Nadia Niaz reviews Open House by David Brooks

May 25, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Open House

by David Brooks

UQP

ISBN 978 0 7022 5352 2

Reviewed by NADIA NIAZ

How can we
Be so arrogant, to think that our
souls are worth so much?

David Brooks poses a cogent question and one that has often been asked by writers. Surely the act of writing is one of arrogance, the act of preserving our own thoughts an act of egotism. Expanded to the way modern humans interact with their environment the question remains valid, even essential. But the question of our value is not just an interrogation of our arrogance as a race – it is also a vital component in creating and re-creating ourselves, in understanding not just who we are, but how.

There is a meditative quality to the poems in Open House that seeks to answer these questions, but gently. There is through much of the book a sense of a breath held for a moment of contemplation and then gently released. It is the kind of book one must read slowly so that each poem, each line, may sing itself into being and back, and us with it.

Some readers may find the length of Open House daunting – most books of poetry published today are fairly short and self-contained and may be read in an afternoon. And yes, this book does demand a lot of attention, but it is also the sort of volume that you can come back to in a quiet moment, the sort that you can dip into the way we do into our favourite music albums, and revisit the bliss of its music.

Open House constitutes a poetic, and sometimes actual, journey. Each of the five sections that comprise this volume has its own distinct character while also retaining a logical relationship with the others. The poet’s voice rings out clearly through each, carrying the reader from poems about place, history, and loss all the way to the last section, which conveys a quiet wonder and delight at life and existence.

This is not to suggest a linear progression so much as a development of interconnected interests. While the first book is more solidly grounded in history, the present exists in it as well, and while the last book feels more about the present – or perhaps just conveys more presence and immediacy – the past is given its due.

‘A Place on Earth’ interrogates the poet’s sense of belonging, truth, guilt, and the quest for peace and meaning. Themes as disparate as Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, looking back at one’s youth, night trains, and quotidian intimacy, sit comfortably side by side and often flow into each other. There is a historicity to these poems – a sense of things observed and absorbed, but not let go. Perhaps, as in the blood from ‘The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto’ and the dust coating all things in ‘Dust’, it is history itself that persists in holding on.

This changes considerably at the beginning of ‘September’. Suddenly there are images of abundance, ripeness, pulchritude, and a relaxing of sorts. This is however quickly juxtaposed with images of sexual abuse and a grittiness that shakes the reader out of the trance of plenty. The poem ‘Nona’ may be the best encapsulation of the nature of this section. In it, Brooks describes an old woman as carrying the history of the town (and perhaps, by extension, of the nation), “a kind of midwife to the day” (32) performing such tasks as are necessary to transform it into a place where travellers may find comfort. With her death, “another part/ of the village/will flap untended in the Boria, another/ house lose its hold.” (33). There is a great noticing, as Rilke might phrase it, of people, things, animals and birds – the smallest creatures are given attention. In contrast, the reduction of ‘pederast priests’, to two words seems an act of righteous contempt.

‘Open House’ brings the reader back to Australia. The title of the section (and the book itself) suggests an inspection, which in turn implies an invitation to come in and browse, assess, and judge what one sees. However, as with actual inspections and open houses, much of what we are shown is curated and translated and so it is here. As in the rest of the book, each poem is crafted with great thought, attention, intelligence and feeling. Brooks seems a poet entranced by life in its variety. The opening poem, ‘In the Kingdom of Shadows’ sets the tone:

In the Kingdom of shadows, world without end,
slugs traverse the prairies of the soul,
mice enter the pure land,
cockroaches conquer the valleys of death.

In the Kingdom of shadows, dominion
of cats and sugar gliders,
moths are mastering the constellations, spiders
whispering their histories to the stars.

In this section, the quotidian and ordinary are made as evocative as the lofty and philosophical because he has understood that both must exist for there to be life.

‘Report from Blue Mountains’ is another shift in mood. It is less contemplative and more direct. The rest of the book seems more the ‘report’ and this section its defense as the poet seems to be in communication with others for much of it. This does not diminish the poetry, but rather adds an element of the conversational to a book comprising mostly soliloquy thus far. It is not that there are no other people in the book – indeed there are many and they are well described characters or beautifully rendered spectres – but that the poet seems to talk to as well as about them here. Here the poet seems to be stepping out more fully into the present world rather than examining it from afar.

The final section, ‘Reading to the Sheep’ repeats the now familiar themes of nature, the observation of creatures, domesticity, but in it the poet seems even more present than in the previous section.

If I’ve regrets
whose life is without them?
If I have debts let the creditors come.
The rain this morning
was like the first rain,
the sun in your eyes the first sun.
(‘Birthday Poem’, 146)

Unsurprisingly, sheep appear rather often in the poems and although they may not seem the most poetic of animals, their solidity and solemnity, their presence in the immediate moment, is effective. This feels like a good way to close this meditation on life and place and belonging, this journey through not just looking at things but seeing them and experiencing them by being open to them. The observer necessarily changes the observed, but seldom is the observation so gently and yet thoroughly presented. This is no aggressive investigation but rather a letting be that echoes concepts of mindfulness and meditation. Muck like the best haiku, the poems feel both complete and resonant.

Brooks is not a strongly political writer, but his views on animal rights are evident. Politics and poetry – particularly in English – can be an uncomfortable fit, so it is further evidence of Brooks’ mastery of the form that these poems often have an odd sweetness to them despite the brutality they describe. Brooks knows to turn the lens onto himself and his own actions and let the message grow from that presentation where lesser poets focus instead on the message to the detriment of the poetry.

Brooks not only captures the minutiae of life and turns it into poetry that makes the reader catch her breath – finding poetry in the mundane is almost the mission of the modern-day poet and writer and many do it well – but also takes the frankly anti-poetical and weaves it into poems that remains accessible and open as well as multi-layered and tantalising.

The quiet, unassuming nature of his poetry that comes through even though each poem is brilliantly structured and considered is what places Brooks in the league of the greats. You don’t so much read these poems as hear them sing themselves into being in your mind, as if they were always there, waiting to be awoken.

NADIA NIAZ is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne where she teaches Creative Writing.  Her work has previously appeared in TEXT, Strange 4 and The Alhamra Literary Review.

Cameron Lowe reviews The thin bridge by Andy Jackson

May 25, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

the thin bridge

by Andy Jackson

Whitmore Press

ISBN 978 0 9873866 4 9
  
  
  

Reviewed by CAMERON LOWE

Andy Jackson’s chapbook The thin bridge (Whitmore Press, 2014) is preoccupied with the human body. If I counted accurately, the words ‘body’ or ‘bodies’ appear in twelve of the twenty-six poems in this slim collection, and of the fourteen other poems the body is present as subject, or part subject, in nearly all of them. If this seems like overkill, it also gives The thin bridge a powerfully unified set of thematic concerns which works effectively in the chapbook form.

If the body is central to this collection, it should also be said that in many of the poems it is a starting point for broader reflections. The book’s first poem, ‘What’s possible between us’ (and it seems important that the question mark is omitted here), introduces the reader, somewhat tangentially, to the preoccupation with the body:

I part the vertical ocean of clothes
and find you there. Spider,

it is almost terrifying to me – suspended
only by the work of your own body. (p. 1)

It is a startling and haunting image, and of course, it is not just the spider’s body that is being evoked here. Yet it is a question the poem poses prior to this—‘Who knows what we’re capable of?’—that resonates throughout The thin bridge. And who is the ‘we’ in question here? One’s initial expectation, given the poem’s title, is that this will be a poem addressing a lover, and that the ‘we’ relates to a couple. However, the poem elides this expectation, producing a destabilising effect for the reader. As with many of the poems that follow this first one, there is a curious tension between the personal and a sense that the poems are probing broader issues. It is a clever dynamic that makes you want to reread the poems, to tease out what might really be at stake.

There is a strong autobiographical element to these poems—as well as a persistent lyric ‘I’—and it is perhaps worth noting that Jackson has Marfan’s syndrome, a condition that affects the body’s connective tissue and can lead to a range of medical disorders including heart disease and spinal curvature. I raise this because on one level the poems appear to demand this sort of biographical reading; the focus on the body—its shape, its frailties, and our responses to physical form—is such an important theme of the book as a whole. Additionally, such biographical information adds a layer of poignancy to a poem such as ‘Desensitised’, where there is a cheeky metaphorical play on the spines of library books, which the poem’s speaker must ‘push…back to vertical’ (p. 10).

Jackson has a talent for striking, and at times confronting, imagery. ‘Mother’s Day’, for instance, brings to mind Barrett Reid’s agonised ‘The Absent Heart’:

They crack open the bone
gates of your chest

to rechannel the paths
your life runs. Five hours

busy around the opened
chasm – machines and

surgeons. (p. 20)

Or, in ‘A certain type of poem’—which might hint at a Charles Simic influence with its ‘immaculate walls of an abattoir’—we are presented with another haunting image:

A life support system, humming after the body is taken / away (p. 7)

‘A language I didn’t know I spoke’, the poem that provides the collection’s title—it’s not exactly a ‘title poem’—is, curiously, one of the few poems in the book that doesn’t display a preoccupation with the body. Rather, the poem appears more concerned with connections between the human and natural world, and makes reference to ‘something obscure we have in common’ (p. 24). It is an interesting poem, in which the poem’s speaker goes on a bush walk and has an unusual encounter with a bird. My initial reaction to the poem was, perhaps ungenerously, that it indulges a little too much in the mysticism of communing with nature. I say ungenerously because the poem eventually deflates any pretensions of special insight on behalf of the poem’s speaker by the remark ‘I…feel / absurdly human’ (pp. 24–25). The poem’s final image, of ‘crossing back / over the thin bridge’ (p. 25), which presumably is a literal bridge but also a metaphor for the passage between different states of being, or states of awareness, is handled with a subtlety that Jackson exhibits throughout the collection.

For all of its considerable strengths, The thin bridge is also a little uneven. The travel poems in the middle of the book, in particular, are something of a flat spot, and seem misplaced in this collection; it might have been wiser, from an editorial viewpoint, to omit them. Few poets are able to successfully write convincing poems about exploring foreign places; as a reader, or at least for this reader, it always feels like being made to look at an album of someone else’s holiday snaps. The poem ‘Reaching and leaning’, which involves a hike in the Muir Woods of California, again provokes an uncomfortable feeling of being invited to share in some kind of mystic experience for the poet:

Standing still and writing this, the voices carry,
all the voices in my head, reaching

and leaning into light, this desire
that shares something with the wood,
the sap, the fingertip seed.

I place my palm against a sapling,
leave a trace. (p. 19)

This is a minor hiccup however, and the book’s final poem, ‘The bike itself’ (p. 35), is a brilliant choice to conclude The thin bridge. There is a temptation to read the poem as an oblique summation of the collection’s preoccupation with physical form; an abandoned bike is slowly picked apart until the object no longer resembles itself, and a half-demolished house is ‘only an empty frame / surrounding a fireplace’ (p. 35). And yet, as with the book’s first poem, ‘The bike itself’ is elusive and ends the collection on a wonderful image:

…Memories not even
lavender-patterned wallpaper can hold onto
lift into the sky, like pollen or dust in reverse.

 
CAMERON LOWE lives in Geelong, Victoria. His two book-length poetry collections are Porch Music (Whitmore Press, 2010) and Circle Work (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013).

Dimitra Harvey reviews Breaking New Sky by Ouyang Yu

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.

Michele Seminara reviews Distance by Nathanael O’Reilly

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’.

Geoff Page reviews Suite for Percy Grainger by Jessica L. Wilkinson

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.

Christopher Brown reviews Maze Bright by Jaya Savige

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 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:

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”.