January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. She was born in Singapore where she studied and taught before moving to Australia in 2007. She is currently completing a Master of Letters at Sydney University with a focus on poetry. Her writing has been published in literary journals such as Meanjin, HEAT Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Softblow, Hecate and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, with a poem forthcoming in Overland. Her work has also been selected for Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2010, to be published in November 2010. In 2010 she was awarded the Poets Union Youth Fellowship for 2010–2011. A chapbook of her poems will be published in mid-2011 with the assistance of Australian Poetry Ltd.
You went to Rome on your own
all those years ago. Your maps sat
on the shelf in your mother’s house,
creased, yellowing. We lay
on your old bed that afternoon
and you traced a flight path
down my arm. It’s not somewhere
you want to be alone, you said.
We took a room on the top floor
of the hotel. There was a balcony
that overlooked the cobblestoned lane
that rang like an ironsmith’s
each time a woman strode past
the shops towards the piazza. We
stopped for coffee but did not sit.
You clutched a map but didn’t need it.
I was here, you gestured
at the fountain, it’s for lovers. I looked
to see its beauty but saw only
tourists fingering cameras, myself
included. I let my hands drop
into the flow and laughed
at how cold it was. You kissed me
on the side of my salty neck.
In the darkness of the providore
we stood and breathed in
the brine of the meats, the ripeness
of olives. We learnt the true names
of prosciutto. We drank warm
oil. The man behind the counter
asked where we were from. Paradise.
You should visit one day. He shook his head.
At the markets we bought
red-stained cherries. I carried
them in one hand and your
years in the other. Each step
we took overlaid each step
you’d taken. In our room, I washed
the fruit in the bathtub. They floated
like breasts, free and heavy.
What Winogrand Said
“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”
So we write. We write
not because we don’t know
what it is we’re writing about,
stuck in our rooms at our desks
with a window facing
the park, the sea, a bricked-up
wall beyond which neighbours
scream at one another well
past midnight. We write because
we’re finding out what
the woman with the cigarette
on the bus felt when she was told
there was no smoking on the bus. What
the young man on the street corner
really wanted with his outstretched
hands and naked, vulnerable neck.
We write because all things
are writable. Nothing
is sacred. Not even the memory
of your mother’s pale leg
propped up on the wet stool
as she washed, you, too young
to turn from the dark flower
at the juncture of her thighs. The scent
of her breast: pillowy, milk-full.
The first time you reached down
and put him inside of you,
even though he, seventeen
and bare-faced, said for you
not to. We don’t know
if all things in our poems
are beautiful, but we do know
that things can be beautiful
in our poems. Or cruel. Lies,
all lies, some say, but really,
we write because it’s not about
what the thing is, at all.
It’s about what the thing becomes
in the poem. It’s about the poem.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Heather Taylor Johnson moved from America to Australia in 1999 and since has received a PhD in Creative Writing, has had a poetry collection, Exit Wounds, published, and has discovered that reviewing poetry is a fantastic genre to work with. She spent all of 2010 living in the Colorado Rockies with her husband and three young children and though she couldn’t leave the subject of ‘home’ alone in her writing, she also found that mountains were very difficult to ignore.
While A Flock Of Seagulls Flies North
Tree stumps wide as the length of my body
and as long as yours
touching mine
from head to toe
scatter this beach;
its perimeter the outline of a powerful tide.
Without you there would be no ex-pat.
Without me no working visa.
We inhabit this earth as if it were our own.
Trying to imagine this ocean carrying
great trees of small forests in such a rush
of movement and moons
depositing them on foreign soil…
sand, not soil
but then you and the beauty of this drowned-out colour
and washed-out texture, how the stumps broke apart
from roots and limbs to rest on this beach
are just the reasons I am here.
The reasons I move, then rest.
Amongst It
Our nine year itch moved us to the mountains.
Small town, big earth
we breathed it every day:
snow
snow falling
snow sifting, resting, misting upwards
from a sexy wind.
Our waterless lips
were constantly parted
constantly wanting to lap it up.
We became so spontaneous the frozen waterfall
we walked upon, ad-libbed and perfect.
And the night in the lounge after Sunny’s party,
the mess, wood stove, us.
Riotous snowballs melted down
the backs of our knitted necks
and the jolt, the stagger, the interchangeable
skin and liquid ice (liquid ice
and incredible skin).
Something fleeting about it all.
And those mountains –
their permanence.
When we finally looked away we breathed;
it was evergreen, deer dung and snow.
In the end we became asthmatic
because after the mountains
my eyes found yours
and then we gasped
forgetting to breath
forgetting the snow
forgetting even
the mountains.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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S. Gupta was born in 1988 in the middle of a Texas snow storm. She graduated from Johns Hopkins with degrees in creative writing and psychology. She currently lives in Washington DC. Her work has previously appeared in The Talkin’ Blues Literary Magazine, and Midwest Literary Magazine.
Blessing
When you are little you figure a blessing is a sort of cake. To receive it, you kneel down in front of your parents and they balance it on top of your head. As you rise you catch it and pop it into your mouth so that the last taste of home is a sweet one.
You know this because your father reads Indian folk tales to you. A lot of them are variations on the same theme: the hero goes out into the world to seek his fortune, but before that he had to seek his parents’ blessing. Mostly he gets it, but sometimes he doesn’t and then he has to resort to Drastic Action or leave home with a Heavy Heart.
You’re outraged to discover that no, in fact, a blessing is not a cake. A blessing means that your parents raise you up, kiss your forehead and say, “Go with God, my child.” You don’t understand. It’s not like words can stop you in your tracks.
“A blessing gives means your parents support your endeavors,” your father says. “A blessing can mean peace, courage.”
He would know. He was nine when he left home. His father was an engineer who hopped from city to city following blueprints to build canals and bridges, anything that would pay the bills. His mother taught her children mathematics at her knee, whacked them with a ruler when they made mistakes, and sent her children off to the best boarding school she could afford: military school where the students change clothes five times a day, run a few miles before breakfast and don’t cry for home.
Your father could not run, he came last in all the races, but in the classroom he left his classmates in the dust as he spun through mathematics, hammered away at physics until it became the lens he used to examine life, and found as he examined it, that he hated school.
But he had his parents blessing.
When he left for college, he did not have his parents blessing. He left to study physics in a place where only doctors and engineers could count on making any money, in a time where even those comfortably ensconced in the middle class worried about having enough food on the table. You’re mad, his parents told him. You’ll never be able to feed a family, they told him. You’ll starve on the streets, they told him.
I am mad, he said. I will not get married and raise a family, he said. I don’t need much money, he said. And then he trained himself to dream of a future spent living in a single room, eating very little. It was not difficult after military school where fifty boys would share one room and the occasional cockroach would be mixed into the canteen food.
As it happened, physics led him to America where he got married, gave it all up for business because he couldn’t support a wife on a researcher’s salary and then got it all back when he started his first company where he could write mathematical algorithms and found he liked it better than the political games professors, even physics professors, especially physics professors, play.
“I have found my life’s work,” he says to you when you are very young.
You have a life plan too. You are going to follow your father’s footsteps, placing your feet in the whirls and hollows he has left imprinted on the earth. First you will become a physicist. You will read his thesis, a thesis that very few people are capable of understanding, he tells you, and then you will ease your way into the company, help it lift off. It runs, it does well even, but he dreams of an empire. You will come, and it will be an empire.
Your first grade teacher is so impressed by your plans, and the stories your father tells her of how you conduct your own experiments, that she sets aside science text books for you to take home. You take them home and you and your father go through the experiments for about half an hour until you get bored.
In third grade you attempt to start your own company. You’ve got it planned out. Work out a profit proposal with your father. Your best friends are going to be your business partners. Announce the idea on the playground. They are full of ideas. Decide their ideas are stupid. The company flops.
You don’t particularly care because you’ve just discovered Sherlock Holmes and are reading your way through the complete works. Every week your mother takes you to the library and you wander in and out of the different sections pulling books from shelves, Nancy Drew, Louisa May Alcott, Tolkien.
“Junk,” your father cries. “Stop reading such junk. Read something worthwhile. Science. Math.”
Occasionally you ask the librarians for books on antelopes because antelopes are animals and animals are biology and biology is a science, but antelopes are so boring you switch to biographies and keep hitting the fiction. Read Sense and Sensibility and decide Marianne is a drip. Read Animal Farm without knowing anything about communism and decide power corrupts. Read Anna Karenina and decide men are evil. Race through your class assignments so you can read, cram homework into an hour so you can read, read through recesses, car rides, road trips, family reunions, dinner parties, read until your eyes hurt and your legs are cramped and the words on the page are more real than the sofa you’re sitting on.
***
Hit sixth grade. The homework starts getting serious. You can’t finish math homework while the teacher explains the lesson anymore. Slowly, so slowly, you don’t notice it, you start to lag behind. A little knot starts living in the pit of your stomach during tests and grows larger and more wretched with each test.
Read so you can forget about math. Read while you should be doing math. Read, read, read.
Occasionally write. In seventh grade a poet teaches your English class for a few days. Before she leaves she pulls your parents aside.
“You must be a writing family,” she says.
“Quite the opposite,” your father says. “I was terrible at the humanities.” He was. He likes to tell you about how he wrote one English paper in high school and turned it in year after year for a solid “B”. A “B” was good enough for English.
“Your daughter is talented,” she says.
He smiles. He is proud. Middle school is all about being proud of you, the poems you are getting published, the essays that the teachers talk about in the hallways, it is almost enough to make up for the fact that the math is getting worse each year. By eighth grade the math teacher is calling you in after class to ask you if there’s anything she can do to help improve your grades.
“You’re not stupid,” your father says. He says it often. He says instead, that he has failed you. He should have spent more time teaching you math when you were little, as his mother taught him. Instead he devoted his time to his company.
You nod and you think of all those wasted hours, the hours you spent reading about fictional people with fictional lives when you could have studied the curve of the universe, understood reality, and you want to throw up.
You have begun to panic about your future. The math isn’t working out, the writing is, but everyone knows writers don’t get jobs, and somehow you know already, that you will never be a writer. You were meant to travel other paths.
Take a deep breathe. High school is around the corner. In high school there will be real science class, and there you will learn, oh you will learn.
***
In high school you load up on physics and chemistry and math. Your father looks through your textbooks each summer.
“You’re going to love these courses,” he says. This is the sort of thing he wishes he had when he was your age. “You should study over the summer,” he says.
You try. You sit with last year’s text book and the coming year’s text book and you tell yourself you’ll do two hours a day, but sooner or later you reach for your pile of library books and the calculus, the chemistry, the physics lies forgotten, and then the school year comes around and there again you’re taking home grades that steadily sink lower and lower.
Stay up late to finish problem sets, drink coffee on test days until you vibrate in your chair, start having nightmares about failing months before each exam. Write in your blog about how much you hate school. Get a small audience. Keep writing in your blog. Write. Write. Write.
“Be careful about your blog,” your father says. “You’re going to be someone running a company one day and you don’t want your blog to haunt you.”
You try.
In eleventh grade you take Calculus. In the hallway at school a parent stops you. Her son is in your Calculus class.
“I used to work for your father,” she says. “He’s a genius. I’m so excited that my son has the chance to be in class with you. He keeps telling me about there’s freshman in his class who is setting the curve. That’s you right? ”
Smile. Back away. Later in the day the Calc teacher hands out the mid-semester grades. She gives you your first fail.
That year your father makes a mathematical break through. His best friend is over at the time, and when your father shows him the math, he gasps and drags you over.
“Have you seen what your father has done?” he asks and graphs and formulas pour out of him and you shake your head and back away.
Your father shakes his head and smiles a little painfully, the smile of the perpetually isolated, “Stop. You’re not being fair to her. She hasn’t studied that. She can’t understand.”
“A pity,” his friend says. “Such a pity.”
“Physics is about seeing and understanding the world in its precise truth,” your father will say periodically. “It’s not like the humanities or the arts, where nothing is known, where nothing is precise and you can build nothing.”
You envy the scientists, the mathematicians of the world— people who are born seeing the truth, people who can slice through the multitudinous deceptions of ordinary mortals, and reveal the bleached bones of truth.
What would that be like?
You can not imagine it. You are not capable of it.
Tell your college counselor on whim you want to go to a place with a good English program.
***
The summer after you graduate from high school you run into that freshman, now sophomore, who was in your Calculus class and dazzled the teachers. “I don’t know what to do,” her mother says half laughing, half afraid as if this girl’s talent is bright enough to burn.
Your father writes down his telephone number, rattles off books and techniques, says, “You must call me if you need anything.” Later he shakes his head and smiles. Oh that girl, that girl, he sees his younger self in her eyes.
Then he tells you not to sign up for Calculus III in college.
“Don’t torture yourself unnecessarily,” he says.
Despite your best intentions you become a writing major in college. Spend three years dissecting books, ripping up your writing style and piecing it together again, learning that you know nothing. Hate the stuffy professors, hate the redundant syllabus, hate the pompous students, get high on Neruda and Eliot while you do your homework, fall asleep dreaming of libraries. Send your father all your stories. He reads them and tells you he’s not the best person to give you feedback: this is not his forte.
Then it’s your last year of college and you have to go job hunting.
No one will give you an interview.
“If you were an economics major or an engineering major you would have a job,” your father says. “They see writing major and toss your resume out. This is the price you pay for following your passion.”
“This is the price,” you say.
“It’s just the writing major,” he says.
“It’s just the writing major,” you say.
No one will give you an interview.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You can always work for me.” His company is beginning take off, it is expanding, these days all he can speak of is the latest algorithm, how it is dynamite and unleashed it will change the world.
After seven months, the government offers to hire you. Your friends laugh. “Good luck accomplishing anything there,” they say. They had expected more from you.
You call your father.
“Come work with me,” he says. “We need you and we’re growing and we’re at an exciting place.”
“But what about this job?” you ask. “What do you think of it?”
“God, when I compare what’s going on at my company with a shitty little government job…oh, it’s frustrating.”
“It’s a shitty little job,” you say.
***
The job isn’t bad as far as shitty little jobs go. You get up, you go to work, then you come home and you write, you write, you write until you think you’ve used up all the words in the world, and then you fall asleep and get up and do it all over again the next day, and sometimes there isn’t enough time to write, and you think, maybe you could be a writer, only there’s never enough time, there’s never enough time and meanwhile all you have to write about is what happens inside the gray cubes of the government.
You can’t stay here forever. But you don’t want to go to business school, you don’t want to get another job that will take away even more of your writing time.
“I know at the moment writing is very important to you,” he says when you tell him this, “But think. Probably, you could do well, even pick up a few hundred every year, but is that enough to live on? To bet your life on? I know you. You wouldn’t be happy without the kind of success I have.”
The next day you go to work and your boss calls a staff meeting. You sit with excellent posture in your crisp white shirt and neat black skirt. You have a notebook full of questions and you ask them in a crisp little British accent. You think about how this isn’t bad, and how in ten years on a morning like this when a fresh breeze is blowing through the room and the air smells like sunlight you will still be wearing a crisp white shirt speaking in a crisp little British accent in some office somewhere. A good life.
You go back to your cube and pull out your assignment, only your head aches so you think perhaps you will sit for a while. And as you sit, you think, ah, you will go home, you will write. But what to write? And you imagine that you are a stranger, picking through your own stories, bidding on them, and you want to gouge out your eyeballs.
It is no use, you think. It is a hobby worth a few hundred a year.
You sip some caffeine to fill something in your chest that has gone hollow and funny and go back to work.
You know what a blessing is now. It is a stone compass, round and heavy that your parents slip into your hand when you are born. Pray that you have the strength to carry it, pray that you are able to follow the direction of the arrow easily and effortlessly so you will never discover how relentlessly it tugs you forward.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Usha Akella has authored two books of poetry. She is the founder of the Poetry Caravan, an organization that provides free readings and workshops to the disadvantaged. She has read at various international festivals and her work is upcoming in the HarperCollins Anthology of Indian English Poetry. She lives in Austin, Texas, USA.
Hymn To Shiva
Here take this bitterness
Hold it in the cup of your throat
For all the lives I may live
Call yourself Neelkant
So I may be sweet as a lyre.
Take these desires
Wreathe them on your body
That I may be a temple
Empty as eternity.
Here take the sight of this world
So I might close my eyes in ecstasy.
Take this, my anger
Seat yourself on it
Your own compassion
whirling white as the milky way
Frothing in your matted locks.
Let it overflow
Drench me.
Tomorrow’s poem
I want to begin a poem
without saying “I want,”
Wait like a page or
undone button in the dust,
A poem that comes like
a blighted ovum,
fading as a body fades into a shroud.
inside, demons are persistent like
worker bees, it is not the unwillingness
to surrender
to the divine but
the unwillingness to
give up on the human,
I want the one as the many.
All that is good is in small quantities,
Like the hidden flames in flowers,
Like eyes which are magic lamps
holding the universe,
All that ties us is invisible,
trailing umbilical chords unsevered.
They tell me prophets are missing from caves,
their words floating in bottles in old seas,
and old cities surface like prophecies,
and someone is a silent incarnation working like yeast,
for some this is enough,
here, I don’t know that face in the mirror,
a ship afar, the sails down.
Botero’s Doves
Can there be a dove of peace,
And a dove of war?
Can a country stick out two tongues?
Its wounds bloom like roses
Or explode as rifle fire,
Can there be two dawns?
A dawn of the sun,
A dawn of the night.
Humans, we have two hearts,
One black and one white,
But to see it so exposed…
Botero’s doves are installed in the plaza of church of St. Antonio. Botero donated the dove of peace to the city of Medellin which was subsequently bombed. He donated another on condition that the former dove remain as it is. The two doves stand next to each other, a chilling symbol of Medellin’s history.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Bob Hart is the author of two books of poems Acrobat and Lightly in the Good of Day (Bench Press). He grew up in Harlem, on 145th Street, 142nd Street and 158th Street. Her served in the army from 1952 to 1954, and was stationed in Germany during the Korean war. Now he works for a mail sorting company in Midtown West, and lives in Brooklyn.
In A Guitar
I like the anger in a guitar—
it doesn’t need a reason;
no need to gain back face, having lost none.
Its strings smell no insults;
it is mouth, not ears.
I like the sorrow spilled from its hole
whose hollow has lost nothing;
rejoices in its own hollow being
(devoid of void, though massless),
empty bowl of tongues.
I crave the tremored fear of its strings
which riverrun, but nowhere.
Five nerves take turn to shiver their speaking:
our doomless deathless dying
by the blood guitar.
Although it drums an air of its own
it can drum one into battle!
It has no politics but it pushes—
or pulls like blind horse running
as its path shines black!
Man, Can They!
Man those girls can laugh!
I mean they really splatter cheer into the air.
They let go. Oh boy they let go.
Can their chairs hold them, tables contain them?
They should ride horses
jump cloudhigh fences; they should, they should
run beside the running deer; do
Phoenician somersault on bulls, then
leap amid spectators in the stands.
Make way for those laughing girls—
wave banners for them; fly the flags.
Spare no colors. Spare no winds. Let the light
burst its sides with brightness.
Let the heavy turtles of the galaxies
declare a rabbit holiday.
It’s catching. Help me hold my sides.
This is too lively for
the likes of any gravity-coherent solid thing.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Janine Fraser’s book Portraits in a Glasshouse was published by Five Islands Press, Series 10 New Poets. She has also written numerous books for children, including the Sarindi series published by HarperCollins. She lives in Riddells Creek, Victoria.
Red Tulips (1)
Tight brown
Fists shoved in dark
Earth pockets
Latent with
The rage of life’s
Short round
Put up their
Leather-red dooks
And deliver
A knock-out
Pummel of punches
In Spring.
Red Tulips (2)
Cut
They continue
To grow in glass
Adding
To themselves
About an inch a day
As reputation
Growing on decease.
Outrage
In the mouth
Of the water jug
They pour out
The peculiars
Of their common
Trouble
Voluble in
Their predicament
As Plath––the ink-
Blot of
Their throats a dark
Puddled jotting
Last fevered
Poem got out on
A gasp
The flame
Going out in them
Putrefying water
Petal drop
Shocking as blood
On the hearth.
Remembering Stonehenge
Mid April, there is this fractal of a second
Hand sweeping the clocks bland face,
Through a day whirling with wind gust
Swirling the parchments of elm
Into a mushroom circle dotting the grass
Beneath the slow grind and twirl of
The clothes hoist hung with a rainbow
Line of briefs, line of socks you peg in pairs,
Stripe of shirts cuffing your cheek.
You know a mushrooms natural history––
Science of spores dropped from the hem
Of the circular skirt, the minute
Mycelium rippling out in the eternal
Pattern of water disturbed by a smooth
White stone––know the rings expansion
Is nothing more than the law
Of urban sprawl, the vociferous animal
Eating out its patch. All the same,
This mythic round of pithy plinths
Pushing up on stolid columns, is as magical
As muttered lore of faery,
Mysterious as Stonehenge. There
Last year in a fine mist of the weather,
You circled the great hewn rocks
Along the gravel path, the guide in your ear
Making a monument of date and data,
Dismantling the mystic. The sky
Gave up its clouds. Huddled under
Your black umbrella, you surrendered
Your ear-plugs and let the grey stones
Speak for themselves––of the ground
They’re rooted in, the light they melt into,
The trembling spaces between.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Aria
translations by Sudeep Sen
Yeti Books, Kerala, 2009, 152 pages, Price Rs.399/599 (pb/hb)
Mulfran Press, Wales, 2010, 152 pages, Price £11.95/14.95 (pb/hb)
Reviewed by NABINA DAS
That Sudeep Sen’s strikingly diverse book of translated poetry is titled ARIA, brings to mind the significance of the music analogy. Just as the different movements in an opera would hold together a singular musical piece for a sublime impression, so do the selections from various language and literary traditions in this book create an array of poetics. From Jibanananda Das of Bengal to Hebrew poet Avraham BenYitshak and the Persian poetess Shirin Razavian – with the expected names like Tagore – Sen’s collection is as rich and nuanced as the collographs and art plates displayed throughout the book.
What makes Sen choose poetry the way he has, for translation, especially in the geographical arrangement? He answers that, saying it was merely the way he went about courting work in various workshops. Looking at the South Asia section, one finds India repeated twice, with Bangladesh sandwiched in between. The next major section is East and West Asian, Middle Eastern, European and South American Poetry. Workshop opportunities apart, the sheer spread makes one wonder if representation weighed heavy on the poet’s mind to organize the book as a smorgasbord. Then notwithstanding the arrangement, one concludes that the samples he presents are each unique in their thematique and yet connected to the overture the book aims at.
It strikes the reader that Sen spans his translating skills not merely across geographical space, but across different times. In this time-space confluence his chosen themes are turmoil, sexuality, desire, politics and poetry itself. Quotes from Wislawa Szymborska, Mark Strand, Gulzar and Kaifi Azmi on the title page and the dedication page illustrate this cosmogony of Sen’s shimmering translation of poetry. On one level we can argue that the book could have done well to include the source texts beside them, not an altogether unexplored idea. Then, about the superior quality of the work presented, there is no doubt.
Sen’s growing up as a tri-lingual has played a significant role in his act of conscious “literary translation” even before this book was conceived, as also his association with other poet-translators he met in various poetic settings. It is interesting to note Sen’s account about the process of this project, at once a daunting and marvellous one. Obviously, the mathematical mapping of the rhyme scheme and prosody, to whatever extent it is employed, is not apparent to us as we read his work. Despite the fact that the methodology he talks about is a rigorous one, especially if the poet has gone to the length of trying to produce an end-rhyme matching that in the source language, the result is of high poetic elation.
In this context, I would like to cite my favourite “Banalata Sen”, an iconic poem by Jibanananda Das, that Sen re-etches in our memory. It is not too tough even for those outside of contemporary Bengali literature to see and hear the end lines of the three stanzas as they occur in the original. The tone is sombre-blithe and true to the original, and Sen let’s his lines flow like the speaker’s long, weary and expectant trudge. What perhaps cannot be achieved in the translated lines is the surprise that Jibanananda had thrown in his readers’ way in Bengali:
… Gently, raising
her eyes like a bird’s nest, she whispered:…
(Banalata Sen)
We have a word as close to the original in “nest” (Bengali: neeR; meaning: home, abode), unless a compound creation like ‘birdhome’ would be the eccentric preference for the original “paakhir neeR”.
I keenly read the Urdu poems in this collection, for the language fascinates me and provokes me to write my own poems in English with the sounds that create imageries of their own. Kaifi Azmi’s “One Kiss” is where the excellence shines forth in each couplet. The clever end-assertion of “glow-and-glitter” in the first couplet and “collect-and hover” in the third is evocative. And the end rhymes “crime/smile” in the last couplet complete the musicality for which Azmi was well-known.
In Gulzar’s short poems Sen shows us the modern voice of the romantic lover that Gulzar nurtures carefully, his tongue-in-cheek humor lacing a last line or a couplet ending a quatrain.
Taking cue from the Urdu poetry, it is indeed a treat to the senses to read the nature poems of Abraham Ben Yitshak:
Lights: dreaming, pale,
fall at my feet
Splashing soft, weary shadows,
Tracing my path.
(Autumn in the Boulevard)
and the crispness of winter:
in the distant
horizon
where the sun’s birth
melts the snow’s solid
into liquid.
I shut my eyes,
The blood
within me whispers –
(Bright Winter)
Sen’s poems here give us the elemental, the objective and the form-specific footprints of Yitshak’s Hebrew verses that we have no knowledge about, but see in the effective arrangement of the dimeter or trimeter lines.
Yitshak fulfils the need for lyricism in his poetics as much as Rabindranth Tagore does. Yet Tagore appears after Jibanananda Das in a curve that represents the contemporary Bengali literary scene, the sweep of the two names constituting a poetic psyche which Sen recognizes well. In this book, Sen has selected the lighter verses of the master poet, the nonsense rhymes. I see much usefulness in Sen’s using first lines of each poem as the title, for all the four translated ones are originally untitled poems. Nonsense verses, sparkling with wisdom nonetheless. As Motilal Nandi, dying of boredom in school, tears off pages from the textbook, dispersing them in the Ganga:
Word-compounds move
float away like words-conjoined
To proceed further with lessons –
these are his tactics.
(‘In school, yawns’)
This translation resonates, given Tagore’s nonsense verse aimed not merely at gibberish with its underlying tone of “tactics” and philosophy.
Tactics, and poetic craft are evidenced in the translation of Sergio Claudio F. Lima that begins with three epigraphs. The poem itself is written in eighteen sections marked by Roman numerals, each a single line, hence eighteen lines. A list poem in appearance and didactic in tone for some of its lines, it may seem to have been an easy candidate for translation. Quite the contrary, for each line is condensed statement. Especially for sections V, VI, XIV, XV, and XVI, the relation of a word to the next one is a complex semantic one. For example:
V. The act of acting: “Only the one who knows this, the
one who does not know, does not do.” – (REX)
VI. The sense is the tension (in tension), one which
forms, broadening …
(The Body [of a Woman] Signifies)
This is redolent of the 20th century American Objectivists’ tradition. Craft transports beautifully again in a poem by Bangladesh’s Aminur Rahman. The piece written in four column-stanzas could be read column wise or cross-column, even laterally within the last column. The last line (word) of each column-stanza visually appears like descending steps, creating a destabilizing effect that captures the source poem’s despair and irony. (Hai hai) Reminiscent of the experimental nature of Language poetry in English, I read these poems (by Raman and Lima) as an inherent challenge to the art of translation. Sen’s patient ear and expertise with forms bring about the resolution.
There are many favorites of mine in this book, Mandakranta Sen, Mangesh Dabral and Zoran Anchevski being a few. All of these make one realize that translation has, for each of these poet’s works, been a separate sword to sharpen, a distinctive overture to compose. In that the collection is a beacon for future works of such nature, creating truly what is a world vision of poetic languages. The last two poems are original English compositions of Sen, a veritable feast of poetics and lush musical assonance.
NABINA DAS is the author of Footprints in the Bajra, a novel (Cedar Books, India). Her poetry, short stories and essays have won prizes and have been published in a variety of literary journals and anthologies in North America, Asia and Australia. A bilingual with a Linguistics Masters, Nabina writes in three languages and is currently pursuing an MFA from Rutgers University (Camden).
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marlena loves to explore life and capture what she sees along the way. She is inspired by nature and its intricate beauty, its subtlety and power. Marlena has an honours degree in Design from UTS and is based in Sydney.
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Figtree
Leech
Lips
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Phantom Limb
by David Musgrave
John Leonard Press
2010
ISBN 9780980526998
Reviewed by KYLIE ROSE
There are a whole host of haunting pains that torment us for reasons we do not understand and that arrive from we know not where—pains without return address.
—Norman Doidge
It’s a Friday night; my daughter and I are taking turns reading aloud from David Musgrave’s Phantom Limb (foregoing Friday-night-murder-night on the ABC). For over an hour, we’ve been circling its rhymes in pencil, finding familiar surnames, drifting into discussion of our family’s history of amputations and water-deaths. We steer a diffuse, yet steady course in Musgrave’s wake, returning to the title poem, over and over. If I’m honest, Phantom Limb is paining me, and I know not why.
I have a feeling there’s something I’m missing.
Systems, order and logic underpin Musgrave’s body of work. His is an exquisitely constructed and formulated world, where painful emotional states are discharged by creating movement in the reader’s imagination through language and form. Phantom Limb reminds me of Adrienne Rich’s description of formalism being “like asbestos gloves”, allowing the “handling of materials [that can’t be picked] up barehanded”
I’m also reminded of symmetry. In The Brain that Changes Itself, I’ve not long read the chapter on pain, specifically the phantom pains delivered by phantom limbs. I’m carrying an image of my childhood hero, Lord Nelson, who was haunted by the presence of the arm he lost in battle. Nelson concluded the presence of his “phantom limb … was ‘direct evidence for the existence of the soul’ his reasoning that if an arm can exist after being removed, so then might the whole person exist after the annihilation of the body” (Doidge, p180.) Somewhere in my mind, these books are fusing.
I’m at a loss to explain exactly why I feel this sense of symmetry, and its relevance, or why I feel so uneasily at home inside Phantom Limb. Perhaps it has to do with the themes of loss and inversion—the real/invisible; the visible/unreal—where I’m limping, trying to make sense of a fluid resonance that defies tangible borders and rational explanation. I’m immersed in Musgrave’s uncompromisingly real limbo, communing with a host of his, and my “sensory ghosts”, memories and memories’ memories; a watery dreamscape where phantoms and legends converge in incessantly questioning waves.
In “Death by Water 1: Hippasos,” the poem’s geometry and trajectory eloquently configure the fate of the mathematician, Hippasos (reputed discloser of surds and irrational numbers).
Two
needs
drove him
to his end —
the perfect beauty
of a theorem and, hidden
within, the outrage of its inexpressible truth.
Disagreeing, the retribution they delivered was swift:
between his knowing and their need
for knowledge, he described
overboard
his death’s
surd
arc.
‘Two’ and ‘arc’ (letters away from Greek arche, or the ageless, the eternal) become the terms anchoring and prescribing the poem’s structure, linking all characters and realities in life, death, and the inevitable path of passionate pursuit. Hippasos’ past expresses itself to our present. It lends shape to an inaccessible realm, and returns us through the vehicle of form, to its point of origin, transfigured. The echoes of estranged languages, disciplines and eras are contained, stabilised and bridged within the poem’s triangulation. Beginning and end unite enemies, and resurrect the death-splash of one devoted to proving the irrational truth.
Everything in Phantom Limb feels measured, methodical and precise. Placement is critical within and between poems. Binaries are held in delicate and tense interface. Even when conventions are flouted, they are done so with utmost calculation.
Geometry is at the core of this collection, not only locating the roots of Musgrave’s poetic lineage, but plotting a framework for exploring the way we are generally held in relation to others, and specifically to the cast of fathers (absent, oppressive, lost), forebears, friends, lovers and enemies. In “Death By Water 2,” begins in the present with the speaker, following his line back seven generations, where intimate biographies bob and blur, seeping to the conclusion:
That’s what happens with death by water:
fiction flows into fact and fact into fiction
and rising up in a flood of words
the past spreads out beyond the present
carrying into life its drifting dead.
Phantom Limb expresses and expands the subtleties of interaction and relationship, honing the ‘human geometries’ defined in the opening poem, “Open Water.” How, why and to whom we are connected are overarching concerns.
In the title poem, we are introduced to one such relational puzzle.
My enemy reminds me of my father
Present in this linear equation are in fact the three points of an archetypal, yet mysterious, love triangle. The meter and consonance set in motion from the outset, create a desire to solve (and resolve) this problem.
“Who is the enemy?” my daughter asks.
I follow the iambic footprints, trying to discover the elusive feet that pose them.
He is a length of mind
which has no end. He harvests anger
and his name is myth.
I’m wary of speculation. There appears a literal answer to this riddle, and yet a deeper legend returns, arriving — as does the pain in a phantom limb — from an unknown source, accessed in dream. Congruent with the poem’s speaker, I fall asleep at this point, Phantom Limb beside me. And when I wake, a searing memory of Plath and her Daddy return as if from dream, along with a quote of Susan Stewart’s:
Poetic making is an anthropomorphic project; the poet undertakes the task of recognition in time – the unending tragic Orphic task of drawing the figure of the other – the figure of the beloved who reciprocally can recognise one’s own figure – out of the darkness. The poet’s tragedy is the fading of the referent in time, in the impermanence of what is grasped…(p2)
like a tingling nose before the lie
…an itch where nothing itched before,
A phantom absence: the limb I never knew I had, excised.
I didn’t expect to find Sylvia’s ‘ich, ich, ich’ so itchingly, hauntingly close to Musgrave’s assonant ‘I’, reanimating a classical paradigm. What did I expect?
I don’t know.
And that is what I am in love with in Musgrave’s work — the invitation to risk and curiosity. What do I know? Nowhere near as much as Musgrave, and that’s why Phantom Limb simultaneously terrifies and excites me. Momentarily I’m paralysed, awed, imagining my mind as some form of prosthesis for his formidable muses—an inadequate, stump-mind limping to allow the full intellectual flexion between painfully dislocated realities.
My daughter rescues me, cantering through “Young Montaigne Goes Riding,” and I’m captivated anew by ‘que scais-je’? We follow the sustained metrical clop through twenty three sestets adhering to an unconventional abcbca scheme, precociously, inventively coupling words—‘mine/ Saturnine, Aristotle/ battle, excrement/contentment’—echoing the pairing of this prodigious mind and its ‘jouncing nate’. Musgrave’s jaunty and crude, yet erudite Montaigne refines and deepens his physical and philosophical seat, as he and his flight animal traverse the ‘oblique paths’ of thought and discourse discovering, as do we, a steadiness and balance in mutable terrains. Mercurial Montaigne and steed, poem and reader align within the strictures of form discovering liberty within constraint and arriving at the possibility one may ‘revolve within’.
Revolution is a key theme. Within “A Glass of Water” the world of opposites elegantly reverse and wed. What the ‘mirror harbours … the harbour mirrors’. Polarities tumble in the half glass of water, stationed on the unstable railing ‘in the failing/ afternoon light’. All angles, all eventualities exist
glinting upside
down inside the glass, and the newly weds,
seen from outside
joining hand to hand for the wedding reel,
glide under its meniscus, head over heels.
Water is Musgrave’s primary element, and it is little wonder. He returns to what is no longer, unravelling, and restlessly, relentlessly pursues reflection — kindred to his imagined Odysseus, seeking solace and release in the ‘ever-many, the sun-deceiving/ faithful, all-embracing sea’. It is the measure (‘beat up, beat down, iambic swell’) of his investigation of those shifting human states of which he is a meticulously observant part; the perfect element through which to navigate his exacting exploration, as it manifests in liquid, solid and gas.
Water mirrors our habitation of different tenses and states, changing phase, speed and direction, expressing itself in myriad bodies and coursing through this collection, tethering disparate histories, identities and ideas. Inevitably, water begs return, and likewise, Musgrave’s poems bespeak a need for resolution, even if the wholeness sought remains elusive, waded only in dream-swell, as in ‘Bodies of Water’.
I’ve seen how, like a dream
that keeps returning
we move from state to state,
water flowing through us,
we through water,
a consciousness, a breath.
As a child, I fell in love with a number of waterborne heroes — from Jason and the Argonauts to Nelson. In hindsight, I was drawn into their worlds because they so generously mapped the vast and inexplicable terrains of humanity I was barely conscious of, yet so compelled to explore. I loved what I did not know but felt, unfathomably, to be true. Maybe I understand a little better now the symmetry I feel between Musgrave and Nelson’s phantoms and I am haunted, happily, by the uncomfortably consoling echo of ‘Rain’s closing lines.
And when it rains
the earth still aches:
it is never enough,
still it is never enough.
Open, resting on my bed between my sleeping daughter and myself, Phantom Limb leaves me with an uneasy realisation I’m missing much, yet a tingling sense that reconnection to a mysterious, vast absence is possible. I will return, over and over, to Musgrave’s poems, even though I feel it will be never enough, never enough, to fully appreciate the true depth of their intricacy, beauty and wisdom.
WORKS CITED
Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. Melbourne: Scribe 2010. 179
Rich, Adrienne: The Making Of A Poem; A Norton Anthology, Eds. Strand & Boland. 287
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 2
KYLIE ROSE lives in Maitland with her four children. Her work has been recognized in the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the Roland Robinson Award. She won the Lake Macquarie Literary Award, and has received fellowships from Varuna, The Writers’ House.