Stephen Edgar reviews Thick and Thin Lines by Phyllis Perlstone

June 4, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Thick and Thin Lines

by Phyllis Perlstone

Puncher and Wattmann Poetry, 2012

ISBN 9781921450532

Reviewed by STEPHEN EDGAR

Some years ago I remember watching a television documentary about the English artist Ben Nicholson. At one point, speaking about a particular series of paintings in which Nicholson had arranged some carpentry tools in various geometric patterns, one of the commentators made what is, I suppose, an obvious but also an illuminating observation: the primary challenge for a painter is working out how to divide up the two-dimensional plane of the canvas—or, like the painter in Anthony Hecht’s poem, “Devotions of a Painter”, one could say “getting as much truth as can be managed/ Onto a small flat canvas”. I was reminded of this while reading Phyllis Perlstone’s  new collection, Thick and Thin Lines. Perlstone, as some readers may know, began as a painter and everywhere in her poems you can see the painter’s eye looking, analysing the fall of light, the disposition and changing patterns of objects, persons and events on the plane of the observed world.

You can see this process at its simplest in a poem such as the brief “Water’s work”:

A red wall under blue sky
gives way to a tree top
when the great boughs that shake their leaves
soft pedal their tinkle                      

while water dashing across
mingling with their breeze-blown suspended
weights of green
is flashing. 

Or again in these lines from “The trees and their patterns”:

in front of the door the palm trees
leaves fanning out and turning in –
the sun catches the palms in the afternoon
in the morning it’s the banana-fronds
sunned-on  dangling their copies
on the wooden wall” 

“Dangling their copies”—a wonderfully evocative phrase. It is as though she is not simply looking at and describing what is before her eyes, but analysing it into its component pieces and putting it back together again—composing it. “Looking is such a marvellous thing,” Rilke said, “of which we know little; as we look, we are directed wholly outside ourselves.” The descriptive is never merely descriptive; it can lead to discoveries. Or as Matisse put it, “To see is itself a creative operation, requiring effort.” In Perlstone’s poems we are constantly aware of that creative effort of the observing mind, almost as though the continued existence of the world depends on it. A passage from Russell Hoban’s novel Fremder comes to mind: “Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit of it in front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space.” This somewhat provisional nature of the world’s reality seems to be present in some of Perlstone’s poems too.

   A bird sails by
It’s not knowing about
  gravity or the science of Einstein’s 

curved space
  that keeps things “real”. Pulled into
an illusion  the flat world reopens 

  now
on
  an ibis.
(“Mirroring”)

Note that “real” in inverted commas.

But, despite the truth of Rilke’s remark, the mind looks in as well as out and it quickly becomes apparent that much of what is going on in this book is the mind’s probing of its own practices, its doubts and uncertainties, and that the finely described scenes of the outside world, always moving and changing, are in conversation with the emotional and intellectual dramas of the poet’s inner life. She speaks of “the airiness/ that is either happiness or weather”.

Or elsewhere:

“…In late afternoon’s
winter-heavy, mercury of sea and river
    thicknesses, surfaces are mirrors of the sky
   its canned greys are the mind’s
other side.”

Observation is a permeable membrane. The world flows through into the mind, and the mind flows out into the world. If I may be permitted to quote from my blurb for Perlstone’s last book, The Edge of Everything, “Where does the self end and the world begin? Perlstone is both enraptured and disturbed by the endless process of existence, engaged and estranged by what the light pins down for our contemplation.” These remarks are equally relevant to the new book. So in “Red lights” the return of light and colour in the morning also reveals “the photo of the mother as a child” that “makes her own child sad” and “imparts a memory this child can’t ever have”. The light of day seems to shine not only into the interior of the house but into the perspectives of memory.

These thresholds and portals do not lead exclusively to the realm of the personal. At times poems open out, suddenly and startlingly, onto subjects of historical scope. In “The Yarra and Arendt’s Centenary” the opening view of the calm river and scullers skimming across its surface forms an opposing counterpart to the poet’s “reflected/ stream of consciousness”, which is obsessed with the horrors of the age, from Eichmann through to the more recent follies of Rumsfeld and Cheney. In “Power unconfined”, the sight of an ocean liner in the harbour, and its queue of passengers taking their turn “with the orders of the day”, leads to contemplation of the power that draws the ship’s vast bulk “to where it will be out of sight”, and confronts us finally with images of the ship St Louis and its Jewish refugees, of the Tampa and the SIEV X.

Even so, there is a network of personal relations, personal emotions connecting all these pictures as well—the pictures of the world and the pictures in the mind—connecting them through time, another recurrent theme in the book, as well as through space. I find this poem particularly moving:

Music can fill all possible space
the way a landscape’s long curve
in a bay
reaches to catch the missed image
intimate as glistening drops
of pastness forming—

in a join of then with now
it is grief’s great deal between us
to tender
for a past retrieved 

can we understand
there was a distance once
too far to see
or to talk of love’s existence 

I like the rather dry wit of the book’s title, Thick and Thin Lines. At first glance this seems a rather bald and uninformative phrase, but the motif proves to be surprisingly productive. We find lines of light and shadow, lines of bodies and buildings (“a line of bricks confining space by design”), lines of music (“thinner than a thin flute’s/sound”), lines, of course, of thought (“the stem-line of your thinking”, as one poem has it), lines of action and unfolding experience, lines of division and connection. “I’m talking”, she says at the end of the opening poem, “to slow my reading down/into where I hold/nearness/in a line of work”. A later poem concludes, “In late sun he’s a measure of lines only/The louvres’ pleating patterns/contain him”. The lines in fact end up containing a great deal.

It is, I hope, apparent from what I have quoted so far, that Perlstone’s language is notable for its freshness, clarity and vividness. It avoids ostentatious flourishes but is rich and precise, and full of memorable images: those dangling copies of leaves I mentioned earlier; a plane that is “a flaw in a clear glass of sky”; that ocean liner “ice-cliff white”; “the snail-slicks of a ship/in its morning passage”; “watching the sun/rub off the rain”. I mentioned above the way Perlstone’s acts of looking seem to analyse the view into its component parts. One quite striking feature of her expression is the way certain  compound adjectives mirror this process. For example:

It’s so quiet I can’t think past early morning’s
not-enough light 

Now she might have said “inadequate light” or “insufficient light”, but the not-enough light is curiously effective. The same poem provides “the out-to-sea waves”. Elsewhere we find “lost-on-the-horizon birds-wings” and “my down-on-earth life”.

Thick and Thin Lines is by turns beautiful, thought-provoking, unsettling, moving—and quite original. Now it is possible to make a fetish of originality. Sometimes it turns out to be nothing more than transient novelty. True originality, though, like happiness, is not really something you can pursue and capture directly; it is in fact a by-product of excellence, of the search for the vivid and memorable expression of a unique vision. And that, I think, is what Phyllis Perlstone achieves in Thick and Thin Lines.

STEPHEN EDGAR is a Sydney poet. He received the Grace Leven Prize, the Philip Hodgins Medal; his latest collections are Eldershaw and The Red Sea.

Dan Disney reviews Radar by Nathan Curnow and Kevin Brophy

June 4, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Radar 

by Nathan Curnow and Kevin Brophy

Walleah Press, 2012

ISBN 9781877010187

Reviewed by DAN DISNEY

This shared book between two poets from different generations is a fascinating collection of segues, ellipses, and strange unities. The binaries are obvious: two poets (at different stages of their careers) populate separate halves of the book with their own styles and, more pertinently, diverging forms. Curnow’s free verse texts are lyric expressions of sense-making in response to weird contexts; Brophy’s wilder propositions are prose poems which chime with their own logic. These two separate formal, rhetorical gestures work toward a unity hinted at by Curnow on the back cover of Radar: ‘My poems are (seemingly) conscious, direct confessions and yours are unconscious waking dreams’. The palindromic title exemplifies this book’s unusual coherence: both halves begin in centralized locations (of self) and then move outward across psychic and/or external terrains. I am reminded of Rimbaud’s cri de cœur, ‘Je suis l’autre’: in their own ways, both poets call into versions of the unknown … while Curnow’s wakeful, sentient texts crystalize meaning, Brophy’s incursions into unconscious realms are less interested in thoughtfulness and valorize instead pure affect.

This book, then, contains two modes of response: the thinking of intelligence, and the feeling of wisdom. Turning attention to the first half of Radar, Curnow’s thoughtful explorations reveal a childhood spent enduring ‘the magic burn/ of anticipation bound in faith, belief and trust’ (‘The Curtain’); inside weird arenas where angels visit and stones miraculously turn to diamonds (‘Boy Got a Bullet’), Curnow seems to forgive one parent – walking across sand, the poet tells his father ‘it is easier if I fill your prints’ – while another cannot stop blaming herself ‘for all she can’ (‘The Piano Lesson’). This is a family romance seemingly populated by the usual tensions, humiliations, and resentments: but Curnow’s texts are at their most human when scanning the vistas of memory through the lens of his own fatherhood. Remembering how –

            The last piano lesson I ever had
            ended in a drug raid on my teacher’s house

Curnow reconciles his own off-key upbringing with teaching his children ‘all the right wrong notes’ (‘The Piano Lesson’). The implication hidden in the imperative is that there is such a thing as wrong wrong notes, but Curnow never descends into recrimination; despite a ‘foundation/ riddled with flaws’ (‘The Hallway’), here is a poet generously open-hearted, and unproblematised by the presence of memory.

One gets the sense that a lesser man may have more anger to offer than ‘So we grew up in your shitty houses’ – a sentiment directed not at his parents but toward ‘the High Church Men’. Indeed, rather than an ideological imposition, Curnow views his parents’ religiosity as not much more than an inconvenience – in church meetings, ‘My sister and I would lie across the chairs, tiring of our best behavior’ (‘Boy Got a Bullet’) – or an exercise in illogicality: why, Curnow wants to know, do some get bullets while others receive miracles? And why, amid the monsters, giants and talking animals, is there no mention of aliens in the Bible? (‘Made from the Matter of Stars’) Indeed, Curnow persists with framing whimsically logical questions throughout his half of the book: he asks ’what happens to birth/ if death is undone/ where will hope reside’ (Neruda, anyone?) and the absence of a question mark here contains a trace of the investigative mode made by any religion. But Curnow is never closed off from possibility, and his half of Radar scans unrelentingly for truthfulness. In ‘Blessing’, he starts with his early experience of magical thinking –

It came rushing toward me across the paddocks
all I had to do was stand – the moment roaring
silent and ancient, collapsing into bloom 

and ends in a personal engagement with mystery: ‘perfect questions, rhyming without a word’, and Sunny the horse who, unlike some creatures in the Bible, offer no answers (despite being tempted with an apple).

Curnow’s meditations on his origins paint, then, a picture of childhood as a place for mild incredulity … a good site for a poetic imagination to evolve, and then escape from. As he shifts his gaze, other themes are developed: the final poem from his section, ‘Made from the Matter of Stars’, acts as a coda which tells the story of the young poet taking flight – ‘my bike was chewing gravel for Melbourne’ – in order to flee for an urban landscape. ‘Made from the Matter of Stars’ frames those poems that shift focus toward his own young family, other poets, and the new contexts of adulthood. The sense is that here is a lyric poet scanning for how human connection creates meaning: amid the epiphanies, though, there is occasionally drear honesty too. Of his own parenthood, Curnow writes –

The tight circle of parenting is terminal,
much like my need for escape – the guilt of
imagining a new life beyond the stress
of this disheartening chorus
(‘Family Drive’) 

while his relationship with the mother of his children is cause for both celebration – seen in the surreal ‘Love Song #5’: ‘I will ask if you’ve fed the monkeys/ hand you poetry as a necklace, this lyrical wish/ of elephants in feathers’ – though is not all joie de vivre, captured especially in the pallor of ‘empty sex and non-argument’ (’24 Hour Landscape’). Curnow, who grew up amid religious truths, is not afraid to venture his own versions of well-shaped thoughtfulness, and what I am struck by is his acuity paired to an esprit: these poems about escaping a rough country existence with poorly-fitting ideas – unimpeachable fiats, really – are suffused with sensuality and sense-making but also, most importantly, generosity … surrounded by his family and friendships with poets equally up to the task of observing as a mode of self-clarification, these poems are contoured by kindness and shadowed by the larger circumference of thankfulness. Ultimately, in taking flight (both literally and psychically), Curnow has escaped to himself.

While the themes are somewhat similar, once we arrive at page 59 of this book, form and style shift to signify we are now in for a very different kind of exploration. Championing the prose poem at its emergence 150 years ago, Baudelaire called this paradoxical hybrid a mystérieux et brilliant modèle; rhetorically, prose poems subvert the lyric impulse to unconceal authentically-realized truths from a centralized authorial writing position, and instead act as model platforms for magical investigations, in which prose-like structures (narrative, plot, conflict, dénouement) work to convey an internal, weird logic. Under this definition Brophy’s prose poems are exemplary, and play a very different style of language game to Curnow’s texts.

While Curnow sets out to explain and resolve the weirdness of his lived experiences, Brophy’s texts formally and thematically elaborate oddness. These surrealistic experiments are self-contained universes of possibility, framed from the outset with a quote from Nietzsche: ‘Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler’ … over the page, and the poet dedicates his poems ‘To Andrea, who teaches me how to feel.’ This, then, is a half-book of mindful responses to affectivity; it is not thinking but feeling, a mode of originary not-thinking, that is taken by Brophy to be the most real mode of apprehension. And the prose poem is a form that grants him permission to make incursions into the non-thought of affect through playful innovation; differently to Curnow’s vowing gestures toward unconcealing truthfulness, Brophy acts as both trickster and visionary (often humorously), and his texts refuse to participate in an explicit sense-making program.

Indeed, and rather than explicatory, these texts are instead allegorical, shifting inexorably within unstable, non-logical dream worlds – places in which we can hear ‘scratching noises coming from behind the bookcase: characters trying to escape their novels’, (‘Siege’) or can catch glimpses of a shadow ‘flickering as it left like a movement from a horse at the far end of a paddock caught in the corner of your eye’ (‘Flicker’). Viz. the epigraph from Nietzsche: the shadow (as representation) of thinking versus the horse (as actual artifact) of emotion? Brophy is inviting us to ride with him through scenes of extra-ordinary domesticity, profoundly baffling (Brophy’s words) as the man who decides, in ‘A Less Personal Life’, to turn into an ant (Kafka, anyone?). These texts are weighted far more toward delight than instruction, but Brophy’s intentions are precise: rather than saddling us with random strangeness, Brophy directs attention in one of the ‘Thirty-Six Aphorisms and Essays’ to how ‘All we see and know is dreamed’. This section of Radar blurs, then, with illogicality, magic, and weirdness: the very modes Curnow seeks to wrestle into order, Brophy willfully celebrates.

In this, these discrete but unified sections of Radar build toward a gestalt that embodies and explores terrains T.S. Eliot concretises with his notion of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ (in which, put simply, thought and affect are harmfully separated). Does Brophy consciously homage the only prose poem Eliot wrote, ‘Hysteria’, with his own text, ‘Anxiety’ – which riffs literally on falling asleep: ‘falling asleep he fell into a river, which closed over him. He woke and fell asleep again, falling from a bicycle …’; on the next page, in ‘Against Falling’ we are in the realm of objectified, materialised language: ‘I must claw my fingers into the fissures of this sentence but keep moving, my knees and ankles tight against its flight upwards’ … speculatively, these poems are not about the horse of emotion but the Pegasus, that mythic symbol for wisdom, ascending: rather than the intelligence of thinking, these flights of the phantasmal seem to suggest our only hope of not persistently sleepwalking through our lives, or of falling into confusion and the hopelessness of repetition compulsions, is through consciously (here, literally) grasping the wild ride of affect, and next learning how to harness affect to language. For Brophy, we must learn the foreign realms of emotion; like Curnow’s prevailing gesture, this is an emancipatory quest after all.

There are several instances of neuroses hard at work in this half of the book – in ‘Fear’, a conversation begins with ‘What are you afraid of?’ and goes nowhere; in ‘Library’, perhaps the most sharply satirical poem in Radar, Brophy writes – 

The book he sought was not on the shelf in its place, but there were so many other books on this and other shelves on this and other levels of the library that he almost vomited up every word he had ever read. 

While this short poem may seem hilarious (and agonizingly accurate to those who, like Brophy, spend time researching inside libraries for a living), the angst nonetheless remains unresolved, and this pattern of affectivity ripples through Brophy’s section of Radar. One of the most striking departures between these two exploratory poets is that while one seems intent on weaving clarity into the disparity of flawed foundations through unified and resolved lyric texts, the other is inventing crazy-seeming vignettes from disquietude that is left unresolved. This latter section, then, is an exercise and introduction to the grammars of affectivity; Brophy wishes for us to learn the language well.

When I first read Radar I reached for Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, thinking of the six speculative models that the theorist maps in order to speculate an Oedipal swerve between generations of poets. But no such swerve exists in Radar: this is a book which can be read as either (the lesser object of) two discrete voices, or as a gestalt of weird and compelling questions asked in styles, forms, and modes which are mutually complementary and which extend each other. Buy this book for its novel, innovative connections; re-read it for two different explorations into humanizing, expressivist, learned terrains.

DAN DISNEY is a poet and essayist. He teaches twentieth century poetry and poetics at Sogang University, and divides his time between Seoul, Turin, and Melbourne.

Linda Weste reviews The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson

June 2, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

The Sunlit Zone

Lisa Jacobson

5 Islands Press, Melbourne, AUS 2012

ISBN 9780734047465

Pb 165pp

Reviewed by LINDA WESTE

In each verse novel, the unique relationship of poetic and narrative elements leads to a dynamic duality of design. Lisa Jacobson’s verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, illustrates how productive this interplay of narrative and poetic elements can be, with its compelling narrative, and its meticulous, yet deceptively natural poetic rhythm, honed painstakingly by Jacobson, over several years.

The initial idea for the verse novel came courtesy of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship to Israel, where Jacobson, scuba diving in the Red Sea, was struck by the ethereality of being underwater. Jacobson produced a two-page poem after the experience; the poem extended into a series of reflective monologues; and in time the project became bigger than either poem or short story and developed into a speculative verse novel.

The Sunlit Zone is set in a future Melbourne, circa 2050. The main character, North, is a genetic scientist working with mutated creatures, the products of environmental problems. In this speculative world of dream-genes, skinfones, cyberdrugs, thought-coding, and genetically modified species, North must come to terms with loss, and reconcile past and present in her relationships with friends, lovers and family.

The focus on loss and grief is carried by the verse novel’s metaphor of the ocean’s layers, which in layman’s terms are known as the sunlit zone, the twilight zone and the midnight zone. The latter, the depths, are associated with North’s past; through resolving loss she returns to the sunlit zone.

The Sunlit Zone is replete with ocean and sea imagery; marine conservation is central in its themes; yet the impact of the ocean on the work arguably extends to its free verse form and fluid storytelling — the sense of the ocean’s rhythm in the ebb and flow of the narrative — and its influence on character, most obviously that of Finn, North’s twin sister with gills who is obsessed with water.

The Sunlit Zone illustrates the capacity of the verse novel form to be as diverse and innovative as the prose novel. Nevertheless, the verse novel, by virtue of its constitutive and inherent doubleness, is a narrative poem; a category it shares with epic; narrative autobiography in verse; Medieval and Renaissance verse romances; mock epic poems; and ballads and their literary imitations. The Sunlit Zone changed Jacobson’s view of the verse novel as a ‘hybrid’ form: “It’s not a hybrid, it has its own form, and its own history over hundreds of years,” she maintains.

Jacobson read quite a lot of verse novels during the writing of The Sunlit Zone including Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and young adult verse novels by Catherine Bateson and Steven Herrick. Some of the verse novels in metered form that Jacobson read felt relentless; “prison-house-ish”: in contrast, Jacobson “wanted to open form up: the ocean was flowing” (Interview). The search for poetic models that could enable such fluidity led Jacobson to the sound word echoes in W H Auden’s poem about Icarus falling, “Musée des Beaux Arts”, which has rhyme, “but spaced out within the poem unpredictably, for instance, in lines two and seven. Such poetry is actually carefully wrought although it looks completely free; it’s not metrical but it has a rigorous application of sound” (Interview).

To ensure that form followed theme in The Sunlit Zone, Jacobson devised a free verse form comprising 313 poetry ‘passages’ — one is inclined to refer to passages rather than stanzas when they vary in line length and their number of lines — and of these, only a few passages have as many as twenty-three lines, while most have between eight and fifteen. In each passage, the syntax preserves the natural stresses found in speech. There is no template by which all stresses are replicated and gain uniformity or regularity in an imposed pattern, nevertheless a close analysis of the passages reveals their coherence and rhythmic integrity.

Each passage is meticulously patterned with rhyme. At the line level, most obvious to readers are the infrequent end-stopped rhymes. Most commonly deployed, however, are the rhymes that fall mid-line, the predominant assonant vowel rhymes and occasional final consonant rhymes, as well as rhymes of root-words with endings. The “sea” theme not only offers up a bountiful lexicon; it also gives the verse novel buoyancy at a phonemic level, at the smallest unit of sound. Its digraph “ea” recurs plentifully in passage after passage, for instance, in “meat” and “cease”, enabling a plethora of rhyme as diverse as: “secretes”, “Waverley”, “ropey”, “everything”, “empties”, “recedes”. Jacobson employs light rhyme, rhyming words with syllables stressed in speech, for instance, “chill”, “smell”, “tell”, “expelling”, “all”, “still”, “pulled” with words with secondary or unstressed syllable, such as “sorrowful” and “exhalations”. The syllable rhyme in “exhalations” produces a further ‘chime’ when brought together with one or two syllable long “a” rhymes (“whale”, “bait”, “grey”, “fray”, “lake”, “waves”, “opaqueness”) in the following passage of The Sunlit Zone:

The whale’s vast flank feels smooth
and chill as long-life meat. The skin
secretes a fishy smell that’s just a bit
too strong, like bait in buckets
stewing on the pier. It’s just a clone,
I tell myself again. Waverley strokes
its big grey head, the spout expelling
ropey exhalations that diminish,
fray and thin. Then, nothing.
The whale’s eye, dark as a lake
and sorrowful. Everything stops.
Even the waves cease muttering
and all is still. The eye empties
as if a plug’s been pulled.
We watch as it recedes
into opaqueness. (14)

To foreground fluidity in The Sunlit Zone, Jacobson preserves the natural stresses found in speech with the combined aid of typography — which introduces directly quoted dialogue with ‘em dashes’, as is common in prose fiction — and by breaking lines of dialogue midway through the syntactic unit, be it phrase, clause or sentence. Protracted dialogue is commonly longer than a line, and enjambs from one line to the next, or over several. Jacobson controls the pace or speed with which sentences enjamb, modifying syntax to accelerate or decelerate the narrative.

The interplay of poetic and narrative elements is instrumental in managing this tension, or “tugging” (Kinzie 470). While Jacobson renders less emphasis on artificial techniques such as alliteration, these do not recede completely; rather they are modified. When alliteration is given a caesural pause, for instance, its impact on diction is muted: “Volunteers stream/in like diaspora, dissipate” (11); “Bonsais stand in pots; poised, balletic” (33). Jacobson varies the frequency and complexity of trope — simile and metaphor —from passage to passage, to intensify, or conversely, to delimit meaning. Personification imbues the abstract or inanimate with psychological motivation or embodied gesture, and enlivens or dramatises the material world of the narrative. Jacobson’s considered attention to syntax, word choice, and placement creates rhetorical effects, such as when line breaks end with modifiers that help passages convey aporia by expressing doubt or uncertainty.

Jacobson also has a facility for varying speech to nuance each character’s idiolect, and to convey the English syntactical approximations of Raoul, whose mother tongue is French: “Excuse us please/but Cello insists she be in her own skin” (77); “Thank you. Now go, he says, /and find some sleep. You lovely/lady. You’re good, you know, /to stay. She’s difficult, no?” (103).

Perhaps the only disjuncture to form following theme in The Sunlit Zone is the uniformity in its collective arrangement of passages: free verse it may be, but the poetry remains conscious of its placement on the page. The passages are aligned down the middle, surrounded by ample white space. The passage breaks are generous and exacting, and each passage is consecutively numbered, its lineation compact.

The Sunlit Zone was Jacobson’s first foray into writing a novel-length project, and she was mindful that it needed to have the qualities of strong fiction. Initially Jacobson considered publishing The Sunlit Zone as a young adult verse novel, “but some parts of the story weren’t suitable for younger adolescents” (Interview). Instead she decided it had more potential as a crossover novel; that is, a novel for adults that older teenagers could also read. Jacobson stands by her choice to write The Sunlit Zone as a verse novel. One of the joys of the verse novel for Jacobson is the white space, signifying “things unspoken, yet part of the poem itself” (Interview).

Jacobson remembers wrestling over phrases, over lines: “the fiction wants to gallop on and the poetry reins it back” (Interview). Yet Jacobson doesn’t view the relationship between poetic and narrative strategies as ‘competing urges’; rather, she considers there’s a playful natural interaction between the two forms: “One only becomes subsidiary to the other if you neglect to do both things at once; that is, to be a poet and a novelist” (Interview).  But given the relationship of poetic and narrative strategies in each verse novel is unique, she acknowledges, notions of how verse novels achieve stylistic tension could be less circumscribed.

Well regarded as a poet, Jacobson has been awarded the 2011 Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize and the HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Prize. The Sunlit Zone was shortlisted for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Since publication, The Sunlit Zone has been selected for the set reading list for Victoria University’s Studying Poetry and Poetics course and Bendigo TAFE’s Professional Writing and Editing course. It has also been short-listed for the prestigious Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry 2012 and has just been listed as one out of twelve contenders for the Stella Prize 2013, a new major literary award for Australian Women’s Writing.

Jacobson has gathered some ideas for another verse novel in the future. In the meantime she has just completed a new collection of poetry, South in the World, as the recipient of a 2012 Australia Council Grant.

Jacobson likes the idea of verse novels making poetry more accessible. The Sunlit Zone, with its compelling narrative and meticulous poetic rhythm, offers a timely reassurance to publishers of the concentrated power of the verse novel form.

Works Cited

Jacobson, Lisa. Interview by Linda Weste, 2 February 2011.
—. The Sunlit Zone. Melbourne: Five Islands Press, 2012.
Kinzie, Mary. A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 199 

LINDA WESTE is a poet, editor and teacher of Creative Writing. Her PhD, completed at The University of Melbourne, researched late-20^th and early-21^st-century verse novels. Her first verse novel fictionalised the late Roman Republic; the experiences of German Australians in 1940s Melbourne are the subject of the second, in progress.

Gillian Telford reviews Fairweather’s Raft by Dael Allison

June 2, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Fairweather’s Raft

by Dael Allison

Walleah Press, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-877010-21-7

Reviewed by GILLIAN TELFORD

On the cover of Fairweather’s Raft a toy-like sailing vessel is adrift on a glassy ocean, its sail reflected as a shadow beneath the surface – and beneath the surface is where the reader is led by Dael Allison in this fine collection. Based on extensive research and a strongly empathic response to her subject Allison guides with skilful passion through a key period in the obsessive, turbulent and estranged life of Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) ‘one of Australia’s most iconic and enigmatic artists.’ (i)

Allison’s poems centre around the trope of a perilous journey, specifically the perilous journey made by a sixty year old Fairweather between Darwin and Timor in 1952 on a flimsy, self-made raft. Given up for dead by searchers, he made landfall after sixteen days on Roti, Timor’s most western island. He was then deported to England but made his way back to Australia – Bribie Island, Queensland – where he finally abandoned his peripatetic existence and spent his last two decades, ‘the most stable and productive period of his life.’ (p. 80)

Allison provides a summary of Fairweather’s biography and development as an artist at the end of the collection. This essay warrants inclusion and is likely to be of interest to both informed readers and others not familiar with Fairweather’s life or work. We learn of his abandonment by family during the first ten years of his life, his troubled years in UK, his time as a prisoner of war, and his determination to pursue his art despite family opposition. We are introduced to his years of wandering through Asia, the strong influences of his time in China and of his arrival in Melbourne in the 1930s. After this time he spent increasing periods in Australia ‘but he remained a loner, living rough between Melbourne and far north Queensland. Escape became a primary motif whenever dissatisfaction manifested:’ (p.78) Allison also outlines information about her research which, in addition to the written sources and personal contacts listed, took her to Bribie Island, to Darwin, and to Kettle’s Yard at Cambridge University, UK in her ‘quest to understand his work and his life’ (p.82)

The first half of Allison’s book portrays Fairweather’s life in Darwin – the two years preceding his raft journey, while the second half relates to the voyage itself. Fairweather’s Raft opens with a poem in three parts, ‘Three paintings found discarded in the mud’ This is a powerful introduction to place, to the artist and his driven, isolated existence. The imagery is vivid, always congruent, and leads to the artwork, to colour and subjects:

2. ‘(No title)’ ….

the painter’s rough marks/ draw black ink into muscle/ trapped faces/ opaque eyes/ storm-edge of a shoulder/ conch of a thigh’

Part 3 is again entitled ‘(No title)’ This untitled convention was a common feature of Fairweather’s paintings. The poems’s line ‘one body two heads/ hauling away from each other’ also rehearses a favourite subject of Fairweather’s – the body with two heads. Here the reader is alerted to the enduring Fairweather trope of the conflicted inner life of the artist

The immersion in the physical world continues as Allison portrays fruitful images of where and how the artist lived ‘Each step into the light’- ‘Frances Bay’s stink of mangroves,// the build-up air viscid as green mud./ Above him nimbus thugs shoulder-butt the sun’ His home, the half-demolished supply boat ‘The Kuru’ is starkly outlined, ‘Stars thrash through the fraying nets/that drape its severed deck.// In the chart room the painter fumbles for a match, lights and pumps the Tilley. Gas flares, darkness scuttles to the vault. …’

We learn of Fairweather’s struggle for artist’s materials in ‘Fugitive colours’ ‘and i need red./ what does this place want of me,/ my blood?’ We learn of how he felt increasingly marginalised by local society in ‘The Rear Admiral’. ‘In the parlance of 1952, wit is trickier/ than bum-man, queer or pansy./Darwin locals snicker,/ “Not in front of the ladies … eh Nancy!”’

Poverty, discomfort, overwhelming memories, tumultuous weather – the pressures build up. ‘In his mind he sails an ocean’ creates ironically indelible pictures of the artist in the wet season, struggling to save his paintings from destruction ‘He stacks them on the table// and climbs up, roosting/ like a broody hen to save them// from the flow. i have to go,/ before this damn town drowns me.// Horizons tremble/ in tin cans and bamboo cups.’ Allison’s research is used with strong effect throughout. Specific details of  Fairweather’s early life and alienation from family are woven into reflections and memories that not only add to the biological narrative but take us into dark and brooding mindscapes. Of these, four powerful poems are included in the prelude to the raft journey, ‘Remembering the grey house’, ‘Family’, ‘Schoolboys’, ‘Demobbed’.

Similarly, lighter memories of previous travels and some highly imaginative pieces by Allison are used effectively for mood and pace changes and further increase the drama of the narrative. One that particularly appealed to this writer is the prose poem ‘Dreaming poets dreaming’ which presents a fabulous scenario, written with enormous energy and skill: ‘what if a raft were to loom from the dark with an old/ man at the bow, his hand firm on the helm? what if they/ stepped on, the two poets from another world?’

Preparations for the journey continue until the poem ‘Cast away’ is reached: ‘silver cracks my eyes apart, empty days—/ the painter and his raft have gone.’

Also interspersed through the book are ekphrastic poems where specific paintings, works and quotations by Fairweather are named and dated beneath poem titles. These dates range from 1936 to 1965, but Fairweather was an artist who painted from memory, revisiting incidents or earlier paintings many years later. With little recorded in writing, it is mainly through his later paintings that the personal experience of the raft journey can be envisaged. It takes artistic knowledge as well as courage to explore these works and Allison has achieved an outstanding success in her role as an explorative poet. One such painting is ‘Lights, Darwin Harbour 1957’ considered by Allison in a finely nuanced prose poem ‘Nightburst’. Here she assumes the defiant, triumphant and somewhat apprehensive voice of the artist as he leaves Darwin Harbour in the raft, at night. Like the painting’s bold, tight strokes, Allison’s words evoke the colour and drama of this night, the lights and shadows, the brimming marine life, the mounting tension ‘released from land’s tether into rising weather.’ Similarly, the poem ‘Monsoon on four panels’ relates to Fairweather’s major work Monsoon 1961-2. Written as a prose poem in four parts, which mimic the size ratio of the four panels of the painting, it is a compelling meditation. Another poem ‘Lacuna’ from the work Roti, 1957 celebrates the exhausted arrival of Fairweather as he is rescued from the beach on the island bearing the same name. He has survived. And we feel we have accompanied him, survived with him through the images Allison has created of the mountainous seas, the physical ordeals, the hallucinations, the accompanying seabirds, the always present sharks.

The raft journey was an epiphany in Fairweather’s life – it ‘made Fairweather famous’ and it ‘also transformed Fairweather as an artist….after 1952 his paintings became more reflective and profound’ (p.80). Some subjects were revisited over many years and the poem ‘Roi Soleil’ after the painting ‘Roi Soleil 1956-7’ reflects the artists’s blissful memories of Bali – a theme often explored.

In this collection, for the most part, the sequencing of poems works well, particularly once the function of memory processes is grasped. The one poem that draws undue attention to itself is ‘Crocodylus’. Whilst clever and enjoyable to read, it didn’t seem to belong to this collection in time or mood.

Allison has crafted her poems, she knows and revels in the language of the wild places she takes us to and the poems are full of musicality, adept sound play and good doses of humour. Free verse is the most common form used but she has added some diverting variations, such as snatches of familiar song or verse, interspersed with dialogue or quoted texts – an effective ploy in presenting the wandering, hallucinating mind of the artist. There is also the final poem in the Coda ‘Raftbedraft’ Lit Bateau 1957 which is one of two written as adapted pantoums and takes the work to a powerful conclusion ‘Sleep collaborates with motion/ and the moon’s a lemon mockery,/ your bed drifts on the swelling lung of water—/ this ocean is not the last ocean.’

In Fairweather’s Raft Allison has created a complex, multi-layered work that reveals new depths on every reading. and will have you returning, as I did, to stand before a Fairweather painting and be fascinated by how much more I could see beneath the surface.

NOTES

(i)  Handout Ian Fairweather, Dael Allison – Panel Discussion, salt on the tongue, Goolwa Poetry Festival, April 2010

GILLIAN TELFORD is a Central Coast, NSW poet.

Charles Manis reviews Snowline by Jo Langdon

June 1, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Snowline

by Jo Langdon

Whitmore Press Poetry, 2012

ISBN 978 0 9757762 9 2

Reviewed by CHARLES MANIS

Snowline, the debut chapbook by Jo Langdon, is both elegant and powerful. The lyric poems in this volume operate primarily in couplets and tercets, and out of the white space come teeth and airplanes and fragments of narrative with the strategic force of well-timed jabs.

The sparseness of the page allows Langdon to bring home images that appeal to our senses in often surprising ways.  In particular, Langdon has a knack for taking the common experience and presenting it in such fresh ways that it becomes visceral. Take, for example, the poem “Nausea,” in which the speaker recalls to the addressee:

Once, through the paper wall,
we heard your housemate’s skull collide
with toilet porcelain. 

The wet barking of her sickness,
and then nothing. 

(9)

In “Falling back to sleep,” the description of an experience so often rendered in terms of vision—light and darkness, clarity and haze—becomes voluminous:

This dream fills your mouth
like a sentence. 

          (10)

Between these moments of sensory arrival, Snowline glides. Few poems firmly establish narrative context, so even when Langdon treads into the familiar territory of the family poem, the approach is distinctly lyrical. The poem “After” never provides a family history, nor even any particular developed set of symbols that might stand in for a longer, firmer narrative. For that reason, the artifacts within the poem stand out much more: “an emptied coffee mug forgotten / on the verandah; a ring of sticky // whiskey on the bench”, and the box of matches, burned out and closed up, that concludes the poem (15). In “Dusk Street,” the speaker guides us like a sort of psychopomp from urban topography into a child’s dreams of “velveteen / ears” with an effortless transition that minds neither wall nor mode of experience (20). Similarly, a young girl in the final few lines of “Stratosphere” intercedes between the speaker and the addressee, shifting from a mid-air lightning strike to the ease of childish affections. Between poems, too, the transitions are fluid. “Shape” ends with light through a window transformed by bodily processes, and “Stratosphere” opens on the next page in a new location with, potentially, a new set of characters, but also with hands acting out their heat upon glass.

This lightness of movement is especially important in a collection of poems spoken almost exclusively from the first-person point of view. Almost every poem takes an extended experience (or set of experiences) and crystallizes it into a few concise lines. Even in a chapbook, a continuous series of first-person lyrics can become wearisome if not dealt with delicately. But Snowline manages the first-person lyric all the better through its disavowal of boundaries. Walls disappear, one consciousness enters another, and language makes space for its own shapes and value, as in “The Shape”:

            Hands and wrists can be too intimate,
            & I’m reminded of other words,

            beautiful perhaps
            for their vowel sounds
            (love, moon, breath, pulse).

            Tonight we’ll sleep on our sides
            to watch the sky occupy
            the bedroom window,

            dimming away its stars to turn
           a blue that belongs to ceiling shadows
           or skyscrapers or gas-stove flames.

                     (5)

At its best, Snowline finds room for both the punchy, visceral image and for the ethereal play of light and shadow. And between these poles, the first-person speaker can move sometimes as what resembles a sort of spirit and sometimes as a fully embodied being. The collection is often preoccupied with images of flight that might fail at any time—planes threaten to crash, and birds fall dead. Yet, the poems often pull off their airiness with remarkable grace.

Many of these poems are spoken about or from within Vienna, and the whole of the collection has a somewhat European flavor. In “Stadtpark,” the speaker meets with her addressee surrounded by images of a Viennese spring, and the poem effectively conveys a sense of suspension, with its frozen scenery possible preceding a thaw. The speaker of these poems finds herself in an intermediary position, somewhere between tourism and familiarity. In the poem “In Wien,” the speaker notes:

            These mountains don’t belong to my
             horizons

            (22)

Frequently, these moments of discomfort open the speaker and the reader to the unexpected. In “Little creatures,” a classroom lesson in French involving a dead sparrow gives way to another meditation on death and flight:

            Il est mort? The boy asks, tilting his head
            towards his mother’s.

            The story is supposed to demonstrate
            something French,

            but instead we focus on this small thing
            the sky can no longer hold.

            (16)

“Little creatures,” though not necessarily set in a foreign country, brings with it multiple instances of that which is slightly alien and yet at the same time home-like, in the sense of the uncanny.

As a collection, Snowline reads like a constellation; its lyrics are held together by only the most delicate threads of light. At any time the poems seem they could drift apart. Yet, Langdon manages the elliptical, fragmentary, and sparse with incredible sensitivity. Even “Nausea,” perhaps my favorite poem in the chapbook, despite an image of skull striking porcelain demonstrates a lightness of touch that provides the reader enough space within familiar subject matter to see something new. Snowline, though littered with mouths, teeth, airplanes, machines, and metal, turns out a sort of ballet. Jo Langdon’s poetic balance and poise are striking in this debut volume.

Snowline was awarded the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize.

CHARLES MANIS is a Philadelphia-based poet and he is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature at Temple University. His work has recently appeared in RATTLE, Fifth Wednesday, and Spillway Magazine.