Sutapa Chaudhuri reviews On Manannan’s Isle by Usha Kishore

41VGUKjwfAL._AA324_PIkin4,BottomRight,-47,22_AA346_SH20_OU35_On Manannan’s Isle

by Usha Kishore

Isle of Man, UK.

ISBN: 978-1-304-14507-9 (PB)

REVIEWED by Sutapa Chaudhuri


 
 
On Manannan’s Isle
is Usha Kishore’s debut collection of poetry. The fifty-six poems included in this collection are multicultural in nature and present a ‘chiaroscuro world’ (‘A Spoonful of Indian Sky’). Intertextual and multilayered, these poems build up, as Kishore writes, ‘an in-between space’ (‘Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism’). Like Kishore, an Indian-born British writer from the Isle of Man, the poetic self in On Manannan’s Isle experiences life as an amalgam of the East and the West, of Ganesha and Manannan, of Indian monsoons and British autumns. In ‘Monsoon Nights’ Kishore writes,

… The smell
of sand perfumes the air in a trapeze of fireflies
and a courtyard quivers in the lap of a pale moon,…
Those monsoon nights rising from a fond letter
are drowned in cups of Darjeeling chai,
as a Manx morning wakes up to a tiger sky.

Poems like ‘Ganesh Utsav’, ‘Monsoon Nights’ or ‘Moddey Dhoo’ too consciously build up ‘an allegory of exile’ (‘Women Like Me’) through the use of mythology and intertextual allusions, especially through the figure of Shakespeare’s Caliban as in ‘On Teaching The Tempest’:

… Caliban rolls
in the dark recesses of my heart,
an accident like me, taught
to moon-worship in an alien tongue.

On Manannan’s Isle explores mythology— both Celtic and Indian— apparently in an attempt to connect the East and the West through myths and legends. The opening poem of the collection, ‘Ganesh Utsav’, seems to serve, for Kishore, as a point of entry into the alien culture. In this poem Kishore’s invocation: “Come Ganesha, bathe in the Irish Sea…”  tries to put the spirit of the Celtic deity who permeates the whole collection, Manannan, the guardian of the Irish Sea and its inhabitants, vis a vis the Hindu deity Ganesha. This seems to be a preamble to Kishore’s later attempt to assimilate the legendary Celtic guardian spirit, Manannan, as an integral part of the poetic persona’s exiled identity and resilience in an alien land. In ‘You Manannan’ Kishore writes:

But, you Manannan,
drag me by my sari tip
into your greenish depths
and imprison me,
my verses and all
in the barnacles that grow
on your rocky ledges.

Kishore’s poetic language in On Manannan’s Isle incorporates the signifiers of two different cultures, not only crossing cultural borders but also giving rise to a heterogeneous ‘mottled culture’ in which the meanings of the borrowed words are ‘translations of fabled history’ (‘Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism’). In this assimilative multicultural language, English, Celtic and/or Indian words or phrases are placed side by side. This hybrid language contains elements as discrete or as heterogeneous as

…my Indo-Anglian
accent, my Sanskritised Puritanism, my love
for Browning’s sardonic quips and Hopkins’s
sprung rhythm … my lingering love
for Tagore, my idioms sprinkled with French
and Latin, my sunburnt Malayali metaphors, as
old as Parasurams’s axe or my calling to equality

                               (‘Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism’)

Creative use of poetic language in this debut collection also shows Kishore’s affinity towards enjambments and broken sentences, used together with unconventional rhythms and a multicultural lexicon as in the title poem ‘On Manannan’s Isle’:

Gathering legends in a sibylline sunset,
the exile fills her wandering rucksack
with fairy fables that wing across time, …
The exile whispers: Vayu? Varuna? Indra?
Which of my thirty three million gods, are you?
I am but one more – cloak yourself in my swirling mists,
hear my laughter in the crashing waves, feel my power
in the roaring winds and say my name!
Manannan!
My veg!
or as illustrated in poems like ‘Power’ or ‘Waiting for Autumn’ :
Your moon, cloaked in mists, serenades
my chakora spirit with fragrant madrigals
and leaves his rays on the edge of my sari.

(‘Waiting for Autumn’)

The imagery in On Manannan’s Isle is evocative and lyrical as in depictions of ‘the jasmine coloured moon’ (‘Power’) or her portrayal of the sights and sounds, the colours and cacophony of a typical Indian bazaar in ‘Teaching Between Two Worlds’:

jalebis frying in ghee, alphonso
mangoes in cratefuls, baskets of jasmine
flowers. Chikankari saris in sapphire
and emerald map the skies with threads

The poem ‘At Janet’s’, on the other hand, uses colour codes and cataloguing to portray the studied monochrome of an urban and sophisticated First World:

                                                   Even the conversation is black and white, crisp vignettes
from stratified layers of glossy magazines, effervescent
as freshly brewed coffee, biting into the tongue, like
saucer-biscuits…

The striking visual quality of Kishore’s images in illustrated in lines like ‘serpent kite sings/a cruel blue song’ or ‘With blood on their beaks, the cackling/hordes rise in a flurry of possessed white’ from the poem ‘Blackbird Chased by Seagulls’, a poem in this collection memorable for its dramatic quality.

Special mention has to be made of the eight ‘The Bones of Time’ poems in On Manannan’s Isle that evolved as part of an ekphrastic project with the British artist, Carola Colley. These poems are close renditions of Colley’s plein air canvas, and they too carry on Kishore’s theme of assimilation, and points towards, as Kishore writes in ‘Meayll Circle’, the concluding poem of Kishore’s collection:

An infinite meld; there is
no vanishing point, just
a harmony of hues…
a palimpsest of time and tide…
border crossings into an ancient,
shaman time…

The poem talks of migrant journeys and home comings — the ferrying across of souls — to adapt one of Kishore’s phrases in the same poem, reflecting a blend of experiences and colours in an ‘abstract landscape’:

…My eyes cannot
fathom this abstract landscape, but a blissful
tranquillity draws me into your float-mounted,
surreal world…

                        (‘Corrody Keeil’)

Kishore’s poetry in On Manannan’s Isle attempts to analyse the notions of Otherness and integration, displacement and exile and in that process interrogates the definitions of home and the boundaries of homeland. On Manannan’s Isle thus projects Kishore as a contemporary poet of the Indian diaspora with a strong, distinct voice — assimilative of the two cultures yet retaining its own tenor.

_____________

Sutapa Chaudhuri, is Assistant Professor of English, Dr.K.L.Bhattacharyya College, University of Calcutta, India. She has two poetry collections — Broken Rhapsodies and Touching Nadir. My Lord, My Well-Beloved is a collection of her translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s songs.

William Byrne

william byrne

William Byrne is an emerging South Australian poet in his mid twenties. He has always lived in rural and coastal townships, excluding an urban interlude for university study for degrees in architecture and design. He has recently had work published in Westerly (Univeristy of Western Australia) and The Disappearing (Red Room Company).

 

 

 

Aspergers

Water dries so fast
on my fore and index fingers
once I leave the chiesa,
that foreign place of incensed marble.                                              

It evaporates
as soon as I see the sun
and basking in it, the smooth shoulders 
of the lane’s cobblestones. I trip                                                                    

in my penance, later, while seated 
in the brassed café
as my lips part for vermouth.
Again I see Rome’s dark shoulders 

then her leather heels and passing souls,
then half smoked cicca,
their pale ghosts hanging in the streets, 
then smooth, tanned Roman fingers. 

Chiesa water dries so fast on my fingers.
The vermouth is also dry.

 

 

Wheat

In my old car, tyres wet, we spoke
black over green like a Rothko painting,
the young crops startled in our headlamps,
their fronds thrashing in the yellow glow.
You too were startled when I turned the headlamps off,
even though we had pulled up aside the field.
The lamps were deadened, yet the radio hailed
in a distant AM. Ice crystals formed on the window,
shading thinly the edge of the screen.
Beyond the glass, grey clouds brushed past the moon
rising on the curved horizon beyond
wheat past further than sight from  two sets of eyes could see. 

Afterwards, we drove to a town
at the edge of the wheat, leaving the earth
on the side of the road where we parked
a dry-ish print framed in rain craters
and shallow puddles bleeding into its soft sides.
We laughed so hard that night as we spoke and tried to see.

 

 

 

Keith MacNider

Keith Mac Nider is an historian, clairvoyant and grief counsellor who loves  living by the sea with his wife and dog.

 

 

 

 

Blue Veined Hand

A friend read her poems to me the other day. Beautiful, deft, cultured verses that rippled across my heart. We sat at a wooden table in her kitchen, coffee cups steaming, a sunny cool autumn morning. I closed my eyes, listened. One image especially moved me, evoked the past from nearly thirty years ago: the image of an old blue-veined hand stretching out to reach a delicate vase.

My mother, Fay, her skin so dry, paper thin as she aged. How it would bleed, that skin. One nick seemed to lead to another, like a sombre medieval procession, bright but pained. The ulcer on her leg, near her ankle, cratered, never completely healed. Visits to the doctor, the same one, the surgery set back from the busy main road. Trees out the front, a path winding to the front door. A fine, early blue stone villa. At St Peters, the Adelaide suburb in which we had first settled.

The cancers that had to be cut out from different parts of her body; others burnt off her face, the wounds erupting into pinnacles, volcanoes, she said, turning away.

We’d always been tanned. Days at the beach. Shek O, Deep Water bay, Stanley, names which flow into me still, remembered and yet at times, unmoored. Black and white photographs of my mother on the beach, white blouse, beige shorts, knees tucked up. No hat. Tropical sun unabated. Others of her in China before the War. Wispy, so young, a wiry attractive woman with a sense of flair. Various men smiling, cigarettes in hand, dapper before the unforgiving advent of war.

As a youth I’d sometimes leaf through these photos, seeking my own roots, trying to find the sap that would moisten the sun baked days of Adelaide summers, life on the dry borderlands of a growing suburbia, relentless in its hunger for more land.

We’d come to Australia to avoid what my parents feared would be a Communist takeover in Hong Kong. During the War my parents had been rounded up by the Japanese in Shanghai and interned with other fellow British subjects and their Allies. There they’d remained, malnourished for three years, cooped up, often ill. Conditions in all camps were bad, resources few and stretched. Weight losses of thirty to forty pounds in the first few months of internment were common. My father kept my mother alive by working in the camp kitchen. He learned how to be a butcher. The most honest person I’ve known, he would sneak small pieces of meat that he’d later feed to my mother. There’d be roll calls where internees might have to stand still in the sun or whatever type of weather, perhaps for hours. Daily life was subject to the caprice of guards, to disease and illness, to lack of privacy, stress, boredom, and towards the end of the War, the danger of Allied bombs going astray. Some people lost hope and gave up; some went mad; some were executed in full view of the rest of the internees. Many of my mother’s health problems started here.

In the late 1950’s a number of family friends and my father’s work colleagues decided to leave Hong Kong and settle elsewhere. England was the preferred destination and New Zealand also figured. My parents chose Adelaide in South Australia because of its hills. My mother especially could not bear the thought of living somewhere ‘flat’. Flatness for her meant entrapment in a featureless plain. Mountains and hills could provide a backdrop, a place which could contain urban growth, could act as a way of positioning her in the world. They were landmarks, invitations to move into another world too, the world of fields and trees, the green wonder of nature.

Adelaide was also less densely populated that Melbourne or Sydney. My parents dismissed Bideford in England as too cold and Nelson in New Zealand (the last of their three choices) as too isolated, too far away from what they had known.

My mother and I struggled the most with the Adelaide heat, with our house which became ‘like an oven’ in summer. Then the heat would be unrelenting. It seemed to bore in, swirl, settle like a blanket, at once claustrophobic and dulling. The kitchen became a place of tyranny and burden for my mother. There was no window in the kitchen; the trapped heat thickened. On hot days the back door would be closed as the heat swept in with the hot northerly winds. We’d come from a humid climate where fans might be enough, but here we’d put bowls of water in front of fans. I’d wet a handkerchief and tie it around my neck, put ice cubes in them as well, or rub ice on my wrists, my mother’s forehead.

Her body, increasingly thin, became a whisper of itself. Her dark hair thinned, became flecked with grey. She rarely complained about pain. Some days she’d put on records on our battered record player, or turn up the radio, tilt her head in such a way I’d know she was feeling sentimental. She loved the music of Louis Armstrong, his signature tune, ‘Hello Dolly’, and would click her fingers in tune with his song, or to Perry Como, other crooners. She’d reminisce about her days in Shanghai, the years before the war, the Bund, International Settlements, the all night clubs; hit tunes, hawker food on the way home. Yummy she’d call my Dad then. They’d dance together in our tiny kitchen, swish past the chairs and table, in rare moments of closeness. I’d relax into that, another side of my parents, my father’s tenderness, sometimes join in, dance with my Mum, I, increasingly taller, my mother, just under five feet inches.

Silent stories curled in cigarette smoke drifting across the room.

In later years the pills gathered around her, various medications, some working against each other, bottles of them that she carried from room to room. Stacked up on the coffee table near the sofa where she’d lay, TV on, eyes closed, ashtray nearby.

Slowly, even the booze let go of. No more those regular afternoon drinking sessions, cheap wine, first from casks, then bottles, beginning in the kitchen, moving to the lounge, the inexorable steps towards confrontation, conversations like interrogations.

I’d drink too, join in as I moved through my teens. Beers, bourbon, Scotch; more beers. She’d point at me, cigarette always in hand, stab the air with point after question, question after point. Debates would slide into accusations which became slurred into exhaustion and upset, denial, futile rebuttal. At times I no longer knew who I was, feared what I might be, might become. I learned to be more analytical, sharp, knowledgeable, to thrive on studying History and Politics, turning her arguments back on her. Surviving.

Living in the cauldron, I came to call it. Life through a truth serum.

Or she’d sweep me up, her comradeship, uncanny sense of knowing, look at me with pained eyes, as if she were looking through me. She’d pull out playing cards, gather them, tell my fortune. These were no frills cards, worn from use. She would discard all the two’s through to and including the five’s. The six of hearts and six of spades were kept, the six of clubs and diamonds were left out. I didn’t notice at first, the structure of her pack. I was drawn by the mystery, the strangeness, the different capacity of cards, their ability to hold and reflect aspects of life, to be cards that were normally used for games, yet here, unveiled, to be something so much more.

My mother would clear the table I front of her. Perhaps she’d put down a special cloth. She’d shuffle the cards, cut the deck three times, put them back together again, and then lay the cards out in six sets of three. Shed put on her glasses; they’d perch just above a ‘volcano’ from a skin cancer on her nose, draw on a cigarette, put the cigarette down on an ashtray, exhale the smoke. The reading would begin. Bits and pieces of my life plucked out as if from a dream, rearranged, then reinterpreted. She’d ask questions, especially about any girls I’d was interested in. I’d be diffident, casual, shrug my shoulders, eventually break, smile, say yes, mention a name or two. Sometimes she’d raise an eyebrow, reach out for that cigarette, light another, look back at me, thinking, eyes searching. There was always enough in what she said to keep my saying yes when she offered to do a reading. Some occasions in my mid teens I’d say no; she’d ticker her chin out, ask later, the next day.

One day I asked where she’d learned to read cards. And she’d replied, ‘from Jean, my friend, when we were interned’. From the cards the two of them could follow camp intrigues, discover who was going with whom, she continued, before turning over a card, tell me what I was really thinking.

When I was a student at University I asked her to teach me the cards. Months later she told me their most rudimentary meanings. Slowly from that I began over time to build up my own understanding, basic at first, then gradually, deeper and more flowing.

She was unerringly accurate. When I went to clear up the house after she had died, I found a newspaper cutting on her dressing table. It was an advertisement for the very firm of funeral directors – and their exact location- that I had independently chosen.

There’d be games of Mah Jong too, my wife and I, father and mother, playing all night, betting with small coins, laughing, joking, smoking, drinking, with little breaks every now and then for snacks and stretches. We’d start just after dinner and go all night, sometimes until five or six in the morning. These were unbeatable times, a comradeship rarely surpassed. All of us would enjoy the banter, clacking of mah jong tiles, the building of walls, silence of concentration, strategic pauses. I’d listen for the Cantonese and Mandarin names, smile inwardly at my father’s frustrations when he lost as he banged his remaining tiles down on the table; enjoy my mother’s quiet sighs whether she won or lost, her glances at me, one eyebrow raised, when my father, so competitive, got irksome.

Mah Jong was another link with our Asian past. I was captivated by the dragons, the four directions, the design of the flower and season tiles, the different characters, colours, symbols. They became more and more a moving mosaic of sound, form, poetry for me. And, in a quiet way, they introduced my maternal grandmother into my life. She’d returned to her birth place in Devon after the war, introduced mah jong to a small but loyal coterie of friends in Bideford.

Her presence in England became snagged in my mother’s long, critical comments about my father, what she saw as his failings, the decision to leave Hong Kong, the move to Adelaide, the heat, flies, humdrum food (then). The quaint names of North Devon, like Ilfracombe and Appledore, their softer nuances unfolding with visions of green hills, closeness to the sea, became romanticised as lush natural embraces of nature far removed from the relentless heat of Adelaide summers. That I was born in Bideford only added to this longing.

My parents, increasingly isolated, never developing close, deep friendships in Australia that could sustain and ground them here in our new country- and take the pressure of my sister and I.

Cigarettes, Camels, unfiltered, too many. Nicotine stained fingers. Spluttering lighters; searches for matches, boxes of them, Redheads. Trips to delis. More supplies. The poverty we’d fallen into as soon as we stepped off the boat at Outer Harbour. My parents, running down their financial reserves, staying in an expensive City Hotel too long.

My mother, not yet recovered from internment, nearly dying giving birth to my sister right after the War. Looked like a ‘shrivelled apple’ she said, eyes moistening. My sister, born in Melbourne, all of us born in different countries. My parents, leaving Melbourne, settling in Singapore, then back in Hong Kong.

Walking up and down the High Street in Bideford and across the tors past Northam and Appledore, my mother, making certain she’d be fit for my birth. Refusing pain killers. If I was going to die, I wanted to know I was dying, she told me once.

The click of the silver cigarette case, opening, shutting, the Bideford crest on it; another cigarette lit.

Asking me to play golf with my father, par three courses as he got older, after he had retired. Something for him to do, she said. Get him out of her hair. Upsets when I didn’t call or drop around once a week. Smouldering like one of her cigarettes when I moved to England for awhile.

One day I got her a wheelchair, had it delivered. So my father could take her out. I have to get out of the house, she’d cry. ‘I feel trapped indoors, can’t stand it, like a tomb’.

We come from generations of people who’ve moved around the world. On both sides of the family. Traversing. Different countries, continents, new beginnings, ventures, exits, places of no return. My mother, born in Peking (then). Her father, half Belgian, half Scot, born in Dundee, a man who often spoke German and enrolled my mother in a German speaking school in Peking. He and my maternal grandmother met and married in Bideford before moving out to China before the First World War. A skilled tailor, my father did some work for the Imperial family, took photographs for national Geographic, and resolutely drank himself to an early death. I have some of his photographs, deftly framed, pictures of old China, some of Englishmen wearing topis, women in their voluminous dresses, picnic baskets nearby. My maternal grandmother never came to terms living in China. She didn’t learn Mandarin, knew no other dialects.

My Uncle and my mother, at ease with the Mandarin they learned from the amah, using it to keep secrets from their mother. My Uncle, fluent in Mandarin, Shanghaiese, Russian, working on the borders of China and Russia, somehow getting to Australia, joining the RAN, liberating my parents in 1945.

Years later, his death from throat cancer in Hong Kong, us living here, me listening to my mother crying, my father’s efforts to comfort her, hands on her shoulder. Newspaper cuttings instead of a funeral; no grave to visit, funeral to attend, money to travel.

My father, born in Hong Kong, his father American, mother German, brought up by his Uncle after his parents’ early deaths.

Travelling was in the blood. Now it was trips to K Mart and Target, asphalt parking lots. No more walks around Morialta Falls in the Adelaide Hills nearby or holidays in the Flinders Ranges, time by the coast at Robe in the south east.

My wife and I spending weekends cooking food. Going through recipes, determined and dedicated, each cooking a number of meals, chopping veggies and roasting and mixing spices; sometimes my wife’s best friend would join in. Red wine would flow, stain a recipe book or two. Then the long wash up, the half hour drive from one side of town to the other, the familiar road past suburbs and shopping centres, getting closer to the Hills. Chinese food; curries; Brazillian, Caribbean, Korean, Arabic, we all loved food from different places, cultures, far from the Anglo norm. Meals that could be frozen, defrosted, reheated. Meals my father could manage easily.

My mother, shrinking, shrivelling up. She, so invincible, brave, dulled now by pain killers, other medications she didn’t tell us about. Nodding off.

In May 1982 an immense peace came over me, like nothing I had ever experienced. It lasted for several days. My worries about my mother’s health, my own post graduate studies and work, drifted away like clouds called by a different breeze.

My wife and I decided to take a holiday, to drive up to Queensland to see her family, began that long drive up past hay and Goondiwindi.

While we were away, just a day or two later, I heard in my mind my mother’s voice, as clear as day. My wife was driving, so I closed my eyes, saw my mother’s face, smelt the Devon violets perfume she so enjoyed, listened. My mother asked me what I thought, whether she should hang on or let go, die. Time to go I whispered, time to go. Did you say something, my wife asked. Thinking about Mum, I replied, left it that.

When we reached my wife’s brother’s, I knew straight away from his facial expression what had happened.

The peace I had known just before we’d left had presaged her passing. It began the process of opening up my own clairvoyance, a different path, far from the academic path I was then travelling on, something more my own.

You know, my father told me when we flew back to Adelaide, she pulled off her oxygen mask. That’s how she went.

I open a cupboard door, look at some Mah Jong tiles, touch them, run my finger along them, the bamboos and flowers, hear my mother’s laugh, the cough that would invariably follow. I press a tile against my forehead, the green dragon, my mother’s favourite, smile. I have learned to read Mah Jong tiles, can use them as divinatory and spiritual sources of understanding.

I put the tile back, close the drawer, pick up a vase, a Chinese one. It’s been around all my life. Run my hands over it, feel the texture, remember an old blue veined hand reaching out.

 

 

 

Gillian Telford

Gillian Telford is a NSW poet who lives on the CentralCoast. Her poems have been published regularly in journals including Blue Dog, Five Bells, & Island & her first collection Moments of Perfect Poise was published (Ginninderra) in 2008. Longer poem sequences have twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize & published in anthologies The Honey Fills the Cone (2006) & The Night Road (2009). In 2010 she worked in collaboration with choreographer Francoise Angenieux & composer Solange Kershaw on Poetica: Five Arrivals which featured as a regional event in the Sydney Writers Festival.

 

 

displacement

(i)

From the incoming tide
I rescue a stone—
              deep olive green
tinged with yellow buff. 

Its colours bring echoes
of old growth forest, as though lifted
from leaf-litter, moss and fungi
but stranded here

among the pastel shells,
the bleached and silvered grit,
it’s a misfit
dumped on a tidal surge.

I roll it in my palm, turn
and stroke it with my thumb,
rub away each grain of sand
and hold it till it warms.

 

(ii)

In waves of harassment, the hostile
natives dive and shriek—
              From the fig’s leafy head,
crouched in defiance— a red-eyed 

intruder, huge and pale, keeps
them at bay with great snaps
of its bill and raucous cries.
When we’re talking of birds

it’s a summer migrant with many names—
stormbird or fig-hawk, rainbird or hornbill;
             a channel-billed cuckoo, flown south
to breed and find hosts for its eggs. 

As I watch it struggle against the flock,
I think of its journey
across the ocean, grey wings beating,
hour upon hour—

driven by instinct and drawn
to our plenty,
each year they find nurture
despite the clamour.

 

(iii)

Across theTimor Sea, the boats
              keep coming.
Some we hear about, some we don’t— 

Some will wait quietly, others won’t.                 

 

the third bridge
for my mother

It was a clean, sharp day
               cut through with winds
from the Southern Ocean, so we wrapped
her in rugs and pushed the wheelchair
along the boardwalk, through rushes
and reedbeds, the grieving swans
the calling, circling terns.

At the third bridge, we stopped.
              Beneath us, a tidal high,
the wind-dragged, surging estuary,
its sun-flecked surface.
And there we took turns to toss
him over— handful by handful,
back to the river, back to the ocean.

But caught at first
on gusts of wind, his ashes
              lifted against the light
then circled and swirled in exultant loops
before the final fall—
the quiet passage beneath the bridge.

 

 

Mani Rao

Mani Rao is the author of Bhagavad Gita – A Translation of the Poem (Autumn Hill Books, 2010), and eight books of poetry including Ghostmasters (Chameleon Press, 2010). She has essays and poems in journals including Cordite, Meanjin, Wasafiri, JAAM, Printout, Takahe, Iowa Review, Fulcrum, Zoland Poetry and anthologies by WW Norton, Penguin and Blood Axe. www.manirao.com has updates.

 

 

 

Ding Dong Bell

The jetty’s out
Who’s at bay
War-mongrels Hera Athena

Stout Menelaus
Slender Paris
Homer leads the charge

Imperfection haunts beauty
So imagination can rule
Helen haunts imagination

In the center of her forehead
Bloodthirsty star of the sea


Iliad Blues

I like battles out at sea
Hot spur
Cold water
Blood swimming both ways
Salty meetings
Sharks due 
At the end
Level blue

 

Peace Treaty

What if Helen died

Cuckold crows
Husband recalls
Body  face  rites

Once broad Trojan devils
Now cower in the shadows of walls
Fearing skywitnesses
Quaking at birdshit

Our boy came back
From overseas with a
Souvenir egg that ticked

A runaway wife’s a rotten prize
Unwanted alive
And dead

 

Yusa Zhuang

Zhuang Yusa lives in Singapore. His poetry has been published in Sargasso (Puerto Rico), ditch, (Canada), The Toronto Quarterly, Ganymede, The Los Angeles Review, nth position and elsewhere. His poetry has also been anthologized in Ganymede Poets Vol. One (Ganymede Books, 2009) and Smoke (Poets Wear Prada, 2009).
 

 

Thoughts In An Easier Time

 

Isn’t torture

at heart a refusal

to get used to

a compromised life?

 

The acceptance is not

the pardon:

 

the flesh is weak; the tormentors

hold the proof

by the joints of its limbs

and a hammer – 

 

The mind is weak; the flesh

poisons with its blood

in easier times.

 

The spirit flees the body

with a scream

that isn’t heard.

 

The spirit enters the body

without pity

when it is broken enough.

 

You are dead to me, the beloved says

at the final parting,

for in my heart you live –

 

When my aunt chewed bark in China

to kill the hunger

of exile, who did she turn to

 

and did the memory

sustain her enough

to let it go?

 

 

 

A Suicide

 

Meanwhile:

 

Coffee is brewing.

The neighbour’s car engine.

Jason’s cat

steals back from the hunt, tripping past the shoes.

 

Somewhere a door. Somewhere else

another door – 

 

The clean-swept pavements outside

once again

astonished by leaves, some still falling. 

 

 

 

Off Day

 

A world without heroes, says the action hero

on TV, is a world without suffering.

 

Yes, it is tiring, I say to a friend

who bothered, but it brings in the money.

 

The past is a mirror

shattered: in pieces, like the heart.

We remain mysteries to each other,

even so.

 

In love, the heart

ticks

like a bomb –

 

And mother,

placing the autobiography back onto the shelf, says –

no one served time longer than he did,

for political reasons – as if refusing to say more.