), is perhaps more telling than otherwise, more Australian than un-Australian, or should I say, more Australian in being un-Australian. What is not expressed in the fiction finds expression in the non-fiction, in the houji (Postscript), in which Zhao Chuan describes why he wrote the book. ‘The reason why I had that desire to write is probably related to my having lived for many years in Australia. It is a migrant society where people from different cities and different cultural experiences have to live together. We are curious about each other; our mutual interaction is ongoing but is never somehow fitting. We live closely together: working in the same place, separated by buildings or walls or we scrape our shoulders as we walk past or are even sleeping in the same bed. However, our memories are probably far apart, hard to be pulled together (230).’

More than Leslie Zhao’s novel, Hongchen jie (Doomed to Red Dust), a recent novel by Ying Ge, based in Australia since 1989, completely abandons Australia in its narration, featuring instead a Chinese-American in Lin Wenlu, who gives up his well-paying job in an American company and chooses to stay in Beijing.[23] It is not hard to find that this homeward bound attachment has already been foreshadowed in his first novel, chuguo weishenme?—laizi dayang bi’an de baogao (Why Go Overseas?—report from the other side of the ocean), in which an old Chinese man muses on the significance of overseas Chinese in these words:

Wherever I go, I remain a Chinese in other people’s eyes. Chinese are a heavy nation. (339-340)…But, I think, whatever circumstances in which they find themselves, Chinese people have a thought that co-exists with their hearts. That is: I am born on yellow earth, I am a Chinese, I should do something for my zuguo (ancestral nation or motherland) and I should do something for my nation….(341)[24]

This is of course didactic but didactic in a way that makes sense. If multiculturalism is meant to keep peoples apart, so that ‘one cannot possibly dance the Russian ballet to the accompaniment of Aboriginal instruments nor can Western ways of singing match Asian folk tunes’,[25] they cannot but keep harking back to their zuguo (ancestral nation) as their only way out, as Ying Ge says on the back of his first novel, ‘However far they go, they remain sons and grandsons of Yellow Emperor, born on Yellow Earth.’[26]

If there is any home to belong to, it is perhaps in the fiction that Zhao Chuan creates, one that is ‘ready to get lost, to encounter strange crowds and to turn into another direction after an exchange of a few words’. (231)

The most poignant remark is made in a recent editorial in huaxia zhoubao (The Weekly Chinese) newspaper, in Melbourne, in celebration of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (25/9/07) when the editor says, after describing Australia as a ‘migrant country’ full of peoples from all over the world, ‘You’d be dead wrong if you think this country is like China where there are “fifty six nationalities, fifty six constellations, fifty six flowers and fifty six brothers and sisters that all belong in one family”. Respecting each other like guests is all superficiality, formality, politeness, distance, strangeness and non-intimacy; it is hard to mix like oil and water.”[27]

Kim Cheng Boey Reviews Aria by Sarah Holland-Batt

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Aria

by Sarah Holland Batt

University of Queensland Press

2008

ISBN 9780702236754

http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/index.php

Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY

Poetry is about finding the image that will suffice, that will embody the complex of emotion and thought possessing the poet’s body and soul. It is about finding concrete details that have a special resonance, and creating from a few particulars an entire mood or landscape. Sarah Holland-Batt possesses this gift in abundance. She has the attentiveness for the telling detail, and the mastery of making magic of familiar things. In poems of startling freshness and immediacy, Holland-Batt bridges the quotidian and visionary worlds in vivid acts of seeing, and reminds us of poetry’s power to renovate, to restore delight in ordinary things.

In an age where there are so many poems and poets flaunting their postmodernist opacity and reducing language to a vaguely apprehensible vaporous flow until nothing remains in the reader’s head, it is refreshing and heartening to encounter a young poet who values lyric clarity, and who, though gifted with art of seeing and turning ordinary things into arresting metaphors, does not disdain to use plain speech to say the most profound things. This gift is evident in the moving “The Sewing Room,” a tribute to the poet’s mother, its tactile touches reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s elegies for his mother:

My mother measured the margins

of my known world there:

a sunlit annex where the lines converged,

wrist to shoulder-blade, hip, ankle, waist;

maps I would only outgrow

charted in painstaking tailor’s chalk.

The image and moment are precisely delineated, and the iconic figure of the mother working her Singer wonderfully captured: “sometimes a foxtrot, sometimes a waltz,/ she treadled the pedal with a pianist’s touch.” The concluding sestet echoes the last lines in Robert Hayden’s father poem “Those Winter Sundays” (“What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?”):

            What did I know of making then,

            rearranging a few sad odds and ends

under my mother’s pinned smile,

her teeth interspersed with ersatz test?

The overlocker zagged on like a lie-detector test.

I kept watch. It never leapt.

The affection, the mother-daughter bond is never stated but conveyed through the telling details, the terse sentences in the last line contrasting poignantly with the preceding aggregate of subordinate clauses, noun and preposition phrases to suggest the inadequacy of language in expressing the mother’s selfless love.

Holland-Batt reveals a Keatsian apprehension of the world around her that yields up refreshing physical details. In a few weaker poems, this silts up the movement of the lyric, but when this rich vein is balanced by a Chekhovian spareness, Holland-Batt reveals a mature mind that makes her one of the most compelling poets to emerge in recent years. This balance is most apparent in the family portraits, where the precision of detail works hand in glove with lyric cadence and restraint to create deeply poignant tributes. In “Exhaustion” the little concrete details piece together a whole life:

One afternoon I went into his silent study

and found, behind the tiny compartments

of paper-clips, rubber bands and push-pins,

an old, red tin – the relic of my grandfather’s oils,

wedged at the back of things. Horse-hair brushes,

graphite stubs, a frayed bit of string. And nestled in

the smudged stippling of china white and cerulean,

a solitary tube of cobalt blue, its crimped end

folded over and over until nothing was left.

The last detail resonates endlessly in the reader’s mind, as a lasting emblem of the grandfather’s life and memory. There are other moving familial poems that echo Robert Lowell (Holland-Batt acknowledges her debt in “Letter to Robert Lowell”), but Heaney is a more palpable influence in the portraits of the father, in “Atonement” and in “The Woodpile,” which is inspired by the figure of the poet’s father splitting “rounds of wood”:

Nights were cold; my father’s breath,

blue as exhaust while he chopped, stunning each

block in two with the blade’s glottal stop

although the cold kept coming on no matter

how hard he struck.

The sensuous weave of alliterative and assonantal sounds and the use of vivid kinetic verbs are Heaneyesque, marrying memory and lyric form in a reverential gesture.

Poem after poem in the collection exhibits a Keatsian sensuality, an alert eye and ear that capture all the nuances of emotion and thought through physical detail.  “Circles and Centres” is unabashed in its use of adjectives, the long train of images breathing rapture:

You are being called. All the garden

around the house is as planets in orbit,

its slim persimmons and cumquats, their shocks

of rind, the pumpkins viridian and grooved

like distorted grenades, plump wattle in sprays

rattling its sweet dust into your eyes and nose.

Heaney is again audible in the digging motif and vivid verbs:

You are digging, digging against it,

possibly for an end; going around the perimeter

of you plot, wielding your ability to crimp

and cinch and singe like a new addition

to your vocabulary.

The poem locates a liminal instant between the outside and indoors, between the self and other. It digs deep into the moment, and while the language is beautifully evocative, it is one of the few poems where the gift for imagery runs aground on its own excess.

Holland-Batt, like Jane Hirshfield and Linda Gregg, has the ability to tune in to the mystery of ordinary things. There is a Zen-like attentiveness, and the ego disappears in a concentrated moment of seeing:

            Will you come back from the other side?

                                             No, but the world will still know me.

            And how will it know you?

                                              In the black cricket’s song.

                                              In the throat

                                              of all things burning.

There is a remarkable precision and economy of language, and a haunting acoustic, a captivating music that holds up the visual image.

Music, as theme and metaphor, permeates the work. The longer poems that with musical motifs – “Rachmaninoff’s Dream” and “Aria for a Painted Dancer” – stumble and lose clarity, the rich word-hoard cluttering up the movement, but “Misery and Pizzicato” delivers that ominous chord in Mahler’s tragic oeuvre memorably:

Morning, thinking of Mahler

in nineteenth-century Austria,

who was told Jews were not welcome

at the Vienna Opera – composer or no.

He turned Catholic, and joked.

‘I have just changed my coat,’

then went home and marked the violins

in his seventh symphony ffff, with a note:

pluck so hard that the strings hit the wood.

Again the economy and exactitude are impressive: in a short lyric Mahler’s life and work are compellingly captured.

Aria offers many poems in which the words achieve the condition of music, to quote Pater. Reading a Holland-Batt poem, one is compelled to listen to the resonance, the silence, the meaning that echoes at the end of the last line. There are a few poems of strained epiphanies, and a few others where the eye for imagery goes uncontrolled, and but overall it is a collection to keep, one to re-read for its luminous detail and knowledge, and its tender, compassionate imagination that is always “Letting the ordinary become the last.”

Natalie Owen-Jones Reviews Storm and Honey by Judith Beveridge

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Storm and Honey

by Judith Beveridge

Giramondo Press, 2009

ISBN 9781920882563

http://www.giramondopublishing.com/storm-and-honey

Reviewed by NATALIE OWEN-JONES

Storm and Honey is Judith Beveridge’s fourth major volume of poetry. Her first two, The Domesticity of Giraffes, and Accidental Grace, established her as one of the finest voices in Australian poetry, and her third, Wolf Notes, gave this status an enigmatic depth and lustre. In many ways Storm and Honey reminds us of what an important book Wolf Notes is. Within this more recent work continues a quality of breath and line and a confidence with subtle states of mind that was first given to us in those poems. More specifically, the idea of writing a sequence through the lens of a fisherman and documenting life on a working trawler continues an interesting theme in her writing. In ‘From the Palace to the Bodhi Tree’ in Wolf Notes, and the ‘Buddha Cycle’ in Accidental Grace, Beveridge also writes from within character. The poetic speaker in the Bodhi Tree cycle is the Bodhisattva, the sequence imaginatively following his journey, physical and mental, from his life as a prince to the moment when his search for enlightenment is about to be fulfilled.  In ‘Buddha Cycle’ it is the monks and laypeople surrounding the Buddha’s life – many of whose stories are drawn from the Pali cannon itself – who speak the poems, representing the Buddha himself as an effective absence, shining at the centre of their experiences.

Yet despite the sequence, on first glance, ‘Driftgrounds: Three Fisherman’, marks an abrupt turn in Beveridge’s poetic. Moving a long way from the non-violence and search for ultimate peace of the Buddha cycles, these poems do not temper the brutality of fishing – the suffering, the stench and death that are a part of that life. Her language revels in the harsh, visceral opportunities offered through the exploration of the fishermen’s lives. Its beautiful meditations, however – ‘Morning, up river’, ‘At the Inlet’, for example – do represent fishing’s other side, the contemplative moments offered by a life on water. Driving both of these, at least outwardly very different themes in her work, is the importance of experience and the acknowledgement of the reality of suffering to Beveridge’s poetry. The importance of bodily experience to the life of the mind finds its own expression in poetry and she invites us, in this volume, to think of this expression as refiguring and bringing into focus far away worlds: the fishing life, sea creatures, the minds of others.

Experience has a hold on this volume’s poems, in the way its words feel on the tongue and to the eye and this animates more than the violence of trawler life. Her poems range wildly across language through sound and ingenious simile and her playfulness – more acute in this volume than in others – acts in a similar way to the creation of her fisherman and her portraits of other men of the sea. It offers a lens through which to view this other, and ultimately our own, world. The opening poem announces the volume’s fascination with sound as it describes the awful scene of a child’s body being removed from inside a shark:

We heard the creaking clutch of the crank

as they drew it up by cable and wheel

and hung it sleek as a hull from the roof.

The poem offers a glimpse of the nature of the sequence’s three main characters, the narrator, Davey and Grennan:

                                                            The limb’s

            skin had already blanched,  a sight none

            of us could stomach, and we retched,

            though Grennan, cool, began cutting off

            the flesh in knots, slashing off the flesh

in strips; and then Davey, flensing and

flinching, opened up the stomach and

the steaming bowels.

Positioning the narrator as the more sensitive one, the writing moves from nauseating detail to cold fact. Speaking of the gulls overhead, ‘Still they taunt us with their cries’, he says, as ‘Grennan with a tool / took out what was left of the child’ (15). 

This first poem sets a shadow of death across the volume. The next, ‘The Trawlers’, speaks more generally about the fishermen’s working life, and introduces writing, language, poetry itself, as another of the sequences most insistent themes:

The broken northern cliff face and tidal rips still

            driving across the rocks. The lighthouse on the headland

            like a valve that blew its incandescence decades ago.

            The trawlers are slanting, moving across thick dossiers

            of water, the wind dictating, urgent, demanding

            a copybook hand. (16)

This is not the only time the speaker describes weather in writing metaphors, nor has a particular focus on time. Beveridge often uses intriguing and quite beautiful constructions where, for example, something is ‘still’ occurring, something else ended a long time ago, and ‘soon’ something else will arise. It is a persistent awareness in her poems that deserves more attention than I can give it here, and I suspect it is tied to her recurring figures of the moon and weather. It opens her poems to endless possibility. The language and poetry metaphors are more specific to this sequence (there are many playful references to Octopuses and their ink) and drive, I think, its intricate inner logic that points not so much to its being made up of poems about fisherman as painting portraits of fisherman-as-poets. The speaker says in ‘Inlet’:

            I know my stroke will lose rhythm in the brown        

                        waters of the cove, but now I make

            curved passage across the bay where even Grennan

            or Davey on the far-off jetty, their reels spinning

                        like a sudden volley of insects

            cued by the dusk, might, just possibly – when

                        they come into the presence

            of still waters – find something beautiful to say. (23)

And after this mention of beautiful speech, the next two poems speak of the other two fisherman, Davey first, then Grennan, in their own adventures towards poetry – in the case of Davey, a percussive adventure in sound: 

                                    …I like a reel to sound as if it ground shell grit,

                        I like it to bitch-box its hisses, I like the full

                        clack and brattle and not just have it chitter

            like a sorry crab. (‘Tackle’ 24)

In ‘The Knot’, Grennan’s tying a knot is like ‘signing a run of verses, / or psalms in the deaf-dumb alphabet’, the narrator marvelling at how ‘hands [that] have felt the cold brutality of the sea / and lugged nets of killing across the shallows, can make / the tiny twists and turns and conjugate beauty’ (26). If these poems, or even the sequence itself, can be thought of as portraits of the fishermen as poets, it would not be surprising to realise that many of the sequence’s other poems, ‘Lingo’, ‘Delancy’, and ‘Weaver’, for example, are also portraits of the characters the fishermen come across at sea. ‘Capricorn’ is another, the final poem of the sequence and, I think, its finest. It reminds me that the book is dedicated to her son, and opens with the metaphor of a lens –something the sequence offers us pervasively, as I mentioned earlier, through its personas and its language:

            Through the end of an old Coke bottle he tracks

                        the flight of a petrel until it is tattered by

            sea wind and another blurred mintage of the sun.

                        Along the pier he hears the men with their

            reels, with their currency of damp sand. His rod

                        quivers, weighted not with fish, but with

            the names of storms: Harmattan, Vendavales,

                        turbid winds running the vanguard of

            dangerous straits.

Do these lenses refigure reality or make it clearer? In tune with childhood, here, it becomes a portal for the imagination: ‘But now the bottle is a horn,’ the speaker says, ‘into / which he pours so much breath’. Closing the sequence with a lovely symmetry by recalling the child of the opening poem, these lines open into the free potential of the mind, where the first closed onto mortality:

                                                      Ah, but you know, if

                        you were to take this child’s hand; if you

            were to keep his gaze in yours and wait for

                        each circulation of his breath; if you were

            to watch the pirated scenes of daydreams

                        play out through a windfall of glass, then

            you’d see the copper-coloured sun. You’d walk

                        this beach a long time with your thoughts

            trading in weather and wind, the petrels keeping            

pace with the rakish lines of dreams

            sailing in with the clinker-built storms.

This freedom is a condition of a literary imagination, the poem goes on to say. It is its weapon to ward off death, although this manoeuvre reminds us of death’s ubiquity:

                                                            No, the world

            would not be a wave repeating its collapse,

            but whatever mintage of story a boy can find

                        among fish scales, sand and the common

issuance of wind; a boy who knows nothing

                        of the linkages between storms; nor of

            the men, yet, who log weather’s quick decay

                        onto gauges of abuse; who knows nothing

            about paying for that old voyage toward death. (60-61)

The last poems, collected under the heading ‘Water Sapphire’, are often rhapsodic, celebrating poetry’s ability to circle and illuminate a topic or thing or word. They are playful meditations on a word’s sound – as in ‘Apaloosa’, on cockatoos and the mosquito. One of this section’s most brilliant poems, ‘The Binoculars’, speaks again of the sea: of sea-birds, and the speaker’s father’s love of watching them and of his friend, Harvey, who fell to his death while doing it. Revisiting the cabinet in which her father locked Harvey’s binoculars, she

                                                                             …levelled

them to the back of the room and saw what looked

to be the sky in mauve-grey, sea mist patterns

full of flecks like the birds I could never bring

to view.

She remembers then that once she

                                    …saw him again clasping Harvey’s

            binoculars between his knees, working the prisms

            and the light-gathering lenses he’d removed back

into place – and slowly sealing into each intricate

chamber as much as he could of Harvey’s ashes. (76-7)

It is tempting to read this final image as an overarching metaphor for the volume, but I do not want to simplify its rich mystery. Beveridge’s poetry requires us to ask the question – which crystallises in this particular collection and, moreover, in its figure of the lens – is poetry essentially facing itself, addressing itself and mining the bright core of language to illuminate its hold on us? Or does it face outwards to the world, bring us the world and open our minds to realities we have not yet experienced? The glass of ‘The Aquarium’, the final poem of the book, might be seen as another type of lens, one through which the speaker views so many of those creatures that appeared in ‘Driftgrounds’ as dead, now with wonder at their alien lives:

            The weirdest things are the tiny cuttlefish,

            the ones whose translucent, gelatinous faces

                                           are hung with the rippling curtains

            of their feeding tentacles. Their locomotion-frills are wafting too,

                        fine as chiffon.

She pulls these creatures close to us and pushes them away with wonderful similes, making them at once familiar and deeply strange. After describing the virtuosic acrobatics of the octopus, with another gesture of symmetry her last image is the shark:

            I go back to watch the octopus again whose arms now

            seem to be conducting music to four distinct orchestras.

                        Then it plays with one of the small rings put there for its

                   amusement –

            and in a flash

   as though its were a length of voile or Dacca silk, it draws

all four meters of itself through the ring’s small hole

                        shape-shifting then tightening

             its small face against the glass before it holds the rim

      of the ring again, and it draws itself back through

                        as if into another portal, another hole in space.

But even after this, it’s that shark I can’t forget –

         how it’s eyes keep staring, colder than time – how it never

                   stops swimming,

                          how it never closes its mouth. (86)

Perhaps speaking of poetry here, perhaps of the terror of death, it is a wonderful image to close a collection that holds the difficult tension between the two.

Beveridge’s is a poetry that keeps an exact and beautiful balance, as if she intuits a point of stillness where each line, each poem, comes to be complete. I often think that the heron, which appears so frequently in her work, is something of a symbolic totem bird. Her poems hold themselves open to the possibilities of time, of chance, of the ‘if only’ of the imagination, yet step with a similar delicate surety:

            Near the pier another heron is holding its bill over the reeds

            as purposeful as a seiner with a marlinspike, before it

jabs then returns to its wire-drawn stance, as if all it must

achieve now is to lift and pull itself into the distance

like sail twine.

…

And look! how they stand – at last – stilled to perfection. (‘Herons at Dusk’ 80)

Tim Wright Reviews Pam Brown’s True Thoughts

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Drinking Water in a Suburb Called Zetland: Notes on Memory and the City in Some Poems by Pam Brown

True Thoughts

by Pam Brown

Salt Publishing, 2008

ISBN:  9781844715152

Reviewed by TIM WRIGHT

In a recent discussion of the lyric in Australian poetry on her blog[i], Pam Brown wrote of her poetics that she was interested in ‘the occurrence of ‘the current’’. The current here could be both ‘the contemporary’ or ‘the present moment’, the moment of writing. In her latest collection True Thoughts this interest in the current merges with an ongoing interests in memory and place (particularly the local). The past and present appears often as a duality in the collection, along with others: stillness and movement, inside and outside, this way or that way, here or there. The poems’ mode is kinetic, they proceed by indirection[ii].

Brown’s noted critical take on the everyday – and sometimes hyper (and anxious) self-reflexivity – is integrated into the practices and habits around work, leisure, friendships, travel, reading, and writing. The title is plural: ‘thoughts’ as in products; not ‘thought’ as process. The poems are less about the kind of thinking exemplified by Rodin’s Thinker, an absorbed stillness; instead thoughts occur, one after another, amidst and in response to movement, radio, traffic, mobile phones. Thinking takes place in a city, and so the possibilities or potentialities latent within it become part of the thinking process. Subject and object are often captured on the move, going somewhere else. Glimpses of the poet appear – catching a train to work or sitting at a desk to read – alongside and simultaneous with records of various kinds of mental action: observing and noticing, worrying, hesitating, remembering or speculating on conversations with other writers and friends, making a decision.

The poems don’t lend themselves to scholarly close reading; they wriggle out from under the microscope; they don’t seem to me to be coded or contained in the way that that method, at some level, implies. They share concerns of memory, and a responsibility to continue thinking politically and humorously in an increasingly fragmented contemporary. About half of the poems are more than three pages long, and move by branching, link-and-node formations: shape mimics thought. I read the poems as a book length work; not quite a sequence, but a collection in which chronology is important. I suspect that a way of reading (or listening) to the poems is required that is more open to distraction – a state the poems themselves are written through – one which could skip across the poems, read them glancingly and let them go out of focus as much as reading lines and words in a sharply focussed way. In a sense this is simply to read in the spirit of the poems themselves. They are not, I think, written as contained aesthetic objects to be regarded. The poems (and their ‘speaker’) proceed by way of indirection, and this is realised in the heightened attention and care given to line breaks – those points of the from which it could ‘go anywhere’ (as one poem says). The anywhere is not fantastic – an escape – but a state of (distracted) openness to possibility which the poems want to maintain, to keep in the air. It is productive to think of them, for a moment, alongside the ‘talk poems’ of the contemporary American poet David Antin. Antin has explained that his style of poem comes from wanting ‘to think about things that are worth thinking about that lead to more thinking[iii]‘.

The two opening poems, ‘Existence’ and ‘Amnesiac Recoveries’ are responses to the US war in Afghanistan, and the Iraq war as it proceeded from dreaded possibility to reality in the summer of 2003. JS Harry’s ‘Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003” (from Not finding Wittgenstein, 2007) and Jennifer Maiden’s George Jeffreys sequence (from Friendly Fire, 2005) are important reference points, being the major Australian poems I know of written in response to the second Iraq war. Where Harry and Maiden use fictional characters to imagine Baghdad, Brown’s response is autobiographical, remaining ‘herself’, in Sydney. In this context the description of a swim in harbour that opens the poem ‘Amnesiac Recoveries[iv]‘, seems luminous, a luxury, when posed against the knowledge of the distant war:

            2002

            I get away

                        from the academy

            and                   after breakfast

            dip in the green harbour

                           under sprinkling rain.

            I know the war continues.

                 on  tv

                     in the background of the frame

            the investigator yawns.

The speaker is both part of, and separated from the unnamed war by a screen. She is, after all (as I am), Australian, a citizen of one of the countries involved in the war, and so, in an obscure sense, involved. I borrow the word from the last lines of John Forbes’ ‘Love Poem’, perhaps the most subtle Australian poem to do with the first Gulf War[v]. The final lines of Forbes’ poem have its speaker watching the televised bombing during the Gulf war of 1991, knowing, ‘ … obscurely, as I go to bed / all this is being staged for me’. Brown’s poem also ‘knows’ the war mediated by a TV screen, but doesn’t stage the same moment of laconic epistemology; it sets the image, moves on to something else.

The poem is noteworthy for how it plots different points across the city, passing through three different environments, from the desiccated university to breakfast to the green harbour in three lines. The searching and questioning provoked in Australia by the wars – about what it meant to be a citizen as well as a writer, an artist, or a poet – are explicit in the poem, and haunt the collection. There’s an awareness that there is possibly more at stake now than then, but also that the ideals and lifestyles of the seventies and eighties have largely disappeared, and that certainties about politics and political affiliations have become more complicated and more fragmented. Ken Bolton has noted of this collection that ‘[t]here is a lot of lying down, small rests, boredom defeated—but also, to a degree, a withdrawal from the game, beyond maintaining solidarity with others’ humanity . . .[vi]‘ .  Simultaneously, there is a will to continue, and to continue thinking in the face of what often feels overwhelming; this is apparent in the plural title (‘Amnesiac Recoveries’) which suggests a series of shocks that each bring about a return to awareness (of history, of politics) from a state of amnesia. The poem continues:

            that empty-to-the stomach feeling

                as I enter the building

                     to begin

            my twelfth year of toil

            I know how to fix everything

              but, obstinate in my resolve,

                                        withdraw.

            who here

              would phone Interflora

                         for your funeral

There is clearly a self-conscious eye observing the poet’s gloominess in these lines. While moods such as these reoccur in the collection, they’re rarely entirely dark. As much as in earlier collections, Brown’s poems are humorous, and anxious–the James Schuyler quote ‘I order you: RELAX’ is a favourite–as they record the attempts of a person to make sense of the new decade, and a new, disappointing, age brought about by those wars. The poems attempt to register that disappointment, but also to try and unlock keyholes to counter it. At the end of the title poem from his 2003 collection, Kieran Carroll made a distinction between decades when he noted the change from the 80s to the ‘slicker, mentally tougher 90s[vii]‘. These two poems and others in the collection seem to be an attempt to do something similar, to find a word for the first decade of the 2000s, to try to understand what is and what was unique about it. By staying close to the body, by not protecting the poems from the grotty everyday and the ephemeral (the ‘tangled crepe-paper streamers,/napkins, plastic plates/& other picnic junk’ left after Australia Day), and also by stubbornly resisting, most of the time, to ‘get metaphysical’, the poems feel out an attitude for existing politically now, one that is as subject to distraction, mood, and change as a mind and a body are.

The first poem in the collection, ‘Existence’ shares many of the concerns of ‘Amnesiac Recoveries’, and could be read as a companion poem. It begins:

            from here on in

            if I follow

            the girl in the

                    ‘your tv

                    hates you’

            sweatshirt       as her motorcyclist

            warms his darkly bubbling engine

            ready to blur

            into a field of speed

            it’s probably

            one less path

            to torpor

                            for me

~

            a dishwasher whirrs above me

            a slab separates us –         water restrictions

                                                                      mean nothing

            war

            is

            imminent,

            Sydney goes sailing

The imminence of war suggests that both poems were written at around the same time: a Sydney summer with its rain, heat and frangipanis smeared on the footpath. Both poems, too, juxtapose the luxuriance and privilege of water (sailing, sparkling waves, the ‘Rose Bay Afloat’) with the obscured, but still dimly apparent, ‘rest of the world’ that the water separates Australia from. As with most poems in the book, other lives appear only as strangers observed, emails, the trace of a life through the whirr of a neighbour’s dishwasher. As an opening poem it flags some of these themes of the book: Sydney, war, memory, and finding ways to continue.  

The anti-war poems are followed by five written during a residency in the Trastevere in Rome. Most of the rest–about two thirds of the collection–seem to take place in or around contemporary Sydney. Memory and the city emerge explicitly as themes in ‘Saxe Blue Sky’ and ‘Train Train’, which detail two Sydney train journeys, one from the leafy eastern suburbs into the city, the other down from the Blue Mountains and past the sprawl of the western suburbs. ‘Saxe Blue Sky’ begins with a train journey to work. One of the things I like about this poem is the particular stretch of train journey it describes. As the train comes out of Kings Cross tunnel the passenger seems to float for a few hundred metres, about half a minute, over a zone of the city which is a crammed mix of the old and the hypermodern. It passes over the housing commission terraces and luxury apartments of Woolloomooloo, the towers along William Street in the distance, the Cahill Expressway, and for a moment beside the Art Gallery and the Domain. Bookended by two tunnels—one into Kings Cross and the other into Martin Place—the experience is highly cinematic down to the jumpcut beginning and the sudden fade to black as the train hits the tunnel. Local landmarks are registered: Brett Whiteley’s ‘burnt match/live match’ sculpture outside the Art Gallery of NSW, a bronze frieze on the gallery wall. Soon the speaker looks away from the train window, down to a set of catalogue cards she will need to go through once she gets to work:

            cards detailed with

                                 pencilled handwriting,

                traces of old colleagues

                                                        now moved on.

The process of recording information onto a card by impression becomes analogous here to how memory can become "impressed" in material things, and here patina becomes important to thought over surface smoothness. What stays the same in a city over time? The poem details those things which persist: icons (the Harbour Bridge), identities (Brett Whiteley), official histories (plaques). Yet there is a frustrating weakness of visual memory, and the way it plays out in the experience of living in the city:

                            I remember most of them,

            more,       I remember their memos,

            circulated notes—

                               our names listed,

                           stapled to a corner,

            memo read,  name ticked,    then passed along

                                                      to the next name—

                        pre-email

The scripts of these old colleagues produce an encounter that’s placed parallel to those official histories embedded in the city, which flash past but leave little impression. One of the questions asked throughout the book is how to remember while avoiding the stillness, or endless replay of nostalgia (which in this case might be the colonial architecture of The Rocks). Cities change, taking memories with them, and so actively remembering former iterations (taking notes, documenting in some personal, experiential way) is a method of resisting what in ‘Amnesiac Recoveries’ is termed ‘memoricide’ – the bombed Baghdad library. Brown’s poems stay close to the built environment, and pay attention to inscription in all its forms (shops signs, old notes, memos…). Rather than history, it might be more useful to think of Brown’s concern with the materiality of memory in terms of heritage. Heritage as ‘that which we’ve inherited’, or ‘that which we are heir to’, allows a connection to history at the interface with the built environment. The political question then becomes, How is it decided what gets kept? In the poem, the sifting, sorting, chucking-out process that will shortly take place with the old cards could be the architectural model version of an answer: personal archivism.  

The poem, ‘Today there is much more heritage than there used to be’, develops this concern while addressing a friend in hospital. The poem moves between several views, the ‘in situ’ view of the speaker, imagined views onto the Harbour, either from Brereton’s house or hospital, to a less inspiring view of a tv from her hospital bed. The poem begins,

            built between the wars,

                       acts of social optimism,

               our anachronistic homes—

                          but,    or,    even,    so

                           we live in them,

            sought after charm emblems.

            in the block next to mine

                              a gang of workmen

            is hurling the walls

                              and the tea break

                              and the lunch

                                            out the windows,

            bricks and door frames

                             plastic forks and curry packs,

                                           like storm debris,

            hurtling

                   like           broken twigs

                                  across the car park

~

            a lightning flash

                       interrupts computing—

            I imagine your stormy view

                                  over Elizabeth Bay,   beautiful

                           night-dark,      night-light,

                          small boats tossing and slicing

                                                through the bay

            (how

            do such tiny blinkings

                                                 guide them?)

                         towards Clark Island

            or heading back

                                   to the illuminated city

The poem transitions between contrasting scenes (day and night, land and water), blending interior and exterior with the lines ‘a lightning flash / interrupts computing’. It suggests a kind of noir city imaginary that the poems work out of. The poem ends comically, with the poet on her knees waxing the bathroom tiles, and the realisation that ‘a resemblance of heritage’ is ‘as near as we’ll get’.

Brown’s poetry might be usefully thought of both in terms of the flâneuse and of the bricoleur, but also of the rag-gatherer, that other nineteenth century Parisian character, collector of what the city dwellers considered of little value. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes Laforgue of Baudelaire, ‘He was the first to write about himself in a moderate confessional manner, and leave off the inspired tone.’ The description is reminiscent of the self-deprecating voice of many of Brown’s poems. The quote continues:

            He was the first to speak of Paris from the             point of view of one of her daily             damned (the      lighted gas jets flickering with             the wind of prostitution, the             restaurants, and their air             vents, the hospitals, the gambling, the logs resounding as             they are sawn and then dropped on             the             paved courtyards, and the chimney             corner, and the cats, beds, stockings, drunkards,             and modern perfumes) – all in          a noble, remote and superior             fashion . . . The first also      who accuses himself             rather than appearing             triumphant, who shows his wounds, his laziness,             his             bored uselessness at             the heart of this dedicated workaday century, its strange             decor:             the sad             alcove . . . and to take pleasure in doing so[viii]

The ‘Haussmannization’ of old Paris in the nineteenth century, the period when Baudelaire was writing, might be the ‘Meritonization[ix]‘ of Sydney in the twenty-first. There are less smells to encounter, and not so many logs-being-sawn-and-then-dropped to listen to, but a pleasurable ‘bored uselessness’, certainly evident in Brown’s poetry, might be as effective a strategy as it was for Baudelaire. For Brown, the city is a grid for making sense of experience, as well as a mnemonic. The poems map the movement of thought as it occurs in a city space. The spare, pared back lines span outwards seeming to collect details. And while she is attentive to the world outside, she seems to be happy to not let it cohere: questions are permitted to stay unanswered, odd irregularities are often placed in the poem as readymades.

Rather than the smoothly flowing motion of the car or bike, the poems move at walking pace, and with the memory of its rhythm, are able to turn around and backtrack. Brian Massumi’s appealing idea of walking as ‘controlled falling’ is a reminder that walking is as much a product of resistance, each step being the arrest of a potential fall, as it is volition. Brown’s writing proceeds, it seems to me, with this necessary resistance, by cutting lines short. One step, then another; one thought, then another. The distractions of a city street are rendered in the short lines and variations in spacing across the page. Brown celebrates the pleasures of distraction, of being able to go ‘in any direction’. At times this distraction resolves into crystalline moments of attention. The first two short poems are from ‘Zennish’, a series of short poems from the earlier collection, 50/50, the third from Little Droppings, a chapbook of out-takes from the collection This World, This Place:

thirty shades

of mirrored

sunglasses —

I

like the look

of a lucozadey amber

~

ah,

the little dose

of gamma radiation

I

was given

at the clinic

~

Drinking water

in a suburb called

Zetland

There is a singular state of attention present in these poems. Duchamp’s concept of the inframince, or the ‘ultrathin’, provides a useful context for these poems. Some of the well-known examples Duchamp gives are the sound of corduroy pants rubbing against each other, the difference in volume between a freshly washed shirt and a shirt worn for one day, the taste of one’s mouth lingering in exhaled smoke. It is these attenuated feelings, Brown’s poems suggest, that make up an everyday plane of affective experience. There is a resistance to explanation in the three line ‘Zetland’ poem, a trust in language to do the work. We are not told who is in Zetland, or why, or indeed what Zetland is: the name could be a 1920s version of a future city, with its ribbon-like freeway overpasses and hovercrafts. In fact, the name derives from the former name for the Shetland Islands – I discovered this by punching it into Google. It is a suburb in an inner but slightly hidden-away, often overlooked, part of Sydney; rapidly gentrifying. 

True Thoughts is populated by screens, junk technology, litter, buildings, freeways and cars, public transport, water (the harbour, the beach, the dishwasher), brand names, and now and then, glimpses or traces (archival, memory traces) of other lives. The poems often alternate between exterior and interior spaces (the interior of a train carriage and the view through the window; the flash of lightning illuminating a study desk sitting at the computer) and this is paralleled to the constantly changing relationship between thought and the outside environment. Brown’s poems, her forms, are ‘true thoughts’, at the level of the nagging ethical worries, as well as the jingle reverberating in a mind interrupting more serious thought, or the overheard conversation. They attempt to remain open to experience in an age of (that potentially optimistic phrase) ‘late capitalism’.

Ashley Capes Reviews Readings From Wheeling Motel by Franz Wright, Music by Michael Rozon, Daniel Ahearn

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Readings from Wheeling Motel

by Franz Wright

Produced by Daniel Ahearn, Chris Ahearn

Music by Michael Rozon, with Daniel Ahearn

Riparian Records 2009
Recorded by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

http://readingsfromwheelingmotel.bandcamp.com/

Reviewed by ASHLEY CAPES

                            And I can’t wait

               to return to this chair
               in which I am sitting, this
               world, the one where

               each object stands
               for nothing at all but
               its own inexplicable existence.                                                                                                                            

Listening to Wright read his poetry, I found myself at his mercy; I experienced each piece like a movie – knowing so little about what was coming next. It kept me involved in a way that was different to the page. In fact, one of the greatest challenges in writing about Readings from Wheeling Motel, is that I can only show you the words, I can’t let you hear them. And it’s important to feel the way in which the intensity of the poetry is counter-balanced by Wright’s calm, measured reading, the open, unobtrusive music. Now, when I re-read sections of the poems here, the intensity is stronger than the calm. Wright, who has battled alcoholism, addiction and psychiatric illness, is biting when it comes to the limitations of prescription therapy, as with “Paediatric Suicide”, which begins with the line:

                         Being who you are is not a disorder.
               Being unloved is not psychiatric disorder.

 This launches an attack, going well beyond defiance:

               And seeing a psychiatrist for 15 minutes per month

               some subdoormat psychiatrist, writing for just what you
                          need lots more drugs

               to pay his mortgage Lexus lease and child’s future tuition
                          while pondering which wine to have for
                          dinner is not effective

               treatment for friendless and permanent sadness. 

               Child your sick smile is the border of sleep.

The poem is one of the most beautiful and heart-rending of the collection. For as much as it is haunting, brooding and bleak, there is beauty, defiance and strength. Wright’s mix of tenderness and harsh realism weaves its way through so many poems, like “Waltham Catholic Cemetery” or one of the longer pieces, “With a Child”:

                                                 And the words
               for these things are so terribly small;
               and the world of those words                    

               only slightly less mortal
               than this instant of taking your hand,
               of taking care to look both ways, 
               not to squeeze too hard, or be too aware 
               that no such mercy will be proffered     

               by a world that has no need 
               of words, or us.

At times it sounds like Wright is searching for and finding the right words, as if he does this ‘live’ as he reads. This space is used to great effect, such as in the list-like poem “Intake Interview,” where each line is given the room to stand alone:

        Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one 
                               else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination
                               of indigenous populations?

The entire recording is sequenced with space in mind. During the poems and between them, there is enough time to feel or think, between one poem and the next. The music, at times quite dramatic, though usually so understated, is transitional between pieces, but also allows the listener room to absorb the poem themselves.

The impressionistic sketches and musical fragments (arranged by a big supporting cast) comprise at the least, piano, pedal steel, nylon acoustic (on the delicate “Out of Delusion,”) electric guitar, wordless vocals. During “Day One”, a simple, hard drumbeat underscores the humour in the piece:

               Good morning, class. Today
               we’re going to be discussing
               the deplorable adventures
               of Franz Wright and his gory flute. 
               Just kidding.

One of the more dissonant pieces of music in the recording is from “Abuse,” which brings a silent film or saloon to mind, with an off-kilter feel, one that is a surprising but not unwelcome contrast with the rest of the collection.

“Bumming a Cigarette” follows and returns to a slow, marching tone, for one of the most harrowing moments as Wright seems to accuse himself of becoming his father, who also suffered with alcoholism and who eventually died after being diagnosed with cancer of the tongue:

               And you can only armour yourself in death-wish for so long, the
               blows are not muffled, it will save you from nothing;
               and the idiot drive to go on, and actually be glad to go on, 
               keeps breaking through, ruining everything, even 
               this last chance for some sort of peace.

The collection does have the feel, at times, of a startling eulogy. Death features large in the collection, both its inevitability and, perhaps, its inability to be explained away by religion (“Everyone, Lord who wakes up in a cell./Everyone Lord who wakes up in the cancer bed.” from “No Answer No Why”). I came to the closing track looking for something tender, more hopeful, and “Wheeling Motel” delivers this. Settling on a reflective moment, it is framed beautifully by piano and a wordless vocal with a gospel, Amazing Grace/Great Gig in the Sky-feel, where Wright closes with an echo, subverting the famous American Civil War poem and personalising the conflict by referencing himself and his father, suggesting an ability to reconcile, to forgive:

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

It’s a privilege to be introduced to Wright’s work in this manner. Hearing a recording is an experience that many of us will never have.  There are poets from the past whose readings are impossible to record. Contemporary poets may be prohibited, or lack the opportunity. There are so many stumbling blocks between poet and listener. But here, Ahearn, Rozon and Wright tear them down and present the poetry in a way that brings the reader, in Ahearn’s words “disorientation, transcendence, a strange peace.”

Andy Quan Reviews Equal To The Earth by Jee Leong Koh

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Equal To The Earth

by Jee Leong Koh

Bench Press, 2009

http://www.benchpresspoetry.com/

Reviewed by ANDY QUAN

Poetry is both universal and specific. Its rhythms and cadences can tap into something like an original language. An image or sentence might reach deeply inside of you telling you that your understanding of the world is shared with others.

At the same time, poetry can be the most specific of experiences. The music of a poem may require it to be read with its native accent. A set of cultural, geographical or temporal references may lose a reader completely.

In this way, I find Jee Leong Koh’s first collection of poetry, Equal to the Earth, published by Bench Press, particularly interesting in how it will connect with different readers: immigrants and ex-pats, gays and straights, lovers of language and rhyme. As a gay Asian poet, living outside of the country I was born in, I feel a kindred spirit in Koh, while conscious of our differences.

Koh’s use of rhyme and formal poetic structures is one of these differences. An Australian novelist and critic, Ian McFarlane, wrote in the Australian Literary Review (3 Feb 2010): “Until quite recently rhyme was crime and sniffingly discarded from the poetry editor’s slush pile, preferably with a pair of surgical tongs.” But he proposed that “we are disposed to rhythm and rhyme”, noting Nicholson Baker’s notion “that rhyme provides poetry’s true form”.

I note my cultural bias. My Canadian peers and role models most often wrote in free verse charged with conversational rhythm. So, I’m not inclined to rhyme but was impressed with Koh’s experimentation with rhyme and form, and caught myself noting how subtle rhymes could elevate an idea into song, enlivening phrase and sentence (in the poems “Pedestrian” and “Actual Landing”), and matched at times with gentle play and humour I (“Spinoza on Love”, “Thank you, thank you”).

A few poems I thought weaker had a central idea, and rhyme, but not enough internal energy to set them alight. I wondered if the rhyme patterns were constraining the energy of language, stronger ideas and words unable to break free. But perhaps I’m biased as one of my favourite of his poems was rhymeless, an intimate lament:

we both know, my love, who is no longer my love,

we’re standing at the very edge of Long Island

but, no, neither wild nor desolate is the edge.

                                                                                      (“Montauk” p.79)

I prefer this voice of Koh’s, when he matches the intensity of what he is feeling with something that reaches for something that is all at once, grand, universal and specific. In a few poems, I detect a depth of emotion that is somehow dampened, almost tossed away so as not to hurt as much. A poem to his father, “What’s Left” has the themes of familial betrayal, neglect, duty and resentment, and yet I noticed more the rhyming structure, or the repetition of the “sigh”, his symbol for his grandfather. Which could be the point: an Asian stoicism rather than a stronger reaction, but the poem still left me flat. Similarly, in “New Year’s Resolution”, the narrator battles loneliness by treating it lightly and the conversational language (“your friends sincere and good-looking, sort of”) lacks charge.

I enjoyed the frank, bold narratives of the handful of sex-oriented poems (including “Glass Orgasm”, “Cold Pastoral” and “Chapter Six: Anal Sex) though as a fellow romantic, I worry for a narrator who “mistakes loneliness for love” and is excited by the sound of a man, more than any man he’s met. But lots of us poets are tragic romantics and will sense a kindred spirit in these passages.

What I was most impressed with was the first section of Equal to the Earth, “Hungry Ghosts”, in which the narrator inhabits different men from China’s history who were attracted to other men – it uses Asian imagery and ideas in ways that are not kitsch but instead playful and original and matches it with a voice that crackles with energy.  (“…kings are threaded with assassins, / male favorites, butchers, turtleshell diviners…”; “…the graying calligraphy, / the bamboo ribs bound by a belt of twine and worn / by age and use.” p. 13-14)

At the end of this set of poems, unexpectedly, the narrative shifts to the present-day, where the narrator describes a simple walk and a soon-to-occur visit from his male lover. The speech is natural and truthful and charged all at once, the rhymes subtle; this voice I felt I could listen to for far longer than it lasts. I liked it also because it wasn’t reaching for a big idea or a closing line, and yet it was resonant with meaning – aging, parental acceptance, sexual identity, companionship – and in a way that is compact and perhaps more successful than the seven-part poem “Talk About New York” about a reunion with an old friend from Malaysia. 

Sign me up for the next installment.

Critic John Leonard wrote in Five Bells (Autumn/Winter 2009) that poets “swim in a current of mutual encouragement” and argues for a “climate of debate” which will lead to better poetry and wider readership (p. 18). At the same time, what is exciting about younger and less established poets is a freshness of voice, an energy and enthusiasm; different than the wise, practised voice of established poets, but valuable in their own ways. So, what I’ve aimed for in this review is balance so that my praise for what I very much enjoyed in the book is made more truthful by pointing out what didn’t resonate with me. Though to each his own, I disclaim. 

First books of poetry are often exciting and compelling as they introduce you to a poet’s concerns and give an idea of where a poet will go in his next book. I’ll be interested to see how Koh builds on his strengths: a light touch applied to the right topics, an openness and accessibility, strong feeling and inventive images rendered in original language. Beyond the poems as individual works, I feel a writer who is working hard at his craft, publishing widely, and excited by language.