January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Stuart Cooke is a Sydney-based writer but at present he is in Chile undertaking research for a PhD on Australian and Chilean ecopoetics. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in various magazines in Australia, the USA and the UK, including upcoming editions of Overland and Meanjin. In 2007 his translation of Juan Garrido Salgado’s Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973 was published by Picaro Press.
Birthday Shift
The entire memory of waking, a
quarter of an hour ago, might also
be handed back to forgetfulness, incurring
no loss. It’s amazing
how quickly it goes – money, I mean,
and love. I had love, once.
I had it I knew
it was there. But
you can’t write about that swift
and sudden fall from grace It’s
that mild evening, ruled
by still air. “Mordecai,” she asked, “what
became of the old books?”
“Books?”
He could have been contemptuous or filled
with hope: you can write this way, you
assembled in wash, blubber, observation,
folding
silica,
can. Write. And I
turned on the television:
Germany’s done with words:
too much to be said; nothing
left
to say Our
daydreams carry us back to it. Love.
Love,
in the faint, white light. You can’t write
about that. At dawn
I see a fox
on the lawn the queerer
the dearer in pink the moment leaves
us,
and passes on.
I was filled with a desire to say, ‘Those
were the days’. Return. Victory shifts, you know, now
one man, now another. Shift. Light
shift. What silly
physics! (now as I look) You
can write lonely poetry. This armageddon of the brain
is lonely poetry and the Jew,
who was seen to be quite elderly,
made his own way to the door.
I came back filled. I hate
birthdays, this enforced
loneliness we step into
locations and change them history
channel blues.
I’m sorry, for whereas the real beginnings
of images
will give concrete evidence I
wouldn’t have fallen in love of the non-I
that protects the I if I wasn’t a lonely poet to teach
the world to laugh at virtue to drink
gin like love
on leaves. Parks filled
with the dream departed,
leaving him there, his heart racing with hope
shifts, birthdays shift
new work in old
light.
Cited texts:
‘Breakfast’, by Martin Harrison
‘Stranger in Moscow’, by Michael Jackson
Riders in the Chariot, by Patrick White
‘Lighthouse Series’, by Kate Fagan
The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard
‘hare encounter’, ‘art nouveau’ and ‘nella casa di balla tutto balla’, by Michael Farrell
The Iliad, by Homer (trans. Robert Fagles)
Those Without Limbs
from Sihanoukville, Cambodia
Those without limbs, those
with round stumps or shards of bone
covered up
are absent from clubs.
Clubs
are the realms of the beautiful,
the whole,
the bodies untouched by history.
Those without limbs are left
to drag themselves along the beachfront,
their half-thighs drawing thick lines
in sand
which we, the varnished, the well-
composed,
step over with wet feet, with
lovers
smiling, and damp wads of riel for the white
blood of bulbous, dissected coconuts.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Margaret Bradstock has published four books of poetry. The most recent are The Pomelo Tree (which won the Wesley Michel Wright prize) and Coast (2005). In 2003 she was Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University. Margaret is co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW.
Recherche Bay
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” – Thoreau
When Aborigines watched
Abel Tasman beating up the coast
(overhangs of cliffs
their camping spots), the great eucalypts,
sclerophyll forests, were already old.
Green is the colour of renewal,
of wild woodland and cultivated garden,
amber the fossilised resin
like tears, or blood on a scimitar’s curve,
the nets and traps of war.
If no-one is there can you still
hear the forests screaming?
Bulldozed out of history,
the gestures of reconciliation
become sites of mourning,
incendiaries dropped from a helicopter
our defeat, the blackened
fern-covered boles.
Pond Life
‘Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become
an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old person,
renewing and moving on. You are not who you were…nor who you will be.’
– Sebastien Faulkes, Charlotte Grey.
Your gardens reminding me
of a different space, penny-frogs
pulsating in darkness,
tea-lights on water.
There is
always water, recurring,
water I dive into, under,
breathing, floating, drifting
in tadpole existence,
my memories fabrications.
Sometimes the tide rises
to the head of the cliff
(sighing among grasses),
green weed tangles like hair.
Dead fish, two-dimensional,
clutter the shoreline,
eyes whittled out
like holes in memory,
moonlight’s abandoned haul.
Frogmen surface,
leviathan-like
on the white tide.
You are insubstantial,
stitched into the seascape
and the clacking sound of boats.
There are dwelling places,
mansions within mansions,
rooms within rooms,
a labyrinth of mirrors.
Waking, I am not here,
my amphibian selves
spiralling down
to the sea’s wrack.
Shadow-puppets rap sound-tracks
in crazed patois
on the garden wall.
The Baptist
Light like gauze,
an oasis somewhere before me
or a Messiah descending.
Living on locusts and wild honey
(dreaming of wine, of bread)
I find my chapel in the wilderness.
Caravaggio will paint me
identifiable by my bowl, reed cross
and leather girdle.
Herod Antipas will proffer my head
upon a platter
to please a lissom dancer.
And I will ask
if what I saw as baptism
was merely death.
– after St John in the desert, by Sidney Nolan
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Anuradha Vijayakrishnan was born in Cochin, India. She completed a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from Calicut University, Kerala and a post graduation in Management from XLRI, Jamshedpur. She writes fiction and poetry while pursuing a full time corporate career. In 2007, the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, Seeing the girl, was long listed for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize. Her work has appeared or is due to appear in Eclectica, Bare Root Review, Nth Position, Orbis, Desilit, Aesthetica, The Pedestal Magazine, The King’s English, Every Day Poets, Stony Thursday Anthology, Poetry Chain, Indian Literature, Muse India , Asia Literary Review and Magma.
Beads
In her hands they are like dust. Or sun-dried
blood, fine-polished. Glittering, unlike
her eyes that slept through the day and through
the caveman nights that came snaking
out of their den and shed their skin
on hers; on hers, for god’s sake.
With her hands, she unravels them on her
skin; that skin scrubbed twice and raw. The beads
drizzle over, touching off cold sparks, tiny
nerve spots that meet and combust. So there is
life yet, and there is something that lives. Rubies
beneath the damaged soil, secret black emeralds
that laugh at the night, laugh at the scarred day.
On her hands she makes red markings. One cross
for every spent force, one knot for each thing
that was taken. She moves those hands in clenched
circles – willing them to cleanse
and be cleaned.
The beads find their way to her feet. Sunspots fall
into her eyes and she turns them into tears.
Who dances?
When I dance, I am like a rustic. Oily-haired
and round armed. I flap my head and grin
at invisible birds. I rise and fall in the garden
sand, laugh out loud when the rhythm
beats my feet.
So this music suits; this wooden bench
on which I can dance suits too. I can clank
my rings, my beaded chains here. Can imagine
wood drums, swing my bountiful hips, go one-two
with my heels, my shoulders, my chin.
Snake-dance, peacock-dance; dance even
like a happy calf with new milk sloshing
in my mouth. Kick my donkey heels
as if they can’t break.
And then, the neighbours fall off, their pet dogs
and their studio kitchens fall
off. My cellphone shatters against the wall, and the internet
dissolves into unreality. Beetles and moths
gather in the corners to watch.
Green plants in window boxes shiver
at the feet, of this goddess
who dances, like a rustic.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lorraine Marwood is a Five Islands press poet and has two children’s books of poetry published as well as a verse novel with Walker ‘Ratwhiskers and Me’. Her latest verse novel ‘Star Jumps’ will be released in June 2009. This novel really encompasses the influences of her poetry, the rural landscape and the surprising detail, all a way to celebrate life in words. Lorraine also writes poetry strategies and is available for workshops across all age levels. www.lorrainemarwood.com
Releasing
Her pelargoniums, her little clucks of treasure
strong square ooze like catspray
fans of flowers like dragon wings
a wintering of wooden shelves
step laddering the back door alcove.
I came into her shuttered world,
I could call her grandmother.
She prodded, poked, admonished, preached
every word a lesson to decipher
a frost crunch world where shyness
was fashioned into stalactites that sharded
straight for heart.
She locked love up like Easter chocolate
turned pale with mothballs-
but here I offer
the sizzle of sausages
the sharing of her soft feathery
double bed, twin trunks up on the wardrobe top
smocked cushions
a cold electric fire
and Grimm’s fairy tales
signed with love from Nanny
bought at EJ Brown’s bookshop.
I have blown to dandelion seed her love of words
not restrained them with dire consequences-
wood smoke and finches
arch over my back door
and a tiny skink lizard
races over the melted frost
mid morning.
I come into her sunlit world.
Salt Desert Donkey
We visited once on these salt desert plains
her wooden sixty year old house
only tree shade around,
desolation of farming inheritance.
She kept a donkey when all the other
farming wives kept chooks or ducks
or snails in their gardens.
She fed grey ears and braying,
softness in the salt-grit landscape.
The donkey moved around the periphery paddock,
looking down on a barbed wire garden,
stunted irises and under the tankstand
a scraggle of marguerites.
And in the autumn when paspallum reared like tiger snakes,
she mowed the measured square of her backyard lawn,
tossing the grey sleet of grass
into the donkey’s paddock.
Neighbours whispered about the
useless animal, its awkward shape
how salt eats more than pasture and trees,
laps at the very foundation of wooden houses
shearing sheds, windmills,
but this farmer’s
wife knows the seawater drink
of their gossip and reasons
that a donkey is future insurance
for salt desert trekking.
Celestial
Between tractor lights
and the first tenting pegs of sky
he looks out to the night
liquid,
deep blue
with a scarf of cloud.
Stars trace the outline
of huge celestial tent,
incubator to his solitary thoughts.
It’s the one intense time of the year
when his temporal strand of humanity
feels the huge canopy of the unknown.
It’s not that he’s extraordinary,
he’s one of many; a time -worn
quantity of farmers out sowing the world’s
granary. It seems to him puny, slow,
awkward. The power of the tractor
sidles away to a cough. There above him
a star shoots, light cutting down through
the ridges of sky. He feels he could
put out his hand, squeeze the light’s shower
compress it like clay, tattoo his fingerprints,
but his reach is minuscule.
The fireworks spit and finish,
he turns the tractor and ploughs
another circumference of the paddock
he gulps in the night air,
believes he tastes stardust on his tongue.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Les Wicks has toured widely and seen publication across 11 countries in 7 languages. His 8th book of poetry is the Ambrosiacs (Island,2009).
http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm
Boy Soldier
He talks about childhood
and prays for old age. There is no middle.
Ishmael Beah shot their feet and after a day of screams
shot their heads for the birdless quiet of evening.
Soldiers in the grasslands
reciting Shakespeare while they
snort brown-brown.
He was twelve.
We are all programmed to believe, a flaw
in the biology.
Our flaky hearts
on all those disappointing flags.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Heather Taylor Johnson moved from America to Adelaide in 1999. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, is a poetry editor for Wet Ink magazine, and the author of the poetry collection Exit Wounds. She reviews poetry and other artforms for various publications. She has a husband, three children under six and a feisty pup, and finds the bathtub a welcome office space.
Shovelling Snow
There is subtlety in a morning snow
silent from the picture window and I’m curled cat-like
on my favourite couch, hot chocolate in my favourite mug,
warming my two morning hands, contemplating objects hidden
covered and coated with winter;
that lump that grew beneath her not yet forty skin.
Last night the phone call.
I spend the day in sweater and sweats and knitted socks
typing away at what I don’t know (death buried beneath the snow?)
because I want insight and closure
and most of the time I sit, staring at the foreign snow,
waiting to grow numb.
At three o’clock my computer rests,
a second cup of chocolate waits
while the hanging sun, timid, waits
to drop below the layered roofs
and the stewing of moose sausage waits,
the uncorking of the South Australian cab sav too
-because we wish to toast her in her own native flavour
and Canadian red wine lacks the complexity we are after.
If only I could find my couch and sit in the silence
of the late afternoon snow
but the driveway’s impatient now, covered and coated
with piles and hours of fresh white subtlety.
Christ but there is no subtlety in shovelling snow
and it does not dare to wait.
Tomorrow they will bury her in the dry, cracked
summer-drought soil, her not-yet forty years,
and as they comfort one another in their daylight despair
this house will be quiet with sleep,
not conscious of how we long for the sun.
The midnight will bring more snow and it will cover
my driveway once more, it will cover the tracks of our daily lives,
it will cover the warmth of the deep underground.
Spaces
I suggest something different from longing,
entirely separate from belonging.
I propose spaces.
Not holes or gaps
implying absence or worse
emptiness
but spaces as places
between what we know.
The big sky
my mother’s face
pizza sauce served thickly.
‘Awesome’ ‘cookie’ ‘garbage can’
my brother’s crooked eye.
SUVs and mountain streams
a bluebird’s song a hummingbird’s wing, tall glasses of 2% milk
my father’s towering body.
Vineyards
combustion heaters
saying ‘partner’ rather than ‘husband’
and sometimes stopping
to remember
he has an accent.
Port dolphins
gumtree sky
the footy the ocean
ubiquitous meat pies.
The space I am suggesting
between here and there
is not so big—
it’s enormous.
before noon
brick backyard
water bottle and phone:
or ‘my birthday poem’
The international dateline confuses calendars and friends
so yes, they all have an excuse.
Here’s to calling card expirations
and the baby’s almost due
and I didn’t get home until late last night,
and here’s to my forever forgiving simply just forgot
but you must know this:
that on this particularly sentimental day,
that here so far from the reaching Blue Ridge
I am waiting telephone on table
brick backyard.
This day is hot
like the summer tried to sneak away,
got caught red sweaty-handed
and spilled all over my body,
and on this day I wish the scent
of the ocean three kilometres away,
for my son to sleep a full two hours,
to tan myself bare
thinly layered sunscreened skin
wisteria my thick fortress.
Sweet family and those pictures of party hats
children with vague names
brown and green corduroy clothes
of the mid 70s we all seemed to wear,
remember this day
colour me into your latest photo
and stick it on the fridge.
Undomesticated university girls,
the river dudes with holey jeans,
my three-year tangle mistake
who shared my tiny bed,
our drinks were always raised to the camera’s lens,
so raise your drinks now, beyond your horizon;
it’s midnight your time
and I’m before noon water bottle ready.
I wish for the dj playing soul
to keep on spinning til the day is done
as I wish for accents like my own
because nothing speaks more of home
than an emphasized r at the end of my name,
the telephone and a strong memory
of an endlessly wooded grass backyard
and the reaching Blue Ridge in the distance.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Fragile Context
By Kristin Hannaford
Post Pressed
ISBN 9781921214189.
324/50 Macquarie St,
Teneriffe, Qld, 4005
order from postpressed@gmail.com
Reviewed by ANGELA MEYER
Poetry can exist between boundaries of communication. It can have an awareness of itself in the uniqueness of its form, unlike a blanket of prose which acts to unfold a narrative. Kristin Hannaford’s poems also thematically blur or dissolve lines, those related ones that exist between culture and nature. She invokes the binary to acknowledge one’s reliance on the other, to promote the reader’s recognition of one because of the other, and just subtly, the danger of one overwhelming the other. In such a way, the form of the poem and its awareness of itself creates a beautiful irony, that the poem is a product of culture, of humankind, but would not exist without nature’s influence. In a way then, much of the poems in ‘Fragile Context’ border on romanticism, although with the modern interruption of ‘progress’ and moments of post-modern inevitability or acceptance.
The poem ‘Mountain’ is a dedication to the poet’s father: a joyful poem of slowly reduced stanzas. There is an empathetic association with the father’s experience, taking a long trip to work and back each day. The narrator imagines him on the train with a utopian home-vision, a life-affirming comfort that awaits him. ‘The distance between the lookout and the car is short./Your chest is tight with breathlessness//and this view.’ The last part of this stanza is both italicised and indented to the end of the passage. It enables the reader to hold their breath on the mountain, which is metonymic for the spirituous joy in nature’s whole, as are the eucalypt leaves he inhales. Overall, the poem explores a quiet acceptance of the balance of work and home life, a gratefulness for the coexistence of environments.
The poet’s children and lover are an extension of the self, nature’s existence in bodily form. ‘Birthday’ presents a contemplation of aging, uncomfortably related to rough wood and the smoothing over of oil, coating as opposed to fixing. But the poet’s child’s smile brings her back to the concentration of a moment and negative reflection is transformed into ‘possibilities’. In ‘Losing the Boy’ the child is breaking his link with the mother and becoming one with new formations. Hannaford innovatively describes a skate-park and its occupants. Appropriate terminology is made poetic as the reader sees, hears and senses the environment, anxious with her to find her son. He is crossing between her and this new culture ‘Almost unrecognizable,/ my son, the man -/ if it weren’t for the blue laughter of his eyes.’ Here, the poet reclaims the son, as forever inseparable from his biology, as nature’s persistence, even when the body is immersed in cultural activity. The lover is invoked in ‘Dismembered (two voices)’. A degree of mystery is maintained in the intimacy of the poem. It literally dismembers its actors, body parts explained, explored and satisfied, or are they? The line ‘this is enough’ brings comfort. The lover also exists in ‘The Night Storms’, a poem about consistency. Where change is inevitable, a memory can reinvigorate what has gone. Around these human endings and reimaginings, nature pervades. The majestic is tied by Hannaford to the everyday – ‘Lightning appears at first as a distant flicker -/ the way a television screen lights up a hallway.’
The poetic observer also experiences moments alone. ‘In the Spirit of Impermanence’ is a manic poem, a rebellion. It is an ode to joyful poetry refusing to be constricted by fashions or movements. It seems inspired by frustration and a ‘throwing off’ of burdensome expectation. She encourages one to ‘abandon pronouns & spirited rehearsals’. In ‘She Leaves From an Australian Forest’ there is a less celebratory aloneness. There is a sense of loss pervading the sparse syntax. One of the few poems with no punctuation or capitals, it flows from one end to the other, space and words interpolated as the woman is with the forest she is departing from. It connotes the coexistence of woman with nature. She recalls someone who is addressed, thinking of returning to them after day-to-day frustrations, contemplating amongst ‘leaves which refuse to homogenise’. Her mood is far-reaching, it is not just the ‘you’ addressed in such statements as ‘stands of trees humanise our frailty’ but a collective. The natural elements and formations remind her of bodily features, again making human and nature synonymous. The last line is potent as we imagine her leaving this memory, this spirit to join the sun ‘ascending’, spirituality and transience are invoked, and the last line resonates with its evocative ‘sounds of sclerophyll breaking’.
Body/nature/art are combined again in ‘Graphica Botanica’, and in ‘Music for Insects’ with focus on the eye and vision. The poet in this one is segregated by a window, but the eye explores nature with a disembodied power. Humans are as fragile as birds in ‘Whistling’ and ‘Displacement’.
Narrative transition is implemented in ‘Pumpkin Island Notes’, a series of four poems. They act as a snapshot of a holiday – known and unknown, nature intertwined with history and characters melded to place – ‘a memory of place, sharp as first incision’. It is extraordinarily vivid, and thickly encapsulating. There are pieces metonymic and metaphoric – coral, bones, for an ocean, a human, a whole. They are then fleshed out with mini-narratives of characters in place – past and present. Another destination is traversed in ‘Tracing Air – South Island’. It begins almost with the rhythm of a nursery rhyme. There is a passionate embrace of nature, a moment in time. It is a poem to smile at. The voice is overwhelmed at the beginning, all is ‘too magnificent’, but then the woman and land become one, she recognises herself in it – ‘a green wild dress// riding thighs and abdomens’. The play of lines with steps and pauses, the assonance and slight-rhymes create an anticipatory envelopment. The development of tone by the end is celebratory and of a woman recognised.
The poet’s delight at language, the discovery of words, their usage, their bodily motion (the tongue deciphering them) is evident in much of the work. In ‘Fishing (a meditation)’ the poet applies words for the value of their sound. Scientific names ‘Saccostrea glomerata’, textural like the fingers on the fishing line. Words italicised for consideration, tied in with sensory recollection, conscious associations – ‘Estuary, the word coats tongue/ and memory, sediment. Silt/ mixtures of detritus and the fecund.’ The construction of the fisherman is not as important as the quiet, the beauty of solitude and the engagement in an enjoyed activity, much the same as reading a poem.
In all, there is much to discover within the pages of ‘Fragile Context’. The curiosity of language carries on to a creative curiosity of narrative. The final poem ‘Jesus in the Swimming Pool’ playfully questions a character’s existence. It is a philosophical finish to the chapbook, inviting the reader to question the environment around them, and further, themselves within the environment. In essence, it is their ‘context’ that is brought forward. Are we to float also? What does this Jesus-figure see that the other swimmers with their heads down do not? Outside the pool are the forests and mountains and many-layered humanities where each reader carves a tract. The poetic voice is not only an observer of these trajectories, but a questioner of the divisions that exist between them. Hannaford traverses nature and culture and ultimately displays awareness, preciousness, and most certainly the encouragement of joy in such fragility.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Martin Edmond lives and writes in Sydney. His most recent book is The Supply Party: Ludwig Becker on the Burke & Wills Expedition
Three Lakes
My mind takes a holiday and my body, faithful and indissoluble accompanist, goes along for the ride. We circumambulate a sacred lake above which the mountain floats white on a white sky like something that cannot be yet is. Later I drive around another profaned by corpses from an ancient massacre; about the first we walk in perfect clarity, the second I round in a miasma of confusion and get lost: body and mind crying blindly out for soul. Had I forgotten there is a third in which all of our complexities are mired? It is like this in all the old places. New memories rise up with the alarm cries of birds and say: Go! Depart this place! Come here not as you are but as you were or would be! Nevermore! Etc. The bush fizzing with tui in the glory of the morning. Light glinting from the leaves and from the swift mirror of another lake, across which the once baleful cone now looks almost benign. As if the echo of catastrophe can only linger for so long before a sleepy domesticity of sun and shadow prevails; as if the days outlast the nights. There’s nobody here but me and the birds: paradise ducks honking as they swim out past the landing place. Black swans spreading their wings in alarm as they stagger clumsy through the mud to water’s edge then instantly transform to nonpareils of elegance and grace. Little blue ducks that were here last time I came as well. The wordless fascination of wordless things. That silence in which all other silences inhere. I can almost touch it—there, past the weir, past the raupo, past that greeny slope and past the sky. In the visitor’s centre the man from Tuhourangi is thinking of giving up his curatorial duties and going to Port Hedland to drive a road train. Port Hedlands, he says. Headlands maybe. Uncorrected. What is interred here laments still in his eyes. It is written on a plaque beside the road: They lay scattered in the deep night, the intense night; the sorrow and grief a tattoo of pain on my skin; and tears stream from my eyes for my dear departed ones. I show him the photo of the man I’m interested in. That’s one of my great great uncles, he says, but I don’t know much about him. And that little he does not say. Rewiri not Rawiri. Bare feet not boots as I had always thought. The quizzical look of one who has died and been reborn: we are not separate and distinct he says or seems to say. Mind body and soul: three lakes with one source. Turbulent or calm. Fathomless. Full of green bones. Or crayfish. Or the massive weedy trunks of trees. In those black depths you may drown. Fall through the earth all the way to China. Become engulfed in tendrils of fear, the terror of forgetting, that dreadful sink of longing. Although I wanted to I did not go through the dark doorway to the buried village. There was an ache in my soul as I drove away, bereft, unsatisfied: like a spirit hungering for blood so it can speak what it knows. And this was not some kind of possession from outside, this was me. Us. Mind body soul. Spirit. And then I knew we must go there again another time.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Touch
By Meena Kandasamy
Peacock Books Mumbai
ISBN: 81-88811-87-4
Reviewed by JAYDEEP SARANGI
Dalit literatures in India are subversive, or structurally alternative to the models prescribed by traditional Hindu aesthetics precisely because they are literatures of sociological oppression and economical exploitation. Dalit literatures are essentially a shock to tradition and sense. They are an assault to the anthropomorphic practice of castism in Indian social convention. A sound piece of Dalit literature is militant in texture and aggressively blunt in meaning. It challenges codified language (because it has so far been used and manipulated only by the dominant, discriminating powers); it challenges assumptions; it challenges age-old, world-views. Its temporal and political designation does not give justice to the artist whose intentions may subsequently be ignored . It is an aesthetics of pain, and a prolonged longing; a powerful aesthetics of resistance. The poems in Touch by Meena Kandasamy amplifies, illustrates, and carries on this struggle for power and autonomy by women poets. Apart from her expert use of language, she has a sincerity of feeling and an honesty of experience rarely encountered. For Meena Kandasamy, the young Tamil poetess, poetry is about empirical truth and experience and she writes and reflects from where she is:
We: their daughters,
We: the daughters of their soil.
We, mostly, write.” (‘Their Daughters’)
Her poetry is at best of private sensibility. Her consciousness is firmly yoked to the world around her, a world characterised by ecstasy and pain, love and despair. Touch contains a ‘Foreword’ by Kamala Das where the renowned poetess writes, ‘Older by nearly half a century, I acknowledge the superiority of her poetic vision’. Meena follows the psychological tradition of Sylvia Plath and Langston Hughes, a ‘fabric rare and strange’. Womens’ fixed role as caregivers was ideologically determined by their biological capacity to bear children and that was through a fixed set of codes represented by ‘categorizers’ as Kamala Das has expressed in her own poem, ‘An Introduction’. Meena Kandasamy regards her poetic corpus as a process of coming to terms with her identity and consciousness : her “womanness, Tamilness and low/ outcasteness”, labels that she wears with pride. Meena has honed her sociological awareness of what it means to be a woman in the caste-ridden, social groupism of Tamil Nadu (a Southern state in India).
Her poetic self gasps in darkness to search for her emotional root proclaiming it as her heritage. This becomes a source of vitality for the poet’s journey. Her confessional mode is not as radical as we find in Mamang Dai, Archana Sahani and Kamala Das. She explores a wide range of subjective possibilities and relates them to her own identity and sociological formulation. Her poetry arises not out of reading and knowledge, but out of active engagement. Touch is rich with varied dexterity that explore the states of mind and genuine feminine sentiments.
Writing becomes a means of creating a place in the world; the use of the personal voice and self-revelation are means of self-assertion. Meena’s self-expressive poems permit forbidden or ignored emotions to be expressed in ways which reflect the true voice of feeling; she shows how an Indian woman poet can create a space for herself in the public world. Across time and space, the woman writer, especially the woman poet, is engaged in an on going dialectic with the dominant cultural hegemonies to negotiate a space for the creative woman, where authentic female experiences can be articulated freely. Meena’s poems record the age-old class hierarchy in Indian society. Her poem, ‘Becoming a Brahmin’ records the sad plight of the so-called lower class people of Indian society:
Step 1: Take a beautiful Sudra girl
Step 2: Make her marry a Brahmin
Step 3: Let her give birth to his female child
Step 4: Let this child marry a Brahmin
Step 5: Repeat steps 3-4 six times
Step 6: Display the end product. It is a Brahmin.
Here words are like quicksilver carrying with them the sparkle of sense. In the sheer magic of rhythm, music and in the beauty of coalescing visual and auditory sensations, these lines are rarely surpassed in modern Indian poetry in English.
Flaming green of a morning that awaits rain
And my lover speaks of rape through silences,
Swallowed words and the shadowed tones
Of voice. Quivering, I fill in his blanks.
Green turns to unsightly teal of hospital beds
And he is softer than feathers, but I fly away
To shield myself from the retch of the burns
Ward, the shrill sounds of dying declarations,
The floral pink-white sad skins of dowry deaths.
( “My Lover Speaks of Rape”)
Meena’s poetic mode ranges from the meditative to sensuous where the metaphysical subtlety of arrivals and departures are ambivalent. A feature that impresses and ultimately convinces the readers is the poet’s readiness to allow conflicting voices to be heard from all contending perspectives. Her poems pose a tension that reaches out to the reader, arousing in one a sense of need that will not be satisfied:
“What will you say of your feeling
Living with a sister who terrorizes
Even manic depressions out of your mind?
(‘Sage in the Cubicle’)
There is always a haunting note of despondency marked in Meena’s poetic lines. We may refer to her poem, ‘Immanuel’:
Now, if there be any mourning
Let it be for our heroes
Yet to die, fighting…
Meena’s poetic lines seem to echo from life itself, from the pauses of loss and vacuity in her sociological repression in a class-stratified Tamil society. Meena deeply penetrates the inner pores of the feminine psyche and brings out the strength and power of life. Sanjukta Dasguta, a Bengali poetess, writes
I am sangam and shakti
Power of fire, water, air and earth(.)
(‘Identity’, Sanjukta Dasgupta)
Like all confessional poets, Meena gives literary form a new sense of personality, attaching value to the image of man. She raises her confessional traits to the level of a specific universal appeal. Her quest for identity is not the spiritual Odyssey; it is a human journey, a sociological journey that dignifies the reader:
Caste, yet again authored a tragedy
He, disease wrecked , downtrodden.
( ‘Prayers’)
In the poem ‘Take This for an Answering’ Meena records her voice of protest ;
You press me into answering
When and why and where and how
I could start to dislike you.
Debates over Dalit studies in India have intensified studies of anti-colonial resistance in general which have been augmented and contested by a broad range of studies. Through Meena’s conscious poetic lines Dalits are hitting back in coloniser’s tongue. The poems in Touch represent the indigenous lifestyle. They resist colonial acts of authority and oppression through their textual transmission.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Language For A New Century
Edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, Ravi Shankar
ISBN 978-0-393-33238-4
2008 WW Norton
reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL
Language For a New Century, published last year by Norton, is a collection of poetry from Asia, and the Middle East. The book is a poetic odyssey, an answer to the nationalistic rhetoric that followed the destabilising events of 9/11. Compiling 400 poems by an equal number of poets writing in 40 languages, this book marks a six year collaboration between three American poets: Tina Chang, Ravi Shankar and Nathalie Handal. All three poets have experienced some form of exile, or crisis, in their attempt to interpolate an Eastern and Western identity. Their definition of the East is broad and inclusive enough to include the ruptures of diasporas, as well as other gaps such as the often-neglected poetry of Central Asia. Their categories are fluid and unstable, crossing the boundaries of religion and state, thereby encompassing countries like Sudan or Tunisia, which are classified as both Asian and African. Undeniably, the process of selection has been mired by challenges and problematic constructs, such as the balance of representation or indeed the notion of identity, which becomes framed in a particular way. The decision to publish a single poem by each of the poets is well intentioned and egalitarian. While this broadens the scope of the collection, to some extent it limits the depth to which a reader may engage with an individual poet’s work.
Nonetheless this is a bold and visionary anthology with an inspired title. The collection is an excellent resource and a generous contribution to contemporary transnationalist literature. Well-indexed and annotated, arranged thematically, rather than geographically, each section of the book is introduced by a personal response from one of the three editors, taking the form of a ficto-critical essay. I found these essays compensated for the anthology’s scope and density, which at times feels encyclopaedic. I enjoyed the extended metaphors and the commentaries provided. “Parsed into Colours” describes Handal’s first collisions with racism. She recalls an incident during a childhood spent in the Caribbean, when she was asked by a Caucasian neighbour why she was playing with three Haitian girls. Ravi Shankar’s essay “This House, My Bones” brings into lucid focus the cultural hyphenation experienced by the poet on returning to suburban America after a year spent in Madras, where he was taken to be blessed by a Hindu priest and have his head shaved and covered in sandalwood paste.
I returned nearly bald, to Virginia in the middle of the school year. I had been a rare specimen in India, marvelled at for being American, and coming back I thought some modicum of magic would remain with me..…Those were unsettled times because I was both literally and metaphorically between homes. (381)
Carolyn Forché, in her foreword, describes how the arrangement of the poems follows “nine realms of human experience”. There are obvious thematic classifications such as childhood, home, identity, exile and war. But the anthology includes poems which are equally inspired by, or evoke an understanding of mystery, spirituality, sexuality and love. One is struck, as ever, by poems about childhood, replete with vital perceptions and vivid images suggestive of those early encounters with language and otherness. Joseph O. Legaspi’s “Ode to My Mother’s Hair” is a lyric disclosure in which the mother’s hair is metonymic of protection, nourishment, absorbing the domestic scents of “milkfish, garlic, goat;”. The hair becomes an embodiment of nature. Fragile memories and emotions are evoked, balanced by a lyrical composure, suggesting the poet’s trust.
And in this river
my mother’s wet, swirling hair
reminds me
of monsoon seasons
when our house,
besieged by wind and water
teetered and threatened to split open,
exposing the diorama
of our barely protected lives (11)
Here, as in many of the poems in this collection, the traumas of poverty, difference and migration cross a threshold into a space transformed.
Pak Chaesam’s haunting poem “The Road Back”, renders the mother as a central, if tireless figure, returning home to her sleeping children, after working all day. Within the domestic context, she is identified with nature’s elemental beauty.
Noone to see, no one
to comprehend when she unties
the starlight she carries back on her forehead,
and shakes loose the moonlight
that clings to her sleeves. (20)
If the mother is a grounding figure in exile’s economically harsh terrain, she is also depicted as being anti-patriarchal, sometimes subversive. Childhood marks out a space of nostalgia, of heightened pleasure or play, a space of inspiration and dreams. It’s a space soon to be challenged by the different forms of political or sexual oppression which many of these poets confront. This is a book of silenced, unspeakable and unattended narratives.
I was disturbed by the brutality of R. Cheran’s “I Could Forget All This” (204), translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom. It depicts convincingly detailed images of atrocities committed in the genocide war against Tamils: “a fragment of a sari/that escaped burning”, “a thigh-bone protruding/from an upturned, burnt-out car.” Within the same section, “Earth of Drowned Gods”, I was struck by the starkness of the poem “White Lie” written by the Lebanese poet Abbas Beydoun and translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah.
The truth is also blood.
And it might be a piece of tongue
or something severed from us.
We might find it in semen
or in dust if these two things
are not simply appearances (215)
The poem challenges the notion of narrations, nations and language, relying on symbolism to convey states of oppression. The role of translation is a crucial to a trans-cultural anthology, since it constitutes an inter-cultural dialogue. Through the filter of a translator, the poems take on a similar but not exactly identical shape, metonymic of difference and hybridity. There is an element of trust one places in the translator’s understanding of the text and the context in which the poem is written. A reader enters into this process, at the finishing stages as a receptor of cultural dialogue. Translations enable the reader to more fully appreciate the complexity of identity, place and culture. Far from being passive, the reader breathes life into the diverse range of these texts. Reading becomes an act of intimacy – we follow the poet’s voice as it travels across languages, cultures, landscapes and memories. One of the impressive collaborations of this anthology is the generous inclusion and careful selection of translations.
While there are poems aplenty by established or illustrious poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, Nissim Ezekiel or Vénus Khoury-Ghata, it becomes a political implement that we discover many astonishing voices scarcely known in the West, as well as those censored within their own country. Nadia Anjuman, a young Afghani poet, was killed by her husband, at the age of twenty-five, for writing against the oppression of Afghani women. Her poignant poem, “The Silenced” (230) reverberates with intensity.
I have no desire for talking, my tongue is tied up.
Now that I am abhorred by my time, do I sing or not?
Inwardly disposed, many of these writers find moments of liberation from the suffering in exile or alienation. The section titled, “Bowl of Air and Shivers”, attests to this spiritual and philosophical vision. The Tibetan poet Woeser, whose poem is translated from Tibetan by d dalton, juxtaposes the political and the divine, as a way of recording resistance.
But here, in the Tibet that is daily ascending
daylight nurtured by the gods’ ether
the devils’ fumes also arrive (494)
True to the range of styles and forms found in this anthology, there are more ironic engagements with the divine. Vishwanatha Satyanarayana’s “Song of Krishna” personifies the god as a spoiled lover, undisciplined, announcing himself inconveniently to the speaker, while she is bathing: Debjani Chatterjee’s whimsical poem “Swanning In” depicts the Hindu goddess of the arts, Saraswati as a gracious if “unexpected guest”. “Even in Fortress Britain,” the poet recognises a pervading presence in absence, an aporia, reminiscent of home, of Heaven, or “a neighbourhood in India.” In “Cycle” the Nepalese poet, Bimal Nibha, compares a humble and ordinary object with the self. The lost bicycle with all its imperfections becomes the vehicle of the poet’s body: his “weight”, his “measure” and “breath”. These poems illustrate how restraint, humour, or the supple use of metaphor can construct specificity and culturally-encoded meanings.
The achievement of Language For A New Century is literary, ethical and political. The collection provides moments of cultural dialogue: selection, commentary and memoir. It invites us to enter the margins of literature where oblivion and oppression are being resisted. As a reference book, it embraces diversity. It responds to humanity as a sweeping caravan of sentient beings who share their journey through tribulations, luminosity, irony and joy. Sometimes this syncretism fails to clarify subtle differences for the reader. The essays, at times, embody an excess of rhetoric, but overall, this is a significant and compelling anthology, which offers new and vital perspectives. Language For a New Century addresses the inherent imbalance in a canon that has, for too long, privileged the West.
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