Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent being History of the Day, published by Black Pepper Publishing in May 2009. His book Lost in the Foreground won the Grace Leven Poetry Prize and William Baylebridge Memorial Prize for 2003. He won the inaugural Australian Book Review Poetry Prize in 2005 for his poem “Man on the Moon” and in 2006 was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature. Edgar was born in Sydney in 1951 and grew up and was educated there. In the early seventies he lived in London and, on returning to Australia in 1974, moved to Hobart where he lived until late 2005. He currently lives in Sydney again. He attended the University of Tasmania, studying Classics and English. For many years he worked in libraries but for the past twenty years has made his living mostly from editing, indexing and proofreading.

         (Photograph by Vicki Frerer)

 

 

 

Ardglen

Like gazing at some other family
In a fogged window pane,
Or in a mottled mirror that has lost
Flakes of its silver tain:

The four boys head and tail in the one bed,
Their breath turning the room’s
Frigid midwinter to a dreaming kitchen,
With its fug of steam and fumes.

Does such a place exist? Where might it be?
How get to here from there?
But there they are, there we are, clambering down
The bank, our thin legs bare,

Barefoot (it’s hard to credit) in that cold.
My sook-soft soles revealed,
I’m piggybacked by one of my cousins over
The thorns that mine the field,

Till we reach the dingy creek to fish up yabbies
On strings of sodden meat,
And lug back home our squirming bucketful—
Which of course no one will eat.

Over it goes, then, in the yard; we watch
Them spill and clatter away
Through grass and fence and blackberries, back to
Their soupy deep. One day

We ranged the paddocks—to the quarry (was it?)
Across the railway line,
And tightropewalked the daring empty tracks,
Or, listening for a sign,

We’d place an ear down on the sun-cold metal
And think we heard the humming,
That charged vibration borne from far away
Of what was coming.

 

Sun Pictorial

How formal and polite,
How grave they look, burdened with earnest thoughts,
In all these set-up sepia stills,
Almost as if, embarrassed and contrite
To be caught practising their fatal skills,
They’d stepped aside from slaughter for these other shots.

The American Civil War,
The first war captured by the photograph
In real time. Even the dead
Seem somehow decorous, less to deplore
The sump of blood to which their duty bled
Than to apologize, humbled, in our behalf.

We know how otherwise
It was. They knew it then. The gauche onset
Of murderously clumsy troops,
Dismemberment by cannon, the blown cries
Through powder smoke, mayhem of scattered groups
In close engagement’s pointblank aim and bayonet.

How far from then we’ve come.
The beauties of the Baghdad night still stun
Me: a blue screen where guns and jets
Unloose the lightnings of imperium—
Intense enough to challenge a minaret’s
Aquamarine mosaic in the blinded sun

At noon—and smart bombs fall
Through walls to wipe the city street by street.
Morning, and in the camera’s light
The formal corpses ripen. Who can recall
By day precisely what they watched last night?
Or find the unknown soldier in a field of wheat?

Being surplus, like the killed,
Millions of those old plates were simply dumped.
And in a modern version of ‘swords
To ploughshares’, many were reused to build
Greenhouses, ranged and set in place as wards
Above the rife tomatoes as they blushed and plumped,

While, through the daily sun’s
Pictorial walls and roofs, the long, desired,
Leaf-fattening light fell down, to pore
Upon the portraits of these veterans
Until their ordered histories of the war
Were wiped to just clear glass and what the crops transpired.

(These poems appeared in Lost In The Foreground, Duffy and Snellgrove, 2003)

 

Tomorrowland

You can’t see it from here,
But caught up in its business to begem
Some ripple-silvered bay or the crests of trees,
Or just a golf course with its dewed veneer,
Ante meridiem
The day unfolds its golden auguries
On a charmed sky. A secular congregation
Is out already to revere
The lit east with a helpless expectation.

It’s like a Hopper painting:
A row of figures sitting mute in the sun,
Which by a plantlike, heliotropic action
Their faces and their thoughts are orienting
Towards, almost as one.
And, gazing on that source of benefaction,
They contemplate and inwardly affirm
What lies in store for their acquainting
At the expiration of a certain term.

And even as they stare,
Appraising what the morning rays appoint,
The light that photocopies her crow’s-feet,
The grey encroachments in his thinning hair,
That stiffening hip joint,
Has swept past as though history were complete.
Back in the bedrooms of this white hotel
Their things, wiser than they, declare
No contest in these fancies. Where it fell

An empty shirtsleeve throws
A purely formal gesture of despair
Across a bed, while nothing will arouse
From lank indifference the pantihose
Haunting a sidelong chair,
The disembodied presence of slip and blouse.
Those traveller’s cheques, laid out in a fat wad,
Half signed away, only propose
Their outlays for the briefest period.
      
The day’s lucid ascent
Has charmed its way in here, it’s true, but lacks
Suspension of disbelief that those outside
Contribute, their frank willingness to invent.
On their reclining backs
They count up the instalments, smile squint-eyed
Into a rushing solar past their sight
Will never stay, far too intent
On what’s to come to see it for the light.

 

English as a Foreign Language

One day in bed I read Cavafy
In Greek—her favourite: “Ithaca”—
And in return I won the trophy
Of her admiring Ah!

And I was flattered to astonish
That way. It wasn’t much to do.
She put in a request for Spanish
Bedtime recitals too,

Hoping that she might thereby sharpen
Her skills in the language she loved best.
In the event it didn’t happen,
Like most things she’d suggest.

And Pushkin too, a modest portion,
But that was pushing it too far,
Though I taught her “I love you” in Russian:
That’s ya lyublyú tebyá,

A lover’s commonplace avowal,
But rather difficult to sound
In Russian; it can be a trial
To get your tongue around.

But she repeated those words over
And over till she had them pat.
In English, though—well, she could never
Quite manage to say that.

(These poems appeared in Other Summers, Black Pepper, 2006)

 

The Earrings

I think of you on whom
          Each lobe,
Shifting between the light and gloom,
Displays in some far room
          Its hollow globe.

Small metal worlds are these,
          With real
And independent gravities,
Attracting as they please,
          Or so you feel,

With their grey weight and sheen.
          Once they
Were hers. But she, oh she has been
And will no more be seen
          By night or day.

They were long lost inside
          The void
Of an old jewel box, denied
Adorning: to be eyed,
          To be enjoyed.

They had no hooks or rings,
          And broken
Eyelets: unpolished, useless things
With dormant glimmerings
          To be awoken.

I give them then to you.
          Hers, mine
And yours: all ownings in these two
Now mended spheres accrue,
          Blend and combine;

All of the properties,
          The pain,
Pleasure, desires and memories
That nothing will appease,
          Nothing detain,

Inhere in these brief globes,
          Their slight
Rocking, dependent from your lobes,
A gravity which probes
          Darkness and light.

 

Playing to the Gallery

The last scene, and the two protagonists
Go through their studied pantomime in the park,
Obeying all the script’s instructions, playing
For time as though time hung upon it, playing
To that gallery of sun-bedevilled windows
Warping along a wall across the street:
Site of their judges—none of whom, they know,
Is really there. All the performances
Assume an audience—even of one—
To applaud, to laugh, to weep, or silently
Observe with admiration what they share
By faith alone. The scene inside the church,
The bedroom scene, the labour ward, and the other,
Later scenes, in which that chill locale
Will bring to bear the comprehensive weight
Of its resources. Or the scene beneath
The acid drops of starlight and the moon’s
Bland irony. Wait; listen, when they cease,
For what succeeds their final pause.
Far inland, bulks of stone well-versed in sunset
Perform their purple passages on cue;
The ponderous Pacific solemnly
Repeats its monologue on rock; wind, wind,
Playing for time, recites impartially
Leaves, grasses, patterns on the random water
Across the bay, or the daily rubbish, lofting
Like a kite above the telegraph wires
A solitary delinquent plastic bag,
As though it pleased some connoisseur of light,
As though it changed the history of this day.

 

The Cars

In the open gallery which adjoins
The station, the installed art of the sun
Projects each day’s obsessive stripes and bars
Of light and shadow over the parked cars,
Each pattern as it’s done undone,
Highlighting and obscuring a few coins

Beside this gearshift; on that dash
An almost empty pack of gum; the Ruth
Rendell abandoned on a passenger seat,
Curling beneath the calculus of heat
And time, a comb with one bent tooth
For bookmark; here an ashtray stuffed with ash

And lip-kissed butts of cigarettes;
The mud-caked boots and other walking gear
Jumbled in the back of a four-wheel drive.
Although each morning many cars arrive
Which every evening disappear,
On these few each day’s sun rises and sets.

Elsewhere a list is being compiled
By the grey process of officialdom,
Phonecalls are tallied and the absentees
Accounted for, the tracked-down families,
For whom photographers will come,
Summoned by sobs, bruised eyes, a blank-faced child.

Elsewhere the helicopter sways,
Casting its shadow over what remains,
Like a raptor idling in its famished weight.
Like scavengers small figures investigate
What residue the wreck retains
Of those who have gone home by other ways.

 

Those Hours Which Grew to Be Years

Triptych

(The lynching of Frank Embree, 22 July 1899)

1: Morning

          Take him away,
          Airbrush him out,
And all these men who stand about
In the clean light of day,

          Stern, humourless
          And dignified,
Seem called by duty and with pride
To some urgent address,

          Some clear appeal
          A patriot
And honest citizen could not
Refuse to hear and feel.

          And citizens
          Who hold their pose,
They fix unflinching eyes in rows
On the unflinching lens.

          But there he stands,
          His body stripped
And scored with the judicial script
Of whips, his handcuffed hands

          Held to conceal
          The private place,
His face upheld, composed to face
The lens, and all that’s real.

[ 2: Meridian

It may be nothing but the tree’s
Rubbing against itself below,
But through the leaves
There is a creaking in the breeze,
A bulk that briefly jerks and heaves
To and fro.]

3: Afternoon

And still they do not look at him
          Where he hangs high
Suspended from a maple limb,
          But eye to eye

About his blanket-covered thighs
          And their raw stripes,
Rehearse, recount, particularize
          With lighted pipes.

And nor will he take note of them,
          But broken-necked
Looks up beyond the hanging stem
          As to inspect

Some far-off singularity
          Posed in the sky’s
Flecked blue, if such were there to see,
          And with his eyes.

 

The Grand Hotel

for Les Murray

Apart from that, though, I recall
Something you said about the place:
That you could never see it all,
It seems to propagate with space;

Always another stair to climb,
Always another corridor
With other rooms to count like time,
The end of which is always more;

A sort of Tardis made immense
That somehow manages to flout
The laws of sense and common sense
By being larger in than out,

The three dimensions’ mean constriction
Opened, unfolded and unpacked:
A building out of science fiction.
Or, come to think of it, science fact.

For don’t they say if we could shatter
Their shackled forces we should find
Dimensions at the heart of matter,
Immensities wound up, that mind

Cannot conceive? That’s some hotel,
And just the place to take to heart
And contemplate the parallel
World that this world is made by art,

Whose finite limits charge and prime
The senses they unpack, and store
Dimensions beyond space and time,
The end of which is always more.
 

(These poems appear in History Of The Day, Black Pepper, 2009)

 

Let Me Forget

You run your eyes across the glossy
Lithography of paradise: the sand’s
White gold, the opaline transparent blue
You’ll soon be lolling in, a sky unmarred
And constant to the limits of the view—
All in your hands.
You take the tickets, pass your credit card.

Behind that door, like Cavaradossi,
If you could hear above your heart’s content,
Blindfold and bound,
A stranger fastened to an implement
Appeals for mercy with the world’s worst sound.

Your wife has bought the extra virgin
Inflected with a subtle trace of lime,
The milk-fed veal, as tender as herself,
The chicken livers, the King Island cream—
It seems a pity to omit a shelf—
The chives, the thyme;
And there’s her shopping voucher to redeem.

Behind that door, it is no surgeon
Who makes the live incision, or instils
Into the eyes
Of some mute animal the caustic mils,
Or monitors its functions as it dies.

So home you both go, your attention
Diverted now towards the holiday
In prospect, now the meal tonight, your friends,
Problems with Chloe, and the arbitrage
Absorbing you at work, on which depends
The tax you’ll pay.
You park the Merc before the locked garage.

Behind that door, past comprehension,
Beyond imagining, the universe;
The laws upon
Whose unknown code the selves that you rehearse
From day to day are based; oblivion.

So much you’ve failed to see or mention.
But you’ve no guilt to own to or dispel.
Each day you take
This anaesthetic and it keeps you well
To face the day you could not face awake.

 

 

Omar Musa

Omar Musa “Hemingway” (Dir: Tom Spiers) from MRTVIDZ on Vimeo.

 

Omar Musa is the 2008 Australian Poetry Slam champion. A rapper and hip-hop artist, he counts amongst his experiences having swum with piranhas and alligators in Bolivia and teaching Aboriginal children in outback Australia. The Malaysian-Australian baritone has backpacked almost every continent and has a treasure-trove of stories to tell. Raised in the orange brick flats of Queanbeyan, Australia as part of an artistic family, the 25-year old says he wants to “introduce a new level of poetry to Australian hip-hop.”

Musa was a winner of the prestigious British Council’s Realise Your Dream award in 2007 and relocated to London to work in the UK hip-hop scene with grime star Akala and slam poet Jahnell. He has been played on Triple J and has recorded with J Records band 2AM Club in Los Angeles. He recorded his debut The Massive EP with veteran producer Geoff Stanfield in Seattle, USA, of whom he says “I finally felt as if I had found the perfect sound to compliment my lyrics.”

“It is a strange animal of an EP,” says Musa. “Written in London, recorded in the States by a Malaysian-Australian, it definitely has an original feel.”  Navigating between underground hip-hop and mainstage performance poetry, Musa’s work is unique.

 

 

 

 

 

Musa’s first poetry collection The Clocks was launched at this year’s Ubud Writers’ Festival.

 

Kirk Marshall

Kirk Marshall is the Brisbane-born(e), Melbourne-based author of “A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953”, a 2007 Aurealis Award-nominated full-colour illustrated graphic novelette. He holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Creative Writing), with Distinction from the Queensland University of Technology, and a first-class Honours degree in Professional Writing from Deakin University. He has written for more than fifty publications, both in Australia and overseas, including “Going Down Swinging”, “Voiceworks”, “Word Riot” (U.S.A.) and “3:AM Magazine”. As of 2009, he is the editor of “Red Leaves”, Australia’s first (and only) English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal (http://www.myspace.com/redleaveskoyo). His debut short-story collection, “Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories”, will be published by Black Rider Press in 2010.

 

 

Suite of Haiku

Electricity:
a strobing head, a cut lip
My blood gloves his fist.
 
They hug me once as
pillows of breath are wrestled
from my lungs: farewell.
 
Cities capture light
and reflect them back on streets
slick with midnight rain.
 
Through the winter he
watches from his register:
I greet him for smokes.
 
Moon suspended as
she smiles into her scarf and
replaces her phone.
 
Wolves whine at my door –
On the beach, they chase waves and
devour turtle eggs.
 
I write, knowing a
succession of dead poets
expect something grand.
 
He is heartbroken.
She is not. She is waiting.
He is years behind.
 
She lies amidst reeds:
her nude back is bruised where the
ladybirds collect.
 
Fog hugs the king’s legs
as he forges through bracken:
a fox turns to watch.

 

 

Nathan Curnow

Nathan Curnow’s latest collection, The Ghost Poetry Project (Puncher & Wattmann), is based upon his stays at ten haunted sites around the country.  He has featured widely on ABC and with further assistance from the Australia Council is writing a new play based upon convict stories and escape myths.   

www.ncurnow.blogspot.com

 

 

Sails and Anvils

 

Travelling to Australia’s most ‘haunted’ house

 

Upon arrival I will be the working poet cocked

for inspiration, directing my hosts with a pen’s arrow

from the signs of my splitting headache.  Inside

the plane the cabin of my head is rocked by

turbulence.  Great sails and anvils are bright

arctic pages, the story of a doomed expedition. 

This is the lesson—do not stay with poets

the night before flying out, drinking ensues

and they just want to have sex or complain

about their rejections.  I left them moaning,

friends of mine, making love like friends,

bearing all but their vocabularies, competing

in wild noises.  Aren’t we all falling, our egos

packed with a plastic whistle to draw attention?

If the plane lands safely there is a rental car

waiting, some compartment I can crash in. 

Another brittle booth, certain to betray me

when the impact finally comes.  I am cranky

this morning, hurtling toward the chapter of

my decline.  But with a pen and a pose I go

to work as if spirited by questions of ‘soul’.

I just want to get off.  Go, get fucked. 

We are turning into cloud.

 

 

 

 

Love Note On Serviette

 

Inspired by an account of the ‘prisoner’ who in 1899 threw a love poem

weighted by a stone over the wall of the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum.

 

my own fond love
this portion find your path
I feel myself beyond myself
am able to choose this rock
to traffic these words
put your cold on me
gazing forever upward
throw me something
I love you I love you
lavender is making sense

 

notice the rocks
I have practiced this
promise me yourself
I found a secret passage
beneath the Peppercorn trees
it is forbidden by the Pope
instead he blessed me
with a hole in the wall
I have imagined
that you wave
 
much like you throw
throw me something
be my gracious garden
your voice climbs over
a lavender ladder
do you want to
hear me breathing
I am feeling myself
the stiff sin of a sinner
the Pope is always watching

 

 

 

The Frame Around Us  

 

Following my night in a ‘haunted’ hearse

 

again my weight on the edge of your bed,

words fall like empty shells, your ticking clock is

Pinocchio’s face, hands point to always speak the truth

 

my up-late brainteaser, I beg you to tell me

but your body is a ruthless mime, signalling all 

that you refuse to say, scared the words will turn to flesh  

 

a shrug of your shoulders, you are locked,

it is late, I am so tired of this coming and going,

one day I will tell you of this grand adventure, what it did

 

and did not achieve, these long road-trips,

a night in a hearse cocooned in my sleeping bag,

I saw shadows spill over the ceiling’s canvas, slide off

 

above my head, slowly at first, each one fell

the way I have become my poems, retreated to

my cluttered desk, I am disappointing to meet in person

 

stranded by language, designed for answers,

neat squares on a page of black, filling the boxes

with crude solutions, revising, we are grubby crosswords

 

down and across, the hands of your clock

trim away the night, as if time decides the rules

of the puzzle, keeps changing the frame around us 

 

just lie down, we are safe for now,

it takes more than courage and words, waiting

to tell you of all I have seen, tonight I will not budge

 

 

(These poems are published in The Ghost Poetry Project, Puncher and Wattmann, 2009)  http://www.puncherandwattmann.com/pwghost.html

Alan Gould

Alan Gould is an Australian poet, novelist and essayist.  His seventh novel, The Lakewoman,  was launched at The 2009 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and his twelfth volume of poetry, Folk Tunes, has just been published by Salt.  Among his many awards, he has won the NSW Premier’s Prize For Poetry (1981),  The National Book Council Banjo Prize for Fiction (1992), The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal For Literature, and The Grace Leven Award for his The Past Completes Me – Selected Poems 1973-2003.

 

 

 

 

 

Two At A Café Table

 

for MG

 

Gold estuary falling on your shoulder,

what does blonde hair do?

It’s thirty seven Aprils since

I swam in gold with you,

 

lay close and breathed pine resin in;

we bonked our lunchtimes through,

our syllabus was tongue and groove

and what might nipples do.

 

Now coffee and our fancy cakes

are lush, but snag our way.

Miraculous how natural

the things we need to say,

 

to find response aglitter in

the lives that we now reach,

this winter day’s exquisite calm,

this frisson in our speech.

 

Is it your body’s loveliness,

is it my voice alone,

is it the gesture of a hand

or curve of your facial bone,

 

that lift us to our form of words

healing as they renew?

How come it took us half a life

to find this rendezvous

 

and see the gift of person in

the flesh that we once held,

now ADG can be less gauche,

Michelle be more Michelle’d?

 

Thirty seven years are here

and shoppers stop to stare

where two old lovers incandesce

and golden is the air.

 

Carolyn van Langenberg: Idea For A Story

Carolyn van Langenburg is the author of three books of literary fiction: The Teetotaller’s Wake, Fish Lips and Blue Moon, published by Indra press. Her collection of poems was published by Picaro in 2007. She has travelled widely in Asia and resides in the Blue Mountains with her husband.

 

 

Idea for a Story

               Leaves dance in the air.

               Dust whirls across the park.

               A dog yelps at its tail. Boys run around anything and everything.

               A woman’s hands disappear, her forearms disappear. A box draws her in, and then she pulls her arms out of the box and raises her hands high in the air. They dart like pale birds, flit and swoop into the box.  

                They dart like pale birds…

                Paper plates smeared with chocolate icing and the grainy green slicks of tabouli spill out of park garbage bins. Flip flop with chewed chicken wings and an empty pvc bottle that takes off with the wind to have a go at the dog. The dog jumps at the bottle and grovels it as if it were a bone. The bottle, too big for its mouth, jerks and rolls and whizzes.

               A woman’s legs walk under a box. Do the legs belong to the woman with the disappearing hands? The dog runs at the heels of the legs. The box bobs and jerks above a body. When the dog races back to the rolling bottle, the box with legs stops.

               The head of the woman with the disappearing hands appears as the whole of the woman’s body bends to pick something up off the grass. She holds the retrieved thing high, pinched between thumb and forefinger, fingers furled into the palm of her hand…

                No camera can see between the soft pads of her fingers furled over the top of her palm, which they touch. She stands still, holding up something small to examine, the box balanced against her hip. She may be reading a sign. She may be one of those women who look for signs to decipher, one who pinches salt to toss over her shoulder for good luck. Caught in this part of her life, she repeats her daily routine, juggling many banal tasks to keep food on the table and clothes on her child’s back. She may look for signs of future good fortune because money is tight. She worries, or does she, about her son’s performance at school, how much television he watches and how few books interest him. Is he a slow reader? How can the camera tell us anything about the life these two live?  As it is, if a camera were to pan this action, it will record that a woman dressed for a picnic in a park carries a box. Her shirt, worn under a sweatshirt, is bright red and her jeans are faded around the knees. She looks dishevelled. What significance will the camera capture in its frame?  What message will be decoded by the decipherers of the visual medium of this woman who loses her hands in a box filled with party food? How will they interpret her holding high something pinched between her thumb and forefinger? Is the message portending that, as she is a mother providing a happy birthday party for her son, she will be rewarded in the future with charming gummy grandchildren? Do those who spend their lives deciphering images drive the life out of motherhood, perching it on top of sentimental interpretation that diminishes humanity?

               She is a woman providing a birthday party for her son. That’s all, in a snapshot.

               The wind tears a feather from the tips of her fingers…

               The wind pelts the bottle with stirred up city grit. The wind smacks twigs and empty crisp bags at the bottle. The wind whips the bottle with wrappers and ripped newsprint…

               Boys yell and run, dog runs and barks, bottle rolls and whistles…

               The woman hoists the box, her head disappears and she stumbles. The box wobbles where her head ought to be, flips open and flap-flaps…

               Add a black sky and the drum roll of thunder with a few big drops of rain working up to a downpour and the scene is set.

               In parenthesis­

               The woman stands at a picnic table in the park. The dog noses a pvc bottle rolling near her feet. Boys cluster at one end of the table, joking about bullshit and who is full of it. The woman’s hands disappear into a box then reappear. They are transformed into birds that rise in the air, swoop and land on the table before taking off again. Her hands plunge into the box again — her hands become other things like bowls and food containers, escaping her attention. Her inattentive eyes mirror the sky that they skim. Grey, they are, with a tree blackening in front of darkening grey…

              Cake rises above box.

              Candles under her chin burst into little flames. Boys cheer. They yell a song about a happy birthday to you. A red-faced boy blows out the little flames. The other boys congratulate him for being full of bullshit. Hands become knife, knife cuts cake, boys stuff triangles of cake in their mouths.

               The dog’s mouth is never shut.

               And so the story begins:

               A woman packs bowls and paper plates and empty plastic food containers into a box. She pushes chewed chicken wings and plates streaked with tabouli and chocolate icing into the park garbage bin. The wind hurls the paper plates out of the garbage bin, tosses them to the ground, whips them across the grass where an empty pvc bottle rolls. The wind and the bottle tease the dog that jumps at the bottle and grovels it as if it were a bone. The wind whips at boys, pushing them backwards when they run forwards. The sky is blackening, the clouds rapidly broiling and thickening. Big raindrops fall and the yelping boys take off towards cars parked under big trees. The woman gathers up the box of birthday party things. When the dog barks and the boys shout, her head vanishes.

               The park is suddenly dark.

               Thunder drumrolls.

               The woman stumbles through pouring rain to one of the parked cars. Her head pops up when the box drops and lands between her breasts and the side of one of the cars.

               When the drenched woman sinks behind the steering wheel of her car, she looks into the rear vision mirror.  The birthday boy, two of his friends and the dog sit in a row on the backseat, grins wet, panting hard.

               Question stops story: Where does dog begin and boy end?

               The next thing that happens is natural. Lightning strikes the ground not far from the car and the thunder that follows is deafening. The dog howls. The birthday boy pulls the dog onto his lap and presses his hands over the dog’s ears. All the boys, lanky limbs crisscrossing lanky limbs, talk one over the top of each other about how doggy ears hurt when noises are loud like thunder.

               The woman behind the steering wheel pushes at wet strands of hair and sort of smiles. She looks enigmatic, like the Mona Lisa. That’s what the camera records. Being a mother is a state of being, like being Mona Lisa.  The image of her as a mother who looks like the Mona Lisa conceals her occupation. She is a writer.

               She galvanises the energy to start the car, a story beginning to unravel in her head. It’s about a birthday party that ends when lightning strikes.

 

[Acknowledgement: Luis Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.]

An earlier version of this story first appeared in Staples, issue 7

Cyril Wong reviews Between Stations by Boey Kim Cheng

Between Stations

by Kim Cheng Boey


Essays, Paperback, 320pp
ISBN 978 192088 2501
Giramondo (September 2009)
Aus $24.95

www.giramondopublishing.com/index.html

 

Reviewed by CYRIL WONG

 

             Kim Cheng Boey is a writer and poet who migrated to Sydney with his family from Singapore in 1997. One could call him a migrant writer. Between Stations, according to one book-description that I read online, is “his first collection of travel writing.” But such a description says very little about a book that is all about the personal and existential crisis of a writer trying to reconcile disparate cultural worlds, as well as one trying to come to terms with his past. 


              Beginning in India, then passing through the evocative worlds of Egypt and Morocco, Boey’s accounts of sojourns in far-flung places in the world are full of gritty anecdotes about fellow-travellers and impassioned references to famous works of art, music and literature used to magnify and universalise the writer’s constant wanderlust. As a Singaporean, I feel a connection to this ex-Singaporean’s desire to disappear into foreign spaces that resist the vicissitudes of change which are still essential to our tiny country’s survival today—as a Singaporean tells Boey at one point, “Changes are necessary. Singapore is too small. We have to move forward.”  

              It is easy to see why this desire prevails. The places that Boey escapes into are imbued with an imagined sense of timelessness; they are full of history, art and spirituality. What can Singapore boast of except that it has managed to succeed as a viable and prosperous nation state in just a few decades? Using photographs of long-gone locations and recounting memories about spending time in now-demolished buildings such as the Stamford Road Library, the author reveals how he is rendered distraught by change. Yet he is also quick to remember that a longing for things to be still and for the past to remain the past can be a pointless, self-indulgent exercise. In a chapter about Change Alley, a centre for corporate culture in Singapore, the writer feels “chastened” when he notes how retirees have adapted “so easily to the new Singapore.” He wonders if “the problem is me…I have never been able to be at home in the present; the only place I can feel at peace in is the past.”

            A fear of the past disappearing is tied to memories of a father’s abandonment of his responsibilities. A chapter can set off from an exotic location, rich with historical significance and framed within celebrated philosophical perspectives—think Walter Benjamin on memory or Susan Sontag on the photographic image—or aligned with quotations from influential works of literature by the likes of Cavafy or Du Fu. Then the writing segues repeatedly into a memory from the poet’s childhood, full of authentic smells and sounds, in which a grandmother is cooking for the family, or in which a father is taking a walk, or a smoke, with his son. The essays turn increasingly philosophical and poetic during such shifts. They are particularly heartbreaking during moments when Boey sees himself in his own son; in such instances, the poet also sees himself as his own departed father through his child’s eyes. Past, present and future collapse, which was what the author had hoped for all along—to unify what is lost with new memories forming in the midst of the present.

              Boey’s fans in Singapore would be glad to learn of the psychological and emotional back-story behind his poems, a few of which are quoted in the chapters. I was personally gripped by the author’s experiences as a counsellor in a local prison, as well as the time when he followed in the footsteps of Mother Theresa’s nuns in helping the poor. The poet-as-restless-traveller has become more three-dimensional to a reader like me who has followed his work since my junior college days. A sense of urgency grips the eponymous last chapter (“Between Stations”) when the writer tell us that as both emigrant and immigrant, he has become “adept at switching between codes:” “You become Kim Cheng Boey instead of Boey Kim Cheng…Kim Boey is accommodating…while Boey Kim Cheng has begun to try to find a way back to the old world…He is still searching for a language to utter himself into being.” Such urgency emphasises the schizophrenic state that the writer has been struggling to resolve throughout this book, particularly when this collection of essays is aching to a close.

            The book ends on a plane in which the writer’s daughter is poking him awake while his son announces “Singapore” over and over. On this aircraft that is hovering symbolically and literally between stations, “between home and home,” the author longs to “dwell in an autonomous state, a resting place between memory and imagination.” In this same instant, we as readers, regardless of whether we are Australian, Singaporean, or something in between, cannot help but long for such a place too.

              

 

Paul Fearne

Paul Fearne is a poet and philosopher working and residing in Melbourne, Australia. His poems have appeared in a number of journals including Westerly, Stylus, Unusual Work and verb-ate-him. His philosophical work has appeared in journals such as Consciousness Literature and the Arts. He is currently undertaking a PhD in Philosophy and LaTrobe University, and has completed a Master’s degree from the University of Melbourne.

 

 

 

A Dream of Coral

let the light of our hesitation bend around the moon
                           and clothe the sea in memories
             let the sound of the morning
sweep this cloud of butterflies
             into the uncertainty of tomorrow

there is a pause in the turning of the sky
              it marks the sorrow the birds feel
that the winter has forgotten its home
                            and the snow is reticent to melt

              a sea horse searches for its past
but the future is all it knows
                                        and in time
it will become a dream of coral
                           and wander further
             than it ever has before

 

The Regrets of Dragon Flies

a clothes line whirls in the breeze
                          on it
              sway pegged dreams
and the regrets of dragon flies

              a rustling catches our ears
it is the litter of autumn
              and the wandering of our fears

in a rain that has not fallen for a thousand years
              the simplicity of our forgetting
                             curls in a gentle mist
              and reminds us
that the last wish of a starfish
                             is all the dawn needs
to chase away the morning’s cobwebs
                            and their gentle intransigence

                            a nervous pride of clouds
(a fellowship that has never known a moments rest)
               gather up our best intentions
and scatter them throughout  the sea
and into the hopes of time
                             as she whispers the trembling names
                of all those lost silences
that have kept us searching
searching for the dust of the night’s companionship
                              and the kind wisps of longing
that sleep in the ancient abbey
we once knew as our home

 

Samantha Wilson

Sam is Melbourne based, obtaining her now defunct degree -Bachelor of Creative Arts (hons.) – at the University of Melbourne a fast-receding number of years ago.  She runs SNAFU Theatre with her childhood friend and playwright May Jasper, and is only now learning how to dress seasonally.


 

The Shape

 

in the end,

the house empty

of course i realised

that i had dreamt of you.

a forcibly empty house

me drying my dishwashed hands

and suddenly crying,

catching myself,

and i remember dreaming

of your small warm hand

in mine.

how i had dreamt you into

my street,

how we had walked together

in the hot afternoon’s

half-light,

you as silent and content,

as i thought you used to be.

in my kitchen,

patting water on my cheeks,

i saw the largeness of

my grief for you,

breathing, living on

without us,

and all the ways i

would continue to pay.

 

 

 

III

 

It is his endless

morning glare

that hits first,

not buried beneath sheets

but encrusted to a chair

or

pouring milk into a bowl

or

slowly pushing the plunger down.

 

He is not expecting you

and that is his consolation.

 

Scraping him off,

touching the edge of the banister

you could very well not be there,

very well not be grinding yourself

into him.

 

*

 

It is four in the morning

when he gets home,

familiar through the sightless presence,

as leaning against templed hallways

he sees you, just,

a fluttering glimpse in a dimming eye

as his hands fumble

dumbly for switches and

pocket change, and he

doesn’t quite know who he is any more

when sudden light surprises the

reflection crouching in the bathroom.

 

Stained, searching through

mirrored gazes for eyes and

ears and the four small moles

that one day disappeared.

His body deflated into

a husk.

 

The moon has beaten him tonight

standing by the window, and

whether he will finish in your bed

is a question you wont ask,

as lives past are discovered

in the floorboards

the house creaking

with unexpected scrutiny.

He does not know you are watching.

Mornings were made for nights like this

as sobs and breath

not your own

numb themselves into light.

 

*

 

He drinks four glasses of water

and remembers, finally, to close the fridge door.

In this half-light

he is a unicorn, almost,

pressing his body down in

bleak inspection of what is still there.

 

And only one thing he can say:

No body is this here

No body is this.

 

 

Murakami

 

You go into a room, because the bedside lamp

is on. You don’t have to turn it off,

but you want to. You trip over

a bedsheet, but the whole time your

eyes are fixed on the lamp.

This is how M makes you feel.

 

You are so fixed on this idea, that

instead of seeing Brando’s tux shirt in

a Godfather poster, you think he’s

holding a soft drink container.

 

It takes several re-glimpses to

shatter that image.

 

Maria Freij reviews What Came Between by Patrick Cullen

What Came Between

by Patrick Cullen

Scribe, 2009

ISBN: 9781921372889

$27.95

http://www.scribepublications.com.au/

 

 

Reviewed by MARIA FREIJ

 

 

Patrick Cullen’s first book, What Came Between, explores the life of three families in Laman Street, Newcastle in the aftermath of the 1989 earthquake, and following another incident with earth-shattering consequences for the community: the closing of the BHP steelworks ten years later. These life-changing incidents provide the framework for Cullen’s twelve interconnected stories, some of which have previously been published in Best Australian Stories, Sleepers Almanac, and Harvest. Cullen’s stories feature individuals at different stages in life and offer us an insight into the existence of very different characters, whose lives are, in one way or another, in a stage of turbulence, tragedy, or change. The earthquake becomes a trigger; cracks appear in the walls where no cracks used to be, or were they always present? The feeling of slippage runs like stormwater through the stories: involuntary childlessness, ageing, love, secrets, and guilt bob under the surface like the whale calf in Newcastle harbour, which, inevitably, is in for disaster when he crosses the surface. For the characters, the secrets and concerns continually approach the surface, but since what lies beneath will bring suffering if brought into the light, much remains necessarily and frustratingly suppressed.

Cullen’s characters are Carveresque in their working-class roots and minimalist depiction. Cullen eloquently balances the line between that which is spoken and that which must remain unsaid, showing great restraint in his narration. Newcastle features as a prominent character in the story as the city itself provides the ground upon which these characters have built their lives. When it is literally shattered, they lose their footing and their unravelling is inevitable:

 

     Sarah got up, dragged a chair over beside the wardrobe, and reached up and ran her hand over the wall.

‘This wasn’t here before,’ she said, tracing her finger along a crack. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’

Paul stirred and looked up. ‘It’s always been there.’

‘Well, it’s opened up some more now. I’m sure of it.’ (p 7–8)

 

For Paul and Sarah, the earthquake is the beginning of a falling-apart in many ways. Just the one crack—and yet, a wealth of secrets trickle from the past into the present. Their childlessness, Paul’s previous life, and Sarah’s illness make for an intriguing depiction of the life of an ordinary yet extraordinary couple. Paul’s breakdown, though neatly restrained, means he takes time off work, his focus turned to repairing what the earthquake has shattered. As he retiles the bathroom, he is able to reconstruct the physical order of his and Sarah’s life. Still, the foundations he is trying to recreate will inevitably be affected by the lies he insists on telling his wife.

For Ray and Pam, as the closing of the steelworks leads to the suicide of an old friend, the unravelling of old lies creates a fear of loneliness and abandonment. The emotional turmoil is subtly depicted, yet the dialogue rings true: ‘Please don’t ever leave me,’ Ray says in the night, his face buried in his wife’s hair. When Ray falls ill and his estranged son returns from Sydney, some of the most human of emotions—guilt, fear, and pride—truly come to the fore, and the proud behaviour of both father and son yields to something more important as love, yet again, is proven stronger and more important.

For the young man whose grandmother, in her old age, moves from her house in Laman Street to stay with her daughter in the countryside, Newcastle is a new beginning. Indeed, his luggage is lighter than that of the street’s other inhabitants. When his young girlfriend falls pregnant, they start a new life together in the Laman Street home, and its previous owner, somewhat surprisingly and disappointingly, never features in the story again. This couple, representing the possibility of change and rejuvenation, seem less credible in actions and reactions; but this is perhaps because of the vigour with which these young people go about their existence and this, in turn, due to their youth. Still, because of the ease with which their troubles are resolved, these two characters appear least realistic: their relationship seems at threat, by the ominous owls in the attic if not by their innocence, but their love persists against the odds. It seems that in a time of chaos and uncertainty, love is still a force to be reckoned with.

Cullen’s characters’ lives are beautifully reflected in the movement around them: ‘Fruit bats crashed into the fig trees, and flapped and fought and fell away to do the same thing further along the street.’ (p 55) Cullen creates a fantastic ambience through the depiction of the city and his wonderful detail: the ‘small red figs pinballing about beneath their feet’ (p. 155) mirror the microcosm he has built, its characters at the mercy of the larger forces at hand: by the ocean, with its sprinkling of coal ships on the horizon, his characters grow apart, and come together. Cullen’s use of light and shade, in combination with the vulnerability of the characters towards the elements and nature: the earthquake, the tree roots growing into the pipes, along with these people’s love for each other and their instinct to defend their marriages, relationships, and lives make for a compelling and engaging narrative that resonates far beyond its last page.