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.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
A Cool and Shaded Heart
Noel Rowe
(Vagabond Press, ISBN 97805511307, $25)
Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK
Just under a year since Noel Rowe’s untimely death, Vagabond Press have graced us with a volume of his collected poems, selected by editor Michael Brennan. The collection does not include Rowe’s first book, Wings and Fire, which he had consciously moved away from, but Section I comprises early poems published in university and literary journals, and selections from his second work, Perhaps After All (1999). This section is especially significant in offering:
examples of many of the key themes Rowe pursued throughout his
writing, such as the work of mourning, the significance of family
origins, relations and childhood, the evolution of spirituality and the
questioning of received faith, communion with others through friendship
and loss, and the day-to-day politics of simply being in the world at the
end of the twentieth century. (Preface, p.11)
The opening poem, written for the poet’s mother, exemplifies a number of these themes as well as Rowe’s versatility with traditional rhyme and rhythm patterns:
You lift your cup in the weak light, the bare
morning, and steam is touching you.
You eat toast, cut and buttered thin,
while the house settles breathing about you.
You and the furniture take the signs in
of children and time. Photographs hold
but do not give. The jacaranda has made mauve
again, the frangipani white with bruise of gold.
(from “You Lift Your Cup,” p.15)
Material things become sacred in the context of emotional connection. Likewise, in the rest of this section, insights and images surprise with their sensitive grasp of the moment, as poems celebrate the existence of friends and observed strangers.
Section II comprises the early, unedited manuscript of the collection Next to Nothing (2004), with the poems in their original order. Particularly moving are poems on the death of Rowe’s father, the emotion spare, again presented indirectly through everyday images:
running his finger like the wind along the fence
to feel its worried grain
noticing beneath the strong and almost everlasting fig tree
the cows sitting black shoulders forward like nuns at prayer
(from “Perhaps after all he hasn’t gone,” p.31)
Habits shaped
for thirty-six years of marriage hang about the house
and wonder what to do.
(from “Pentecost,” p.32)
This section also includes conversations overheard on buses, dramatic monologues, and, in “War Coverage” (p.48), an exposé of the political-speak which masks our perception of the realities of war, so that:
It’s only later that the images we see
of Baghdad’s skin being stripped and sent away weeping,
of blood lost and stumbling through the camera’s eye,
of children’s limbs abruptly stopped and going nowhere,
really do disturb:
The beautifully understated sequence “Magnificat,” in the voice of the Virgin Mary, underscores the humanity of Christ and queries the inevitability of his resolve. Cadences stretch across lines, the enjambment carrying the forward impulse of the poems:
Last night, when the bread went
from my hand to his, it was bruised,
and still he carried the scent
of the broken jar, the sinner’s nard.
When, to take his wine, he bent
his shoulders forward, I was afraid
to ask, did he wish, now, I had refused? (p.60)
Having seen so many reversals,
I should have known he would test his muscles
on the stone, and walk away from the dazed
grave, leaving its mouth open and amazed. (p.61)
Other poems are variously written for friends and mentors (“Watermelon, the only word I have”; “For Kevin Lee, Professor of Classics”), experiment with form and style (“On This Winter Morning”; “Backyard Blues”), or make connections between Buddhist thought and traditional Western theology.
The fourth section of the book, the complete text of Touching the Hem, written during Rowe’s initial period of cancer treatment, is indisputably his finest work. In her review of the 2006 volume, Judith Beveridge reminds us that
Rowe’s greatest gift in these poems is to see beyond personal distress
and discomfort and to connect with what one could argue is poetry’s
most significant benefit: community.
(Southerly, vol. 67, no.3, 2007, p.223)
Again the wry, spare imagery does duty for statements of suffering and loss, as in poem 13:
Today I’m allowed home,
taken, after one month away,
by the occupational therapist. She wants
to see how much the house needs to be
modified. The bed, the leather lounge,
the kitchen table, the madonnas, buddhas and paintings all
indicate this is the place where I used to live
but now they appear in a different light,
one that is faded, less substantial. I’d like
to make it to the garden but can only stand
at the back door (the therapist says another step
is needed) wondering if the lilies from
my mother’s garden are still alive. By now
it’s raining, trees are rubbing themselves up against
the cleaned air, and a bird is darting past
the frangipani tree without a sound. (p.151)
Moments of heightened lyricism contrast with the seemingly matter-of-fact, a microcosm of acknowledged temporality. The phrase “the place where I used to live” suggests that the poet has already moved on.
In his reactions to both living and dying, Rowe does indeed “touch the hem,” and a reading of the poems in A Cool and Shaded Heart allows us particular insight into that state of grace.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ana Blandiana was born Otilia-Valeria Coman on 25th March 1942 in Timiºoara, Romania and adopted her pen name at seventeen with the publication of her first poem. After marrying editor Romulus Rusan in 1960 she attended the faculty of philology in Cluj-Napoca.
Ana Blandiana
I first heard of the poet Ana Blandiana as a child in Romania when the popular starlet Margareta Pâslaru sang her famous poem Lasã-mi toamnã frunze verzi, (Leave me green leaves Autumn.) Later, in the 1980s, when I was dissatisfied with life in my country of birth, Blandiana appeared again in my consciousness with poems that young people could relate to. However, I did not realise the full extent of her involvement in arts, and especially politics, until two decades later. By then I had fled communist Romania, made a new life in Australia and begun my research into Eastern European poets.
Translation is generally considered detrimental to the original work because of the loss of the original rhyme, rhythm and expression. However, I would argue that Ana Blandiana’s poetry is translated into English to advantage. Romanian is a romantic language and the word choice, its inflection, sound and particular connotation can outstrip the content in importance. Ana Blandiana’s original poems have an enthralling rhyme and rhythm. The translations allow the reader to focus on what the author is saying rather than the way in which they say it. When reading Blandiana’s poetry, understanding content is crucial in order to appreciate the poem’s beauty and profundity.
The political context in Romania at the time had a significant influence on Ana Blandiana’s work. Her poetry expressed the concerns of an oppressed nation that would otherwise face severe repercussions. She is best known for her use of the extended metaphor with which she masked her criticism. “Hibernare” (Hibernation) comments on the nation’s ignorance and unwillingness to act by depicting them at the border of sleep: “Don’t listen to my brothers, they sleep. / Not understanding their own shouted words, / While they scream like some approving wild beasts.”
In 1985 she became known, nationally and internationally, for her most controversial anti-communist poetry. At the insistence of the student editors of the Bucharest magazine Amfiteatru, Blandiana submitted a group of four anti-communist poems. One of them was Eu Cred (I Believe), in which she reinvents her nature theme:
I believe that we are a botanic nation
Otherwise, where do we get this calmness
In which we await the shedding of our leaves?
She was sufficiently popular to demand the world’s attention in case of political persecution since, in the words of Romanian editor Musat, “Popular poets had a special status; an aura [of] which they took advantage” (Musat). Blandiana was banned from publishing nationally after Ceauºescu became aware of the poems’ seditious content. In 1985 she sent Totul (All,) a reflection on everyday Romanian life, abroad to be published in samizdat, in different western newspapers and later broadcasted on Radio Free Europe. The Independent in Britain devoted their first page to a translation of the poem and provided an interpretation of its surrealist prose. As a result, the communist authorities placed a ban on books containing her name and poetry, which lasted from 1985 to 1988.
In an interview with Naomi Frandzen, Blandiana reveals that, like many public personalities at the time, she was tempted to flee Romania (Frandzen) but her poem “Cetina” (The Fir Tree) discloses her fear that, once departed, she could not return:
They cannot leave, not even as ghosts.
Around them water and sky migrate
The wind asks constantly: “Don’t you go?”
The fir tree sobs: “I’m home.”
The political context created a personal dilemma as she strove to balance her poetic integrity with political demands. Among the many early poems that showcased her romantic style she wrote “Torquato Tasso,” as a result of her study of the Italian poet and in response to her early experience with the censorship which was run by Directia Presei (The Press Department). In an interview published by the National Journal Online in 2005 she revealed that “[with censure] we had to always negotiate, to renounce. About my first book I cannot even say with all my heart that it is mine, that much the censor intervened” (Viata Mea E Un Roman: Amintirile Anei Blandiana.) In “Torquato Tasso” she reflects on the absence of truth in poetry and society and her role as a poet to uphold it:
Through the night he came towards me, he,
The poet failed by fear.
He was very handsome.
You could see the poetry in his body, like an x-ray film.
Poetry unwritten out of fear.
Even without political implications her poetry was contentious, delving in philosophy, religion and morality. Although she tried to incorporate the truth as she saw it, her willingness to succeed in a literary career and her new status as a poet did not allow for complete freedom of expression. “Each Move” reveals her dilemma:
Each of my moves
Is seen
Simultaneously in many mirrors,
Each look I take
Meets with itself
Several times,
Until
I forget which is
The true one,
And who
Mocks me.
In a society where communal harmony was claimed to be upheld, she questions the role of poetry, revealing its controversial and untameable nature, which lends it a sense of notoriety:
I hear how someone steps behind me in eternity
And plants words in the wake of my soles,
A wise step – quotation marks,
A wrong step – poetry.
After the December uprising in 1989 and the execution of Ceauºescu, Blandiana’s ban was officially lifted and she continued publishing. She also reopened the Romanian branch of the worldwide association of writers, PEN, in 1990, and over the years founded numerous projects and organisations aimed at preserving freedom of speech and opposing the persecution of writers.
Her early work and the poetry written after the 1989 revolution are characterised by nature and emotion as pure expressions of life. It resembles the youthful preoccupation with love, self discovery and romanticism in cultural desert produced by oppression and lack of freedom of speech. “Rain Chant” celebrates youth as it compares sexuality with nature: “
I am the most beautiful woman because it’s raining
And I look good with rain’s locks in my hair.
I am the most beautiful woman because it’s windy,
And the dress desperately struggles to cover my knees
As well as displaying an intense awareness of life, her poetry has several dominant thematic elements including morality, religion and spirituality. The dominant religion in Romania is Romanian Orthodox Christianity; “Pieta,” published in 1969, reflects on faith through the confusion of Jesus Christ’s mother at his death:
Clear pain, death returned me,
To your breast subdued, almost a child.
You do not know if you should thank
Or cry
For this happiness,
Mother.
Her latest volume, Refluxul sensurilor (The Senses’ Reflux) was published in 2004 and marks four decades of literary work. The poetry brings her work full circle as it deals with themes from her early poetry. Birth-death, beginning-end and youth-old age persist underneath mundane life and under the tone of calm elegy. Having retired from political life, she embodies personal moralities in images of night, sea and church bells, symbols that recur throughout her poetry. “Thistles and Gods” reflects upon time and mortality:
All time is only a day…
There is no past, no future,
An eternal today, stunning,
With the sun above unmoving
Unable
To measure
Immortality’s failure.
During her career Ana Blandiana won a number of literary awards, including the Poetry Award from the Romanian Writers Union (1969), the Writers Union Award for Children’s Literature (1980), the Gottfried Von Herder Award (1982) and the Mihai Eminescu National Award for Poetry (1997) (e.Informativ.ro). These awards, together with a significant body of inspirational work, assure her an honoured place in world literature.
Notes
Alianþa Civicã Romana. General Information. c2006. Civic Alliance. Available:
http://ww e.Informativ.ro, Sursa ta de Informare.
Cultura Romaniei, Ana BlandianaBiografie.n.d.e.informativ.ro.
Frandzen, Naomi. "Interview with Ana Blandiana." Lingua Romana: a Journal of French, Italian and Romanian Culture. 1.1 (2003): 1-10.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Besmellah Rezaee (Hamta) was born in Afghanistan and is an Australian Afghan who currently studies a double degree in Law and International studies at the University of Adelaide. In addition, He works as a Publication officer for Karawaan Organization; he is the executive Director of “Sokhane-nau” magazine, and hosts a show in radio Adelaide called ‘Dialogue’ every Sunday. He is the founder and president of AATSA (Association of Australian Tertiary Students from Afghanistan) at the present and also works as an interpreter with Multilingua ltd.
اینجا کابل است!
اقیانوس درد
ساحل غم
قصر دارالمان، کوه آسمایی، پل آرتن، زیارت سخی1
روزگاری مهد:
حاکمیت، غرور، محبت و نیایش بود!
سیاهی وهم آلود جهل
بر کوی و برزن
بر در و دیوار
بر آدم های این سر زمین
سایه افکنده است
کبوتران “سخی”2 رنگ باخته اند
“افشار”3 هنوز بوی خون میدهد
“ده افغانان”4 سینمای حرص و هوس شده است:
اینجا یکی در پی لقمه نانی
روزش آغاز و شبش پایان ندارد
و دیگری در پی لحظه هوسی
شبش آغاز و روزش پایان ندارد
دریای کابل
بی آب و ماهی و موج
در سکوت ابدی محبوس شده است
کودکان اینجا
بعد از زمان خویش به دنیا آمده اند
آنها علم را در دست فروشی فرا میگریند
“گودارد”5 هم مرده است
تا اینبار نیوریالیزم را در کابل احیا میکرد.
اینجا کابل است ! کابل!!!
1 نام جاهای معروف در کابل
2 سخی نام زیارتگاهی است در کارته سخی کابل
3 افشار نام منطقه است در قسمت غرب کابل که در جریان جنگهای داخلی کشتار دسته جمعی و قتل عام مردم در آنجا صورت گرفت
4 نام جایی در مرکز شهر کابل
5 جین لوک گودارد نویسنده و فیلمساز معروف فرانسوی بود که در بنیان گذاری مکتب بنام آتیریزم و فرنچ نیو ویو سهم بارز داشت
This is Kabul!
The ocean of pain
the shore of sorrow
the Dar al-Man palace, the Asemani mountain, the Arten bridge, the Sakhi shrine (1)
a time of cradle:
there was sovereignty, pride, kindness and benediction!
Damn the war…
the fearful blackness of ignorance
has cast a shadow
on every quarter and on every district
on the door and the wall
on the people of this land
The pigeons of the Sakhi have lost their colour (2)
Afshar still reeks of blood (3)
Dah Afghanan has become a cinema of restriction and caprice (4)
Here a person seeking a bite of bread
never starts the day nor ends the night
and another seeking a moment of caprice
never starts the night nor ends the day
The seas of Kabul
without water or fish or waves
are exiled in eternal silence
The children here
have been born after their time
and will be educted in the future through hawking
Godard is also dead (5)
to once again revive neorealism in Kabul.
This is Kabul! Kabul!!!
[author’s footnotes]
(1) names of famous places in Afghanistan
(2)Sakhi is a name of a shrine in Kabul
(3)Afshar is a name of a district in west of Kabul where massacres took place during the civil war
(4)the name of a place in central Kabul
(5) filmmaker
Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh is an Iranian-born Australian writer. His books include the novel The New Angel (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2008); with Ken Avery, translations of medieval Sufi poetry Fifty Poems of Attar (re.press, 2007); and the collection of poetry Eyes in Times of War (Salt Publishing, 2006). The main themes of his writing are history, spirituality and dissent. His current projects include a nonfiction novel about the life of his grandfather (to be published in 2009) and, with John Kinsella, an anthology of Persian poetry in translation.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Belinda Lopez is a young Australian journalist working in Jakarta, Indonesia. Between writing stories and editing for an English-language newspaper in the capital, she has been hiking her way around the many islands of the country, jotting down poetry as she goes.
To Philip Larkin, from Singapore
With the promise of clean,
I was morally confronted
by sex shops, and fingers
entwined on trains.
Even still, sterility ran me inside-
a blessing I was alone,
I dived into solitude
like a finely sculpted boy,
I lunged in a store
where books are hailed the profit,
pushed past a muddled mess of man
who’d found solace in little words
strung together,
and I searched for you,
L, L, L,
tongue flicking my palette fast.
Found an anthology from home
unknowns- even for poets-
that doesn’t matter,
they wrote of Glebe
and left-wing smells
you would have found it bum
so I didn’t buy it.
Oh God, I wanted to feel
Sappho Cafe and messy dusk
tuned to the love songs of
social invalids.
But you weren’t there.
So I left with E. E. Cummings
feeling like I’d taken home the wrong man.
Ibu
Morning calls draw her up from bed
an icy splash to shock her into life
she refuses the hot water in the house.
And Allah takes in prayer as
cracked barefeet genuflect,
soles up to the unrisen sun.
Underneath her head scarf
her hair is black silk,
She removes the tattered cloth
and it falls around her like in the movies
and a woman of 40 is 18 again
dark eyes and cheekbones to the stars,
is this what he sees in crossed pictures,
before he delivers blue circles,
despair for emptiness and poverty,
sweat and truth:
that he is nothing, and she has the strength
he can only dream of in bubbly visions?
The source
At parties I know politics like table manners
Our egos are champagne glasses
drink up, name drop
and see who’ll gulp it down.
The secret is subtlety
never mind that I tally up the
mentions in the rags.
Now at night I hold a pillow, not a
a spouse with good connections.
20 years ago I would be lapping up the
giggles, her watching me wriggle
like a worm between the sheets
I would have stopped for a blue
sky and wondered if something
bigger made it and smelt a beggar’s
musty breathe and felt my stomach sink
in love for him.
Now ecstasy is musty paper
with rows of little lines.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
A recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award and Commonwealth Poetry Award, Keki N. Daruwalla has so far published about 12 books, consisting of mostly poems and a couple of fictional works. Some of his important works are Under Orion, The Keeper of the Dead, Landscapes, A Summer of Tigers and The Minister for Permanent Unrest & other stories. He also edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry. The Library of Congress has all his books. His most recent collection is The Glass Blower. His novel For Pepper and Christ was published this year by Penguin, India.
the tribal goddess
there may or may not be a tribal goddess
but I salute her in absentia,
this goddess of the tribals of the forest
of shadows scrimmaging
on the fern floor of the forest
not just the goddess of the dark heart of the forest
but of the forest-fringe
who extends her hand
to meet the vegetal goddess,
protector of those who limp into the forest
trailing a thread of blood,
the ones who subsist on a diet of nettles,
protector against the lords of the buckshot
and the iron trap, hide-robbers, horn bandits
and the ivory thieves
the rational ones continue to despise you
as do the monotheists
who think no end of themselves
who think they are very advanced
and aeons ahead of the polytheists
and the pantheists and solar theists
and lunar- and-planet theists
but as the concrete forests rise
on concrete plinths and smoke belches forth
coating the sky’s lung
we’ll be migrating to you
in barefoot trickles at night—always night
in silence or with din
the goddess of nocturnal silence
and the nocturnal howl are the same,
one eye Capricorn and the other Cancer
you’ll shortly be in demand
for moss-masked as you are
you are the mother of secrets
goddess of the water springs
still hidden in the earth
A Dam in the Himalayas
Valley floor and flanking hills have gone under.
Roof-tiles are paved flagstones now
and shimmer and refract as they never did
whenever a light breeze smears the waters.
The blur that is the temple spire is washed and warped;
it trembles when the waters move.
The palace too has gone down with its veined marble,
— colour of sunsets, burnt sienna–
though its pillars still hold the ceiling
Atlas-like, each pillar
erupting from a carved lotus.
If an underwater flute were activated
its Garhwali melody would gurgle up
in a string of bubbles; and carp and mullet
would scuttle away thinking some water mammoth
on the lake-floor was breathing down their fins.
These are enchanted waters now, mermaid
and water-nymphs, all breast and sinuous waist
move here; flowering trees still drop petals;
kingfisher and blue-jay
sit on an underwater branch looking for prey.
These are not waters, they are mist, memory
I look for your face, your shadow here,
your body and your bier wrapped in water-weed,
but loved one, the waters close in upon
the outlines of your face, now beyond recall,
and mist and vapour rub your smile away.
Before the Word
Corn is great, on the cob or otherwise,
but before corn in the ear there was life.
Fire is holy especially for Zoroastrians,
but before fire too there was life.
Before the bowstring and the flint arrow sang,
there was life.
The word is great,
yet there was life before the word.
We can’t turn romantic and say
we were into bird speech or river-roar then,
into the silence of frost
or the language of rain.
But forest speech and swamp speech
came through easier to us.
When lightning crashed,
the cry of the marsh bird was our cry,
and we flung ourselves to the other branch
like any other baboon.
As winter whined on windy cliff,
we shivered with the yellow grass.
In winter-dark a hundred eyes
flared yellow in the jungle scrub.
When seasons changed, blood coursed with sap
and flowered in meadows. We were at home.
Nor eyes nor bat cries bothered us.
What if we didn’t know
a bat assessed reality
from the ricochet of its cry?
Though there were no words,
fear had a voice with many echoes.
Worship was quieter, adoration
spoke only through the eyes or knees.
What was it like before language dropped like dew,
covering the scuffed grass of our lives?
Fish
The sea came in with her and her curved snout
and her tin coloured barnacles
and long threaded rose moles
patterned on her body.
The sea brought her and her curved snout
and her rose moles and her eyes still translucent
as if half aware and half unaware
of the state of her body.
The sea came in with her and her scimitar snout
and her translucent eyes
graying into stone.
The sea brought her in,
wrapped in seaweed
and slapped her on the sand,
all five feet of her
with the armour of her scales
and the filigree of her rose moles.
The tide kept coming in
but couldn’t disturb her
or her resting place—
she was so heavy.
The sea fell back, but even
as the thin-edged foam line receded,
it went to her once more with a supreme effort,
rummaged among her barnacles
and left.
Lorca
Dawn will come as it always has,
escorted with pearls,
the earth-chalice
spiked with frost.
Sandwiched between your rivers
‘one lament and the other blood’,
the land will flame like a tongue
of fiery green
threading the Sierras.
The bullring will pulse with blood;
the red dust will still whirl
and eddy across the road;
evenings will be as they were before—
light-rose or mauve-shadow
or smeared with iodine,
and chalked with the flight of cranes.
Nightscapes will still be the same:
bars of flamenco carried by the wind
goatherds round a fire
and sheepdogs barking
at the rustle of dry oak leaves.
Only you will not be there.
“Before the Word”, “Fish”, and “Lorca” first appeared in Collected Poems 1970-2005 (Penguin, 2006)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Geoff Page is an Australian poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry in throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand.
Ruminations
for Marie Dacke
1.
Though not a happy clapper, I
still praise the filigree of things,
those traceries of fine connections,
the way my friend in Lund
established in her PhD
that certain clever beetles here
(and all about the globe)
employ the moon to navigate,
rolling out their spheres of dung
in straight lines from the mother lode
to feast on unopposed.
2.
I praise how they’ve ensured that I,
surrounded by the wide Monaro
(its slownesses of sheep and cattle),
can sit here in a coffee bar,
enveloped by the summer air
and, toying with my cappuccino,
measure out these lines for you
untroubled by a fly.
3.
But, then again, I have to think
about those pesky flies,
classified by Carl Linnaeus
(1758),
a genus that’s done 65
million circuits round the sun —
and so to those Monaro cattle,
obliging both the fly and beetle
(the Musca and its moonshine rival)
with all the manna of their dung,
those cattle with their destinations …
protein with a price per kilo.
4.
Not a simple story really —
but let’s not spoil a cappuccino.
We tinker with our tinkering,
horologists at work (with eyepiece)
and smile at how we do not hear
the hoofprints in the room.
Allegro
We are gathered in a room
for violin and piano:
two young female Swiss musicians
and fifty-five or so of us
convened by invitation,
waiting for the strings
to variously be bowed and struck.
I let my eye run down the program:
dates of birth and dates of death;
that hyphen in between.
So much a small mark may reveal
expanded on the stave.
Outside, through the picture window,
a last sun shows the rhododendrons
as, suddenly, in this still moment
I see the room fill up with death:
the slowness of a lifetime’s cancer;
a final swearword on the freeway;
the cloudy whirling of a sky
around the heart attack.
The options ramify like roots
out into the room,
fingers thinning into nothing.
Conceivably, we’ll go together,
one death wrought from light and sound,
a man quite suddenly among us,
his coat too heavy for the weather.
The first piece starts; they’re blonde and gifted —
and not without some humour.
Conducting us by choice and voice
across two centuries of Europe,
they’re celebrating all those hyphens
between the bookends birth and death.
We know, of course, the one date only —
although a few are stooped perhaps
with what their doctor’s said already.
Those last four digits grow remote,
as if immeasurably deferred
by what we’re hearing in the strings.
Struck or bowed, each note sustains us
even as it shouts or whispers
rumours of the end.
The Swoop
Every day
it has to happen.
Why is it that with
so much ease
a magpie sweeps
in front of you
as if connecting
up two trees?
You’re doing 60
kph;
it makes its long low
easy swoop
as if to laz-
ily complete
some half-arsed sort of
loop the loop.
It’s graceful, yes,
but snooty, too;
you hear a brain of
thimble size
declaring in a
quiet hauteur,
You’re much too easy
to despise,
you shadow in your
shiny car.
Can you hope to
equal this?
Whether you
speed up or brake,
your bumper bar
will always miss.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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joanne burns is a writer of poetry, including prose poems; short fictions; and monologues. Over a dozen collections of her work have been published. Her most recent poetry collection an illustrated history of dairies Giramondo Publishing 2007 was shortlisted for the 2008 NSW Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. kept busy, a cd recording of joanne burns reading a selection of her work, was produced by River Road Press, also in 2007. A new collection of her work ‘amphora’ will be published by Giramondo Publishing in 2010. She lives in Sydney.
answer for Tatjana Lukic
death
a fine gold corridor
you float down on an
early sunday morning –
your big day out – then lift
to somewhere like a butterfly
that’s shed her latinations,
into the hums, the whirrings,
sussurations, drifts of astral
air
you will appear and reappear
i hear the rhythms of your
words as you disappear into
the here and there and every
where, new breaths streaming
with the shimmer of your colours,
no ‘little silly things’, you wear
the big things now [with flair]
thought waves its love in every
colour
August 13th 2008
note: ‘little silly things’ was Tatjana’s description of artworks she was making, mentioned in an email on July 30th 2008
ladoo
could this be a poem
of four hands like ganesha
the hindu god who has that
many [or even fourteen]
ganesh ganapati elephant
god of good fortune wisdom
removal of obstacles sweet god of
writers, a kind of spiritual teddy
bear though never close enough for
a hug; he has his hands full with serious
things eyes black pools of a potent mind,
an elephant buddha not snuggleup bear
remover of obstacles desire & pain, one hand
holds an axe the next a whip; one hand for a blessing,
that lotus in the other realising itself: he’s a handy man
no nails required, a bundle of gifts with a generous belly
that absorbs protects, a mini-phleroma a gnostic ganesh
riding his mouse, this tiny mooshikam, what does it
mean: smart rodent assistant sniffing cryptic gems,
a too proud egomind needing gee’s stewardship –
a pantry of meaning, in the mythopoeisis nook;
from all accounts gee likes a ladoo or four, something
sweet to suck on as he listens for clues with those
capacious ears, vivekananda [before there were two]
i like ganesh best when he stands, one foot raised
above the ground, a fuller measure of his grace; my
unopened ganesh jigsaw puzzle gave me no obstacles
when it sat for two years below three brass figures of
his dancing self, the pieces slipped together quicker
than the washing up; he reclines on the table lit
by the shine of five ghee lamps; if you used his image
as a coaster or a placemat would he stop you eating or
drinking too much, would he take you to task –
what a task he completed with his missing tusk,
as scribe of vyasa’s vast mahabharata, in his rush
to get started snapping a tusk off to use as a pen, he
never paused for a break – a true ur god
no seventh day of rest
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anne Elvey’s poems have appeared in Antipodes, Cordite, Eureka Street, Eremos, Meanjin, PAN, and Salt Lick Quarterly. In 2008, her work was placed first in the page seventeen poetry competition and highly commended in the Max Harris Poetry Award. Her research in ecocriticism and biblical studies is supported by Melbourne College of Divinity and the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. Anne lives in Coburg, Victoria.
Love’s ghost
The egret’s poised
on a platform
of silt. While it seems
she walks on water,
she wades knee
deep, with grace to
impale the soul.
She is the sign
for a clef
between treble and bass –
not yet invented –
or perhaps above,
a body that is reeds’
song, that
when she alights is
more than air. She
hangs her plumes
on sky’s stave:
score for the orches-
tra between us. And
she breathes there,
knows other
things, but
(like you and me)
does not know
what takes flight
when you raise your
hand for silence.
Paperbark, Ashgrove
Dense with tenderness your layered skin is ragged
as if torn by an ancestral scribe
and laid tuck against tuck against trunk,
the innocent flesh shed and held –
like a word you might say about yourself –
as wind breathes against your weeping delicate leaves
that eat the light.
Your body drinks
and deep inside remakes the soil and sun.
So two crows call that you have called them here
and your wood’s joy
at their impertinence
erupts
in peels of flesh.
Is it strip me you say?
Or do colonial eyes see paper where flesh is?
Did your shedding call older hands to ochre?
What is this breath that lifts like a curtain
your lanceolate leaves
where each one’s caress
pierces the space it defines?
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Graham Nunn is a Brisbane based writer, co-founder of Small Change Press and a founding member of Brisbane’s longest running poetry event, SpeedPoets (www.speedpoets.org). He is the current QLD editor of Blue Dog: Australian Poetry Journal and is the Secretary of the Australian Haiku Society (www.haikuoz.org). He has published 4 collections of poetry. His latest collection, Ruined Man is now available from www.smallchangepress.com.au
Hide
among cheap thin-walled rooms
stuffed full of sweating fat men
trying to remember old dreams
the rain all afternoon all evening
its quiet rhythmic sound
before it grew too dark I watched
pigeons drink their own reflection
the room elongated the fourth wall
too distant or too dark to see
no moths at the window
only a swaying power line
raindrops dripping from it
one red spot fading on my thigh
where a flea from the mattress
shared my warmth my loneliness
and returned into the weave
Break Away
i.
This landscape folds in on itself. Everything that
moves – wind, dust, laughter – changes. Streets
soften. Sunlight plays across glass, but windows
appear blank unless viewed from within. Walls
begin to sweat & sour. We give it up & go.
ii.
You’ve put on your Marilyn perfume. Our old
letters have never smelled so sweet, our
memories seemed so true. I’ve plotted our escape
to the island – dawn light breaking in the window
salt breeze carrying the ocean’s secrets.
iii.
It’s past noon and the weather can’t hold. Take off
your silence and your coat. Let’s chance it – throw
ourselves to the season. There’s a cold that starts
in certainty. You see? There’s only one thing
left to do. Sweep you off your feet.
iv.
Here’s a necklace of water, of awe. A puzzle
that began the night your mother walked
along the shore and took the ocean by its lapels.
Empty your basket of black stones. When we
arrive, sunlight will follow, the waters will calm.