May 23, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
David Brooks is the author of five collections of poetry, three of short fiction, four highly acclaimed novels, and a major work of Australian literary history, The Sons of Clovis (UQP, 2011). His The Book of Sei (1985) was heralded as the most impressive debut in Australian short fiction since Peter Carey’s, and his second novel, The Fern Tattoo (UQP, 2007), was short-listed for the Miles Franklin award. The Sydney Morning Herald called his previous collection of poetry, The Balcony (UQP, 2008) ‘an electric performance’. Until 2013, he taught Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, where he was also the foundation director of the graduate writing program. He is currently co-editor of literary journal Southerly, lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and spends several months each year in a village on the coast of Slovenia. His most recent collection of poetry is Open House (UQP, 2015).
An Invasion of Clouds
My study has just been invaded by clouds
each smelling vaguely of lanolin and urine,
soft-eyed, wet nosed, curious-tongued,
come to inspect my books and papers,
like tax collectors for the invisible
or auditors from the ineffable earth
trying to determine how I waste my time.
Their leader, the unicorn, wants to taste
the volume of poems in my lap, while another
makes for the unfiled bills, the third
stares at the ancient aquatint
of my great-grandmother in her wedding-dress,
and the fourth, the black one, turning his back,
slowly and sensually rubs his behind
on the literary theory section of the bookshelf.
Following the others out,
he pauses at the door-frame for a final scratch
then pees with pleasure on the just-washed floor.
Midnight
Midnight, and out of nowhere
a giant hornet
worrying the window-frame,
two red moths
dozing under the desklamp-shade
and a bright green scarab
clambering over the stale bread; outside
a purple moon
rising over Nova Vas, the Great
Bear and her cub so
visible last night
now hidden by cloud, or should that be
mist, in the Vast Forest?
Somewhere a priest
worrying a fragment of a leaf.
Somewhere an ant
wrestling with her God.
Somewhere another Earth.
May 23, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Tracy Ryan is a Western Australian writer whose most recent book of poetry is Hoard (Whitmore Press, 2015), and whose latest novel is Claustrophobia (Transit Lounge, 2014). She is currently a visiting fellow with Literary Cultures of the Global South at the University of Tuebingen, Germany.
Winter: Liebestod
Inured by now to snow
nothing could drag me
away from inwardness
this would-be scraping
and clearing of the mind’s
dark drive with its slick
misnomer “black” ice
to the neuralgic window —
except that queer aria
of howls, falsetto, which now
in counterpoint and now
in unison makes plaint
to a woman who not so much
walks two white dogs as is
herself spurred on by animal pain
and mine, and stops her ears.
Winch-Bird
…haul/ My eyelids up
— Sylvia Plath, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”
Unseen, and named not by our utterance but by his own,
cranking the day up for me as he cranks your day down,
insistent and regular as the kitchen roller-shutter: creak…
creak… asserting particularity, necessity, marking off time
remaining in this place, staking out hours for work
and hours domestic, that querulous line between Home
and Them. The rest of the process a guessing-game,
if you care to determine who makes that mimic cry
and is endemic and does not leave in winter, allowing that
seasons are now so altered the guides don’t always apply.
If we have to make him real I’ll settle for woodcock,
Waldschnepfe, but in our private bird-world he will not
have to be hunted, only to be what he does, Winch-bird.
May 20, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
John Pavlou is a poet and songwriter from Brisbane who regularly engages in both literary and musical activities around Australia. His passion for literature was evident in his childhood and he first began writing short stories and poems while he was attending primary school. Songwriting was a natural path for Pavlou considering his love of both words and music; however, his affection for poetry, prose and spoken word was reinforced upon taking literature courses at university as well as engaging in local poetry meets hosted by Ruckus Slam. He identifies as a Greek-Australian and maintains that the feeling of belonging to two nations often plays a role in his life and work. The poem “Feral Dogs in Igoumenitsa” refers to an experience he had during his first trip to Greece. John Pavlou currently lives in Brisbane; he practices music and creative writing and is also undertaking study to be an educator.
Feral Dogs In Igoumenitsa
A rag-tag gang of teeth and fur approach the work-lights at the Port of Igoumenitsa. Each animal is startling in its own right and each carries robust folksy colours under their paws. City soot jumps off their shoulders as they swagger in the midnight air. Some are wearing collars and I can hear the metal buckles and trinkets jangle, singing with charm – the ghostly remains of a regal past.
The waves lick the jetty posts. I breathe in the green sea and detect a faint scent of burning oil. The feral lot rolls past me without so much as a look in my direction. This haphazard array of shape, size and colour is almost laughable, is laughable. And I do laugh as the sound of their claws hammering the bitumen recedes into silence. I’m left to imagine the richness of their history and wonder about their former glories. They, who know both the craziness of domestication and free winds of urban shabbiness. They, who make blankets out of tatters and houses of rags.
The wind belts across the waters surface and up into my face. I see the sole light of the ferryboat, swinging on the dark horizon.
May 20, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Prerna Bakshi is a poet, writer and research scholar of Indian origin from Sydney, Australia. Her work has previously been published in over two dozen journals and magazines, most recently in Grey Sparrow Journal, Silver Birch Press, Wilderness House Literary Review, Kabul Press, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature and South Asian Ensemble: A Canadian Quarterly of Literature, Arts and Culture. Her full-length poetry collection, Burnt Rotis, With Love, is forthcoming from Les Éditions du Zaporogue. She tweets at @bprerna.
The death train
You’re all grown up now.
Don’t jump around too much
out in the open.
A girl gets told
as she plays hop scotch.
You have grown breasts now.
They bounce up and down.
What if anyone sees?
I’ve been told rubbing
this oil helps.
It works like magic.
A girl gets told
as she gets used as a guinea pig
for virtually every ‘home remedy’
under the sun.
Don’t wear this dress.
It will attract the eyes to your weak spot.
You have such small breasts.
I worry who will marry you?
They are either too large
or too small.
Too saggy
or too perky.
They either bounce too much
or not at all.
Too this, too that — never right.
Never satisfactory enough.
Except on that day when it didn’t matter
how women’s breasts looked.
How big they were
or how small.
They were just right.
Just the right size.
The right shape.
The right shade.
The right kind of breasts
on the right kind of women.
The chosen women.
Women who were handpicked,
lined up,
one by one,
had their breasts chopped off;
blood gushing all over the jam-packed
train carrying refugees;
women bleeding
slowly to death.
Their breasts, finally,
finally — the right size
for being cut into pieces.
May 19, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
David McCooey is a prize-winning Australian poet and critic. His latest collection of poems, Outside (2011), was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards and was a finalist for the 2012 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award. His first collection, Blister Pack (2005) won the Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for four major national literary awards. McCooey is the deputy general editor of the prize-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009). His album of “poetry soundtracks”, Outside Broadcast, was released in 2013 as a digital download. He is a Professor of Literature and Writing at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria, where he lives.
‘Whaling Station’ Redux
i)
What trash, that poem of mine about the whaling station
we visited in Albany in the primitive 1970s, those years
when an operational slaughterhouse could be a family
tourist attraction. My late father’s legacy of 35mm slides,
newly digitised, undoes my poem, with three shots—
miraculous and amoral—of butchered whales,
a shock defacement of poetry’s mouthy reckoning.
ii)
In the first capture, there are winches, wire, a stone wheel
(for sharpening things, I imagine), rust-coloured concrete,
a fibro building, and the figures of two blue-singleted men
in gumboots, one bending, both partly obscured by steam rising
from blocks of whale meat. The steam has a pink colouration.
iii)
The second capture suffers from camera shake,
that analogue of nausea, and shows two men with metal bars
prying into the whale’s remains. Above them are
the innocent clouds, a seabird with extended wings.
iv)
In the third capture, two boys are in the frame. They could be,
but are not, my brother and me. They are looking at a single carcass:
headless, flayed, and eviscerated, the mess of it
rendered into dreadful blacks, reds, and whites.
In the centre of the whale the JPEG clips to pure black.
v)
I was five years old when I was taken to witness this industry of men.
When I show my father’s photographs to my six-year-old son,
I skip past these three images, momentarily panicky.
My blonde son, intent on the screen, wants to know what
he’s just seen, but does not argue when I tell him it’s not for him.
We move on to a grainy shot of Uncle Mac—who was no blood relation,
but shared my father’s name—standing before the Arc de Triomphe.
Europe
The grey and the green
under the white of the sky,
and over the black of the earth.
The annual pogrom of Autumn.
Soldiers in the fog;
soldiers marching
in the guiltless dusk.
The storybook animals
living in bungalows.
The night birds singing
their repetitive songs.
May 19, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
David Ishaya Osu writes poetry and nonfiction. He is a board member of the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation based in Uganda. Among publications, his poetry appears in Chiron Review, The Lampeter Review, CutBank, Vinyl, Transition, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Nottingham Review. His works are also published in anthologies including: RædLeaf Poetry: The African Diaspora Folio, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, Maintenant 10: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art. David is a fellow of Ebedi International Writers Residency, and is currently the poetry editor at Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel.
Time in my bread
I will sandwich
time in my bread
and swallow it, then
beg to
return to
my mother’s mode
sorry, womb
where all
the eels and the
snakes and the gas
flames will take me
as their friend
fit to control
cocktails
and sunshine
Death debate
You cannot lock
air in a
casket, or not
expect people to see
the white you wear
or the black
in the eyes;
there is no hope
that the house will grow back, she said
but, there’s wine
in the glass
and the people
will have rains to make
ice of
their burnt bodies
May 19, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ben Hession is a Wollongong-based writer. His poetry has appeared in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, and Cordite, with work also to appear in the 25th anniversary anthology of Live Poets at the Don Bank Museum, Can I Tell You a Secret? In 2013, his poem “A Song of Numbers” was shortlisted for the Australian Poetry Science Poetry Prize. Ben is also a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.
Stuart Park Lagoon
After the storm, the stream breaches
the strand:
racing out skeletal branchlets;
racing out unconscious, plastic fragments
of suburbia.
Ostensibly still stands the lagoon,
the surface, tense with stillness,
a pelican breaks.
You can tell where to fish, watching a pelican —
an Aboriginal man had told me, once.
Where then, are the fishermen today, absent
from the overflowing water?
May 19, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Andrew Stuckgold is a writer and photographer living in Erskineville, NSW. He has been published in Meanjin, Cordite, and Spineless Wonder’s Writing to the Edge (the 2003 Joanne Burns Award). He is currently working toward completing an MA degree in Creative Writing at Sydney University.
Taken
These eyes that split
from the darkened water
surging upward.
A snapping lunge
armoured in nightmare,
a maw that reeks
like a bone garden, crammed
with punching teeth;
the spike hammer clamp
of shattering leaden jaw.
This green scaled grinder;
meat and sinew torn
from that still half living,
ripped ragged
to the feeding;
consumes its corpsed bride
in a salt red wash:
blood, bile, and faeces
the banquet’s
clawing perfume.
May 4, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Stuart Barnes was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and educated at Monash University. Since 2013 he has lived in Central Queensland and been poetry editor for Tincture Journal. His manuscript The Staysails won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, resulting in the publication of his first book, Glasshouses (UQP, August 2016). His website is https://stuartabarnes.wordpress.com/; he tweets as @StuartABarnes.
The Moon and the Mason Jars
for Ruth Whebell
Purified in stainless stockpots
with black Italian cursives and gilt,
stuffed with smashed green cabbage, sea salt,
yoghurt’s
whey; three-quarter revolutions compel
the Latin blanks. From elliptic orbit a well
versed silver tongue assuages the dish rack’s
topsy-turvy characters.
April 3, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hook and Eye
By Judith Beveridge
Braziller, Ed Paul Kane
ISBN 978-0-8076-0000-9
Reviewed by MICHELE SEMINARA
Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye is a collection of previously published poems selected to showcase the highly regarded Australian poet’s work to an American readership. The poems are for the most part imaginatively — rather than autobiographically — conceived, lyrical while still remaining largely outward looking, and full of the sensual imagery and sound-play for which Beveridge’s work is prized. Yet what is most striking about the book, comprised of work written over a twenty-five year span, are the enduring and distinctive spiritual concerns of the poet, and how these inform her praxis.
As Maria Takolander points out in a recent review[i], the book’s first poem, ‘Girl Swinging’, seems deliberately placed to give the reader insight into (perhaps even guidance for entering) the poet’s creative practise.
I often think about
the long process that loves
the sound we make.
It swings us until
we’ve got it by heart;
the music we are.
(‘Girl Swinging’)
The process of creation rather than the creation itself is paramount, a process which (like Beveridge) ‘loves’ playing with ‘the sound we make’ and which ‘swings us’ until we come to understand, at a heart level, ‘the music we are’. There is a profound desire for personal transformation: the speaker, longing ‘to be a symphony / levitated by grace-notes’, turns quietly within, ‘listening to myself’ until ‘that feeling comes / of being lifted into the air’. Takolander has convincingly argued that lyric poetry is fundamentally a poetry of embodiment and senses a paradox here in the way the remembered sensations of the girl’s body ‘swinging’ generate the adult speaker’s spiritual disembodiment. Yet it is not merely sensory experience which leads to this state – it is the poet’s attentive focus upon the girl’s sensory experience which foreground a form of mindfulness and lead the narrator of ‘Girl Swinging’ to her own kind of lyric elevation. Beveridge’s poetry could perhaps be called a poetry of conscious embodiment; here, physicality acts as tool for deepening the narrator’s awareness until she rises into a space of ‘…clear singing / …above / the common rattle / of chains’.
The life of the future Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, and also that of his antagonistic cousin Devadatta, are the subject of Beveridge’s previously published poetic sequences ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’ and Devadatta’s Poems , extracts from which appear in this collection. In one such poem, ‘The Kite’, narrated by Siddhartha as he progresses towards enlightenment, the image of a boy expertly controlling a kite in the wind suggests how he might gain similar control of his own errant mind – how he might learn to make it ‘sing’.
Today I watched a boy fly his kite.
It didn’t crackle in the wind – but
gave out a barely perceptible hum.
At a certain height, I’d swear I heard
it sing. He could make it climb in
any wind; could crank those angles up
make it veer with the precision
of an insect targeting a string…
(‘The Kite’)
The word ‘hum’ here carries dual meanings. It evokes the same sense of musicality, of ‘singing’ as an analogy for poesis as in ‘Girl Swinging’, yet it also carries a spiritual meaning. ‘Hum’ is suggestive of ‘Aum’, an English translation of the Sanskrit symbol ॐ, which, tellingly, has no exact linguistic meaning but expresses the non-divisible unity of of the body, speech and mind of an enlightened being. It is mantra, or enlightened sound, believed – in the Buddhist tradition – to vibrate at frequencies capable of setting up harmonic resonances within the mind/body of the practitioner, frequencies capable of unblocking internal energies obstructing an experience of our true nature – ‘the music we are’. In ‘The Kite’, Siddhartha has an epiphany when he realises it is not through the practise of asceticism, or withdrawal from the world of the senses, that he may learn to make his mind ‘hum’ like a kite, but by directly and consciously engaging with the world. Like the narrator of ‘Girl Swinging’, Siddhartha’s mindful focus upon sense perceptions hones his awareness and helps his mind ‘fly’.
The dual meaning of the word ‘hum’ is revealing and offers a way of understanding Beveridge’s poesis as a type of sacred ‘singing ’. She states: ‘Sometimes I want the effects of my poetry to be subliminal, as if the poems were tuning forks vibrating at a pitch just out of ear-shot, but which are secretly changing the structure of thought and feeling.’ [ii]
As the practise of mantra and chanting in many spiritual traditions attests, sound is a powerful tool for mental transformation; perhaps, for Beveridge, poetry, like mantra, is a form of spiritual practise.
The poem ‘In the Forest’ further explores the theme of the transformative power of mindful observation:
… But sometimes,
watching a butterfly emerge, I sense
my own eyelids flutter in the strange
puparium of a dream. O, I don’t know
if I’ll ever wake, changed, transformed,
able to lift on viridescent wings.
But as I watch, I feel my mind enter
a vast space in which everything
connects; and a grasshopper on a blade
of grass listens intently with its knees.
(‘In the Forest’)
This poem, narrated – like ‘The Kite’ – by Siddhartha, is reminiscent of the famous story by Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou, who, upon waking from a dream of being a butterfly, ‘did not know whether he was Zhou who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou’[iii]. In ‘In the Forest’ we once again encounter a distrust of the conceptual – ‘I don’t know’ the speaker tells us; a focus on the power of observation when co-joined with pure sense perception – ‘I watch’, ‘I sense’; and an emphasis on how one must ‘feel’ one’s way into the ‘vast space in which everything / connects’. To ‘feel’ is to experience emotionally as well as physically, suggesting that perhaps the two must unite if Siddhartha is to enter the ‘vast space’ of enlightenment. The synaesthetic image of the grasshopper listening ‘intently with its knees’ symbolises the interconnected nature of this vast inner space. However, the image is not simply expressive, but a scientific fact: grasshoppers do indeed listen with their knees, implying that for Siddhartha the mental state ‘in which everything/ connects’ is less a fantasy than an achievable reality.
The spiritual world view which informs Beveridge’s poetry is evident not only in her choice of subject matter and the meticulous detail of her imagery, but also in the way she uses an array of speakers to narrate her poems. In his Note On Judith Beveridge at the beginning of Hook and Eye, Paul Kane remarks that Beveridge has said she is ‘not at all interested in writing about herself’, observing that this ‘attitude of self-effacement…opens up the world of the poet rather than the poet herself’. It also opens up the concept of the ‘I’ in a way that many Eastern spiritual traditions do; by using imaginative characters (Prince Siddhartha, Devadatta, various fisherman) to ‘author’ the poems in the book, Beveridge explores and shifts around the ‘I’ in ways which suggest ‘I’ is not a set concept. Certainly, as a poet, she is more interested in inhabiting the ‘I’ of others, in examining what it is in the human psyche that unites us.
Of course, not all of Beveridge’s poems deal overtly with Buddhist subjects. ‘To the Islands’ is a poem which uses the spiritual metaphor of rowing to a far-off shore as the basis for both an auditory meditation and a manifesto on how the speaker plans to journey:
I will use the sound of wind and the splash
of the cormorant diving and the music
any boatman will hear in the running threads
as they sing about leaving for the Islands.
(‘To the Islands’)
The speaker of this poem eschews conceptual knowledge as a method for undertaking her journey, admitting, ‘Look – I don’t know // much about how to reach the Islands’, instead layering auditory image upon image, each becoming more subtle – as the mind that perceives such subtle sounds would need to be, and as the mind that reads them gradually becomes:
Meanwhile I’ll use the sound of sunlight
filling the sponges and a diver’s saturated
breathing in the lungs of an oarsman
rowing weightless cargo over the reefs.
The strength of imagist poems like ‘To the Islands’ is that they allow the reader to experience for themselves a process of mindful awareness. It is common in Beveridge’s poems for the syntax, like the mind in its ‘watching’, to meander, the lines cascading over the stanza breaks and the sentence structures never quite concluding . This sense of flux is expressed, unsurprisingly, to greatest effect in the watery poems of the book – the ones excerpted from ‘Driftgrounds –Three Fishermen’, where the images don’t so much build as flow, often in the progressive tense, giving the reader the experience of flowing along with the narrator.
The mouth of a little fish had just sipped away a star
from the river, a lyrebird was opening the day, volunteering
to be a bell. We were watching an egret prod at the nutrient
dark, its beak one tine of a fork catching what floats, just
as the sun began cracking the trees awake. The bird’s song
reached us, then it sharded into the river’s cold glass.
(‘River Music’)
In poem after poem of Hook and Eye we are similarly invited to ‘watch’, ‘hear’ and ‘feel’ experiences directly along with the poet via her sensual imagery, syntax and sound play. The effect on the quality of our own awareness is cumulative, subtle, yet palpable; we can feel our minds slowing, focusing and deepening.
In a guest post for The NSW Writers’ Centre on poetry and spirituality Beveridge wrote:
Throughout history, poetry has always been the most powerful and effective form for addressing and exploring deep spiritual questions. Partly this is because poetry is connected so intimately with the breath. Poets know that the breath can act as an interpreting spirit, something which will help move, uplift and carry lived experience into rhythms and tones which allow both writer and reader to feel as if they are in communion and intense dialogue with the world around them.
Poetry as an art form employs repeating structures of sound, image and rhythm, and this patterned approach enables both writer and reader to access knowledge in non-discursive ways. Patterns can lead to insights and revelations which may not be attained or reached through logical or rational methods alone. [iv]
Beveridge could be describing her own poetry here: it is she who is the master of ‘show don’t tell’, not merely imaginatively presenting a scene but subtly shifting her reader’s very perception. Like Grennan in the poem ‘Grennan Mending Nets’ the poet helps us to feel our own minds ‘drift’, to experience how good it is ‘to just let fish and weather turn [our] head; to sit and work / taking thread from warp to weft’. Reading Hook and Eye we find ourselves shaking our heads the way the eponymous Delancey does, ‘just working / it slowly – like a sieve at the water’s edge’ of Beveridge’s poems. Or perhaps if – like Beveridge in her writing – we have been especially attentive in our reading, we may find ourselves, like Devadatta in the final poem of the book, ‘At Rajkote, After the Rains Retreat’, emerging from our poetically induced meditation with an awareness so sharp we ‘could reckon / a hare’s smell down to a point, accurate as a compass’; have our thoughts come ‘as airily as insects skimming / over a pond’; or experience ‘a peace come over’ us which has ‘the equanimity / of snow’. If poetry is capable of inducing such sublime experiences, surely it is the poetry of Judith Beveridge.
Notes
[i] Takolander, Maria. ‘Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye.’ Cordite, 16 June 2015. Web. 10 August 2015.
[ii] Takolander, Maria. ‘Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye.’ Cordite, 16 June 2015. Web. 10 August 2015.
[iii] Mair, Victor H. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. New York: Bantam Books, 1994. Print.
[iv] Beveridge, Judith. ‘Making Space for the Inner Life: Judith Beveridge on Poetry & Spirituality.’ The NSW Writers’ Centre, 2013. Web. 5 August 2015.
MICHELE SEMINARA is a poet, editor, critic and yoga teacher from Sydney. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Bluepepper, Tincture Journal, Regime, Seizure, Plumwood Mountain and Social Alternatives. Her first collection, Engraft, was published by Island Press this year. Michele is also the managing editor of online creative arts journal Verity La.