Liam Ferney

Liam Ferney is a former poetry editor of Australian online magazine, Cordite. His first collection Popular Mechanics was published by Interactive Press in 2005. He lives in Brisbane, Queensland.

 

 

 

“Room 14, please.”
 

Apparently Singapore is an island.

At the expat bakery

                        desperate for a macchiato.

It has been years since mangoes

& I wonder if too much rice

            leads to forsaken cereal

while Obama wins a primary & Rudd says sorry.

 

The days between dispatches

            have grown long & I can’t

gurney the dust from my knees.

& the noise from next door,

            as unlikely as it seems,

a muezzin’s call to morning prayers.

 

 

 

Portraits of Famous People

 

“Even when the subject is different,

people paint the same painting.”

                                                                Andy Warhol

 

for Luke

 

It was supposed to have been a gift. When she asked for it back he had turned to stand in the doorway, as elegant as an apartment block. As rugged as William Holden he held secrets like trump cards. There was a right time for martinis but that had passed. “You were always going to leave,” she said. As wistfully as an unbeliever’s incantation. And he looked beyond the Bugatti appliances, out towards the balcony. This city was no grid. The characters: just imagined. And when the hour passed it disappeared. A click, indistinct from the 3600 that had proceeded it.

 

 

 

 

Houses of Neglect

 

A door ajar, the louvered window

through to a retreating brown roof,

the tips of the gums fingerpoking

into the oil paint perfect blue sky.

 

To win at this game you’ve got to lose;

every jazz man propping up a bar

scatting along with Trane about the one

that got away attests to this.

 

The problem is familiarity,

slipping in and out

of it’s private school uniform

forgetting that every star

 

is for someone a setting sun.

To avoid didacticism and melodrama

you play like a politician and keep it obtuse

not letting on, you still don’t understand

 

what it was you did

to leave everything as busted as a Nissan Pulsar

the colour of curdled milk, weeds pushing

through the floor in late summer humidity

 

like oil in a Texas dirtbowl.

The neighborhood cottoning on

and the parts start to disappear,

first the radio, then the battery, the alternator

 

some hoon strips the tyres before

the last cheeky monkey flogs the engine.

 

 

Alex Skovron

 

Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and came to Australia aged nine. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Autographs (prose-poems, 2008), as well as a prose novella, The Poet (2005). Awards for his poetry include the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize, and for his first book, The Rearrangement (1988), the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His novella was joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction. He lives in Melbourne and works as a freelance editor.

 
 

 

The Mist

We chased each other, childish, hilarious,
Round and around the lit kitchen table
That multiplied for cardgames, meals, painting
Of eggs at Easter, shelling of beans.

As I swerved laps of tablecloth – the mirth
Of the occasion as much a mystery
As a measure of the reason for itself –
A futileness, strange but convivial,

Passed like a limpid mist across the memory
Of something I had yet no right to know.
As if you think you could catch me, is one way
The mist translates itself. As if it matters

It was a moment of pure insight, distilling
A recognition sharper than wisdom –
Bright as a giggle, its closing ellipsis
Muffled in the frenzy of our running.

The point, it laughed, and I understood:
Whether or not they caught me round that table
Was not the point. What mattered
Was the clamour of their wanting, the complicity

Of wood, the night at the window, the clock
And the crockery trembling above us,
The playcards scattered, our conspiracy
Of laughter – and most precious of all,

That shiver of a question, fleeting, permanent,
As if it could ever let go of me …

 

Night-Errand

A man lies awake gazing
at the curtain into the past
that hangs in front of his eyes.

He can discern shifting images
beyond the delicate gauze
and the ache in his diaphragm

Is pleasure and regret,
the silent curlicues of desire
trapped in the chamber’s gloom.

The future is hurting
but he knows nothing about the future,
he traces the trembled outlines

Of each dancing apparition
(for each dancing apparition is
himself), and struggles for focus.

He strains to re-enter
the cathedral of the past, it is prayer
(the past is prayer)

And he could worship there
if only the gauze would clear
and he touch the flesh

Of history. Because he needs
to know again, know
again, he needs to touch

The outlines, pry them apart,
push his entire being
into every last one of them

And maybe then, maybe
then he would know
why the curtain is forever

Stirring in the breeze
of his desires, why the gauze
shimmers like reprimand,

And why each curlicue
of the music that breathes him
is singing the irony of time.

 

 

Maya Khosla: Red-Tailed Hawk

Maya Khosla was raised in India, England, Algeria, Burma, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Those cultures as well as her background in biology strongly shaped her writing. As an independent wildlife biologist, Maya is comfortable wandering through oak woodlands or waist-deep in silty waters (wearing chest waders). Her books include “Keel Bone,” (poetry from Bear Star Press; 2003 Dorothy Brunsman Award), “Web of Water: Life in Redwood Creek,” (nonfiction from Golden Gate National Park Conservancy Press, 1997) and “Heart of the Tearing,” (poetry from Red Dust Press 1995). Performing, teaching and writing have earned her awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Poets and Writers Inc., and the Ludvig Vogelstein Foundation.

 

Red-Tailed Hawk

 
The flowers you give
are my maps. If I am ever lost
their petals’ scent will pull me
toward your musk again.
 
           
January 1, 2008
 
It’s a cloud-lidded morning. Thoroughly soaked, the fenceposts lining my little backyard are stained so dark the lichen growing on them looks fluorescent green by comparison. Rain is a mark of auspicious beginnings, though Michael just walked out of my condo with his spare motorcycle helmet and running clothes.
 
“I’m moving to the Philippines, Tash,” he declared before leaving. “It’s home.”
 
He has often mused about emigrating. But the emphasis on home gave his announcement a ring of conviction I haven’t heard before. We were standing in my condo hallway next to the stairs going up to my bedroom, where we shared New Years resolutions last night. I searched the olive-green flecks mixed into the browns of his pupils that drew me in from the moment of our first date, years ago, when he lifted me into the air in spite of a sore left shoulder.
 
But this morning his eyes were too dark to see the greens. He sank to the edge of my second stair to tie his shoelaces.
 
Michael was raised in the Philippines. His Dominican mother, siblings and the online game company he works for are all based there. I’ve visited Manila, Kanlubang, and Makiling with him. I too have most of my family overseas, in India. So I sympathize with his sense of home in a distant country of seven thousand-plus islands. It’s the warmth, the ability to buy a single cigarette, to figure out ways to return home from office for an afternoon nap. It’s the tropical air that can get so heated and heavy with moisture that when it breaks into drizzle, it’s hard to notice the difference.
 
He stood again, filling my condo hallway.
 
“Give me a hug? I won’t be seeing you again.” He leaned forward, arms reaching, the fingers of his square hands spread. His lips were in a pout, his eyes focused, intent.
 
I shook my head. As if yielding meant he would leave my place, California, the country. As if leaving without that hug meant he would have to reconsider.
 
When he turned to fumble with the front door locks and pick up the helmet, his right hand came within inches of me. I felt an urge to grab and shake it vigorously. He slipped out and I held the door open, breathing in the scent of post-drizzle moisture.
 
Sun behind veils, salts of loss on the tongue. An Anna’s hummingbird dashed past in a streak of shiny vermilion, wings beating about eighty times a minute, like a pulse racing over words held down. Its speed emphasized its ground level opposite, a two-legged trapped as if in torpor, unable to rush out and beckon her partner back.
 
It’s quiet here; guilt deadbolts me in. I made him leave. My hallway looks whole shades dingier. The dining table and its contents, two freshly drained tea mugs, a persimmon and a sliver of leftover fruit loaf, shrink-wrapped in plastic, hold the weight of a recent conclusion.  Upstairs, my unmade bed is too tousled to allow for a quick smoothing over. It needs to be stripped and redone.
 
The blooms he brought me yesterday are louder in his absence—red so saturated it looks wet. They are a reminder. We had planned a morning hike. The remainder of today was supposed to form neatly around the crystal of its there-and-back symmetry, the sweet scents and rush of blood and breath.
 
Last week’s storms have filled the North Bay’s soils and streams and enriched its forests and meadows with every color except this drained gray of sky. I have spent twelve winters here working out in the wild, so I know. Coho salmon are torpedoing up towards their deaths against the flow of swollen creeks. Frogs are emitting creaky calls from under umbrellas of dripping ferns. Bulb-bright highlights of new growth are re-greening every limb-tip of every bishop pine, redwood and fir. When a hawk alights, the branch gripped in its circlets of claws will shake and sway and splash. Winter wrens and varied thrushes in the vicinity will fall silent.
 
I haven’t the energy to emerge.
 
Michael is driving south to his home in Novato. Inside his car, he will switch the air vent back to ‘cold’ since I’m not with him. He will brush his hair impatiently with his left hand, the dark curls springing back after each stroke as if in protest. His eyes will be locked ahead as he waits for a chance to enter the right lane, glide past the slower car and swing back across highway dots and dashes.
 
The New Years resolutions we bantered about seem utterly irrelevant. Mine included accomplishing symbolic nuggets of what I hope to achieve within the next three hundred and sixty four days. “First thing’s first: begin it feeling new,” my mother used to launch forth. “Wear pressed clothes without a trace of past perfumes. Take six deep breaths at an open window. Make modest wishes…”
 
I do. Today they were good food and exercise, fresh air and water, a respectable chunk of work and a search for bobcats, raptors and frogs. These were the seeds I wanted to set, the emblems of my intentions for 2109.
 
Moving to the window, I twist the angle of the faux bamboo blinds and put my face close. A cold smell is all. A few weeks ago Michael gripped my battery-powered drill in both hands and worked on each fitting with single-minded diligence, asking me to hand him a nail here, a bracket or a blind there, stepping back to view it before moving on to the next one. Hours later he had installed them in all my windows. We whispered our verdict in unison.
 
“Wow!”
 
He drew down the new blind, placed my drill inside its blue box on the coffee table and closed the distance between us. When we kissed, a slight leak in his right nostril wet my upper lip. I moved to wipe myself and he drew back to clean his nose with a quick apology. He was just as quick to advance again. The thudding in my ears blended with the salts and frictions of touch and the nose-drip was forgotten — until we parted to climb the stairs and the same wet spot chilled with evaporation.
 
When I get the angle correct, cloud-light glances off the blinds’ buttery hue and lights up the red and yellow cushions scattered across two futons that frame one corner of my living room. On the shelf in my downstairs closet is the new brocade sweatshirt I planned to throw on before leaving. Next to it a blank space where Michael’s white motorcycle helmet was stored. The sight propels me upstairs. On the top shelf of my bedroom closet, his running tea shirt and shorts were kept folded next to my field shirts that have clung to their mud-and algae-stains through wash cycles. He’s neater than I am. He’s meticulous. Even the absence of clothes looks rectangular.
 
I can’t bring myself to move my shirts and woolen shawls over to fill the empty space. Leaving it empty falls in the same category as refusing him the goodbye-hug. It’s a safeguard that could protect against an absence so complete it’s irreversible. Against losing my grip on those arms that looked weighty with rest just hours ago in this room.
 
The dishes, counters, and tabletop are clean, the bed made. I pressed the persimmon from its ends so the flesh gave, easily, two halves of a whole. The orange flesh had the consistency of an overripe mango but was sweeter, chalkier, full of rich sugars and salts. It was comfort food.
 
I threw away the fruit loaf that began our quarrel. I had taken it out of the freezer and warmed it in lieu of my homemade date-oatmeal bars, which I had run out of.
 
Michael eyed the density of fruit and nut between bites.
 
“Who’s been here? You had a whole loaf a couple of days ago.”
 
“This? It’s been sitting in the freezer,” I argued.
 
Still chewing, he scanned my living room and shook his head.
 
“I don’t think so. Look at those two cushions lying by the fireplace. You’ve had company. Recently.”
 
I tried to remember when my friends Susan, Mella, and Sally had been over, whether they’d eaten much of the loaf. We had met sometime before Christmas, probably two weeks ago. Then I realized it didn’t matter what I said.
 
Michael was chuckling, shaking his head. “Tash, it’s obvious someone’s been here. Cozy evening with him?”
 
“You know what, Michael? Enough.”
 
He stared at his empty tea mug as though making a calculation. Then he sprang up. “You know what? It’s obvious you’re involved with someone. I’ll do the same.”
 
“I think you need to leave,” I heard myself say. He responded with the wide-eyed gaze of a frightened child. Then he went around the corner and I listened to the thump-thump of his feet up the stairs.
 
It’s 1:44 p.m. When I get online, Michael is there too.
 
“I am completely devasted and cant even breath,” he begins his chat.
 
He’s back. Except the misspellings reveal a carelessness rare for him.
 
He types, “I just can’t imagine being without the love of my life and yet I bring us so much pain and turmoil.”
 
It’s a shot of lucid light searing the gloom. Perhaps we’ll get through this. He writes that even his divorce was easier than losing me.
 
“You are not losing me!” I reply.
 
“It’s this seroquel,” he writes. “It’s making me crazy.” Seroquel is his latest antidepressant.
 
Two hundred and ten emoticons of a face in tears arrive on my screen. I have never understood how he does that so fast. I want to reach through the electronic windows separating us and cover the hands that type unfiltered fears and push the return button with the urgency of one who is trying to check his fall in a dream.
 
He does not mention the fruit loaf or cushions.
 
It’s a little over a mile to the cement-lined ponds and greens of Sonoma State University. I’ve worn my new sweatshirt for ritual’s sake, and a rain jacket over it. There are footprints ahead, but no one else is walking the Copeland Creek Trail now. No one is playing in the football field south of my path. The creek is invisible behind a riparian world that has risen like fire; swaths of green and nubs of new leaves-to-be are pointing skyward like a multitude of hopes. Their savings account, groundwater, is rich and gurgles underground like a secret.
 
There is a slap and suck to each step through muddy softness. Crossing a puddle the brown of soil-flour, I think of the hike we missed this morning. The same eight miles through Point Reyes National Seashore along Bear Valley Creek became a habit for us long before Michael’s counselor began giving him prescriptions for antidepressants. We stuck with the eight: Bear Valley Trail to Meadow, Meadow to Sky, Sky to Mt. Whittenberg and back down to Bear Valley. Is there some significance to our missing out on the first of the year? Was it best, asking him to leave when I did?
 
A white-crowned sparrow clings to a spindle-thin twig among a perfusion of bare branches. Its gold beak is an ember opening to release a series of plaintive trills. I watch with binoculars. It catches sight of me and dips into the creek-side tangle.
 
A red-tailed hawk circles on the air thermals above. Its tail swivels and I catch a glimpse the red dorsal feathers. My binoculars magnify the down-turned head, shifting slightly from side to side as it scans the football field. Hunting is a swift dream, mired in instinct but crisp with the single-minded focus of pursuit. 
 
In a breath, it bunches up its wings, extends its claws and plunges fieldward. A predator’s drive looks so sure, yet it is in the dark about itself. The wings unfurl as claws touch grass. Now it’s hopping, now still.  Apparently it has missed its target.
 
A few seasons ago I encountered a fallen red-tail. That too was a cloud-wrapped day. I was surveying for burrowing owls in rolling grasslands close to Altamont Pass, where wind turbines cover the ridge-tops for miles. The raptor must have collided with the turbine roaring above us.
 
“If you throw a large cloth over it,” a woman at the nearest wildlife rehabilitation center explained when I called, “it will calm down. If you don’t have one, back off or you’ll risk having your wrists lacerated.”
 
I shed my fleece jacket and spread it wide, measuring. It was no large cloth. I made a split-second decision and advanced in terror. The bird stood regal, head rising, hooked beak bared, crest feathers standing. They looked damp—rain or sweat? Every inch of its foot and a half tall body was designed to intimidate.
 
Still, I advanced closer. It took one hop away. The left wing was dragging in a pathetic antithesis of the poise that was using up so much of its body’s meager energy savings. It raised the talons of one leg at me with a predator’s regal fury. The beak was still bared. I couldn’t afford to hesitate. Let instant darkness calm it.
 
I had been given good rules over the phone; I had sat through training classes in Golden Gate Raptor Observatory before that. But when the moment closed in, adrenalin-fired fear eclipsed all thought. 
 
I dropped my fleece on the bird and all was very quiet. I bent double and gathered up the raptor in my jacket. It had calmed down— immediately. It sat still, trapped, light as held breath.
 
Walking uphill with arms outstretched, I was panting soon. My car was parked under the wind turbine and its wails grew and grew as I neared the ridgeline. Inside my jacket, all was so still that there were moments when I was convinced the red-tail had slipped out. I turned back once, but the capture spot was already out of view.
 
Was it comfortable inside? Would it heal, hover in the updrafts again to decipher—the way no human eye can—the day-glow ultraviolet ribbons of mouse urine, the twitching, racing maneuvers that must look utterly futile from a bird’s eye view?
 
And most important, had I folded the broken wing correctly, given it enough breathing room?
 
I didn’t dare check. Awareness of a human face would have caused more stress to the bird. The questions were torture, though. They haven’t left me, though I now know one of the answers.

 

 

Andy Quan Reviews Equal To The Earth by Jee Leong Koh

Equal To The Earth

by Jee Leong Koh

Bench Press, 2009

http://www.benchpresspoetry.com/

Reviewed by ANDY QUAN

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we’re standing at the very edge of Long Island

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

                                                                                      (“Montauk” p.79)

 

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

 

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

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

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

Sign me up for the next installment.

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

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

 

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

Readings from Wheeling Motel

by Franz Wright

Produced by Daniel Ahearn, Chris Ahearn

Music by Michael Rozon, with Daniel Ahearn

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

http://readingsfromwheelingmotel.bandcamp.com/

Reviewed by ASHLEY CAPES

A musical collaboration between the US poet Franz Wright and Los Angeles musicians/producers Daniel Ahearn (Ill Lit) and Michael Rozon (Brazzaville, Melvins).
 

When I received Readings from Wheeling Motel, by Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, Franz Wright, I was immediately struck by how convincing Wright was as a reader. He does not rush a single moment, and brings a sense of assuredness to the recording, with his willingness to leave space where space is needed. Having Ahearn travel to the poet’s home in Waltham, MA to record the readings may have added to this, as the studio can be a demanding place, where budgets and schedules often hang over a performer.
The publisher notes that the original music, recorded by Ahearn and Rozon in Los Angeles, “creates a dreamy counterpoint to Wright’s delicate, deliberate lines” and “offers the rare opportunity to experience this world-class poet in a uniquely personal and direct manner.”
I agree. It is a highly personal experience, at times an unnerving one too, both musically and thematically. An extensively self-referential collection of pieces, conviction comes from a willingness to both examine and criticise the self. Even to run across the bruises at times, as in the mercenary tradition of much poetry, Wright tears through his own life and ends up sharing stunning material. “Night Flight Turbulence” is a perfect example of a personal moment becoming shared, through both its interaction with the music and the listener. The recording builds a tight space around the narrator, enhanced by heavy, reverb-drenched atmosphere, courtesy of the piano’s legato phrasing and reversed guitar. Wright’s expression of confinement is made more tangible with a word choice that is both conversational and abstract:
               In the greenly-lit restroom, 
               I looked pretty ill, like 
               a vampire locked in
               a confessional;
               the drug had no effect
               whatsoever, maybe 
               slightly more arctic and fearful.
 
Here and throughout, Wright’s voice is like an anchor, holding everything in place. The music moves around and beneath his raspy tone, never intruding, but instead supporting his imagery and deft use of metaphor and simile. At times the music almost sounds like it chills him, despite being recorded after his reading.
 
Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue seems comparable. Both recordings are musically cool and reflective, often pensive, or simply dark. And both voices are deep, raspy and weathered, but clear (though more so in the case of Wright). And it’s that clarity of voice that’s so frequently mirrored in his poems – “At 54” is a wonderful moment of revelation, where ‘place’ becomes everything:

                            And I can’t wait

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

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

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

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

 This launches an attack, going well beyond defiance:

               And seeing a psychiatrist for 15 minutes per month

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

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

               treatment for friendless and permanent sadness. 

               Child your sick smile is the border of sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Tim Wright Reviews Pam Brown’s True Thoughts

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

True Thoughts

by Pam Brown

Salt Publishing, 2008

ISBN:  9781844715152

Reviewed by TIM WRIGHT

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

            2002

            I get away

                        from the academy

            and                   after breakfast

            dip in the green harbour

                           under sprinkling rain.

 

            I know the war continues.

                 on  tv

                     in the background of the frame

            the investigator yawns.

 

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

 

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

 

            that empty-to-the stomach feeling

                as I enter the building

                     to begin

            my twelfth year of toil

 

            I know how to fix everything

              but, obstinate in my resolve,

                                        withdraw.

 

            who here

              would phone Interflora

                         for your funeral

 

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

 

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

 

            from here on in

            if I follow

            the girl in the

                    ‘your tv

                    hates you’

            sweatshirt       as her motorcyclist

            warms his darkly bubbling engine

            ready to blur

            into a field of speed

            it’s probably

            one less path

            to torpor

                            for me

 

~

 

            a dishwasher whirrs above me

            a slab separates us –         water restrictions

                                                                      mean nothing

 

            war

            is

            imminent,

            Sydney goes sailing

 

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

 

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

 

            cards detailed with

                                 pencilled handwriting,

                traces of old colleagues

                                                        now moved on.

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

                            I remember most of them,

            more,       I remember their memos,

            circulated notes—

                               our names listed,

                           stapled to a corner,

            memo read,  name ticked,    then passed along

                                                      to the next name—

                        pre-email

 

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

 

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

 

            built between the wars,

                       acts of social optimism,

               our anachronistic homes

                          but,    or,    even,    so

                           we live in them,

            sought after charm emblems.

 

            in the block next to mine

                              a gang of workmen

            is hurling the walls

                              and the tea break

                              and the lunch

                                            out the windows,

            bricks and door frames

                             plastic forks and curry packs,

                                           like storm debris,

            hurtling

                   like           broken twigs

                                  across the car park

 

~

 

            a lightning flash

                       interrupts computing

            I imagine your stormy view

                                  over Elizabeth Bay,   beautiful

                           night-dark,      night-light,

                          small boats tossing and slicing

                                                through the bay

            (how

            do such tiny blinkings

                                                 guide them?)

                         towards Clark Island

            or heading back

                                   to the illuminated city

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

thirty shades

of mirrored

sunglasses —

I

like the look

of a lucozadey amber

 

~

 

ah,

the little dose

of gamma radiation

I

was given

at the clinic

 

~

 

Drinking water

in a suburb called

Zetland

 

 

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

 

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



 


[i]          [http://thedeletions.blogspot.com]

[ii]     The phrase is from Edward S. Casey’s chapter title ‘Proceeding to Place by Indirection’ from the book The Fate of

      Place: A Philosophical History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997/98

[iii]    ‘A Conversation with David Antin, with host Charles Bernstein and questions from Penn students’, University of Pennsylvania – March 16, 2004 [http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Antin.php]. A fuller quote reads: ‘I have a distaste for the jewel-like work, which I don’t tend to do very often as you can probably agree. I also don’t like it. That is in some sense I’d like to produce an object that’s an action. And it’s an action that leads to actions by others: mental actions or human actions. And on the other hand I don’t want it to be simply talk .. In a certain sense, simple talk that isn’t engaged with trying to figure something out or think something through, dissipates too rapidly for what I want to do, I want to think about things that are worth thinking about that lead to more thinking. I want to do thinking that leads to thinking.’

[iv]                Taken from a longer collaboration with Susan Schultz, housed in the Department of Dislocated Memory, at the     

                     International Corporation of Lost Structures [http://www.icols.org/pages/PB&SS/PB&SS.html]

[v]     I refer to the final poem in Forbes New and Selected Poems (1992), not the poem of the same name from Damaged Glamour (1998).

[vi]    Ken Bolton, from a review of True Thoughts unpublished at the time of writing

[vii]    ‘ The Night I saw Terry Alderman Dancing to Nick Cave at Chasers’, from the collection of the same name, Ginninderra Press, 2003

[viii]   Convolute J, ‘Baudelaire’, The Arcades Project (1999) Harvard University Press, Cambridge, p. 246

[ix]    Meriton is a large construction firm, responsible for many apartment block developments in Sydney.

Natalie Owen-Jones Reviews Storm and Honey by Judith Beveridge

Storm and Honey

by Judith Beveridge

Giramondo Press, 2009

ISBN 9781920882563

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

Reviewed by NATALIE OWEN-JONES

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

We heard the creaking clutch of the crank

as they drew it up by cable and wheel

and hung it sleek as a hull from the roof.

 

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

 

                                                            The limb’s

            skin had already blanched,  a sight none

            of us could stomach, and we retched,

 

            though Grennan, cool, began cutting off

            the flesh in knots, slashing off the flesh

in strips; and then Davey, flensing and

 

flinching, opened up the stomach and

the steaming bowels.

 

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

 

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

 

The broken northern cliff face and tidal rips still

            driving across the rocks. The lighthouse on the headland

            like a valve that blew its incandescence decades ago.

            The trawlers are slanting, moving across thick dossiers

            of water, the wind dictating, urgent, demanding

 

            a copybook hand. (16)

 

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

 

            I know my stroke will lose rhythm in the brown        

                        waters of the cove, but now I make

            curved passage across the bay where even Grennan

           

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

                        like a sudden volley of insects

            cued by the dusk, might, just possibly – when

                        they come into the presence

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

                        clack and brattle and not just have it chitter

            like a sorry crab. (‘Tackle’ 24)

 

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

 

            Through the end of an old Coke bottle he tracks

                        the flight of a petrel until it is tattered by

            sea wind and another blurred mintage of the sun.

                        Along the pier he hears the men with their

            reels, with their currency of damp sand. His rod

                        quivers, weighted not with fish, but with

 

            the names of storms: Harmattan, Vendavales,

                        turbid winds running the vanguard of

            dangerous straits.

 

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

 

                                                      Ah, but you know, if

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

            were to keep his gaze in yours and wait for

                        each circulation of his breath; if you were

            to watch the pirated scenes of daydreams

                        play out through a windfall of glass, then

 

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

                        this beach a long time with your thoughts

            trading in weather and wind, the petrels keeping            

pace with the rakish lines of dreams

            sailing in with the clinker-built storms.

                       

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

 

                                                            No, the world

            would not be a wave repeating its collapse,

 

            but whatever mintage of story a boy can find

                        among fish scales, sand and the common

issuance of wind; a boy who knows nothing

                        of the linkages between storms; nor of

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

                        onto gauges of abuse; who knows nothing

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

 

 

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

 

                                                                             …levelled

them to the back of the room and saw what looked

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

full of flecks like the birds I could never bring

to view.

 

She remembers then that once she

 

                                    …saw him again clasping Harvey’s

            binoculars between his knees, working the prisms

            and the light-gathering lenses he’d removed back

into place – and slowly sealing into each intricate

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

 

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

 

            The weirdest things are the tiny cuttlefish,

            the ones whose translucent, gelatinous faces

                                           are hung with the rippling curtains

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

                        fine as chiffon.

 

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

 

            I go back to watch the octopus again whose arms now

            seem to be conducting music to four distinct orchestras.

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

                   amusement –

            and in a flash

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

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

                        shape-shifting then tightening

             its small face against the glass before it holds the rim

      of the ring again, and it draws itself back through

                        as if into another portal, another hole in space.

 

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

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

                   stops swimming,

                          how it never closes its mouth. (86)

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

            as purposeful as a seiner with a marlinspike, before it

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

achieve now is to lift and pull itself into the distance

like sail twine.

 

 

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

 

 

Jenny Lewis

Jenny Lewis is a poet, children’s author, playwright and song writer. Her last collection, Fathom, was published by Oxford Poets/ Carcanet in 2007. She has been commissioned by Pegasus Theatre, Oxford to write a verse drama, After Gilgamesh to be performed in March 2011. She is also working on a linked collection of poetry, Taking Mesopotamia, for which she has received a generous grant from Arts Council South East. She teaches poetry at Oxford University.

                                                                                              

                                                                         Photograph by Frances Kiernan   

 

Maker 

for Pedro Bosch

 

this is the place where broken
things come to rest from their brokenness

they can’t get the taste of terracotta
out of their mouths

they know they came from mud,
only yesterday

they were a substance
to be walked on
 
now their bridles, palms, trunks,
wings hold unexplained shadows
 
the moon
eyes the world from their jagged holes
 
above them, peacocks roost in the trees –
Neem, Arjuna and the Banyan
 
under which Krishna sat
scooping butter
 
the bark’s twisted textures
are ropes going into the earth
 
resting before the spring burst
of growth, green after green
 
reaching for the sky with its
shattering light.

 

 

Silver Oak

 

Instead of heat and light
grey shrouds:
 
each morning a burial
we fight our way out of
 
grevillea robusta
a sentinel of stillness
seen through muslin –
 
would look at home
snow-covered
 
among the tundra’s herds
and frozen, sea-lapped edges:
 
yet this is India too,
her private winter face
 
cleansed and secretive  
in her dressing table mirror
 
with thoughts of spring
a world turned away from –
 
the make-up and saris,
the razzmatazz of blossom.

 

 

 

 

Aseem Kaul

Born in New Delhi, Aseem Kaul now lives in Minneapolis, where he is Assistant Professor of Strategy at the University of Minnesota. Aseem’s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, nthposition, Rhino and Softblow, among others, and a collection of his short fiction, titled études, was published in 2009.

 

 

 

Ghalib

Tonight, you recite Ghalib from memory;
because poetry, like blood, must come from the heart.

Taking a sip from your glass after every couplet,
the scotch rhyming perfectly the melancholy on your tongue.

You cling to nostalgia like an empty mirror,
to the scent of this language that withers like flowers.

You gather pain the way the sky gathers,
pinprick by slow pinprick, the stars.

Somewhere between question and answer
the feeling dissolves. The need to sing becomes

the struggle not to fall. And you arrange
your ruins into one last gesture,

knowing the Beloved will not heed your call,
knowing she will prove false, like God, or the Moon.

***

You write to me from Delhi,
speak of summer blackouts,

of how, disconnected from the machines,
you thought of Ghalib –

the bomb blast of his grief
leaving the city in ruins –

and how the history of loss
could be written on a feather.

When the power returned
you turned the lights off,

lit a candle to see
the darkness a little better,

and still the shadows
were not the same.
 
***

“Madness”, Ghalib writes, “is never without its reasons;
surely there is something that the veil is meant to protect”
 
And I think of all the years we have spent
listening to these ghazals, the verses
 
falling from our lips like pieces of exquisite glass
from broken window frames;
 
shaping our mouths to his sadness,
unbuttoning our collars to let his words stain
 
the rubbed language of our songs.
What have we been hiding from,
 
my friend? What longing is this inside us
that we disguise in a dead man’s clothes?

 

Autumn Cannibalism

It’s a painting about war:
about civil war and the way
hatred makes us all family,
 
the way two wrongs will feed
on each other till they both
taste about the same.
 
So it has to be wrong
that it reminds me of us
eating ice cream in the park
 
that October, reminds
me how you pressed
your lips to mine
 
for one squeezed instant,
how your tongue curled
cold in my mouth,

how I pulled away surprised;
and how, in that moment,
spoon still in hand,
 
you looked good enough to eat.

 

Static

There are nights beyond voices;
nights when all you listen to
is the static on the radio,
its sound of in-betweens;
 
haunted by disturbance,
by the endless galaxy
of daydream whose pipes and whistles
remind you how long it’s been
 
since you danced with a stranger,
or stayed up till dawn
nursing heartbreak
with the volume turned down low.
 
You wanted something more –
a song you knew the words to,
the sound of human speech –
but are content to sit
 
by this fire of crackling frequencies,
the hiss of its sympathy
like the echo of some long-ago
Babel, a clamour of stations
 
that murmurs the air; displacements
you prefer to the silence
they inhabit, if only for the sense
that there is someone else out there.

 

 

Kim Cheng Boey Reviews Aria by Sarah Holland-Batt

Aria

by Sarah Holland Batt

University of Queensland Press

2008

ISBN 9780702236754

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

Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY

 

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

 

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

 

My mother measured the margins

of my known world there:

a sunlit annex where the lines converged,

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

maps I would only outgrow

charted in painstaking tailor’s chalk.

 

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

 

            What did I know of making then,

            rearranging a few sad odds and ends

under my mother’s pinned smile,

her teeth interspersed with ersatz test?

The overlocker zagged on like a lie-detector test.

I kept watch. It never leapt.

 

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

 

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

 

One afternoon I went into his silent study

and found, behind the tiny compartments

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

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

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

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

the smudged stippling of china white and cerulean,

a solitary tube of cobalt blue, its crimped end

folded over and over until nothing was left.

 

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

 

Nights were cold; my father’s breath,

blue as exhaust while he chopped, stunning each

block in two with the blade’s glottal stop

although the cold kept coming on no matter

how hard he struck.

 

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

 

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

 

You are being called. All the garden

around the house is as planets in orbit,

its slim persimmons and cumquats, their shocks

of rind, the pumpkins viridian and grooved

like distorted grenades, plump wattle in sprays

rattling its sweet dust into your eyes and nose.

 

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

 

You are digging, digging against it,

possibly for an end; going around the perimeter

of you plot, wielding your ability to crimp

and cinch and singe like a new addition

to your vocabulary.

 

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

 

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

 

            Will you come back from the other side?

 

                                             No, but the world will still know me.

 

            And how will it know you?

 

                                              In the black cricket’s song.

                                              In the throat

                                              of all things burning.

 

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

 

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

 

Morning, thinking of Mahler

in nineteenth-century Austria,

who was told Jews were not welcome

at the Vienna Opera – composer or no.

He turned Catholic, and joked.

‘I have just changed my coat,’

then went home and marked the violins

in his seventh symphony ffff, with a note:

pluck so hard that the strings hit the wood.

 

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

 

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