May 25, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Breaking New Sky
Ouyang Yu
5 Islands Press
ISBN 978-0-7340-4824-0
Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY
For a country that crows daily of its multiculturalism, and that is in good part comprised of a long-established and growing Chinese population, it’s perhaps telling that Australia has produced few collections of contemporary poetry from China. Some of those are Otherland Literary Journal, and Vagabond Press’ Asia Pacific Poetry Series. Prolific Australian writer and translator Ouyang Yu has often spoken of his “frustration with Australia’s parochialism and insulation as well as its cultural narrow–mindedness”, and of a desire “to bring something new into this often stifling and strangling…cultural and literary environment” (23-24). Most Australian readers have had little exposure to the rich terrain of contemporary Chinese poetry; nor would they be aware of its turbulent inception in breaking from, and defining itself against both the deeply embedded traditional strictures of Classical Chinese poetry, as well as the repressive political conditions of the post-war period that “in mainland China…pressed [poetry] into the service of the state” (Lupke 1).
Breaking New Sky, a new collection of poems selected and translated by Ouyang, presents work from forty-six established and emerging Chinese (including Taiwanese) poets, born predominantly between the late 50s and 80s (though some as early as 1913 and as late as 2002). The collection’s title – a play on the Western idiom “breaking new ground” – connotes innovation, originality, and also risk. It embodies contemporary Chinese poetry’s iconoclasm, as well as Ouyang’s desire to introduce “something new” into the Australian literary landscape.
The title itself “breaks new ground” by reinventing the hackneyed metaphor. This points to the possibilities of Ouyang’s primary translation technique – “direct translation”: a process where “words or expressions” are translated “as they are in the original, not as they are matched with something roughly equivalent in the target language”. In Bias: Offensively Chinese/Australian, Ouyang writes “it is in this process that new meanings grow on the carcasses of the old stereotypes” (139). Indeed, many of the poems in Breaking New Sky gently challenge, stretch, and vivify English. We see this in off–beat, often unexpectedly beautiful, apt, or playful phrases and images, such as: “The sky is so blue / it does not allow people to be too greedy” from “The Orchard” by Hu Xian; or “Your heart… / A street, laid with black stones, towards the evening” from “A Mistake” by Cheng Chou–yu; or “an ant / fell in love with you last year” from “Possibly” by Qi Guo, to name a few. Sometimes the poems also sit oddly on the page, on the tongue, in the imagination. They ask you to question how English holds and generates ideas.
The translations’ generally plain, understated English lends cohesion to the multiplicity of voices. Though a handful of the poems might be classified as conceptual or more political in nature, most pivot around personal and domestic issues and scenes. Tone is seamlessly rendered in many to generate ambiguous or manifold implications, notably in the collection’s deceptively simple opening poem “Lamps” by Ai Hao. In “Lamps” an almost whimsical sense of urban interconnectedness is engendered when lamps light up from the bottom to top floor of a building in answer to a door “shut with a thud”. But the image soon turns on its head: no one emerges or moves between the floors, and the poem concludes, “It is just a cluster of lamps sensitive / To the sound”. Despite the poem’s clear-cut imagery, the reversal is ambiguous: is the final sentence a statement of fact or a wry metaphor? Has technology assumed the place of people in a parody of human connection and responsiveness? Or are people as isolated as pieces of technology, lacking genuine contact and relationship? The poem’s ambiguity, however, extends deeper; the omission of certain details (what type of building it is, the time of day etc.) allow for myriad permutations: perhaps it’s an office block, after hours, and a draft has blown closed the stairwell door. If one considers China’s “ghost cities” – massive (and expensive) urban developments, sitting empty, unused – the resonances of the poem morph entirely.
In her essay “On English Translation of Modern Chinese Poetry” Michelle Yeh discusses this particular feature of modern Chinese poetry: through “syntactic ambiguity…a quick succession of images [is presented] that blur[s] the line between reality and imagination by intermingling what seem to be literal descriptions with metaphors.” Looking at the poem “Autumn Window” by Bian Zhilin, Yeh asks “Is the twilight on the gray wall like a tuberculosis patient or is it the other way around?” (281-282). Whilst we see this “intermingling” in “Lamps”, the poem presents in English as syntactically spare, clean; other poems in the collection, however, occasionally struggle to acclimate to English’s more rigid, inflected mode.
An especially intriguing aspect of this collection is the fusion of lyric and nature poetry. Often the boundaries between the human body/experience and the land become blurred. We see this in poems such as “On the Balcony” by Lu Ye, where the speaker watches the Yangtze from her balcony, which mirrors “another Yangtze that originates in [her] heart, running / through [her] body”. The repeated motif of “the sandbar in the heart of the river” reverberates in references to the speaker’s own heart, “my heart is happy, dizzy”, and implicates her experience of love in the landscape. We see the interchangeability of the land with her body when she observes: “My windows all open towards June and the viscera / of the summer exposed / The summer in my body happens to be lush with water grass”. By the end of the poem, land and body aren’t simply mirroring each other, their boundaries have become ambiguous, enmeshed: “…my heart is the origin of Mount Geladaindong / My veins meandering for 6,300 kilometres”.
The first line in “Mother the Hardest to Describe” by Bai Lianchum: “The earth is indescribable”, is echoed in the speaker’s later reflection that his “Mother” is the “hardest / to describe”. The speaker sketches the richness and cycling of natural systems:
…even a fallen leaf is thickly covered with
Seasons and roads. On a south–facing slope, there are so many
Rivers and diamonds growing, so many roses burning
Years are indescribable: dust flying. In the darkness, even grass roots
Are shining. The wind is blowing hither and thither. One moment
the sea is a city
The next a desert…
This is summed up in the following description of his mother who is “as old as young…as ugly / As beautiful and she is as poor as rich. Her / Hands and feet never stop moving”. As we realise the speaker’s mother is literally in the ground and implicated in its processes – “the only white flower she has bloomed into” – the poem acquires an elegiac poignancy. The mother’s interred body becomes the force behind the trajectory of the planet through the cosmos and the turning of the seasons: “…the earth / The years and the life always moving with her. I am also moving / with her”. The body in the ground doesn’t in fact “stop moving”, it becomes deeply integrated in vigorous, living cycles. Nonetheless, the poem recognises the complexity of grief: “To get closer to her, I bury my body. / For many times, in the face of the only white flower / She has bloomed into, I have finally learnt to hold my tears back / Although my fingers still cannot stop trembling.”
Poems in the collection also explore prescriptions of femininity and masculinity. Whilst Ouyang states in the introduction that “[t]he poetry of Chinese women poets that [he has] encountered is more lyrical than political and that is where their power lies”, adding that “in a woman poet’s hands…we detect a tenderness” – it would be reductive to dismiss the deeply political implications of Lu Ye’s poem “B–Mode Ultrasound Report, Gynecology Department”, and how it delicately unhinges stereotypical associations of “tenderness” with women and their bodies. Given the immense sociocultural pressures associated with, and the policies (worldwide) that seek to exert control over women’s bodies, any work exploring these issues is a political one.
Lu’s poem measures the weight of personal longing as well as external and internalised socio-cultural expectations to bear children, against a body that is unable to match them. In the poem, the speaker’s uterus is her singular defining feature, her “final file”, “the most vital part of a woman”. More than this, responsibility for its ability (or inability) to bear children is subtly transferred to the speaker, indicated by her gynaecology report which is like “the remarks on a student’s performance at school in the old days”, also pointing to the way women are talked down to about their own bodies. Lu destabilises the authority of the cool, “accurate and submissive” figures of the report by musing on how it would sound if it were written in “figurative language”, and goes on to describe her uterus’ shape as “closer to a torpedo / Than an opening magnolia denudata” – the image of the torpedo connoting power, as well as destructive force. Its force, ultimately, is turned in upon the speaker, as “this church of love” has become the “ruins of love”. The hyperbolic metaphor of her uterus as “this other heart” reiterates the value assigned to a woman’s reproductive capability: a person can’t live without a functioning heart, though a woman can happily continue living if she’s unable to have children. At the end, we see the way these pressures and expectations have divorced the speaker from her experience of her own body: “This other heart, an organ the most solitary and empty in the body / Ah, instead of being a house, an old garden, it often feels homeless”.
It is impossible to do justice to such a diverse collection in so short a space. To quote Afaa Michael Weaver, “Contemporary Chinese poets emerge from centuries of poetry, much of it attuned to the art of living, of observing human and natural circumstance with a singular concision in the language, of bringing eons of meaning to a single lift of a tea cup to the lips” (xii). Interpreting this richness and deftness through the technique of direct translation, Ouyang offers us a collection that at once speaks to and unsettles our familiarities, drawing us into a dialogue with contemporary Chinese voices.
WORKS CITED
Lupke, Christopher. “Introduction: Towards a Chinese Lyrical Modernity.” Ed. Christopher Lupke. New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008. 1-8.
Ouyang Yu. Bias: Offensively Chinese/Australian – A Collection of Essays on China and Australia. Kingsbury: Otherland Publishing, 2007.
Weaver, Afaa Michael. “Forward: Muddy Rivers and Canada Geese.” Ed. Christopher Lupke. New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008. ix-xv.
Yeh, Michelle. “On English Translation of Modern Chinese Poetry: A Critical Survey.” Ed. Eugene Eoyang and Lin Yao-fu. Translating Chinese Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 275-291.
May 25, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Distance
by Nathanael O’Reilly
Picaro Press (2014)
ISBN 978-1-921691-76-8
Distance, Nathanael O’Reilly’s first full-length poetry collection, is separated into three sections – ‘Australia’, ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ – the first and most substantial section (which deals with the experience of growing up in Australia) functioning as the emotional cornerstone of the collection. The title and section headings immediately alert us to the major themes of the book – distance, separation, identity, expatriation, connection and disconnection – but the distances and proximities explored here are not simply geographical or physical; they are also temporal, cultural and emotional.
The book’s first poem, ‘Crabbing’, evokes a strong sense of the speaker’s location in a small corner of an alluring, yet incomprehensible world. Boys crab as they watch boats that ‘have travelled – / from the top to the bottom / of the earth just to fish’, and wonder at ‘the vastness of space’. The boys’ ability to pull the crabs ‘out of their world’ foreshadows the journey Distance will take us on, moving us progressively (and often painfully) away from the familiar. The terrain of the familiar – the people and places of childhood – is explored joyously in this first section of the book: in the poem ‘Ballarat Scenes’, a series of fourteen sensual images moves us progressively through the speaker’s youth, culminating in a moment of reflection as he looks ‘for my surname on headstones / erected a century before my birth.’ The poems here are marked by light and landscape, and also by a strong sense of childhood security and lack of personal responsibility. They are nostalgic without being saccharine, looking back fondly on a time when the world – and time itself – seemed to spread out endlessly. In ‘Sinking’ the poet revels in a period of life when he could
… meander in and out
of consciousness
knowing I have nowhere
I have to go and nothing
I have to be after sunrise
These are the halcyon days, ones made all the sweeter by being viewed in retrospect, tinged with the knowledge of loss and time’s inevitable passing. In ‘Lost Suitcase’, the speaker recounts returning ‘Home after two and a half years’ and searching for a suitcase of ‘letters received over a decade’, only to discover ‘a continent emptied of friendships’. Similarly, in ‘Your Funeral’, (a standout poem and the last in the ‘Australia’ section), connection to place, people and – by extension – self, is further eroded when the speaker attends his grandmother’s funeral and realises ‘that now you are gone / I am running out of reasons to return / to the place where I felt most at home’.
The theme of displacement is further explored in the ‘Europe’ section, where the speaker feels ‘I understand little’ and ‘am like the wind’. Lack of Australia’s vast spaces, light and natural landscape is keenly felt here. As he did in the ‘Australia’ poems, (‘Frenchies, rubbers, dingers’(17)), and as is common in his poems generally, O’Reilly – in his laconic and vernacular fashion – now draws upon the names and colloquialisms of his new environment (staying in an ‘Ikea-furnished apartment /on Goethestrasse /overlooking an art gallery, / Trinkhalle and a strip club’(45)), to describe the clash he finds between the ancient and garishly new. Pinning for belonging, the speaker looks to his Irish roots, climbing ‘The Hill of Tara’, to tie a handkerchief on a ‘rag tree’, and in doing so
taking comfort in a ritual
foreign to me, but routine
for my people, seeking
to connect through a simple
gesture to our ancestors
In these Irish poems the mood elevates, the speaker finding (as he did long ago on the gravestones of Ballarat) that ‘On the main street of the village / my ancestors called home / half the shops had my surname written above the door’. Here there is an uneasy sense of belonging and yet not-quite-belonging, as the speaker relies upon a friend to
… guide us safely
across borders we could not see,
navigating cartography
visible only to a local.
(‘Invisible Borders’)
Nationality and identity seem inextricably bound for O’Reilly – in ‘St. John’s Wood’ every character is defined by it: the speaker shares ‘a room with a Canadian / and two racist South Africans / next to a roomful of farm-raised Kiwis’, buys ‘international phone cards / from surly Pakistani newsagents’, and sleeps with ‘an ex-ballerina / from Altona’. Displacement from country has clearly engendered a disrupted – and yet paradoxically heightened – sense of national identity in the poet. Like the stones in the poem ‘Skimming’ – which hit ‘the water again / and again and again, before / sinking to the bottom sighing’ – the speaker searches for his own resting place, ‘scanning the hillside / for the home of our dreams’ with his wife in the poem ‘Cote d’Azur’.
This restless search for a ‘home away from home’ leads the speaker, in the closing ‘America’ section of the book, to finally, and not without struggle, reconfigure his sense of self. No longer drifting, he now speaks of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, and is challenged, by the ties of marriage and fatherhood, to fit into his new American home and culture, a culture which has scanty knowledge of his own: ‘You ain’t from around here, / is ya? Where y’all from? /… You speak English real good’, drawls the hairdresser from ‘At the Hair Salon in Big Sandy, Texas’. However, such fundamental change requires a reassessment of the old concepts underpinning ‘self’:
The conflict went deeper,
all the way down to childhood,
religion, family politics, gender
norms, culture and nationality.
(‘Blue’)
and a subsequent rebuilding:
We entered armed
with wine, a knife,
cheese, crackers, cigars,
a lighter, your photographs
and my poetry.
(‘The Woods’)
Ultimately, in ‘Texas Life’, the speaker learns that there is ‘enough between us’ to create ‘a private universe.’ Still, he is haunted, in ‘Reminders’, by
reminders of a life left behind,
connections to places no longer
part of everyday life, ancestors
decomposed in graveyards,
friendships suffering entropy,
halcyon days impossible to recover.
In the final poem of the collection, ‘Expat Christmas’, the speaker resigns himself to staying ‘with my American / family in my American house / going to my American job’, but still attempts to ‘destroy the distance’ (between America and Australia, past and present), by drinking ‘Jacob’s Creek’ and eating ‘salt and vinegar chips’.
Distance is a hugely nostalgic collection, traditionally, elegantly and simply (in the best sense of the word) written. Marked by a sense of both internal and external exploration, the poems take us on a journey through time and place, charting the terrain of identity, nationality, connection and belonging within the context of spatial, cultural and temporal displacement. These poems have the power to make one pine for one’s own childhood, reassess one’s own identity, and reconsider one’s own connection to ‘ancestors’ and ‘country’.
May 25, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Suite for Percy Grainger
by Jessica L Wilkinson
Vagabond
ISBN 978-1-922181-20-6
Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE
It has always been hard to know what to make of the Australian composer and pianist, Percy Grainger. There have been at least six major biographies and “companions” and something of a revival of interest in his music since the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2011. Melbourne poet, Jessica L. Wilkinson, who has been immersed in Grainger’s life and work for some years, has now produced a verse biography of the man.
As the poet says in her notes at the end, “ … sometimes I wonder if there was not one but many Percys: Percy the Pianist, Percy the Composer, Percy the Folk-Song Collector & Arranger, Percy the Experimenter, Percy the Nordic, Racist Percy, Sentimental Percy, Percy the Language-Reformer, Long-Distance-Walking Percy, Generous Percy, Mother’s Percy, Percy the Lover, Percy the Flagellant, and so on.” Clearly , all this must be a challenge for 118 pages of poetry.
Understandably, not all these Percys are given equal weight but Wilkinson leaves the reader in little doubt about their importance for one another, even while there are few, if any, one-to-one psychological explanations offered. Wilkinson’s list may also be incomplete. She doesn’t, for instance, mention the Antipodean Percy who, in the last stanza of “Colonial Song”, seems to have a considerable understanding of his own “weirdness” and its possible origins: “We are so far, here / so far to go. Sooner / or later it must tell / & we will get weird / brave shoots arising / from the virgin plains.”
As can be sensed from the above, Wilkinson is mainly interested in the man’s undeniable “strangeness”. Her oblique, fragmentary and generally experimental approach to the whole project seeks to reproduce this, and perhaps to dramatise it, but certainly not to “explain” it. That would be a serious challenge even for the most experienced psychoanalyst . It is also important to note that Wilkinson would hardly have been so interested in Grainger’s personality had he not had a substantial body of work in the first place.
On the other hand, there are a few occasions where Wilkinson draws a close parallel between Grainger’s sexual enthusiasms and his compositional practice. In “Cream, Jam & Dizziness”, based on letters from Grainger to K.H. (presumably Karen Holten), the poet talks of: “A stress against the canvas — a stroke for the excitable score / evolving across a taut, wet thigh / notes, struck into the text / and sustained.”
For those ill-versed in Grainger’s work — and his life more generally — it’s a good idea to read the reasonably informative Wikipedia entry before attempting Wilkinson’s book. A few tracks on You Tube might also help. Although much of Suite for Percy Grainger is composed from intriguing details, Wilkinson makes no attempt to be “comprehensive” in any encyclopaedic sense. Her approach throughout is suggestive rather than definitive.
The suite is divided into five sections (“Movements”?) which are roughly chronological: “To Begin & End Together”, “Compositions & Arrangements”, “Archive Fever”, “Loves and the Lash” and “Thots & Experiments”. The poems often use musical fragments on the stave as well as the resources of “concrete poetry ”. Some are lists; others are best described as “found poems”. Many of the poems, but not all, spin off from, and bear the same title as, Grainger’s compositions.
It’s hard to find a “typical” quotation to illustrate the tone of the collection as a whole. The last part of “Gardens”, dealing with the first reactions to what would become Grainger’s signature piece, his setting of the folk tune “Country Gardens”, is reasonably indicative:
if you like, as I play
a few tuneful snippets
to satisfy the first need:
to be loved (by the old folk).
Sharpe says ‘good work’
but it is a shallow success
as Balfour jumps up
at the fragment & says:
‘how awful‘ — with a lusty shout!
(into his handkerchief).
This quotation is also perhaps an example of the strength and limitations of “non-fiction poetry” as a genre. In the absence of footnotes (and extensive reading) we can’t be sure whether this is a lineated version of part of one of Grainger’s many letters or whether it’s a separate poem by Wilkinson based on those letters. To some extent, this shouldn’t matter but to more literal-minded readers it probably will. Some of these readers may wish to pursue the matter further in Felicity Plunkett’s Axon essay, “Hosts and Ghosts” on “non-fiction poetry” and related matters .
Balfour, it should be noted in passing, was not the politician but a friend and fellow musician. The phrase “a few tuneful snippets” is an early indication of the self-doubt that troubled Grainger in his final years. He knew that, earlier on, he had somewhat set aside his composing for his career as a concert pianist (even a society pianist) and his relatively small quantity of original work (as opposed to the setting of others’ work) seems to have troubled him — not unreasonably.
Some experts have argued that at least a few of these difficulties were the result of the undue influence of his mother, Rose. It seems she was both an enabler and a constrictor. It’s difficult to imagine Grainger’s early success without her. Rose’s suicide in 1922, when Grainger was forty, was both devastating and liberating. Wilkinson records it rather brutally: “Rose Grainger jumped off New York’s Aeolian building in 1922 maddened by syphilis and incessant rumours that she and Percy were intimately involved .” One feels impelled to add that Rose caught syphilis from her womanising husband some years beforehand and that the rumours were almost certainly untrue .
One relative omission from Wilkinson’s Suite is much information about Grainger’s wife, Ella, a Swedish artist, whom he married in 1928 and whose nineteen year old (“illegitimate”) daughter he also happily took into the family. It’s perhaps a forgivable prurience to want to know more about how Ella managed Grainger’s sexual proclivities. The poem, “To a Nordic Princess (Bridal Song)”, does provide a few clues. It runs, in part:
Percy is content; he has found her!
a very goddess of the breed
& sharp of tongue—she is his:
henchman! pavement artist!
skilled milkmaid! bells-companion!
free music craft-partner! experienced
lover, hands over eyes for the
parapara spurting on her belly! …
In this context, it may be relevant to consider Grainger’s statement (in “Free Music Gins”) that “Everything in my art is based on violently sentimental emotionalism & must be received on that basis to get anything out of it .” It’s hard to know how considered this statement was but it is certainly part of the puzzle.
Some readers may resist the significant amount of poetic experimentation that runs through Wilkinson’s Suite; it can make for frustration at times. It takes many forms, many of them difficult to reproduce here. They include overprinting and fading, arrows connecting one part of the text with another, distortions of the printed line etc. Most readers will soon see, however, that Wilkinson’s approach is also one that Grainger, with all his work on “free music” and the instruments with which to play it, would have approved.
Wilkinson may not have “solved” the enigma of Grainger’s life and work but she has vividly re-created its dimensions — and forced us to recognise the impossibility of any facile resolution to the “problems” he presented as both a man and an artist.
CITATIONS
Plunkett, Felicity. Hosts and Ghosts Hospitality, Reading and Writing, Axon Issue 7 http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-7/hosts-and-ghosts
GEOFF PAGE is an Australian poet and critic, editor of Best Australian Poems 2014. His awards include the Grace Leven Prize and the Patrick White Literary Award.
May 25, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maze Bright
by Jaya Savige
Vagabond
Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER BROWN
The title of Jaya Savige’s chapbook, Maze Bright, previews several of the book’s concerns regarding writing and writing as process. While the title suggests itself as a single adjective (hyphen omitted), it equally proposes itself as an anastrophic syntax, one signalling perhaps the glaring complexities of the linguistic terrain as well as the varied directions and likely wrong turns in language that lead, potentially, to illumination.
Questions of direction and orientation infuse the opening poem, “Etude”, which looks to the games arcade and Pac Man, and the maze-like layout of each, as sites analogous to writing. The opening lines of the book read: “I’ve lost the blueprint but from memory/the maze idea emerged first as a way/of mastering the art of being lost /by simulating it under controlled circumstances”. This seems clear enough but for, “the art of being lost”, which teasingly problematizes the question of direction for how does one “master” the purely negative condition of “being lost”? Read “being lost” as an ironic substitute for “finding one’s way”, that is, read it as a disruption of logic, are we’re invited into the spark and intelligence of the collection.
If the early stanzas preface a poetry of indirection, “Etude” soon shifts the focus, questioning the ephemerality of the artwork via the transience of its eighties context, and concluding with the lines: “Quick, before the window shuts/ and my blinking initials vanish forever from the end screen of the custom/French walnut tabletop video arcade/circa nineteen eighty-eight.” The unpunctuated line, “French walnut tabletop video arcade”, which in its temporal span echoes the first line of the poem, “Pac-Man is my minotaur”, merges classical and contemporary allusion exemplifying the proximity of antiquity and, thus, the agency with which new may be made old. Additionally, there’s the sense in this kind of appropriation that the mythologies themselves are re-contextualised and vitalized within their new poetic domicile.
The question of myth and the means of its integration becomes an engaging element of the work. When in the poem, “Wingsuit Journal” Savige refers to his persona as “some pissed off Apollo”, the question of allusion as a certain default position for analogy suggests itself, but then, in this poem, we are talking about human flight and so a godly comparison can only seem apt. “Magic Hour, LA”, invites similar consideration. Savige compares a “folding screen depicting notable scenes in feudal Kyoto,” with, “a buff pimp in denim cut-offs…outside a 1 hour photo”, it being more than the rhyme that fuses ancient and contemporary worlds, and very much the “folding screen” and instant photograph that together suggest some continuing human propensity towards mediated reality. Myth is part of continuum and LA merely a latter-day phenomenon of an enduring human fascination.
The epistrophe of the closing stanza of the same poem asks further into LA as an icon:
…when the locust sun descending on
a field of bending wheat is prologue
to a tale stripped of all denouement,
and silhouettes are all our dialogue
In this instance, the emphasis on a stage or cinematic terminology speaks to various aspects of the Californian character: LA as “Tinsel Town” of glam, and generator of myth par excellence, but as Hollywood, historical home of American film-making, whatever myth the latter and its product imply.
“On Not Getting My Spray Can Signed by Mr Brainwash” seems a distillation of concerns around the value of art and object in a consumer age. It’s a poem that concedes the appeal of a modern material world while dissolving boundaries between traditionally revered antiquity, emblem here for “culture”, and modern, disposable commodity. It’s rhyming stanzas again smooth the edges between a modern consumer world and world of art and culture: “I appreciate/a top shelf invader piece/ as much as any Eurydice.” The poem isn’t, however, without its misgivings in regard to consumerism and can be “pretty sure” of “the way our fetishisation of the toy assault rifle inflects his [a toy Elvis wielding an M16’s] canonization as The King”. Stanzas five and six exemplify the poem’s expository style:
“The hubris is in thinking
of each meme-savvy mashup
as a protest, allied to a flash
mob trashing Topshop.
It’s not. This canvas is passive
as TV. No caulking with irony
can prevent its schtick’s hull
ripping on the reef of cliché.
|
The poem ends memorably with an appeal to Duchamp, appropriate figure here for the way we value art and object. Savige “prays” to Duchamp that he not be affrighted by contradiction, but rather accept the potential for complex, contradictory relations with the world. The final lines, “…unfazed that he’s conscripted/by the thing he criticizes,” suggest perhaps a conflict with the poetic object as much as a conflict with consumer fetish.
Probably more than any other poem featured here, “Act of God”, resonates with certain of those from Latecomers, and the way that collection describes a human presence in nature. It’s a short but strikingly sinuous and gritty poem describing a moment in nature, a meeting between birds, in the context of an indoor garden in a corporate building. I was intrigued as to what its act of god might refer? Is its reclamation miraculous? Does it refer to the corporate gods? Are we lured into some anthropocentric position in which we read humanity as god, but perhaps forget nature itself? The corporate building in question is the Suncorp building, somewhat divested of signification if read it as just another bank in Queeensland. And this is part of the appeal of the work; we have the reified Suncorp building and attendant myth on one hand, and a plausibly concrete locality on the other, and so an interesting tension. There’s lots to consider in this poem but what really struck me is the strength of every line, right up to the superb ending (not quoted here.) A sample reads: “Among the starlike flowers…she met a blue-faced honeyeater…To gain its trust she noshed on freshest sushi of the soil…an Hibiscus Harlequin beetle…whose bright shield shone…as she crunched it for protein.”
What surprise, what incongruity do we find in nature taking up home in the corporate void, of investing it with life (there’s the act of god). And what incongruity do we see in a rock icon lunching with an ageing monarch? I am not proposing any particular thrill of ironic delight at this, only that in the poem “Nick Cave at Buckingham Palace”, we again encounter a mythological mergence, one more about culture here than time or place. But here’s a delicious offering, a trenchant and energized parody of Australian celebrity culture, totally at home with the subtleties of Australian life and language – as the following passage indicates:
Naturally I fall
in with the play
wrights
and an oddly
foppish
yob from Toowoomba
fluent
in several ocker dialects…
Like salacious columnists
we’re in bits just witnessing
“The Body” sluice
through a bank of tail-
ored suits, still hot as lime juice
on a torn
cuticle… |
The rest of the poem reads with matching acuity. Describing a cast of Aussie guests to the palace, and Cave as, “high priest of duende…currawong among a froth of swans”, the poem does much more than create a giggle out of its apparent contextual incongruities. It deftly engages an Australian idiom, “…poor Clive is properly crook”, which addresses an older Anglo-centric Australia, parodying Rolf and Clive and the monarchy, perhaps, as archaisms; it presents a lively discourse on language as relative to context: “My patois is a heady mix of amnesia, empire and capital”, as if the palace were the perfect location in which to conveniently forget one’s language and one’s origins.
The book continues, losing none of its early urgency. “Citicity” re-engages ideas of abstractions of place, and the poem “Cinemetabolic” abstracts language through a process of homophonic extrapolation: “Shore, hive bean cauled ah word-shipper of falls codes…Whey cup, hits thyme two hacked…” Indeed, poetry is for reading aloud.
Of the ten poems that make up Maze Bright, each indicates a depth of resource and intelligence. Some were written in Paris, others first published in the UK, and while each poem embodies a wealth of cultural reference, and interplay of myth and allusion, they are also, in a lively and demotic way, Australian. I’m guessing this book comes as one of the last in the vagabond Rare Object series (which has given way to the more recent deciBels undertaking). It’s best not to look at books such as these as “necessary fore-runner to the subsequent full-length collection” but to view them for what they are, in this case, a joyous offering in Australian writing and publishing.
CHRIS BROWN lives in Newcastle. His poems have appeared in Southerly, The Age, Overland and Cordite and were recently anthologized in Kit Kelen and Jean Kent’s anthology of Hunter writing, A Slow Combusting Hymn. He is writing a book of poems: “hotel universo”.
April 12, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Writer, Ali Cobby Eckermann was born in 1963 at Brighton, Adelaide, on Kaurna Country, however, she grew up on Ngadjuri Country. She has travelled extensively, living most of her life on Arrernte, Jawoyn and Larrakia country in the Northern Territory. When she was 34, Eckermann met her birth mother Audrey, and learnt that her birth mob were the Yankunytjatjara people from north-west South Australia. Her mother was born near Ooldea, south of Maralinga on Kokatha Country. Eckermann relates herself to the Kokatha mob too (Ali Cobby Eckermann 2013). Her first verse novel is His Father’s Eyes, and her second verse novel, Ruby Moonlight, won the Kuril Dhagun Indigenous Writing Fellowship, which is part of the black&write! Indigenous Editing and Writing Project sponsored by the State Library of Queensland. Ali has won several awards including: First Prize in ATSI Survival Poetry competition in 2006, First Prize Dymocks Red Earth Poetry Award NT in 2008, and was Highly Commended for the Marion Eldridge Award in 2009. Her poetry has been translated and published in Croatia, Indonesia, Greece and New Zealand. Ruby Moonlight was published in 2012 by Magabala Books, and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and was awarded the “Book of the Year” at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2013. Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Nunga poet, is the second Aboriginal writer to win the top prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, in consecutive years. Ali Cobby Eckermann’s important works include:
little bit long time APC, 2009
little bit long time reprinted by Picaro Press, 2010
Kami Vagabond Press, 2011
His Fathers Eyes Oxford University Press, 2011.
A Handful of Sand: Words To The Frontline co-edited with Lionel Fogarty Southerly Journal 2011
Ruby Moonlight Magabala Books, 2012 Deadly Award Outstanding Achievement in Literature
Love Dreaming & Other Poems Vagabond Press, 2012
Too Afraid To Cry Ilura Press, 2013
JS: Could we start with you telling us a little about your childhood, schooling and tertiary education?
ACE: My childhood may sound unusual but it was a regular childhood for many Aboriginal children born in the 1960’s. I was adopted as a baby by the Eckermann family and grew up on a farm in the mid-north of South Australia. Mum and Dad couldn’t have their own children, so adopted the four of us kids. It was a good life: baby lambs and chickens, kittens, the cubby house, gardens and orchards, and the iconic tennis court!
Our family was German Lutheran so we grew a passionate respect for good food and the sharing of it. Collectively our family was self-sustaining, We had a dairy, milked cows every morning and every night. So as children we learnt the practise of hard work. At a young age we learnt to grow sweetcorn, watermelon and tomatoes. My parents were kind people, and I remember their generosity to others. But it was the social arena outside the family group that I found confronting. Even at a young age I remember racism; I did feel that I did not really belong here. Of course this became more evident in my teenage years, at high school, when I met other Aboriginal students, some adopted and some with their families. I had no concept then of the extent of the Stolen Generations in Australia.
JS: You have a strong need to educate and also give a voice to those, who for whatever reasons (lack of education, poverty, marginalisation), cannot get their stories told. Do you know of any specific reasons you care about this why you care so much about this?
ACE: Mostly I feel I have this obligation to myself. In hindsight I grieve the fact that when I was a teenager, and life became very difficult, I can’t remember anyone asking me if I was okay. As an angry young person I did not know how to voice my emotions, and as a result I succumbed to the adoption of my only son. This led to many years of addiction. And it was years later during rehabilitation, that I began to recognise the value of every story, and how to value my own. These skills were reinforced after finding my family, especially by the Aboriginal Elders. It is a true value of my culture, to care for others.
JS: What are the traditions of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Lionel Fogarty?
ACE: Actually, Lionel Fogarty is one of my best friends. He has been an incredible mentor to me, in my early years, as an up and coming writer. I find his writings powerful; much of what he wrote 35 years ago is relevant today. I was somewhat sad to find Oodgeroo Noonuccal at a mature age; I regret that I did not learn about her poetry whilst in school. Sally Morgan’s My Place was the only book of Aboriginal writing that I discovered and read in my young years.
JS: Who are Nunga?
ACE: Nunga is a collective term for Aboriginal people who live in South Australia. In Queensland the term is Murri, in other states the term is Koori. My traditional family in the desert are known as Anangu.
JS: How are they different from other Aboriginal communities in Australia?
ACE: I believe, in respect to Aboriginal literature, there is a collective spirit. As Aboriginal writers we need to truly support each other, and support each other to mentor the craft. Each writer will identify by their Language Group name, and may casually refer to the collective terms. Mostly I identify as a Yankunytjatjara writer, and most of my poetry is influenced by the natural landscape of my people.
JS: Who are some of the important contemporary Indigenous writers ?
ACE: Lionel Fogarty is one of Australia’s most important writers. He first published his poetry as a young man in his 20’s. The journey of his life has been shared through his poetry, and is a truly honest gift to the world. Kim Scott and Alexis Wright have both won the Miles Franklin Award, the most prestigious literature award in Australia.
A Facebook site BlackWordsAustLit is the best resource of Indigenous Literature in Australia. It is both an archive and an introduction to our newest writers. Check it out and follow the prompts.
JS: How many Indigenous authors write in English?
ACE: Most Aboriginal authors and poets write in English. I believe the publishing world requires this, for the selling of our books. It is also a legacy of the removal of so many of us from our family. And the cost of translation in Aboriginal language is very expensive. I feel sometimes the cost is the preventative, and of course we are not empowered to change this. On the other hand the resurgence of Aboriginal language, at a community level, is truly inspirational. Many families and young people are relearning these ancient languages; our mother tongue.
JS: Tell us about the Stolen Generation?
ACE: My mother was separated from her mother at the age of seven. This is very confusing for her, as the mission where they lived had a Children’s Home, to prevent the removal of children. It seems my mother was an amazing student, and it was deemed that continued association with her family would be detrimental to her education. She told me that she would watch from the window as her siblings went with Kami and other family members to hunt for lizards and other bush tuckers. She told me she felt sad. And this is one of the main legacy’s of Stolen Generation removal, the sadness that still exists inside us.
I was 33 when I found my mother. At the time she was the Co-Chair for National Sorry Day, an annual day of remembrance and celebration dedicated to the Stolen Generations. Her legacy in life is amazing.
JS: Many of your poems start with “ooooo’. What does this mean?
ACE: This was an error, a typo. The title of these poems is clear. I did get a shock when I saw the publication of this. Now it remains as a mystery for the readers.
JS: What are your important themes of writings?
ACE: I would hope all my writings achieve my basic goals; to promote healing and understanding between Aboriginal people and the rest of the world. As I travel internationally I often hear how media has portrayed us incorrectly, that our rights have been returned to us, how past issues have been resolved. This is not the truth!
I do enjoy meeting writers from other cultural backgrounds. Mostly our issues are similar, and often we share a similar expressionism. This has an empowering effect on me. I love reading global poetry.
JS: Could you please mention a few poems which represent you as a Nunga writer?
ACE: Circles & Squares, First Time, Love Dreaming, Ribbons, Wallaroo
JS: You have written verse novels. What stories do they tell?
ACE: My first novel His Fathers Eyes was commissioned to explain the Stolen Generations to upper primary and lower secondary students. It is published by Oxford University Press in the series Yarning Strong. My second verse novel Ruby Moonlight is a story of massacre, the often unmentioned history of colonial impact. It tells the story of Ruby, who survives the massacre of her entire family. I set this story in the 1890’s. I was moved beyond words in 2012 to receive the Deadly Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature (an Aboriginal Award) and again in 2013 when Ruby Moonlight won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the NSW Premiers Book Of The Year. This book should be in every school library.
JS: You have already attended translation workshops in India. What is your experience? Do you think that translation works are close to text/original?
ACE: The experience of the Autumn School for Literature Translations is an amazing experience. The passion of the selected students is paramount to the success of this. I was immersed into wonderful conversations; I shared many photos of my family and traditional lands. We discussed every detail. And my heart told me during the final recitals that the students had achieved the best translations of my work.
The unforeseen publication of my poems by the Deptartment of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University is a testament to this. Some of my poems will sit with two or three translations. I am proud that the student’s names and their work will accompany my words. I believe this will become a unique handbook of international translation, due to this shared experience.
JS: What do you hope your work will achieve?
ACE: I write in the hope that my grandchildren will be safe in their true identity in Australia. I write that they will not have to assimilate or change any cultural aspect of themselves to achieve what they want. I write in the hope that Australia will become more mature, to embrace the values that only diversity can bring, to be kinder to the impoverished and the poor, and to stop pretending that these issues do not exist within the national identity.
JS: Are you familiar with Indian Dalit writers?
ACE: In 2012 the University of Western Sydney hosted a two-day festival for Australian and Indian writers. Alexis Wright and I were invited to open panel discussions with two Dalit writers who had travelled from India for this event. It will remain a highlight of my writing career. The panel was judged one of the highlights of the festival.
The opportunity to return to Kolkata, to travel to New Delhi and attend the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2015 will allow me to meet with Dalit Writers again.
JS: Can you describe an “average” working day for you?
ACE: I day dream a lot! Much thought goes into my writing, long before it reaches the page. And some time ago I quit my regular job and returned to visual arts; I love sculpture and painting. I find these two artforms compliment my artistic process. My visual arts actually funds my writing career. So my life is frugal and exciting. There is no ‘average’ day.
JS: If you were to prepare an anthology for school students would you include some of your own poems?
ACE: Of course. Our literature is necessary to inform that our culture still exists, beyond tourism. I would also include oral readings of Aboriginal poetry by Aboriginal poets. I believe our voices bring a beautiful timbre and rhythm of our words, which is both healing and powerful.
JS: Do you believe in Literary Movements? What are its weapons?
ACE: I guess my ‘literary movement’ is the establishment of my Aboriginal Writers Retreat. It is an environment for all writers, however it is Aboriginal themed. Every participant must ‘leave their ego on the highway’ and arrive to a place of equality. This is how we learn. I have enjoyed sharing my space, and watching the outcomes in people. Lionel Fogarty was my first Writer-In-Residence and we co-edited Words To The Frontline: an edition of Southerly, Australia’s premier literary magazine.
Originally I established the retreat in my home at Koolunga, in South Australia. However my personal career has grown beyond my wildest dreams. So I am now in process of mobilising the retreat, and am looking for sponsorship to purchase a caravan. The caravan will be customised to include a workspace and include an extensive library of Indigenous literature. Many grassroots Aboriginal writers have not been exposed to multi-cultural writings. Sometimes there is no literature of any kind in their home environments.
It is my wish now, to travel to communities and transport my workshops there. I believe the main benefit will be tri-generational story-telling and writing workshops.
JS: What are your current engagements?
ACE: Currently I am in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in America. It is a three month residency and is funded by the US Deptartment of State. The program has been running since 1967 and has allowed Iowa City to become the only UNESCO City Of Literature in America.
JS: Would you please share a recent poem with us?
Ngingali
my mother is a granite
boulder I can no longer climb
nor walk around
her weight is a constant
reminder of myself
I sit in her shadow
gulls nestle in her hair
their shadows her epitaph
I carry
a pebble of her in my pocket
* Ngingali is Ali’s mother’s traditional name
JS: Thank you! You are an amazing source of inspiration.
Jaydeep Sarangi, is a bilingual writer, academic, editor, translator, and the author of a number of significant publications on Postcolonial issues, Indian Writing in English and Australian Literature in reputed journals/magazines in India and abroad. He has recently collaborated as peer reviewer for CLR, Universitat Jaume I, Spain. He is one of the Editors, “Writers Editors Critics” and the Vice President of literary organization, GIEWEC (head office at Kerala). Widely travelled and anthologised both as a poet and a critic, Dr Sarangi has delivered keynote addresses in several national and international seminars, conferences and read poems/research papers in several continents. He is Associate Professor in the Department. of English, Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri College (Calcutta University), 30, Prince Anwar Shah Road, Kolkata-700033, WB, India. E mail: jaydeepsarangi@gmail.com
April 7, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alan Botsford serves as editor of Poetry Kanto, Japan’s oldest bi-lingual poetry journal. Author of the essay-dialogue-poetry collection Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Sage Hill Press 2010) as well as two poetry collections, mamaist: learning a new language (Minato no Hito 2002) and A Book of Shadows (Katydid Press 2003), he teaches at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan, and lives with his wife and son in Kamakura.
a mamaist heat
i was thrown into the white heat, the tumult and trial,
the ferment and turmoil, the flurry and disorder.
i was convulsed by and floundered in
the shivering and shuddering,
i ebbed and flowed, i waxed and waned,
i pumped in the swinging and fluctuating
to quiver in the sway
and flit in the pulse.
i pitched and plunged, i bobbed and weaved,
i tossed and tumbled from pillar to post,
side to side, round and round, in and out, up and down,
and now the ardor of the cheerful fire has me crackling,
thermally loose in the burning and fully alive in the blooming,
the blush of dawn, the glisten of night
gleaming and blazing in my blood,
gossamer and solid are the circuits of my heart.
a mamaist shot
The brain shot through
With Eros
Has a mind of its own
Were it opened for business
Where the heart shot through
With Eros
Is the lion among us
Alive and well
Fiercely loyal to
No bottom line but its own
Mystery
Like
The stomach shot through
With Eros
Hungry for Otherness while
The intestine shot through
With Eros
Absorbs the lessons
April 7, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hello dear Reza,
How are you?
Are you in a good place?
Everyone is here and they are saying ‘hi’ to you.
I’m sure you remember Mustafa! He is saying to you, “Let’s play cards!”
Ali is saying, “Do you remember you would always get 6-6 whenever we played backgammon?”
Hussain is saying, “Do you remember whenever we played soccer, you would always be the goal keeper because you were tall?”
Behrouz is saying, “My mother goes to your mother every day and they cry together”. Hassan is saying, ” Forgive me, when you departed, there was a bit of displeasure between us”.
Reza! Do you know anything about Hamid Khazaei?
Are you together?
Please say ‘hi’ to him and say to him that we miss him.
Reza! It was hard to believe you had departed, we can’t believe it now either.
We would never think that they would kill the strong stocky Reza Barati, unjustly under a stroke with their hand. Reza, no court of law has been established for you yet!
Your murderers and their masters are walking freely and they are showing off, blocking the way your blood is beside.
Reza, I don’t know if you know what they have done to us in this year that you weren’t here. It’s been really hard. Reza, they shed the blood of those like you and Hamid Khazaei in the name of human rights and they did not even care.
Do you know what Scott Morrison said after your death? He said “the way to stop these deaths is to stop the boats”. It is shameful.
Reza, they are more ruthless that the dictators of our own countries. They kill people at once there, but here, they kill slowly and by torture. They killed Hamid ruthlessly as well. Maybe he’s told you himself or maybe his pride hasn’t let him tell you that, how they did treat him ruthlessly. He died slowly slowly in front of our eyes in less than a week.
Reza, this is end of the world, no one helps us. They completed their racist confrontation by killing you and Hamid to show how mean they are.
But you don’t know that great people amongst them in Australia honoured you after your death. We can remember in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and many other places. Thousands of people shed tears for you and they condemned their government and that is your actual court. You don’t know but thousands of kind people lit candles for you and sit in streets. They showed humanity has not died yet and the account of the Australian people is separate from their racist government. Today, we are hopeful in the aid of these people with their great souls to achieve our freedom.
You are closer to God there, so pray to God that we will be freed from this prison very soon. Reza, I know freedom was nothing more than a dream for you and Hamid, an unachievable dream that you did not achieve here but now you are completely free, so rest in peace!
Dear Reza, I don’t want to keep you busy for a long time, but you will be in our hearts and souls forever. If the tree of our freedom gives fruit, we will not forget the blood of you and Hamid by it.
We love you both!
Translated by Ali Parsaei
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
George Michelsen Foy has worked as a commercial fisherman, a magazine editor, and chief cream-puff transporter in a pastry factory in England. His latest novels are Mettle and The Art & Practice of Explosion (University Press of New England); a non-fiction book, Finding North: How navigation makes us human, will be published by Flatiron Press/Macmillan in 2016. His short fiction has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Monkeybicycle, American Literary Review, et al.: long-form essays in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, et al. He was awarded an NEA fellowship in fiction. He lives with his family in Southeastern Massachusetts and in New York City, where he teaches creative writing at NYU.
Ferguson
How wrong to walk the streets dressed how you dress and know those codfish eyes will follow you always, how wrong to know that voice with sharpened fricatives will slice a path to stop—hands pale as non-fat slap your thighs apart twist your head and depending on what you’ve done (and you’ve always done something) click chill around your wrists: and if you say no? And if you run or just move wrong? The voice that worms out, flattened by electrics and satellite, from your mom’s/ girl’s/ grannie’s/ dad’s cell phone will be a voice they do not know: that never said ‘Wait, I got a joke for you,’ nor ‘Happy birthday’ nor ‘Fuck you’ even: how wrong for someone they never met to say, ‘I’m sorry, but I must inform—
Sabotage
Tournan en Brie lies a little east and south of Paris. It was a quiet town when I was growing up. Nothing much had ever happened there. A minor lord or two bullied farmers from a tower. There was a church, two bakeries, two patisseries, a butcher shop, a pharmacy. Apart from wheat, the main crop was boredom. It was Kansas with good cheese. When my brother and I stayed in Tournan—we were there months at a time, visiting our grandmother, nothing to do but shoot gravel at each other with slingshots in the garden—we used to walk, with our parents, to watch cars hiss by on the highway running east and west. That was what passed for entertainment in Tournan. My grandmother called that highway la route des invasions, invasion road. She knew what she was talking about. The first time the Germans came from the East they killed her brothers, every one. Her husband’s only brother was also killed; he had come back from Australia to fight. Her husband, the town doctor, was gassed at the front. The gas braised his guts and he died shortly afterward, at home. Grandmère wore black, inside and out, for the rest of her life. She kept her husband’s surgery as it was the day he left for war, and raised their only child in a country of unrelenting loss. When the Germans returned, twenty-two years later, they billeted three officers in her house. Grandmère was pissed off. Not only had the bosches killed her husband and all the men in her family, they had given her son the excuse he needed to leave and not come back. Now she was expected to make their beds, sweep their floors and watch them brew coffee in her kitchen? They had real coffee, too, she said, a luxury in those days. All this was bad enough. What really made her sore was, these Nazi officers in their high conquerors’ boots would lie down on her mattresses, on the family’s lace bedspreads, without taking off their footwear. This was the last straw. Invasion and mayhem were one thing, but here was final proof the Germans were barbarians. So she joined the resistance. From then on she refused to acknowledge her lodgers. She declined to make their beds. She listened to the BBC in secret. And she sabotaged the coffeegrinder. This was a cruel blow. American B-17s were flattening factories—they would bomb Grandmère’s house toward war’s end—the maquis were blowing trains to kingdom come. And these three Wehrmacht captains were deprived of coffee. I still have her coffeegrinder, it still doesn’t work. I’ve tried to fix it many times and can’t figure out how she broke the thing. I suppose, as with most sabotage, all you need is sufficient rage.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marion May Campbell is a Melbourne writer who currently teaches in Professional & Creative Writing at Deakin University. Her latest work of fiction is the short novel about failed revolutionaries konkretion (UWAP 2013). ‘Geometry & Geography’ is from a work-in-progress.
Geometry and Geography
Little sister is doing a maths assignment on the card table under the salty-louvred window in the Shoalwater Bay shack they are renting. There is the good feel of sand on linoleum underfoot. No one cares about housework here. One clean sweep is all. She’ll do the ten Euclid problems then get ready for Saturday arvo dancing classes — shave legs, shampoo hair to squeaky clean, since this is before conditioner, draw up silky stockings, trying not to ladder them with chewed fingernails, clipping each stocking with the rubberised suspender buttons, shimmy into the tight green and black hound’s tooth skirt and grey cashmere jumper. Slip into the patent leather shoes with the squashed heels. On the first floor Dancing Studio she and big sister will be lined up with the others, teased and bouffed and sprayed, along the studio wall for the boys, who’ll skid across the polished boards to choose their partners for the Pride of Erin. Will the tidal wave part around them, leaving them there? The word wallflower hovers. Oh the Red Sea dividing. Red is the blood that flows from me. Let the boy-wave not divide like the Red Sea around us, and leave us stranded like two cooling lumps of pumice stone. But let me not be chosen ahead of her. Then I’ll have to drag her sorrow, ball-and-chain. The mother has her hand cupped over the speaker of the receiver and says something to the blue-eyed grandmother, a tiny wrinkled and painted doll sunk in the depths of the cane armchair. Voice broken, the mother coughs. The big sister asks hoarse, What, what?
The scream comes from another world. With its savage ripping force it skins her. She sees herself blue, blood pulsing under the moon sheen, a skinned rabbit. That voice is a killer wind. She dares not look. She’s not where her big sister is. She cannot be. That space is always taken. She doesn’t know what her sister knows. She’ll never know what her sister knows. She rents the space of not knowing. I still rent the space of not knowing. The scream rends the space of not knowing.
There’s only the scream in the room, all the air’s stolen by it. It’s a tearing of the voice box and there’s no stop to it, like a line with arrows on either end, it might be infinite. It’s a destruction of wave harmonics.
The dead father is made alive out of myths.
When he’s two the dead father’s Enchanted Mother lets him take apart the Mantle Clock, Mainwheel, Mainspring, Wheel Train, gears serially undone, the whole Escapement: Escape Wheel, Pallet Fork, Balance Spring and Balance Wheel, until wall-to-wall, the lounge room floor is Time dismantled. Endless space now between the tick and the… At two mind you, the mother on the phone has said. The younger daughter thinks that to dismantle is not to mantle. Now that’s all he is: a photo of a uniformed moustached head on the mantle. The dead father is the first on his block to make a crystal radio set and he makes them for the neighbours as well. This is around 1927 in his twelfth year, common enough, since they were widespread, even in WWI. But it’s from these he gets hooked on microwaves and condensers. It’s not far to radar and beyond. Just waves big and small.
In this family they are good at making up genius boy children. The younger sister will have a boy child who speaks in clear crisp words at nine months and at ten months in telegraphic sentences — uzza icecweam as they glide past a Peters Ice Cream sign on a Deli. Maybe it’s because myths make magnetic spaces. Events are pulled to them. The grandmother says, Isn’t that a-mazing, as the Toyota Corolla glides under a freeway pedestrian overpass. Under the next pedestrian overpass from the elevated safety seat at the back the Baby Genius voice pronounces, Uzza mazing. With these enchanting boys it’s serial mazing.
The two sisters in the beach house enchant no one. They understand that they are girls. The space of the dead father draws the big sister, who remembers everything about him, indelibly out of her own life. Only the little sister can have her own life. She knows she can rent the father if she wants because he has retreated and she can make him over for herself and from faded bits and pieces she can borrow him when she wants.
From behind the dunes through the house the jade waves pound. The boom, the crack, the boom. And the gorgeous salt sea-weedy smell rises to fight that ripping scream. There’s been a fire, the mother says, re-cradling the receiver, threading the cord through her fingers, lighting a Capstan cigarette.
Little sister has just had her first period. It’s over now. Outside, away from them, she slips her undies off on the warm weathered boards of the front porch, safe behind the unpruned tee-tree hedge. The wood presses into her bare skin. Wood prints into her. Things press and impress and your body speaks back. The sun draws on her sex. She thinks it drawls. The sun drawls on me, speaks intense and slow. It works on me, like that stuff for wounds that pulls out the gunk, like what is it, like Magma Plasm. Her young sex milkily responds. What is this, what is this, it says. It is sweet salty liquid almond speech. The world drawls on you. You whisper back.
Even when mother sister grandmother are sucked into the black sinkhole of the telephone—there’s been a fire; it’s all gone—you can let the sun draw on your body. The sun pulls like a poultice. She reads her geography text. She has a state exam approaching. Study is the sun’s drawl, letter-by-letter, map-by-map. The sense of sun and the drawn Earth orbiting. Geography and geometry are what Egyptians did as part of sun worship — earth drawing and measuring. She reads Huddersfield and Halifax. She has her memory tricks. She gives her own names to them. Her body drawls back its slow language. Shuddersfield and Whollyflex. The industries. Smelting. The likelihood of what goes with what —where there’s coal, there’ll be smelting. Steel. Summat like that. Where there’s moock there’s brass, her grandma says her Scouse great grandma used to say. Coals to Newcastle. The weather, the climate and geography. Sun- struck daughter of a man who would’ve made it rain. The rainmaker father is dead and dead again.
So much later the Midlands and the North Country will carry their charge back to this scene. Oh the smelting. She will top the state in Geography.
Sooner she’ll learn the microclimates of a lover’s body. The quite non-tristes tropiques.
Now from the fibro shack perched on the low dune over the road the daggy burred Border Collie comes and sniffs her legs, licks the salt. What’s happening here, whatcha been up to, the moist nose reads her. Dusty Springfield is singing on the leather-clad transistor, I only want to be with you. The younger sister and the Border Collie are you for now, for Dusty’s voice.
The scream has died in the dunes. All their stuff was in the removalists’ storage shed. Is in another form. Chemical change is irreversible. But not for the younger sister. She can reverse. Most of it’s gone. They will be repeating in their broken voices over and over. Gone gone. She hates their voiced grief. She sees with satisfaction the great gothic span of twisted metal hangars above the ocean of ashes punctuated by small heaps of foul reeking globular nothing.
The mother’s voice is blank. What this means is — all the photos and pictures and furniture from when he was alive are gone. The scarf, the sister’s voice is a roar of stolen air, exiting. Like the scream of the bushfire. Maybe her sister is a fury. A fate. One of those Erinnyes. She had one thing that was the father’s — the Air Force scarf, not a uniform scarf, but in the deep grey blue wool, that someone, maybe one of those endless volunteers knitted for one of the NZAF boys, in thunder blue basket weave stitch. The bigger sister’s relic from the father gone — he to sea, now the scarf to fire. This burning of all his things, of the antiques he chose, the books he’d read or meant to read, incinerated in the cremation he never had. Of course the mother will not jump in the two-toned, olive and apple-green finned Morris Major Elite to inspect what remains, as the Storage Management invites her to do— the sprinklers saved some things, you are welcome to inspect, the mother says they said.
There’s never been a body to identify, so why would she run to contemplate the remnants of thingsthingsthings? The photos would’ve burnt first, she says, lighting another cigarette. No I couldn’t bear to rake through the wreckage. The older sister howls and howls until the younger one slinks off again to the dunes where the old Border Collie will follow her. They’ll sit together and watch the swollen body of the ocean roll and break. This loud grief will always upstage her, until she becomes a subtle actress, or so she thinks.
And the younger sister, callous, letting the sun milk her like crazy, sets her mind free to do geometry and geography, or daydream the German teacher taking her in her arms, meine schöne meine Liebe, or even the boys’ eyes lighting up as they skid across the dance floor to choose her. The ones with oily rock n roll quiffs, more than shiny Beatles’ mops, the rebel boys in tight black jeans and winklepickers are the ones she wills to notice her. She’ll tease her hair into the biggest beehive. Take that, Pride of Erin.
April 6, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kent MacCarter is a writer and editor in Castlemaine, with his wife and son. He’s the author of three poetry collections – In the Hungry Middle of Here (Transit Lounge, 2009),Ribosome Spreadsheet (Picaro Press, 2011) and Sputnik’s Cousin (Transit Lounge, 2014). He is also editor of Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home (Affirm Press, 2013), a non-fiction collection of diasporic memoir. He is an active member in Melbourne PEN, and was executive treasurer on the board for Small Press Network from 2009-2013.
Jetstar to Rockhampton
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Breaking New Sky
