January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
When I’m trapping on the Foggy, / fifteen miles off Catherine Hill Bay, / the world is good” (“Trapping on the Foggy”, lines 1-3) writes Anthony Lawrence in his faux-simplistic manner. In his earlier collections, Lawrence often explores traditionally masculine activities, carried out by men in the company of men, like the drinking and pool-playing at the Anna Bay Tavern in “Lines for David Reiter”, or in solitude, fishing and remembering. The solitary moments are often filled with the urgency of being-in-the-world: the voice plays with these masculine scenes; its subtlety and sensuality is neither obviously male nor female, but both. The themes are human above all, and the voice encompasses many unexpected nuances. In a sense, this renders the voice ‘genderless’, a quality that allows for a more honest probing of the self and the landscape, an honesty that in later collections has seen Lawrence explore trauma and grief by mapping the emotional landscape with sincerity and integrity.
In “Trapping on the Foggy”, we see the narrator reconciling his Other self, his place in the world, and his childhood. This poem is an excellent example of the deceptive simplicity at play in Lawrence’s work, where fishing is never merely fishing. Indeed, the small slice of universe the persona inhabits in this moment is soon encroached upon by the surrounding world; its wickedness enters already in the next stanza on a local as well as international level: “In the morning paper, a murder / in Leichhardt; someone’s fist / photographed under rubble in Mexico” (lines 4-6). Even though the natural environment offers some consolation when the “wind makes calm / the most violent of days” (lines 7-8), this is not where Lawrence leaves us. Rather than pursuing the redeeming features of beautiful and uncorrupted Nature, he turns to the image of the tankers that come and go, which place us so visibly in the vicinity of Newcastle, Australia’s biggest coal port—few are the children who have not counted ships on its horizon. It also places us in the larger context of post-industrialisation, and the contemporary pastoral. These lines echo Charles Wright’s “Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night”, where the oil rigs off Long Beach are “like floating lanterns out in the smog-dark Pacific” (line 3), man-made intrusions in the pristine environment (albeit one where the native flora has already been tampered with: the stars are in the eucalyptus, a species introduced to California for its fast growth and commercial value).
Wright’s oil rigs are mirrored in the “mythic history of Western civilization, / Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac” (lines 14-15). Similarly, in Lawrence’s “The Barn, the Moon”, his persona turns upward and struggles to name what he sees, hinting at a conflict between two worlds. The cosmos invites a reading of the microcosm as the idea of the very large leads to the focus on the minute, on ‘you’—the real pinprick in the universe:
Tonight I saw two planets
aligned over the blunt rocket head
of the Point Moree lighthouse.
Guessing their names,
their position in the sky,
I thought of you.
(lines 27-32)
Wright’s (anti-)epiphany—“I have spent my life knowing nothing” (line 18)—comes explicitly from within, an acknowledgement of his existential condition. Lawrence’s epiphanies tend to come from elsewhere; in “Trapping on the Foggy”, as the persona falls into daydream, out of the depths of his subconscious emerges the memory of a shark:
It’s mostly routine, but once
a bronze whaler followed a trap
to the surface – it came out of the water
and laid its great head over the stern,
snapping in the air, tipping the runabout’s
nose to the sky. I looked into its eyes
and knew it wanted me. (lines 14-19)
The fisherman and Lawrence the poet are inextricably linked, the act of fishing a recurrent trope standing for the poetic act. Recurrent, too, are the hints of an underlying threat: the sharks; the sun, which is “a red balloon dragged under by the run of a surface predator” (“Carnarvon” (x) Collecting Live Bait at Dusk Under the One Mile Jetty, lines 16-17); and the funnel-web spiders “at the bottom / of swimming pools, sipping like deadly / pearls their bubbles of oxygen” (“Black Yolk and Poison”, lines 3-5).
Above all, Lawrence’s relationship with the sea is one marked by sensuality and intimacy:
And with every trap, I release myself
slowly, descending through miles
of green, sun-shafted water, down
through the bubbles, in touch with everything.
(“Trapping on the Foggy”, lines 23-26)
The sensuous moment exemplifies this physical knowledge that one gains knowing the world through the senses, through the body. Many poems touch on this affinity and relationship with the sea, and the sexual undertones are sometimes more explicit. The legs of the redbacks in “Black Yolk and Poison” are “like fingers touching fishing line, / translating vibration into hunger, / hunger into death” (Lines 10-12), hinting at the most human of needs. In “Shearwaters,” the qualities of the sea are hard to separate from those of a woman:
an incoming tide of shapes
that merge to seed a furrow
where the sea’s dark pelt and raining wind combine –
[…]
Can the scent and texture of our skin be changed
by such encounters? (Lines 7-9 & 25-26)
The process of creating a poem has a prominent role in Lawrence’s work, as theme and as subject matter. It is as if the poetry cannot be escaped, as if, whether he’s holding a pen or a fishing rod, Lawrence is always writing. This sensation is accompanied by a certain weight. His worlds become one when the lure hits the water, because it must sink into other depths; however, the fishing trope can conjure up an artifice. The idea of being constantly conscious of the meaning of an experience, of its immediacy and pertinence, is exhausting, and potentially means that all moments are tampered with, created, man-made. There are certainly occasions when an indulgence in stylistics and the poems’ self-referentiality dominate:
A pair of sooty oystercatchers are probing
an oyster-blistered mantle of exposed reef
with their red beakspikes. I’ve found it’s
often best to wait a few days before turning
such things into poetry, but the accurate
wading and stabbing of the birds demands
immediate attention.
(“Sooty Oystercatchers, Venus Tusk Fish”, lines 1-7)
Here, a chasm is revealed—the writer cannot fully inhabit the moment: he is changing it through the interpretation he is making (and, notably, its opposite is also true: “I move and I am changed, then changed again / by the telling of it” (“Shearwaters”, lines 34-35)).
In “The Barn, the Moon”, Lawrence offers memorable images and another glimpse of his aesthetics: for Lawrence, poetry is part of the natural order, and the only way to make sense of our place within it:
Some things emerge
from the day’s ordered scene
to arrest our inner attention,
and we respond to them,
using words or actions
until they pass, or remain
to build a small fire in our sides:
sunset through a pane of dimpled glass,
and the table is gold.
I respond with a shock of emotion
these words make visible. (lines 1-11)
Not until the words are written, and the images are translated, do their true significance and effect become real. The reflexive element notwithstanding, Lawrence gives equal attention to his narrative selves and the craft, like in “Trapping on the Foggy”, where he skilfully navigates the gaps and achieves a precarious balance through a Wordsworthian return to lost time: “I’m a child again,” he writes, “staring into tidal pools, my hands bent / and pale in clear water, counting bright shells” (lines 37-39). Memory is critical to Lawrence: indeed, to “move beyond the place / where memory harvests meaning” (“Shearwaters”, lines 35-36) is to allow the past a vivid presence.
Clearly, Lawrence is not, as his imagery might suggest, merely a landscape or nature poet. His real exploration is of the inner landscape and the processes at play in being a man and in being a poet. Unlike Murray or Kinsella, Lawrence does not evince a political agenda; nor does he aim to define the Australian landscape and its people. Lawrence makes no grand statements; his is a much more personal, private, and autobiographical poetry. His kinship with the sea resembles Robert Adamson’s affinity with the Hawkesbury, a nourishing and absolutely essential relationship that sees Lawrence, with playful awareness, “finger[ing] the handline like a downcast kite, / translating each bite into possibilities” (“Trapping on the Foggy”, lines 29-30).
The simultaneous presence and absence in Lawrence work—his tacking between inner and outer landscapes—allows for a poetry that speaks eloquently of love and loss; these deeper resonances become more pronounced in his later collections. The mantra that is “The Syllables in Your Name” is whispered in a faraway place, further underscoring the separation. “Infidelity and the Punishments Available” evokes distances growing larger by each stanza. In his lyrical poems Lawrence steers us into another type of unchartered waters: those of the strong psychological states into which he invites his audience. With honesty and openness he speaks of alienation, love, and madness, and again of the role of writing; art, for Lawrence, has become an instrument with which he navigates inner selves and landscapes. In these poems, too, the sea tropes have a prominent place: in “Tidal Dreaming” the narrator ponders having left his “body’s sleeping anchorage” (line 9) and the two characters are in “the wide bays of each other’s arms” (line 10). When Lawrence moves from the narrative into the more lyrical voice, and blurs the line between wake and sleep in this poem, the sensuality of the voice is poignant:
No need to question how far we travel
when behind our eyes time and distance
disengage their symbols to flicker and collapse
like glass in the skylight of a kaleidoscope.
When I lean forward to kiss you, pine needles
fall from my hair. (Lines 14-19)
This is a beautiful, loving, and most intimate moment to which we are privy. Lawrence’s lyrical poems are secretive, opening doors to rooms that not everyone can enter, and where the masculine imagery all but disappears. In these rooms, “rainbows hang in a bloom of spray” (“Just Below the Falls”, line 24) and a narrator divulges a truth in which we may all share: “I’ve been trying for years / to heal the private wounds of my life” (“The Aerialist”, lines 52-53).
In newer poems, like “Scars and their Origins”, there is also a noticeable shift in how Lawrence approaches both the moment and the writing of it:
I learned how to listen and when to distance
myself from the moment, and where I once
went to school on the immediate
and the external, now all I have to do
is remember how you wept and turned away
from the open lesions of my anger.
(lines 9-14)
The distance from the moment allows for a different vision, and a space for healing. When Lawrence describes trauma, he takes a more direct approach to his craft and the snare of memory and guilt. His voice is unswerving, and the metaphors less engineered. This is certainly true in “Just Below the Falls”, which suggests a fall in mood and the crucial role of writing to existence and survival:
It’s been coming on for days, entering my speech
and sleep, bringing news from the other side.
This is how it is, where the sandstone ledge
I’m standing on is breaking away, and the whipbird’s
ricochet is lost to water’s thunder.
Something will happen if I stand here long enough –
a poem will come or the ledge give way,
though I’m through with falling back on the notion
of the suffering artist – we all have our demons
to contend with in our time.
(lines 13-22)
Lawrence’s seductive entanglement of the subject and the poem is an invitation to a most intimate moment: the imagery and sensory connection leaves the subject vulnerable, to his predicament and to his audience. This is a careful balancing act, and one at which Lawrence excels. It is a large task, bridging the gaps between inner and outer landscapes, the craft and the image, and the past and the present, but one to which Lawrence is committed. A painful and arduous act, remembrance is ultimately a saving performance—one that keeps us from falling “captive to the constant / awful noise of reclusiveness” (“In the Shadows of a Rockspill”, lines 14-15).
WORKS CITED
Lawrence, A. “Black Yolk and Poison”, in Three days out of Tidal Town, 2002: Sydney, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited.
Lawrence, A. “Carnarvon” (x) Collecting Live Bait at Dusk Under the One Mile Jetty, in Three days out of Tidal Town, 2002: Sydney, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited.
Lawrence, A. “Lines for David Reiter”, in Three days out of Tidal Town, 2002: Sydney, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited.
Lawrence, A. “Sooty Oystercatchers, Venus Tusk Fish”, in The Darkwood Aquarium, 1993: Ringwood, Penguin Books Australia Ltd.
Lawrence, A. “The Barn, the Moon”, in Cold Wires of Rain, 1995: Ringwood, Penguin Books Australia Ltd.
Lawrence, A. “The Queensland Lungfish”, in Cold Wires of Rain, 1995: Ringwood, Penguin Books Australia Ltd.
Lawrence, A. “Trapping on the Foggy”, in Three days out of Tidal Town, 2002: Sydney, Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited.
Wright, C. “Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night,” in Chickamauga, 1995: New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dark Bright Doors .jpg)
by Jill Jones
Wakefield Press
ISBN 9781862548817
Reviewed by KERI GLASTONBURY
The titles of Jill Jones’ most recent full-length collections, Broken/Open (Salt Publishing, 2005) and her latest, Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), have the contrariness of koans. There is something deliberately ‘puzzlingly poetic’ about them, and as in Jones’ poetry language is deployed as a decoy. Part of me resists this residual idea of the poet as a kind of sage, with the reader positioned as an initiate who must work for cathexis, yet I am also conscious that the experience of reading Jill Jones’ work is an active one. The act of reading becomes a participatory force, necessary to re-energise the detritus of language once the poet has left it. If the nervous system is the body’s communication network, then rather than ethereal disembodiment perhaps Jones allows for the synaptic relationship of poet and reader, from one nervous system to another.
A quietly prolific poet in many respects, Jones does seem to embrace poetry as an everyday ‘practice’. In her review of Dark Bright Doors (ABR, June 2010) Gig Ryan refers to the book’s ‘repetitive vocabulary’, and she isolates two distinct poetic modes that Jones employs: one relying on a form of phenomenological gesture and the other more ‘grounded in the everyday’. I think Jones’ poems work best and are at their most experiential when these two elements are combined, realising the chiaroscuro of the title’s Dark Bright Doors and most effectively capturing the duel sense of ‘being-in-the-worldness’ that the poet strives for. Some of the shorter gestural poems read more like philosophical exercises and I preferred the poems that also contain cultural—as much as natural—weathering, or poems where the transcendental image is usurped by a pithy turn of phrase: ‘gulls riding / what’s left of the air’ (High Wind At Kekerengu). While still predominantly a poet of city and suburb any dichotomy between nature and culture is a false economy in Jones’ poetry, with Jones positioning herself as an intermediatry (not afraid to invoke birds and clouds and flowers). It’s as if she won’t allow the so-called ‘school of quietitude’ to have a monopoly over the metaphysical (as is foregrounded in the somewhat cliché choice of quote on the front cover: ‘poetry of unsettling mystery and beauty’).
Last year Jill Jones co-edited with Michael Farrell Out of the Box: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher & Wattman, 2009) which was notable for its post-identity poetic. I can’t help but read Jones as part of a lineage that would see her partly inheriting and partly resisting the poetry of, say, Pam Brown and Joanne Burns (the poem ‘Esplanade Blues’, for example, could have just as easily have been written by either). Overall, however, I find Jones writes with Burns psychic radar, but less ironic distance and Brown’s interest in the contemporary moment, sans the critical personism. Perhaps the link is as much that all three poets seem to have been recently widely published, with the inevitable risk of establishing individual orthodoxies. That said, of the three, it is Jones who has taken her work into the ‘realm of the senses’ and somewhat changed ‘camps’. Where Burns and Brown remain sceptical, Jones’ work absorbs a recent turn to the language of imagination and ecology. Jones’ resistance to the traditional lyric ‘I’ seems more broadly linked to post-humanist philosophies. This may also have come out of her Doctorate of Creative Arts at UTS with Martin Harrison, another Out of the Box poet whose influence I can read in Jones’ recent poetics, along with the American Objectivists in poems like ‘The Thought Of an Autobiographical Poem Troubles & Eludes Me’:
So I’ve been leaning against
the names of things
not just walls but the very air
the rug, the pen
the silver garbage bin.
and even William Carlos Williams (in poems such as ‘Sorry I’m Late’).
Fittingly for a book published by Wakefield Press (considering Jones now lives in Adelaide) it is possible to read some autobiographical trajectories into Dark Bright Doors, particularly in the poems that refer to Adelaide (however obliquely), New Zealand, Sydney and Paris. It’s a book about movement and distances, but refuses to indulge in direct declamation, as Scott Patrick Mitchell writes in his review of the book: ‘It tetters on the edge of things with a sensual energy’ (Out in Perth). Sometimes I find Jones’ obfuscations too ponderous and in this era of climate change her references to the weather akin to dressing up old poetic tropes as contemporary geosophy. The many shorter poems in this collection, however, build a pressure system much like a weather map with lows and highs, often coming together exquisitely in the more dense poems such as ‘O Fortuna’.
…Surely
the end is nigh and it’s a faith squeeze, when to be
heterodox, when to hold the line, which comes at you
up front and always, always leaves you past, belated,
but still humid with life at the turnstyles pushing
another weekly into the slot, watching it burst
up again. While folding your damp umbrella
into these sharp hectic hours, you keep appearing.
Jones’ poems are the Dark Bright Doors of perception of the title. This collection continues an experimental tradition in contemporary poetry that refuses some of post-modernism’s past binaries and opens up poetry’s radar as a par exemplar for registering life’s and language’s atmospherics, ensuring (to borrow from another book title) that everything is illuminated.
KERI GLASTONBURY is a lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Newcastle, her poetry collection ‘grit salute’ will be published by SOI3 in 2011.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dean Gui is first generation Hong Kong born, having left when he was fifteen from King George V School to finish high school in Saint John’s School of Alberta, Canada, an all-boys’ Anglican boarding school. He spent the next twenty years living in the USA, the first sixteen of those in Chicago, and the last four in California. Getting back into academia was the last thing on his list of things to do after a BA in English and an M.A. in Creative Writing to follow from the University of Illinois… but through the guidance and wisdom of one friend in particular, he taught his first high school English class in 2000. Since then, Dean has made a career of teaching. His poetry has been published in small press around North America, in magazines such as Arizona State Poetry, Innisfree, and Worm Feast.
King
the perfect princess
took off her tiara this morning
after a fierce night
bumping with celeda and the queens
peeling off a cat suit
claws and lashes
she plopped down onto her loo
a darling cigarette between dry lips
bent-over churning inside
exhaling into a black and white
photo album cracked open on the floor
full of black and blue memories
of a little boy
with little girl dreams
pink wallpaper
golden lips
skin like powdered lilies
wishing everyone away
and when the wigless, crownless
princess scratched her balls
clicked her heels three times
and whispered
“there’s no place…”
“there’s no place…”
“there’s no place…”
the sun suddenly disappeared
shadows laid out another line
and with three snorts, starlight, and stardom in her eyes
quasi life had begun again
Eurasian
dragon eyes
durians
guavas
sister you are missed
sinigang
feijoada
lang mein
mother you are missed
peppered gizzard
boiled pig’s blood
fried fermented tofu
grandmother you are missed
hamburger helper
ramen noodles
uncle ben’s
dinners are just not the same
anymore
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Viki Holmes is a widely anthologised and prize-winning British poet and performer who began her writing career in Cardiff as part of the Happy Demon poetry collective. She has been living and writing in Hong Kong since 2005. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Wales, England, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Macao and Singapore. She was twice a finalist in the John Tripp Award for spoken Poetry (Wales), and was a runner-up in Hong Kong’s inaugural Poetry Slam. Her first collection, miss moon’s class, is published by Chameleon Press (Hong Kong) and she is co-editor of the Haven (Hong Kong) anthology of world women’s writing Not A Muse, which has launched at literary festivals in Ubud, Hong Kong, and at a variety of locations in the US and Canada.
aqueous
We didn’t know what to drink, what was possible
when the light beckoned; kinked finger’s promise
of a coin flicked to the ocean’s wishing well:
spun from thumb to fore-finger,
tossed in the tumble of tide and night.
We hardly noticed it at first, huddled
in the depths of the evening, but
the doors hinged open, in an instant,
we were more than warmed, cuddled up
in an amber glow. We were soaked
in light: sub-mariners peeking
from a fringed amber bubble,
questing for treasure.
Our eyes swum; we found a place to sink into.
Shoals of wanderers ushered the closeness you’d written.
Reassurance shimmering
through the fronds, we plunged together,
a kiss predicted, promised. I replied:
fumbled clutch at a coin’s wish; latched
in the murmur of a mermaid moving seawards.
Silently but singing.
discoveries made collecting botanic samples
after Adam Aitken
on these cliffs we imagined we knew one another
looked back on how we’d nostalgised endlessly.
it was over before it started:
caravan’s land of grey and pink, pre-history,
pre-liminary. set adrift, we fashioned
joints from bamboo, made fires over
sand-hoppper cities, watched cliffs
burn. it was our last place, running
away from a hatful of acid and
not enough drugs. the sky loomed
and we came back here, parked
up in your red car, shivering
through the sun’s comedown.
somehow we made it, and in
the cradle of the night’s arms
we almost made it right
that time. yellow gorse
trifoliate spines
waiting for the scorch
for regeneration
fire razes some,
others need the
heat so they can burst.
a cormorant flashed
for a moment,
years below us.
off-duty, watching
us let go.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Ansley Moon was born in India and has since lived on three continents.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in J Journal, Jersey
Devil Press, Southern Women’s Review, Glass: A Poetry Journal and
various anthologies. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and
was chosen as SLS Unified Contest Fiction Semi-Finalist. She lives in
Brooklyn, New York and is a Poetry Editor for The Furnace Review.
Visions from a Brooklyn Window
I
Sometime between night and morning
we are awaken to sound of gunshot.
You held me down.
“That wasn’t a gun. Go back to sleep”
But I am reminded of him, years ago.
The rifle by his side. I know that nothing
sounds like a life being taken
but what it is.
II
Sometimes, I am sometimes shaken from sleep.
You always, undisturbed beside me.
My side damp with a feeling that maybe
I could have made what happened
un-happen.
Your snoring, a reminder that reality
exists, only if we believe in it.
Annabelle’s Cove
I
My father baits my worm,
piercing the silver hook
through the flesh. Delicately,
killing it. Each time he says
that I, like my brothers,
must learn the art of killing for myself.
Preparing me for the life ahead,
without him.
II
He pushes the throttle down,
slowly, eases out of the cove.
His cigarette suspended
in his left hand. His beer
in the cup holder.
As we leave and charter
into the mainland, the sun
bakes his skin a dark brown.
III
On the evenings in Georgia,
we would huddle in the front
of the boat as we glided through
the waves. A soft thud as the motor
lifted out and back into the water.
And the gas from our engine showed
our trail of breadcrumbs, but we never
wanted to find our way home.
IV
Year passed. The cove went up
and down, and back up in price.
My brother saving my cousin,
my mom’s Easter lilies, grilling fish,
playing checkers, swimming
in the dark. And all of us.
Washed away with the dock.
Summer
Summer was picking blackberries from the vine,
being the smallest and the only girl, reaching
beyond my brothers. Throwing some back
but keeping the ripest for myself, inside
the bowl I made with my shirt. The stain,
the proof of my guilt.
Scratches like border lines
of divided countries, the blood,
small bodies of water.
My legs, a map of all my sins;
the trees I climbed. And almost
being caught. On someone
else’s property.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Peycho Kanev’s work has been published in Welter, Poetry Quarterly,The Catalonian Review,The Arava Review, The Mayo Review, Chiron Review,Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, In Posse Review, Southern Ocean Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago.His collaborative collection “r“, containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is available at Amazon.com. His new poetry collection Bone Silence will be published in September 2010 by Desperanto, New York.
Abandon The Moment
Her breasts like temple’s bells
swing back and forth…
and the highway of her legs
disappear in the horizon,
into the mist of the dream:
there is nothing else except
sweat, lust and sorrow.
Everything sinks into the deep well
of the memories,
once her sure body lit candles
for the darkness in me
and now the pulsating neon of the night
is thicker than any light could banish.
What was once
will never be
again.
The sun goes down
behind the hills
and the birds on the wires –
tilting and silent like
boats by the lake shore.
Abandon all
and all will be again
with or without
you.
Learn to
slide.
Empty Space
The sun penetrates the glass
and hits the small plant on
the windowsill
I look at my toes,
I observe my arm.
From the whiteness of the sheets
her face emerges like some fat drunken
moon and asks me:
“Do you have any cigarettes? “
I light one and put it between
the waiting fingers.
I watch the ashes,
I see the butt.
And then she gets up
and walks naked to the bathroom
leaving me in the empty bed
with the swirling smoke
and the burnt desires.
Some people go through all
of their lives without experiencing
something like that
as for me this is my everyday
routine.
Light
and
grey.
Everything fills.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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A dual Australian-Irish citizen, Nathanael O’Reilly was born in Warrnambool and raised in Ballarat, Brisbane and Shepparton. He has lived in England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine and the United States, where he currently resides. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Antipodes, Harvest, Windmills, LiNQ, Postcolonial Text, Transnational Literature, Prosopisia, and Blackmail Press. He is the author of the chapbook Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010).
Driving in Texas
I.
A woman pushes a baby
In a stroller down the centre
Of a busy four-lane highway
As traffic speeds by on either side.
II.
A black pick-up truck overloaded
With tools, bricks and buckets
Weaves in and out of its lane
On a narrow county road.
III.
Three African-Americans kneel
In the grass facing away from the road,
Their hands cuffed behind their backs
As cops search their Cadillac.
IV.
A helmetless motorcyclist wearing
Shorts and t-shirt hurtles down
The freeway at ninety miles per hour
Zigzagging through heavy traffic.
V.
Five white flower-adorned crosses
Ranging in descending order
From daddy-sized to baby-sized
Testify in the grass beside the highway.
VI.
A roadside canvas marquee bears
A hand painted sign proclaiming
Holy Spirit Revival
7:30 nightly 24/7 prayer
Too Young
We killed time at the empty skate park
In Matamata, where I pretended I had
A board, running up the quarterpipe
Chucking one-eighties, sliding along
Steel rails, simulating ollies and kickflips
While your mum toured hobbit holes.
Too young to be embarrassed,
You thought I was hilarious.
Worn out, we retired to a main street café
Where we drank chocolate milk and a latte
While sharing an Anzac biscuit,
Then drove until we found a playground.
You joined in with the Maori kids,
Too young to know or care about race
Or nationality, rolling down an embankment
Into a pile of crunchy June leaves
While I exchanged nods with the other dads.
When your mum returned from the tour
We took the narrow backroads in the rain
To Te Awamutu, hoping in vain to find
A monument to the Finns. We had to settle
For Waikato Draught at the Commercial Hotel.
You sipped lemonade, too young to understand
Why we cared about music from New Zealand.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé divides his time between his art and teaching creative writing. A recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award, he has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in publishing, with a theology masters from Harvard University and creative writing masters from the University of Notre Dame, he has recent or forthcoming work in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Cricket Online Review, deadpaper, Dear Sir, Ganymede, Pank, and The Writing Disorder. Also working in clay, Desmond is presently sculpting ceramic pieces to commemorate the birth centennials of Nobel Laureates William Golding and Naguib Mahfouz in 2011. Works from his Potter Poetics Collection have been housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.
hsuan tsang before the taklamakan desert
That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.
~ T. S. Eliot
as lettered as song sparrows, finespun but ambivalent, purling rune, verse-love-elegaic
letters, ringing bells pealing-bowling-tolling, over-diatonic, dropping from belfries
a bunch of letters homophony-unwrapping-polyphonous; more becoming, becalming
as lettered as dash-of-love dreams, the scrunchy unscripted curves of them; they knell
slow, only lettered stubs of permissibility but not clarity, not token, soft-shod monody
as lettered, like someone else and his parcelled ideas about someone-else-especial
as a lettered dõgen inhales carbon-copy scruples, never sound changes, or cedar oil
there are nothing but sutras everywhere in time and space; sometimes sacred letters
are used, sometimes profane letters; sometimes divine letters, sometimes human
letters; sometimes the letters of beasts, sometimes the letters of ashuras; sometimes
the letters of a hundred grasses; sometimes the letters of ten thousand trees*
yet lettered to curatorial people doubled over in tracts, their inscribed, stolid podiums
as pasty; nothing letters what it seems, like rifling-trifling words split into infinitives
and supernal letters; they vacillate themselves, planate-unrest, periphrasis ill-at-ease
as lettered as their flamboyance letting us hide, letting go; we seek iliadic-baneful signs
kernels anew as lettered this vanilla midnote; I am such rest, the painful rest of it too
such serial-story calligraphy finely lettered, like love-in-waiting drawing likes as red
morning of herons as lettered as it is watery, disavowing, surging alkahest in hallways
as lettered, me beyond my own instruction, content as contusion art, euphony combing
still lettered, can’t he see? I don’t instruct my art nor its lost parts and whisper plains
these belles-lettres scarcely ciphers; tidy dais yet ochre-known, conduits so recondite
these belles-lettres unearthed that bless today of our sudden star-turning, terrene days
its letters as wrapt, happy-as-filigree trappings, us in puji si, whetstone and greying
* This verse has been lifted from a citation of Dõgen by J. P. Williams in his book on apophasis. Of Dõgen’s ideas on the use of sutras, Williams writes: “Thus we see that the ineffability of reality is not a question of there being no words we might use to describe it, but rather that there are no words which would describe it completely.”
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Cath Vidler’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary magazines including HEAT, Sport, Quadrant, Turbine, Southerly and Cordite. Her first collection of poems is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann (www.puncherandwattmann.com) in 2010. Cath is the editor of Snorkel (www.snorkel.org.au), a literary magazine specialising in the publication of creative writing by Australians and New Zealanders.
Counting The Stars
Nothing left to do but count
the stars
(I could be here all night).
*
Like stopped confetti
their utterances
reside, bright-lipped
round the moon’s
pale head
(the abacus has gone to bed).
*
Oh chuckling stars
what can I do
but cut my losses
and count on you.
At the Botanic Gardens, Sydney
i.
Bats hang from branches
like pods of midnight,
asleep in the reek
of restless dreams.
ii.
Grass recollects
night-slitherings of eels,
their sibilant tracks
seeking closure
at the pond’s tepid lip.
iii.
Herbs cluster and build,
a storm-system
of piquancy.
iv.
Somewhere,
a drop of rainforest
falls, spreads
to full capacity.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gurcharan Rampuri (born 1929) has been writing poetry in Punjabi for six decades. Author of ten volumes of poetry, he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1964. He has won many awards, and his poems have been translated into many languages, including Russian, Hindi, Gujarati, and English. His Collected Poems appeared in India in 2001. Many of his lyrical poems have been set to music and sung by well-known singers such as Surinder Kaur and Jagjit Zirvi. He has won numerous awards in both India and Canada, including the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Punjabi Writers Forum of Vancouver, as well as the 2009 Achievement Award for Contributions to Punjabi Literature from the University of British Columbia.
Amritjit Singh, Langston Hughes Professor of English at Ohio University, is a freelance writer, editor, translator, and book reviewer. He has authored and co-edited well over a dozen books, including The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance; Indian Literature in English, 1827-1979: An Information Guide; India: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing; Conversations with Ralph Ellison; Postcolonial Theory and the United States; The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman; and Interviews with Edward W. Said
Judy Ray grew up on a farm in Sussex, England, and has lived in Uganda, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Currently she lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is a volunteer ESL teacher. Her books and chapbooks include Pebble Rings, Pigeons in the Chandeliers, The Jaipur Sketchbook, Tokens, Tangents, Fishing in Green Waters, and To Fly without Wings. With poet David Ray, she has edited Fathers: A Collection of Poems (St. Martin’s, 1997).
Ghazal
Love smiles when it stumbles.
A star shines throughout its fall.
It takes an age to numb just one pain.
The next moment awakens another hundred.
How can one sleep when longing for the absent one,
And who will sleep on the night of love?
Sadness is my only companion.
Who would befriend me in my melancholy?
The peacocks cry even as they dance.
The swan sings even as it dies.
Beauty yearns for love
as surely as the moon goes around the earth.
One thought contains the universe.
The moon illumines a dewdrop.
Ghazal
I have just burned your letters.
Look, I have bathed in the fire!
Through this pilgrimage to the grave of love
I have revived forgotten pains.
The smooth dark night of your hair –
my fingers have caressed its lush shadows.
I have spent a tearful night
and the dawn is red-eyed.
I have consoled my weeping heart
by imagining scenes of intimacy.
The stars want an encore
though I am done telling my tale.
Life is both sorrow and music,
and I just sang your song.
To light up a glimpse of you in my dreams
I extinguish my own lamp.
Songs, Promises, Tears, Hopes
have won over my estranged lover.
Pet Lies
Lies, lies, lies all the time, repeated
until they become today’s truth.
A lie sits in the seat of power,
lies are armed with daggers,
lies have many followers.
The platform sure is crowded, in thick fog,
with the confused old holy man in command at the center.
A deafening racket blasts all around
and dark clouds of ruthless death
overshadow the skies.
Brutality, rage, fear and helplessness prevail,
but we cannot escape the need for food.
The terrifying abyss of need has deepened.
Death lies in ambush at every corner.
There is someone walking toward me,
but I don’t know if he is friend or foe.
Should I trust his smile, or is it poison?
I will not make eye contact with him,
weighed down as I am by guilt
of sins I didn’t commit.
These cheats and cowardly braggarts
keep on throwing dust in the people’s eyes,
leading them on with deceitful, well-rehearsed lies.
Professional politicians on the one hand
and the ruling elite on the other,
together they have built their empire of lies.
Opportunists
Yesterday’s friends are today’s foes.
Even a brother has a sinister look about him.
Now he accuses with stinging words.
Blood relationships are meaningless.
Today, venomous arrows, daggers, poniards, lances
are plunged into the hearts of one’s own.
Yesterday’s enemies are in close embrace today.
With wounds from the sword healed,
these sycophants ignore the poison of hate in their hearts
as they dance to the pipes of self-interest,
kiss and lick each other.
Labels pinned on one person yesterday
are now used for another.
Those who were called corrupt
are now held to be virtuous.
It is easy to line up arguments
to justify any good or bad deeds.
Since the dead will not return,
who will want to lose today’s profit for their sake?
In pursuing a dream of ideals,
who will ignore the weight of power?
Who will sacrifice national interests
and ignore the lines that divide communities?
Who can beat these sharp villains in glib debate?
So what if they commit awful deeds?
Today