January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Circus
by Ken Bolton
Wakefield Press
2010
ISBN: 9781862546899
REVIEWED BY RAE DEE JONES
For thirty years Ken Bolton has shown tenacious dedication to his chosen art. Apart from producing a series of volumes of poetry of unusual consistency, he also edited the magazine Magic Sam. When I read this recent volume after browsing through some of his earlier poetry I was struck by the remarkable invisible evolution in tone and content.
Take the typical first poem from his first volume, Blonde & French (Island Press, 1978):
Living brilliantly: outside –
the green/ so blue, & the green
is so bright & the wall it is clinging to
is totally in shadow but only just
because the 3 small horizontal lines /of
louvres/ have caught the midday sun,
though they jut out only a little, & shine
a brilliant white a painterly tour de force like
3 single white strokes of a loaded brush ….
Already there is the precision and ‘objectivity’ of language, while the verse is permeated with flat, po-faced irony. The poem hints at humour, but is too severe to allow it through. The images are light and deft while the tone advises the reader that there is much to be taken seriously. Even when describing desire:
I want an insanity
to enclose me :a quote/ from Robbe-Grillet’s
The House of Assignation: Lady Eva “he will
be driven mad if she continues to give in
to his phantasies” I want that – that particular
arse slowly
The quote from Robbe –Grillet effectively distances the reader, and perhaps the author, from comic (or romantic, or lustful) intensity.
Now read forward thirty two years to Circus, where we find a single long poem constructed seamlessly as a novel, with themes and characters acting independently of the person (but not the manner) of the author. While the blurb acknowledges his debt to Robbe-Grillet, the imagery is much less detached. A major link throughout the poem is the search by the Assistant Foreman of a small and rather seedy travelling circus for the forever missing last tent peg. There is always this missing peg! In the last verse, he succeeds. While the search goes on, there is a lot of character development and action, much of it hilarious. My favourite character is the thoughtful elephant, who is introduced while searching for a hypodermic in his body while contemplating the possibility of having AIDS:
He hums the great Dion di Mucci tune.
The Wanderer,
Thinks of Christopher Brennan, a man killed by a tram on his way home.
Rummages in his straw.
He raises his foot,
Looks for the syringe,
But cannot find it.
Good.
The singing elephant is a wonderful comic creation who ambles about, glumly addressing the big questions of …:
When I read that doggone letter, I
Sat right down and cried: She said now daddy I hate to leave you,
But I’m in love with another guy –
Da-doot-doot doot,da doot-doot doot!
The elephant is a wonderful comic creation, who reminds me more of the cockroach Archie in the Don Marquis classic Archie and Mehitabel than Robbe-Grillet. Sexual activity is presented differently:
In the dancer’s caravan Regina Xo is naked astride a man. It is Giorgio Verzotti,
Olivia’s fiancé.
Should this be happening?! Moments later Olivia comes in.
Giorgio! She is glad to see him and soon is in the same position. See, she laughs,
Mine are much bigger than Regina’s. Regina smiles – she is making a pot of tea.
The humour is robust throughout, especially in the scenes where the strong man, Ulysse, dives into a water tank from great height:
He lived for danger, Andrea told Gina and Tomaz.
That modified tank, … Giorgio began. His dream
Was to dive in and disappear. It needed an awful lot of plumbing.
– Secret passages, side tanks …
Once he dived and much of the water had leaked away,
It took a long time to come out.
We thought the trick had worked
And he would ride up on his motorbike, smiling.
He was concussed. Julie Lautone looked in
And he was floating about on top.
Children were impressed.
Man of strength- Man of wonder.
Two characters are watching daytime television (which the elephant is also observing through a window, between their heads), a movie which could afford a wonderful opportunity for serious and slightly portentious observation. An old movie, featuring Gilbert Roland, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, about a circus. The conversation is as follows:
“One of Beckett’s favourite actors,” Attila remarks.
“Brecht, I think,” says Tomaz.
It is too stupid and they turn it off. Gina reads the men their star signs.
The elephant looks at a mouse near the caravan’s tyre.
But he does not really see it. He is thinking about Peter Lorre’s lines in Casablanca–
“Rick, Rick, you’ve got to save me!”
Then he laughs …
Ken Bolton’s poetry has evolved to the point where he has written a fine verse novel with strong absurdist elements and tight control over character, dialogue and timing. There are not many books of poetry that I could imagine being turned into a film. This is one. And it is definitely poetry.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Porch Music
by Cameron Lowe
Whitmore Press
December 2010
ISBN 978 0 9757762 7 8
REVIEWED BY ANNA RYAN-PUNCH
Cameron Lowe’s first book of poetry, Porch Music, showcases his ability to deftly navigate both the natural and the surreal in this striking collection.
The book is divided into two sections. The first, Balloon Days, is a series of sometimes intensely personal poems, and highlights Lowe’s admirable talent for elevating the domestic to the unheimlich. These pared-back pieces are deceptively accessible, but can alter our gaze with a single word; push our perspective from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Easy is perhaps the most minimalist example of this. The poem opens with a very simple image, depicted monosyllabically: ‘You wake with her hand/on your back’. The following two couplets continue in this vein, but the final three lines transform this pure image: ‘her hand is a thing known/without turning,/a thing, a small easy thing.’ Great import is brought to a small moment, without the need to add further images.
Sardines takes disparate images and weaves them together in a unexpected and complementary fashion. It throws us from the abstract notion of an economics of emotion to the oddly olfactory image of sardines, and back again:
and let’s call that love
following a free market model
in which emotions float deregulated
like a tin of sardines in brine,
always ready on the counter
for a quick and easy sale, or
a sudden move in interest rates
that leaves us hopeless in denial.
The poem forms a neat, hard whole, juxtaposing ordinary images to create profound strangeness.
Counting is a more narrative poem than many in the collection. The initial taciturnity of the poem’s subject will be familiar to anyone with a reticent father or grandfather:
There were things learnt and taught of course,
outside things; to turn a sheep for crutching
and an ease with dogs, an understanding
that much in life is better left unsaid.
But the final stanza moves the poem into another realm:
…speaking of things left unspoken,
the shrill screaming of shells
in the jungle and the warm
welling blood, or our need,
deep in the night, to love.
There is admirable delicacy in this exploration of what lies behind stoicism; moving us as readers from comprehension to true understanding.
While Lowe’s skills in traversing the romantic and beautiful are a highlight, there is also a sly humour and practicality that curls through these poems. Lowe’s level-headed attitude locks onto the absurdity of the ordinary, and plaits humour and romance into something that is often as moving as it is funny.
Summer is perhaps my favourite example of this. It is essentially a love poem to summer channelled through that humble Australian symbol of the season – the barbequed snag: ‘The smell of sausage on the wind/from a distant backyard brings you erect’. We are displaced as readers by the evocative commercial images:
…wetsuits slide like quicksilvers
towards the waiting water, which viewed
through a screen is as beautiful as a bottle
of Coke and just as sweet.
The successful marriage of absurdity and truth in the final lines gives Summer a lovely tension between humour and beauty:
…As the day’s
heat softens into an evening there’s that
sausage again, adrift on the hot breeze,
whispering: it’s summer, it’s summer.
Self-portrait also displays Lowe’s trademark dry humour. But in this poem, it is less explicit; captured in surrealism (one of several poems that nicely anticipates the pieces in the second part of the book):
Note how my hairstyle resembles the 3rd Apostle
at Port Campbell – seen
through heavy fog –
and how the moth circling the lamp becomes a dog
chewing an old bone then the telephone rings:
it’s you
and I turn into a postcard,
my mouth shaped like a tourist’s smile
a sort of distant, disremembered quote.
The notions of appearance and façade in this poem are intriguingly rendered – a hairstyle appears as a rock formation; a spinning moth throws up an image of teeth gnawing; a fake grin becomes cardboard. The ordinary is once again extrapolated into the strange and new.
Like the title of the first section of the book, Lowe’s poems often rise like balloons. His brief pieces are imagistic in nature, filled with the ‘clear edges’ that Pound advocated. But Lowe’s touch is with the soft, rather than ‘hard light’ of imagism. The nature of light itself threads throughout the poems, as do images/landscapes associated with it: sea, summer, mirrors. While this lightness of touch accentuates the quiet power of the more successful pieces, it leaves others (eg. A Sunday, Another Sunday, Paling Fence) feeling a little slight. They remain as ‘images presented’: evocative, but stopping short of the full transformative exploration that characterises the better poems.
The first half of Porch Music is, admittedly, the ‘easier’ half. The second section, The Corrosive Littoral, is a series of poems based on paintings by Australian surrealist James Gleeson. While they stand alone as poems in their own right, I found it more revealing to look up each painting, and read the painting and poem in tandem, with the book held next to the screen. To flick our gaze back and forth creates a dialogue between painting and poem, a language which locates each within the other. The Corrosive Littoral poems are mostly prose poems; dense, highly imagistic and often playful. On occasion they read too much as a pure descriptive of the painting (eg. Spain); they can feel like a walk around the story of the canvas without elevating response into interpretation:
…And you, her lover,
stood above her as she lay there, stood and walked and
passed her by. And leading you on, to distant
mountains shaped like a sleeping man, were the hooded
ones…
But the more successful poems in the Corrosive Littoral section are among the most striking in Porch Music. We inhabit the corrosive littoral throws up images reminiscent of From Here To Eternity:
Practice love on this beach in the old-fashioned way:
they’ll make a movie if the price is just right…
The painting is thus made familiar to us, and then Lowe makes it natural:
Under extremes, he
explains with clouds in his brain, the algebraic sum of
all things: in a cyclical process the answer returned is
always something or none. Even so, she whispers, we’re
falling apart.
Making the surreal into something personal is the achievement of this part of the book, and one that Lowe’s down-to-earth style is made for. In a way, The Corrosive Littoral is the reverse of the Balloon Days section of the book – the second half takes the unheimlich and makes it heimlich.
A standout poem in the second section is Congratulations on the maintenance of an identity (a play on Gleeson’s painting titled Coagulations on the maintenance of an identity). Notions of father, son, woman and child interplay throughout the poem to create an effect that not only leads us through the painting, but lifts it into something that raises goosebumps:
…For the
man there is a dream of blue sand and even though
long dead there the child still stands, holding a string to
the deep-diving moon that does not stop. Don’t cry Dad,
I said, seeing in his face my face and feeling the shame
of a father’s tears and the shame of having cause those
tears. Dad the moon doesn’t stop…
The notions of confusion between child and adult, woman and man, the ‘maintenance of identity’ in both are delicately layered in this poem.
Porch Music is a quietly complex collection – a book that understands the humorous divide between city and country, the oddity of domestic turning to exotic, and the easy slide from the organic to the strange. It is a book that is by turns accessible and difficult – a collection of consistency and contradiction.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
New and Rediscovered
by Vicki Viidikas
Transit Lounge
May 2010
ISBN: 9780980571769
REVIEWED BY MARTIN EDMOND
That Incorrigible Weapon: Vicki Viidikas, New and Rediscovered
A few years ago a friend who lives in Queensland asked me if I would mind having a look around the second hand bookshops in Sydney for the only one of Vicki Viidikas’ four books he didn’t own a copy of: Knabel, her third, published by Wild & Woolley in 1978. One very hot January day I stopped in at Gould’s in King Street, Newtown and spent an irritable half hour or so looking through the poetry section for a book I felt sure was there but could not find; I remember the black dust from the street that coats all the books on the lower shelves sticking to my sweating hands like a contagion. Some weeks later, on a whim, I called in again and this time found a copy in a matter of minutes.
When I took it to the desk to pay Bob Gould, sitting up on his high seat, began to reminisce. Such a fine writer, he said. So sad. Do you know, she came in here just a few weeks before she died, to sell some books? She was getting rid of her library in stages in order to finance her drug addiction … as he spoke, incongruously, he began taking rolls of banknotes from his pockets, presumably the day’s takings, and handing them up to a young acolyte standing at his shoulder. It seemed an apt illustration of the relationship between writers, books and money.
At this point I had not read any of Viidikas’ work and didn’t really look at Knabel either; just parcelled it up and sent it off to Rockhampton. I was however aware of a flavour, indeed an aura, around her memory—several older writers I knew, my Queensland friend among them, sometimes spoke of her, always with an oddly wistful tone in their voice. It wasn’t like they were recalling a companion or lover of their youth; rather it was if something unique and irreplaceable had gone out of the world when Viidikas died, aged fifty, in 1998. Now, a dozen or so years later, we have a selection of her work edited by Barry Scott and published in a handsome edition by Transit Lounge. And so it is possible to approach the question of what kind of writer she was.
The selection is substantial and includes material from all her books as well as about twenty previously uncollected pieces. It consists of poetry and prose and is ordered roughly chronologically (some pieces are clearly out of sequence), without making any particular distinction between her two main modes of writing: that is, free form poems and prose pieces which are usually short, even compressed, and at times resemble prose poems. There are also eight colour plates of naïve drawings and excerpts from two longer works: an unpublished novel called Kali and the Dung Beetle and a sequence entitled Prisoner Poems. The selection works well and the book can be read, as I read it, straight through from start to finish as if it were a kind of autobiography.
A peculiar sort of autobiography, however. Viidikas is not primarily interested in herself as much as in things seen and done; she is neither analytical or theoretical and nor is she disposed towards the drawing of conclusions—or, god forbid, morals. She instead sends despatches from the frontiers of experience, with the emphasis always upon the nature of the experience rather than the nature of the self who experiences. That is to say, she is an instinctive writer who is driven to write down things that happened to her, or that she made happen, as they happened. Many of the short prose pieces, for instance, are really character sketches of people she has known and some among them are unforgettable: individuals you will not meet anywhere else in Australian writing though you might still come across them in the street.
The poems, which seem rather more extempore, like the prose usually bear a strong trace of their occasion and those occasions are frequently, though not always, traumatic. The focus upon experience rather than self makes of these apparently confessional pieces something more like reportage; yet it is reportage that does not deny the full participation of the self: an analogy might perhaps be found in the work of Herbert Huncke, who also put himself in the way of extreme situations and then wrote up the results. Like Huncke, Viidikas casts a cold eye on life, on death and the complications that ensue in the passage from one to the other; and if the lack of self pity, even of self regard, is both bracing and disconcerting, it has also the paradoxical effect of making us feel we know what it was like to be her without a concomitant sense of knowing what it would have been like to know her.
This entails, I think, another paradox: the self that negotiates these experiences, this brave, reckless, honest, insouciant, hyper-aware voyager, discloses herself primarily as wound or, less surely, scar. Self as wound is not the intent of the writer but a consequence of her writing; and because she is not analytical, the effect is of a vulnerability that is pure, intense and unannealed. Therefore it is not a surprise to find her, in the latter stages of the book, describing the country of addiction from the point of view of an insider, a long-term resident, and ultimately someone who will find it impossible to leave. There are many kinds of addict and many reasons why people become addicted; one, certainly, is that heroin is a great salve of mental pain.
Viidikas seems gradually have fallen silent; her last book, India Ink, came out in 1984, fourteen years before her death, and she did not publish much in magazines in those later years either. However, it would be a mistake to let that encroaching silence shadow the earlier work: she is one of those rare writers whose every utterance is worthy of attention; or, to put it another way, she did not write unless she had something to say. Her major themes—they way or ways in which men and women relate, especially sexually; the nature of religious or other kinds of rhapsodic experience; the exotic as it appears to the committed traveller—do not date and hence her dispatches from the frontiers she explored or transgressed remain vivid and contemporary.
Her longish story of an affair with a young Cretan man, for instance, told with unflinching honesty, could stand as a paradigm of all such encounters and includes, at its climax, a haunting insight into the effect the violence of men has upon the affections of women. Similarly, her hair-raising account of a night out in the environs of Bangkok, trying to buy marijuana, is a narrative which could easily have ended in a murder—her own—and thus gives insight into encounters that may not have finished so well. Her Indian experiences, which were extensive, have a dynamic that oscillates between revelation and disenchantment and I wondered if the unpublished Kali and the Dung Beetle, which must on the evidence of the extract given here shed more light on this aspect of her consciousness, will ever come out in full.
Of course certain kinds of religious experience do also bring the pilgrim to a place of silence, a nirvana that might bear some superficial resemblance to the muted trance of the addict; in both states the fealty to experience that leaves such a strong trace through Viidikas’ writing is replaced by something that may not require a witness or indeed witnessing. Even as skilled and committed writer as Viidikas might long for a cessation of the effort of composition as well as an end to the necessity of wrenching from the world material that may then be composed. The last poem in the book, Lust, written just two months before her death, is a kind of renunciation of the sexual adventuring anatomised in the rest of the book; when she writes Who will bring back the beauty / the ecstasy, the mystery / of creation? you know that she (the last spinster) no longer considers that a task she can fulfil.
I did wonder what the books were that Vicki Viidikas sold to Gould’s around the time of the composition of Lust; but, having told me the bare bones of the anecdote, the bookseller would not say any more. He took my dollars, handed them up to the young fellow at his elbow and turned his mind to other things. Kerry Lewes, in the introduction to this selection, does list some favourite writers, mostly European: Akhmatova, Djuna Barnes, Baudelaire, Beckett, Cavafy, Cendrars, Éluard, Grass, Herbert, Holub, Popa, Prévert . . . but not Rilke and not Rimbaud either. Nevertheless Viidikas’ densely compacted, highly allusive, linguistically inventive prose poems do sometimes recall Illuminations; as her courage, her despair and her silence echo the doomed Rimbaldian trajectory.
Letter to an Unknown Prisoner, a late piece (1990), begins: Today was almost impossible to begin, with no sleep, all night tossing like bunkers on a great ship, far out on the Arabian Ocean . . . ; and ends: Freedom, to unlock denial; freedom, that incorrigible weapon. A weapon that she seems to have used, both in writing and in life, in every possible manner she could devise; and then with great generosity reported openly, skilfully, truthfully and beautifully upon the results.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com
Walk With Words
“I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine, only given to me for safekeeping.” Wislawa Szymborska
Life at 3 A.M. is an elephant
urging me to make choices –
The night chill challenges my social life.
It asks why I commit myself to words
and turn away from humans,
who often talk too much.
Temperature has no speech – it never knows
the setbacks of language.
I have married words. Every night,
I bang on them, wearing my blood red matador’s cape,
working towards perfect orgasms.
Tonight, I am not writing. I walk
in the bituminous street, feeling bitter
after seeing my friends whose life
is made of unpronounceable stock codes.
My feet go numb; my existence, a walnut wafer,
brittle, belittled.
I search in the sky for the mercurial moon –
Not there.
I look back and ask the street how far I will walk
alone
Mark Twain as an Anti-Anti Smoker
Effective January 1, 2007, the vast majority of indoor areas of workplaces and public places, such as restaurants, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, karaokes and bars which are frequented by people of different ages are required to ban smoking.
Hong Kong Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance, cap. 371.
Mark Twain, a heavy smoker
(and literary
figure) himself,
is going to rule our city. And he,
with his humor and flare,
has decided to set free all
underground smokers.
In his inaugural ceremony, he strides
onto the stage,
his forefinger curling
his moustache
when he speaks:
“I won’t bow my head and
confess like a child. I give you all freedom
in an adult style.
To cease smoking is
the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know
because I’ve done it
a thousand times.”
You, who exterminated
that thing
in the city,
must be dismayed
to know the law
is dead.
That law, an infant, which cries no more,
barely knows how to toddle.
That thing –
as you insist calling it –
has a white sinewy-lean body,
a mini-chimney,
paper-smooth, smell of ancient culture. That thing isn’t wood, but it sometimes crackles when lit
in absolute silence.
I’m warning you! That thing is returning
at full speed. And this time,
you’ll say no euphemism. You’ll speak
of its real name
as you do when you name
Jesus, Kwan Yin and the one
rolling over you naked.
During those bleak days, we felt like
fugitives
in the name of the hoary
addictive.
We hid in the darkest corner
in universities, diners,
at rooftops, anywhere so long as
they were invisible on maps,
puff
ing
and breath
ing
at the same time, degraded like dogs which ransacked for food in trash.
Soon we will hang a Mark Twain
flag outside our windows.
His face
soars in proud smoky air,
when we fondle with
that thing
legitimately inside. Soon we will smoke in buses, in churches, in malls, in the City Hall, in museums, in the Coliseum.
You then will die gradually
of second- and third-hand
smoke, and we,
devoted chain smokers,
will die faster. Don’t worry.
Don’t dissuade –
we are all prepared. Everything dies
on a predetermined date,
including the law
you once embraced.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ali Jane Smith’s first poetry collection, Gala was published in 2006 as part of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program. Her work has appeared in journals such as Southerly, Cordite, and Famous Reporter. She has recorded readings for audio Cd and performed in schools, universities, pubs, cafes, shopping malls and festivals. She is the Director of the South Coast Writers Centre.
Poems as Dolly Parton: A real live Dolly
Up close you can see
the texture of my skin.
The smile that was always mine
the eyes full of thoughts
of you and the other people
I care for. Of the world
and what can be done.
If you take my hand it will be
the hand that you know.
The touch that you have grown
used to and never grown used to.
The voice most of all
shows the things that change
and never change
like a long, long love affair.
It’s easy to hear what’s been lost:
the range, the clarity, but
in my voice now you’ll hear
all the joyous moments
inspired thoughts, desolate
hours, true griefs, and loving gestures
you have known.
Poems as Dolly Parton: Only Dolly Parton album you’ll ever need
I know you love
the dirt-poor dreaming girl
who lets you forget
the hours and pains in
writing, singing, playing, looking pretty.
The show that lets you forget the business.
I know you like the stories.
You like my heartbroken women.
My happy singing women. My ruined
but still hopeful
lost and longing never despairing
picked up and dusted off
women who know the cold truth and carry it
alongside warm hopefulness.
You look at me as I
smile out at you from your tv
a photograph or the stage
when I sing and laugh and let you see
a glistening tear that doesn’t spill.
You want me to mend
your hurts and forgive.
To see the good in you, but
the pain and cruelty as well.
To know
and still love you.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marlene Marburg is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne College of Divinity. Her research is focussed on the relationship of poetry and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Marlene is a poet, spiritual director and formator. She is married with adult children, and lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Moving Images
Wurrunjeri earth,
skin and muscle bulldozed
to raw and slippery flesh.
Deep rivers turned shallow
slush upside down
Water like wind
finds the empty places
It wants to whirl
The earth-shapers are stopping erosion;
moving piles of dirt from here to majestic there.
Progress demands intervention, they say.
They erect a good will sign,
Rehabilitation Project,
but many of us are old enough to know
the banks of the local creek
are little changed in thirty years.
By October, the stench settles.
Crystals on the banks twitch in the light.
Dust fog begins to rise.
Walkers inhale the disturbance,
coughing debris out and in
Oneness with the earth is closer
than we think
I don’t believe in an interventionist God
Nick Cave sings, and the wind is alive
to his song, and the water
knows to seek its own level
Whorls
The ammonite in my hands, gazes
from a mysterious, soul-breathing centre,
recognising we are kin in the cosmos, Jurassic heritage,
forming and transforming fossil and flesh, hardened
and polished like marble and slate, cool
spiral labyrinth, narrowing path to the holy of holies,
birthplace outgrown, time and again, the dark place
edging forward into the light. It is as if she struggles;
albino lashes languishing in her burial rock.
Wine stained strands float from her like mermaids’ hair.
Cavities are filled with coral crystals,
pearls from a stowaway rape.
The ammonite is clothed in delicate embroidery,
golden imprint of once green clusters flourishing on a sea bed;
We animate them in the theatre of imagining, mirror
the infinite mind giving shape to desire.
Returning the gaze, I bridge the vast gap of time,
explore her colour and shape as a once-lost sibling.
Ammonite sister and Abraham’s lost son
see the whorls in my fingers and the mirror of self.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three collections of poetry. Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009) is shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. Poetry prizes include the Red Earth Poetry Award, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Poetry Olympics, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the inaugural Publisher’s Cup Cricket Poetry Award and the BTG-Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing prize. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities, most recently UNSW, (2007-2009). He is currently the recipient of a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is working on a book of short stories and a fourth collection of poetry.
Seeing you again
Driving to your place, I remember
how you said you wanted to carry my hands
around inside your bra. You won’t say that today.
You are married and it’s years since that
dinner dance, foxtrotting under the tablecloth,
my cock wet before I’d eaten the entree.
You said you adored men in dinner suits
the onyx studs from my ruffle slowly
and carefully, as if they were amulets
with enough power to peel back
my shirt and open up my skin.
You meet me in the driveway, comfortable
in tracksuit and windcheater. Your hair
is not quite the way I remember it.
We don’t have much time alone.
Your husband’s making coffee
in the kitchen as words ripen
on the roof of my mouth like blackberries:
fat icicles ready to fall. My cup wobbles
on its saucer as I recall the last camping trip,
our lilos pushed together, your sleeping bag
zipped into mine, the guttural snores
of lion seals floating up from the beach.
I think of what might have been, waking
to a thousand, thousand dawns, children,
the closeness where you don’t need to speak.
Instead, there’s this afternoon tea, polite
conversation, the way I look at you and wish
I could live more than one life.
Wood becoming Rock
Walking down the steep path to the backyard,
I hold the stump splitter like a baby.
I’m an occasional woodchopper, intent
on clearing the logs left by the previous owners
—an eyesore, abandoned.
One huge tree, an angophora, fell down
of its own accord, unable to get enough purchase
in the rocky hillside, harming neither limb nor property.
I’ve already chopped and moved a mountain
of wood, gradually, like a hot-rodder
restoring a classic car.
But what’s left now is the hard stuff,
wood well on its way to petrification—
green-tinged, adamantine, too heavy
for one man to lift. I swing the axe
up towards the hidden sun and the other bright stars,
then bring it down onto the dumb block.
I make no impression on the weathered wood.
Relentlessly, I search for a fissure in the log,
a crack the width of a hair that I can wedge open.
The longer the search, the greater my enlightenment.
If only I could borrow the Marabunta,
those ferocious army ants from the film,
The Naked Jungle, let them feast on the wood,
then stop right there. But as I remember it,
they don’t stop, eating everything in their path.
I swing and swing until I am a riot of noise, a mob,
a serial woodchopper who won’t cease until he’s felled
the forest. I hack until my shirt sticks to my back.
My shoulders ache, my arms have emigrated,
and I am all axe,
as Gimli is axe to Legolas’s bow.
I can’t work, it seems, without making
some connection to popular culture,
though this is not work, this hefting
is not my bread and butter. Sparks flash
blue and yellow at the moment of impact
and I understand how my ancestors struggled
to make fire. I’m tired, wet, almost done
for the day, but over there,
against the fence lies another
and it will lie there until I come for it—
ageless, slowly rotting, obdurate and silent.
I wield my iron-age tool until the wood wails and shrieks
and when I finally cleave through the stump,
the sound of it splitting fills the cave
of my head with the last rays of sunlight.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michele Leggott is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland and was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2008-09. She has published seven books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005, 2006), Journey to Portugal (2007) and Mirabile Dictu (2009). She edited Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland. Michele was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to poetry. See also www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/leggott/index.asp
te torea / the oystercatcher
trebling stage left
and how would you ever
pick them out on the rocks
until they move and orange sticks
poke and shrill at the kids who want
food and probably flying lessons
same old same old torea not in
Native Animals of New Zealand
but certainly one of the cards torn
from the jelly crystal packets each week
always three and often duplicates
what were we learning and why is it stuck
in the active grid this morning
looking at Motukorea their island and Motuihe
where a goose jumped out of a boat
on new year’s day and danced
for lettuce from a bucket oh he’s
too little to leave on the farm they said
and rowed back out to the yachts
bobbing off Von Luckner’s bay
dogs rode in the bows of kayaks
landing we supposed on other parts of
the island famous for its permeable approach
to security Pearl chasing down the Moa
out there in the sparkling waters of the gulf
and they got all the way to the Kermadecs
with their charts sextant and radio
and their pantomime imperial flag another story
outside the cordon of plastic ribbons
on the landward beach and a sign
DO NOT DISTURB THIS BIRD gazing
absently out to sea just above
the highwater mark a jelly card swap
an indigene without sound and this book
that comes into the house today
trebling calling catching itself
on the black terraces above the tide
Maungauika and the winter stars rising
over my northeastern shoulder
the answers
it looks impossible but really
it happened is happening the table top
bright red and the little chairs
each with a decal on its creamy enamel
the continuous tea party
that seems to be taking place whenever
we look whenever we ask
what was that where are those baths
that merry go round she rides
with one of us the plank and sawhorse
seesaw in the driveway the baby
stomping along in the sunhat
with her mother and the mountain behind
is that her on the path with presents
and why are his fingers bandaged
it is the moving that matters
the two of us and her walking to camera
at Pukeiti the waterwheel beating
along the cool ravine or the Rinso box
and one of us running and jumping
under the clothesline rocking the pram
one taking out the other with the business end
of a hobby horse silent howling
swimming and getting stagily into the car
the circus the fire engine a donkey ride
at Ngamotu Fishers’ bach Dees’ bach
Onaero Urenui Mokau ordinary things
and behind them the extraordinary grief
of watching the toddler on the lawn
fall into her father’s arms
tonight on the cold Wellington streets
I see them walk by coats no longer over
their arms but the ring from Stewart Dawson’s
glinting on her hand there and on mine
and on mine here extraordinary grief
and the answers we make
from distance which is no distance at all
te oru / the stingray
hot blue stars at the edge of the world
some like horses some like music
and one has a saxophone
we’ve got chalk words and lots of food
we’ve got the saxophone
blowing us out to the edge of the world
where the poems are
orcas arrive in the harbour
hunting stingray the researchers
who named them have tracked the pod
from the Kaipara and say it is unique
in taking on the rays maybe maybe not
the whales frolic all morning
and when an escaping stingray
soars on camera ray skips lunch
with orca an old story flaps into view
stingray in the boat crew jumping about
trying to gaff it the whacking tail pain
my father’s bandaged fingers
held up to the whirring camera his salute
to the fish to us and to her
hot blue stars at the edge of the world
cool blue bird under the wharf
a new sun climbs into the sky
on this side of the harbour
the tug Wainui and her barge Moehau
are bringing in sand from Pakiri
for the beach at Torpedo Bay
a stingray cruises about the shins
of the kaumatua blessing the sand
the foreshore and the seabed
are not quiet places who can say
what belongs to this green mountain
rearing out of the morning mist
hot blue stars flash of wings
under the wharf kingfisher bird of omen
tell us how the sun lights the new moon
how kites with sting tails float over Orakei
how an old story encircles the gleaming bay
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Anis Shivani’s poems appear in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Fiddlehead, Meanjin, Washington Square, Verse, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. A debut book of criticism, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, will appear in July 2011, and a second collection of short fiction, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, will appear later in 2011.
The Death of Li Po
Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. The emperors,
on whose behalf I wandered, are jealous like wives.
To travel a thousand rivers upstream or down, in a
moon’s half cycle, is only to deliver one’s true debts.
In Ch’ang-an, the winehouses gave me a special name
I both abhorred and loved at the same time:
Banished Immortal, meaning he who imagines life
as a continuation of the mountain’s other side.
Long ago, in the gibbons’ shrieks I heard in K’uei-chou,
a passage of sorts was enacted. I lost my strangeness.
Now, on this river that beckons to the civilization
still remnant in the shrunken land, land of half-sight,
I embrace the moon, its diffuse wavy pattern, its
silken bodice, its talkative-silent recital – a poem
inherited among the thousands I most love,
to live through the tough interrogation ahead.
Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. If I drown,
in the brown depths the poet’s only disguise flutters.
To Orhan Pamuk
You have the hüzün, the melancholy
of undying empires piled on each other,
the intrigue of the word-defying holy,
the torture-games of brother by brother.
You strand the Bosphorus on feet of clay,
an Istanbullu fifty years on the same street,
seeing the Golden Horn as on the first day,
nodding to the names behind the retreat.
We, loud exiles and immigrants, toss-offs
and runaways, our good parents’ heartbreak,
dig for first and last names in the old troughs,
defend to the death our identifying stake.
Your loneliness is spared the daily death.
We, the free, delineate each new breath.
Dear Paul Muldoon
Barricade the America behind the Princeton
oaks, behind the New Yorker’s gates, in a-technical
language of your aged-youth, steeped in the tragedy of
loaves and laughing sciences and lush O’Casey;
barricade it from the striptease of hidden views
familiar from publishing’s megacelebrities touring
the country in birdcages lined with squawk;
barricade America’s broken highways and silenced
cancer wars with ribbons of your faltering
precious dialogue with Heaney and his forefathers
and theirs, buried deep in the potato fields from
whence no man emigrates sans soul in a coffin box;
barricade America whose gift to herself is platitude,
toward blue Eden, soaked with irony,
a flatulent brig staggering onward to foggy coasts
borrowed from other continents, land masses
whose shape resembles fractured skulls.