January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rumjhum Biswas’s prose and poetry have been published in India and abroad, both in print and online. Notably in South, Words-Myth, Everyday Fiction, Muse India, Eclectica, Nth Position, The King’s English, Arabesques Review, A Little Poetry, Poems Niederngasse, The Little Magazine – India and Etchings – Australia. Her poem “Cleavage” was in the long list of the Bridport Poetry Competition 2006. She won third prize in a poetry contest run by Unisun Publishers India in February 2008. A flash fiction by her was shortlisted in the 2008 Kala Ghoda Arts Festival literature section Flash Fiction Contest managed by Caferati. Her poem “March” was commended in the Writelinks’ Spring Fever Competition, 2008. She won third prize in the Muse India Poetry Contest 2008. Her story “Ahalya’s Valhalla” is among the notable stories of 2007 in Story South’s Million Writers’ Award. She was a participating poet in the 2008 Prakriti Foundation Poetry Festival in Chennai. Links to her work at www.rumjhumbiswas.com. She blogs at http://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com/
Pelicans On The Brisbane River
“They’ll be here soon,” said the man in the wide brimmed hat
lumbering on his way down
into the wide belly of the tourist launch.
So we stayed above, sipping iced lemon tea
picking at our lamingtons nonchalantly flicking
crumbs off our clothes. Honestly speaking
nobody cares except for mother. “Don’t be so
impatient,” she said, as she smoothened her hair
before it succumbed to the river breeze again.
“Didn’t the man say they’ll be here soon?” So we waited
above the snowy froth churned up in our wake.
The launch skimmed like a water skater on the river’s skin,
flying faster than the flock of birds that seemed
to be doing a marathon just for the heck of it.
Some people preferred Brisbane’s sun bitten breeze
so they went up. But some, like mother, wanted the soft river
spray. We however outnumbered them all
clambering all the way up and then
all the way down. The river crept smoothly along
humming a song. Until finally the stars of the show
arrived waggling like miniature paddle boats,
jelly- jawed and ready to receive
our excited offerings of fish and more fish peeled
from buckets of ice. The pelicans smiled.
They spread their wings out wide for us and our cameras. They knew
what to do and they knew what to eat. Unlike that other
family that day, so lost in contemplation at the lunch buffet,
holding up a softly murmuring meandering queue
as they pondered and weighed
the pros and cons of each and every dish.
The Other Side of the Sun
Dusk has hefted this bloodless day
upon grim shoulders
and is now striding towards a horizon
where the Borealis are waiting
to feed…
Night drops down on iron haunches
and scans the sky
for a Moon, any Moon. Even an Arabian Moon.
Instead this night is hit full in the face
with wind, sleet and hail
Snarling at this January day, winter’s dragon
teeth stand
row by row by row on power lines and telephone poles,
ready to champ down hard
on bird, beast and man…
Its power is elusive. Elusive like the mirages
in the burning fields
on the other side of the sun. Redemption is too far away
and winter’s flinty fingers are breaking now
over the dreams of the dead lying forgotten
in unimportant lands.
Anaesthetized
I am at this portal
where the corridor of infinite doors
opens up one after the other
multiply and recede further
and further away from me.
Light turns opaque. Light turns heavy.
In that deep and perhaps dark world
light turns. Time ceases its terrors.
Dreams release their hold over notions.
My mind becomes torpid like a tomb.
My thoughts are embalmed. Sound
becomes numb and sight is nullified. Touch moves
more than a thousand touches away
from skin catacombed by sutures.
In the darkest maws of my belly
another consciousness stirs.
I cede control. I cede myself.
There is no ‘I’. No ‘Me’ left to hold.
Afterwards the hours are counted and stored
in the bag of oblivion.
Time becomes wafer thin.
Afterwards my tongue begins to seek words.
My words desire utterance and a man who loves me
understands me. Translates my wishes to those
who wield syringes.
There is no ambiguity here.
Eventually I unhinge and flow back
through the canopy of infinite doors
from that long corridor.
I return as one who was
a special guest of death before the gap
between then and now was squeezed
into an infinitesimal thing. I return as the one
after whom the world spun
and fell back like rain.
But I do not care then. I do not care.
Like a new born baby, I do not care.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Brenda is a Sydney writer and artist, of Aboriginal and British descent. She has had work published in journals anthologies and on the web. Her poetry readings have been broadcast on ABC RN and 2MBS. In 2008 she won the NSW Society of Women Writers Poetry prize. Brenda plans to publish her first collection The Sound of Red in 2010
Under the net
He is a man without a shadow
living in the park. Humid nights hiding
behind the kiosk. Or in the undergrowth
his dark shape spread on ivy. He wakes
to the murmur of couples leaving
a well-lit path: footsteps on the grass.
Settles to the steady roll of traffic.
Christmas lights. Possums sparked
to an all-night frenzy in the giant trees.
The shaft drops him into old territory
an open vault. Stale air. He waits
as the cold closes in, counts his steps
along the rail, unsteady on flint.
Hands trace a line to a corner place
at the end of a walled-in tunnel.
He lies awake, listens to the sound
of his breathing against the whirr
of trains. Heading into blackness.
Blind Faith
He comes at me. Side on. The weight of metal
pressed at my side. A hand clamps my mouth.
He breathes one word, up close. Move…move
There are men on the ground, a gate swinging
I am deaf to any thought of protest as the bag
covers my head. It smells of fermenting hay
hot against the lids. I listen to the men shouting
in strange accents, count each turn out of town
senses on high alert. We drive for hours. Stop
when the air is cooler. Maybe it is already night.
Blind Man’s Bluff at a half-remembered party
Arms search empty spaces for familiar shapes
a friendly voice. Now I wait for some command
to shuffle forward: like an old woman shackled
by pain. A baby stepping onto new ground.
Sounds carry when you’re closed in, bare feet
on mud-brick. A square, three paces each way.
I have learnt to be attentive to every variation
strain to catch familiar phrases under the door.
When a guard raises his voice I hold my breath
tighten the little fears, mouth dry. A water bottle
anchors my hands, roped against risk of slippage.
Clothes cling heavy under waves of midday heat
its prickly light penetrates my roughcast prison.
Only night loosens the pressure under the mask.
Or the touch of water. One small escape allowed
for daily bathing, to absorb the playful splashes
on skin and hair: fill a chasm inside me. Waiting
for the barter, like prized sheep penned at night.
Back and forth a mobile’s ring tone sets the price
of freedom. A pause in the skirmish: long days
trading this body for comrades held like me in
some other place. Waiting for payment. Funds
exchanged for my ordinary life, already pledged
long ago to their distant cause. Sight unseen.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lachlan Brown has studied poetry at the University of Sydney. His poems have appeared in Heat, Southerly, Total Cardboard and Philament. He was shortlisted for the Blake Poetry Prize in 2008 and is a recipient of the Marten Travelling Bequest for poetry. Lachlan lives in Southwest Sydney and teaches at William Carey Christian School in Prestons.
a secret work
After a time the prophets kept their silence,
no longer speaking of that place where decisions were made,
where the glint and curve of hardened metal formed a singular language
and the cries of departing flew out across the landscape.
I have struggled for years, against this gap in the record,
attempting various solutions with little hope of success.
Now though, I sense the approach of another,
and must make preparations to leave this city.
The shadows of buildings darken the pavement,
dragging the evening ahead of itself.
And the wind channels its way through every street,
like the breath of something vast that draws near.
I am locking my office for the final time and so take out a small key.
Without astonishment I feel its weight settle against my palm.
a miracle occurs
Somehow I have made an astounding return:
the alps rise against a blue sky, the sun streaks down the valley,
a meadow feels those mountains pulling skywards
and lets its daffodils run into the light.
Yes I have seen this place, known it before.
In my childhood I was taken to many fabric shops,
and as my mother made her purchases
I would weave my small frame through the rolls of material
into a soft world that did not begin or end.
In one store a picture of this setting was fastened to a wall,
and I stood spellbound, until my name was finally called.
Now, so much later, I am here and cannot help but smile
at that younger self pushing through a forest of silk and cotton,
only to be held, silently, captivated by a scene.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Phyllis Perlstone, a Sydney poet, first worked as an artist and experimental filmmaker. She turned to poetry full time in 1992, taking courses in poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York. She has gained various awards, including the NSW Women Writers poetry prize in 2004, and was second in the National Women Writers poetry prize in 2005. She has published reviews and articles. Her poetry is published in various journals and anthologies including Westerly, Siglo, Social Alternatives, Notes and Furphies, Meanjin, Blue Dog and A Way of Happening. Her first book is You Chase After Your Likeness (2002), reviewed in Southerly by Jennifer Maiden, and by Louise Wakelin in Five Bells. Her poem “Music and Landscape and other Consolations” was included in The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology for 2007and her latest book The Edge of Everything published by Puncher and Wattman was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the 2008 Premier’s Awards for N.S.W, and ‘Ondine’ was included in Motherlode, 2009.
(Photograph by Max Deutscher)
Hokusai
after your ‘thirty six
views of Mt. Fuji’
now you surprise me
on my calendar for April
with a print of poppies
the flowers are paper party-cups
folded on themselves
or flattened wide by a wind
springing the seams of things
in whole fields
open to the new season
That’s why I look at
my mother and her sister
in a snapshot
on a city street in Sydney
at their eyes on the photographer
their smiles and their hats
the bunched violets on my mother’s lapel
and my aunt’s cape
flaring on her shoulders
they dare their happiness
as if they were young and without care –
looking good
they might have said of themselves –
and why I stare at my orchids
my white ‘butterfly’ phaleonopsis
my dendrobium purples that arch out
into the room
and then turn to look outside
at the lemon-scented gum
rising, a casuarina going up even higher
and then back again to gaze
at a grevillea – the way
it crowds the balcony with a branched extension –
its tiny flowers spray-brushing the rail
Hokusai, because of your print of poppies
I look around at these things
for a joy to match yours
Tuesday 24th April 2007
For the rain it raineth everyday
today’s rain is falling
landing on leaves on roofs on
whatever catches it first –
it’s as steady as the air
it drops through –
at one or two almost-stopping points
you can hear the run of it
over the ground
where it puddles and leaks into holes
At an attention of waiting for its last
or next to last tick
my ears can’t help but measure it
Expectancy – as it’s still
unable to be tightened into silence –
doesn’t let me escape either
from your stress
your turning away
from what I can only think to myself
you don’t need to feel…
Basho’s frog croaks
in the half-quiet
the sound of my voice can’t repeat
adequate replies to you –
the rain a mirror to everything
comes back
as if it’s shining a night-light at itself –
there’s a lane of echoes
opening and closing
only the frog’s joking note
can hop away
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dr. Rizio Yohannan Raj is a bilingual writer who has published poetry, fiction, translations, criticism and children’s literature in English and Malayalam.
Her debut novel in Malayalam, Avinashom (2000) was shortlisted for the DC Books Silver Jubilee Award and is presently being translated into English. Her second novel Yatrikom was published to critical acclaim in 2004. She was part of the revival of the Mumbai Poetry Circle while she lived in the city. Her poems in English have appeared in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Her debut collection, Naked by the Sabarmati and Other Guna Poems is under publication at the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.
Rizio has also translated into English, some of the landmark poetical works in Malayalam such as Kumaran Asan’s Veenapoovu and Chintavishtayaya Sita, and many of the 20th Century Malayalam writers from various generations. She has done translations from other languages, the latest of which include two novels by the Swedish writer Torgny Lindgren, The Way of the Serpent and Sweetness into Malayalam, and the co-translation of the first single collection of Maithili poetry in English, Udaya Narayana Singh’s Second Personal Singular. She has also translated and introduced Gujarati and Marathi Dalit poetry into Malayalam.
Apart from her literary writings, Rizio has been balancing two simultaneous careers in publishing and higher education. During her decade-long career as a books editor, she had headed the editorial departments of Navneet (Mumbai) and Katha (New Delhi). A PhD in Comparative Literature, she has also been a faculty member in the Mass Media department of Sophia College, Mumbai. She lives between her home in Mumbai and Kasaragod, Kerala, where she serves as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Central University of Kerala.
Tree
While the show is on
beneath its sprawling shade,
age creeps in
without the tree knowing it.
Suddenly
the whole spectacle
is another ring of memory,
the trunk, older by a year.
Naked by the Sabarmati
1
Dream:
You beckon me from the purple trail of the day,
I rise from the warm shore:
our clasped hands, a thorny globe in mid-air.
The salt in the air nearly blinds us;
yet we look into each other’s eyes
and find the first stars of the evening.
‘We must cross the night together:
it is time we sought the river.’
2
Journey:
The silhouette of the hills
is a reverie etched along the horizon.
We are as prayerful as the trees,
hymns frozen on their way to God.
We walk under the moon in growing silence,
waiting for a song to come by.
Someone whimpers–
a feverish piccolo or a sunflower withering?
It’s one of those strange nights
one smells the dew on autumn leaves.
I close my eyes and chant –
Wind! Wind! Wind!
3
The road leads us to the wall of the city by the river.
We press our palms against it;
our touch, a sigh dividing a swell of silence.
The wall eagerly splits before us: we enter the city:
hushed slums and stained minarets, our witnesses.
But where are the men and women
who had painted dreams of hukkah on my autumn nights –
the handsome kite-flyer, the fat woman of wit,
the bearded old philosopher, the paanwali behenji,
the turbaned tractor driver, the Madrasi mechanic?
Where are the farmers
who had squatted upon after-harvest stories –
Chandrakant, Lalitabai, Bhoomir Dhrumesh, Fatema, Aalam?
Where are the sleeping children?
Where are the bhajans? Where is the banyan?
4
A tremor runs
down to my toes.
‘Your hands are flushed, ’
your quivering voice breaks deeper into the air.
Dear, I am red from within; I have swallowed embers:
words, gestures, silence.
You know it; your face shows your knowledge—
the stars in your eyes are tired while you whisper.
I cannot bear uncertainty any more, and run to the river.
But there are only dead stars and our pallid reflections in it.
Comrade, can you name this moment
to which even the river has lost its flux?
5
Perhaps, the river must wait
before it can flow again,
for everything waits:
field for seed,
serpent for woman,
fig for hunger,
rock for diamond,
bansuri for breath,
quill for ink,
parchment for Time
Waiting fills the elements, too:
a white piece of sky
a coppery speck of land
a cobalt drop of sea
a black pole of wind
an orange sun,
wait for Word.
6
And then you and I run
as though a lightning has entered us.
Through the flight our clothes leave us
one by one, till the skies offer
themselves to us, and we grow wings.
The peeling was abrupt; nothing
had prepared us for this bareness.
Now we are gliding witnesses
to the trembling of the city –
is it seized by fear or shame?
We can’t make out:
Have we been late in arriving?
Have we no choice now
but to flee in our starkness
as though our sins are chasing us?
7
City of opposites,
along our naked flight across your breast,
you remind us of our one true Spartan.
His frail body had warned us
against choking in our clothes,
like truth getting lost in words.
We now remember our semi-clad martinet,
and see how this age asks for all we have
to be allowed to return to our nature.
From the bare banks of this river
it is clear now: we have endured too many guises;
a shedding is inevitable.
We must lose all our garbs:
we must turn digambaras,
with just the ashen horizon on us.
Our wild bodies alone may save us now:
they will tell this blind century
that we are woman and man first.
Our nakedness will again connect us
with this river,
and with each other.
8
Hope:
There, the river calls us now to its flow,
even as our last clothes renounce us:
‘Let us share our remains:
you, the sweat on your brows, and I, my longing.’
Now you and I stand in knowledge of each other
as in a garden of memories.
With infinite tenderness I tell you,
‘Comrade, let us celebrate our freedom.’
We embrace by the Sabarmati,
bare, forgetful.
And we enter the flowing river:
light floods us –
Light.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Enoch Ng Kwang Cheng is a poet, literary translator and publisher. Since 1997, Ng has been at the helm of firstfruits publications. In 2005 he won the Golden Point Award for Chinese Poetry. In 1991 his first book of poems were awarded Best First Book by the Taiwanese literary journal “The Modernist”. His poetry has been featured in journals in Singapore, India, Malaysia and Taiwan, and anthologized in China and Singapore. Ng is one of the awardees of the Singapore National Arts Council Arts Creation Fund 2009.
Yeo Wei Wei is a teacher, literary translator, and writer. Her interest in translation began during her PhD in English at the University of Cambridge. Her translations have recently been published or are forthcoming in journals in India, Taiwan, and the U. S. She is currently working on a translation volume of Enoch Ng Kwang Cheng’s poems (to be published in 2010). She lives in Singapore.
书虫
毛毛虫
吞吐一部份诗行
成可口香叶
一部份张贴在蛹
的内壁
取光
Bookworm
The caterpillar
Munches a few lines
Tasty leaves for its repast
Lining the walls of its cocoon
With the uneaten parts of the poem –
Therein and whence
The light.
家事
（一）灯火
水退以后
额头火红
犬吠声
篱笆好
一片月
住下， 就是一生：
彩电
蕃薯
枪声
女人
齐齐蹲下
凝视远方的老鼠
时间似猫眼
独眼牛
在杜撰的钢索上
平衡祖先
了无新意的
困境
猪在肥
水灾在雷
(三) 晚餐
武装
革命结束之夜
摸着石子
过河回来的元帅们
晚餐生蚝
佐以京戏：
黑猫 白猫
穷追老鼠
From Family Matters
1. lamp light
After the flood recedes
foreheads red as fire
dogs barking
sturdy fences
a sliver of moon
To stay is to settle down, a lifetime:
colour tv
potatoes
gunfire
womenfolk
neatly crouching
time spies on mice in the distance
with watchful cat eyes
2. circus act
One-eyed bull
on the steel wire of fancy
calibrates the ancestors’
unoriginal
circumstance
pigs fatten
floods follow suit
3. dinner
In fatigues
the night the revolution ended
stepping on stones
the generalissimos cross the river, returning
raw oysters for dinner
peking opera for company
black cat white cat
hunt in vain for mice
十二月
如常的警笛声
果核纹路分明的下午
天蓝如此
下课以后球就会滚到另一边
雨后无辜的蘑菇
则不免让人分心
地表, 板块, 土拨鼠: 松动的日子
说不定难免就是
湿翠的菊花无端开落
december
the police siren makes familiar rounds
through the seed grooves of an afternoon.
thus the blue sky surveys:
a ball rolls from one end of the court to the other, after class.
mushrooms, newborn after the rain,
daintily lead the eye and mind astray.
these days of unwinding, a palpable reprieve tingling soil and sundry:
earth’s surface, tectonic plates, groundhog.
moments, perhaps, for spectatoring and speculation:
chrysanthemum flowers, bursts of moistened jade, bloom and fade, just so.
父亲素描
晚年
他的脸开满菊花
南中国海过的眼睛
不再潮汐
耳，继续路往天籁
鼻穴， 深埋梁祝
嘴， 沉默得很大声
唯双眉翔不出
翔不出
铁蒺藜，以及
铁蒺藜那边的泥土
Portrait of My Father
In the twilight years
His face bloomed into chrysanthemums.
The eyes that crossed the South China Sea
Were weaned off the tides.
The ears followed still the trail of nature’s sounds.
The nose, buried deep in the legend of the butterfly lovers,
The mouth spoke loudly without words.
Time and again his brows made the mad flight
Flailing again and again
before the barbed wire fence,
exiled by the barbed wire fence,
from the land over there.
想起杜甫
– 纪念与梅剑青同游悉尼的日子
风停了废墟开始浮出水面
急急急带雨: 床在异地, 前世是码头
天空系在脑后, 我们是风里来火里去的云
高人江湖满地, 踢踏过唐人街, 已是中年
猿声多一阵少一阵, 人倚斜了天涯
啸过冬天漫长的边境
哀伤的头颅内住着完整的瓷
Remembering Du Fu
– in memory of the time spent with Boey Kim Cheng in Sydney
After the wind died down, ruins rose from the water.
The rain poured, making haste, making haste:
our beds are remote from home; our past lives, a quay.
Sprawling behind the mind is the sky –
while we who have no care, we clouds blazing through wind and fire,
what care have we for the masters? Already there are too many in the world –
enough that Chinatown was our playground until middle age caught us playing truant.
Marking the rise and ebb of monkey cries, man leans to rest and the horizon slants.
Ranting and raving along the borderlines of winter;
The pained skull shelters a piece of porcelain, perfection no less.
Note:
In July 2006 I was in Sydney for the launch of Boey Kim Cheng’s book After The Fire: New and Selected Poems. It was a holiday as well as a work trip for me. We spent quite a lot of time traveling by car and we listened to his CDs of Du Fu’s poems.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dinah Roma-Sianturi is an associate professor of literature and the director of the De La Salle University’s Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center (Manila). Her first collection of poetry A Feast Of Origins (2004) was given the National Book Award by the Manila Critics’ Circle while her recent work Geographies of Light (2007) won a Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature.
Family Portrait
Where I touch their faces
creases cut through their gaze,
dreading the escape
past the lens.
Too many times I looked,
too many times I fancied
where they had gone after
the stillness, how into the fields
blurred by their shadows, they had
shaken the horror off their bones.
Among them, I could have
taken my place, stepped into
the imperceptible pact of light
and shadow, past and present
conniving where I’d stand
in that instance of bodies
composed for history—
Next to my mother, perhaps, barely
sixteen, faint in the background,
her lean arms limp at her side;
or, beside my aunt, a nimble girl,
whose hair shorn of passion,
sang herself to exile.
What story of that year
and place recalls the daybreak
they were herded into the river mouth,
the hour calmed by the leaves’
consenting sway?
In this airy, well-lit room,
a tale long sealed in glass
shimmers each time light shines
on them now, as when sun hits
water, as when surface breaks
in ripples of fear.
After Hafez
I did as you say.
I did not surrender
my loneliness
too soon.
I waited for what
it can teach me
of heaven
and earth,
of what keeps
them apart.
What blessing it is
when voice breaks
crying out for God—
a heart seasoned,
the body scarred
by cuts deeper
than divine.
The Naked Imperative
Endure is what the morning
Wants to say each time dawn
Bares the gentle sprawl
Of her body as light seeps
Through the thin shade
Failing to honor why she is here—
The shifts of joy, the unbelief
In promise that moves her
Past space, her steps,
The pardon of distance.
And what is it like
When she stands bearing
The gift she mourns and seeks,
The desire that comes
With the world, and offers
No door out of it?
Endure is this
Woman’s will and giving.
The earth stirred, hewn
By its own longing.
She is still. Naked. Sleep
Of deep valleys, ridges and planes—
The nightfall’s landscape
Of blissful absolution.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Young Rain
New Poems by Kevin Hart
Giramondo, 2008 (85 pages)
ISBN: 9781920882457
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG
Kevin Hart’s poems are full of darkness and light, oscillating gracefully between meditations on death, the limits of selfhood, sex and the erotics of longing and memory. And although they are composed in a style that seems disarmingly straightforward, the poems sometimes suffer from a barefaced corniness.
When the poet is attempting to draw our attention to a name within a name, within which his dead mother sleeps (“My Name”), or the life “barely lived” that brushes against him on its way to somewhere far away (“That Life”), it is with a elegiac sense of loss, as well as a desire to define the ineffable in life and language. At times, reminiscent of Robert Frost, the speaker celebrates the reduction of his life to the barest of essentials: “My hands – I rest my head on them. / My eyes – I rest my mind on them. / There’s nothing that I really need” (“Nights”).
Other times, such as during the “Amo Te Solo” sequence, the language becomes trite (“There is no life on earth / I would not spend with you”), quasi-poetic without being funny (“When a tornado starts its crazy swirl / Just let the house blow down”), even banal (“And my right hand works o so quietly there”) and the poet seems to mistake crudeness for authentic candour (“Fuck off, fat clock – I want her now”). It is also amusing to note how John Koethe, on the back of the book, is eager to claim that such “lustiness…has almost disappeared from contemporary poetry.” Koethe has obviously not been to many slam-poetry readings in- and outside of his country.
It is during the shorter lyrics that follow that the book seems to really take off. In “The Great Truths,” for example, the poet juxtaposes a self-conscious sense of banality
(“The world is love / No matter what we make of it”) with the cleverness of lines like “The pen must know a hand on it” and “pens fly quickly to our hands,” while in “Lightning Words,” a mental struggle plays out in taut moments like this: “Prayer, / That terrible, strange thing – // A soul / Unclenching something fierce to play…With evening falling fast…And hoping to be gripped / Halfway down.” A grappling with the onset of darkness, and with what this darkness can mean for the spiritually anxious speaker, forms the troubled heart of this quiet and sustained meditation.
In the fourth section, a long sequence, “Night Music,” takes centre stage, where a greater poetic artfulness and an infinitely more affecting display of honesty are showcased: “The day my mother died I was home late: / My lover told me bluntly at the door…I heard her slice / Onions and carrots while I simply say / And waited for the thought to cover me / So I could live inside it for a while.” Then in the fifth and final section, a stirring and evocative long poem, “Dark Retreat,” takes on the dark again (whose meaning is personified dramatically): “Dark One, you know me to the bone, / You scrape my heart / And find too much that frightens me. / The dead are yours, I know; but still I turn.” But the speaker is ambivalent about this terrifying union with the dark; there is the chance that it might reunite him with loved ones, after all: “My father – he is dark / My wife – o she is dark / They are not far: take me.”
Here is a poetry that bravely attempts to speak to a universal experience of desire and love, but also loss and mourning. It is full of equivocation and a brazen sentimentality that occasionally undermines the force of its message. Yet, as a book, Young Rain has enough of a convincing sensuality and a persistent sense of metaphysical wonder to make up for its deficiencies.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Man Wolf Man
by L. K. Holt
John Leonard Press, Elwood, 2007
ISBN: 9780977578771
78 pp. pb. AUD23.95
Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY
Lyric poetry has the power to slow time down to intense, expanded moments of seeing and feeling. Its measured breaths connect language and silence, music and poetry, the visible and invisible in an attempt to assuage the longing for answers to the deepest questions of what it means to be human. L.K. Holt’s Man Wolf Man is a wonderful proof of the potency of the lyric. It is an astonishing and deeply satisfying debut, its lyric grace and power, strongly evident from the first to last poem, sustaining the enquiry into the nature of human bestiality, art, beauty and love.
There is a remarkable range and reach of theme, style and form here, but the underpinning question is Shakespeare’s “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?” Beauty and terror, eros and thanatos reside together in these poems of baroque equilibrium and decorum. Obliquely the poems seek grace and redemption in the face of the unspeakable. The opening poem broaches the dualistic nature of man, the barbarism of truth in the title and the imagery:
We want not beauty
but light for aim, or the cover of black.
Sometimes the enemy knocks before
entering. A baby is hidden in the drawer.
There is none of the portentous gravitas that many poets fall prey to when dealing with such grave themes. It tells the truth but tells it slant, as Emily Dickenson counsels.
Death and its violent disruptions are taken up in different ways in the rest of the collection, in “Slaughter House,” “The Botanist,” “Violence,” and most movingly in “Long Sonnets of Leocadia,” a sequence about Goya, the master of the abominable and grotesque. The speaker of these dramatic monologues is Goya’s housekeeper-mistress, who is rumoured to have borne him a daughter and who was erased from Goya’s will by his son. Here, in a reinvented sonnet form and in stanzas effortlessly rhymed, love and loyalty are held in tenuous balance with horror and death. Goya’s art of unflinching witness is vividly rendered: “every horror a new eyehole/ for you to focus.” Holt captures Goya’s signature subject and style in precise, fluent strokes: “You paint a purposeful silence, mouths chasmal/ to consume all sound, small complete eclipses.” The wolf motif in the opening poem looms large in the last poem of the sequence, and refers to Goya’s crayon sketch “Wolf and Man”; in its central location in the collection and in its foregrounding of the key motif, “El Otro,” which means “the other,” as the wolf is called in Spanish folklore, becomes the pivotal lyric in the collection. It depicts Goya’s art of witness, the vigilant wolf-like way he observes and turns human carnage into art. Goya himself metamorphoses into the animal that is his emblem for the human condition:
Yet when our time comes
we want nothing but to stay wanting; to be consoled
looks a lot like the end. I’m scared of dirt.
You, of the wolf who does not flee but, slowly, turns.
The sequence, like the other two sequences “Unfinished Confession” and “Glove Story, Paraphrased,” reveals a capacity for sustained engagement with the subject, and a delicate, thrilling fusion of intuition and intellect. There is an erudition that is never showy, a deep engagement with historical facts that feeds her quest for understanding and equilibrium in the face of terror. Indeed, Holt wears her learning lightly, gracefully: Galen, Donne, Shakespeare, Kristeva, Primo Levi, Althusser all cohabit harmoniously in a language and form that is intricate and sinuous. The elegy to Althusser captures his life and work in a powerful psychological snapshot, the lyric cleverly miming the postmodernist reflex of “interpellation”:
He has no history: a thorn of theory
for the biographer. He ‘epistemologically breaks’
from himself each moment of each day
and in a such break – a tiny slice of clock –
He Killed His Wife. Capitals his punishment.
The discontinuities of death faced are not merely public or historical. There are intimate familial portraits of profoundly moving elegiac note. “Grandmoth” commemorates the poet’s grandmother through a marvellous metamorphosis of image and theme. In its lyric grace and delicate handling of detail, it is an impeccable elegy worth quoting in full:
On the wall the moth has fashioned itself
two-dimensionally, self as self-portrait.
Its eye-forgeries see everything in the room:
where I see memories it sees a great feast.
They are always fleeing, like thieves, like bits of dusk
left behind, at the opening of drawer or door, their stomachs
freshly full of coat or jewel-box lining; tweed and velvet
are left a demented lace of their hungry design.
From the box where I keep her necklace
(in non-existent photos I see her neck laced
with it, I see how it hangs consolingly beside
her one lonely breast) out stole a moth
and I thought it was her: my grandmother
returning as something hungry for a time not lived.
The moth, a symbol of transitoriness, triggers the memory of the grandmother, and a fleeting moment of recognition and rebirth. The details are never loud, gently evoking the movement of thought and feeling, aided by the couplets that render the sonnet all but recognisable, another instance of Holt’s formalist leaning, which is not content with using inherited templates but turns them into startlingly fresh and coherent forms. “Half Sestina” is another example of Holt’s confidently deft handling of form; here the sestina is remodelled to convey the narrative threads between parents and child: “In sepia wraps, father is a baby I can hold anytime. / To forget my beginning and console him in love’s-end: / an oxymoron brutal; impossible by design.”
Holt handles serious themes with delicate grace and irony. There are also playful erotic moments of Metaphysical or Cavalier verve and wit. Donne is present not just in the parody “The Flea,” but also in “Pompeii” and in “Sedimentary Layers,” which, like Donne’s love poems, yokes the serious and playful together in a carnal moment:
If a geologist were to wander in
and see us lying here
– my head on your chest but
but your legs on top of mine –
he’d certainly be a little perplexed
over whether you or I came first.
This is one of the delightful lyrics of the here and now, an instant unburdened by history and death. “Bird Ghazal” offers a train of fleeting avian transcriptions, revealing a mind as alert to innocent pleasures as it is to the sombre shades of history:
The tern – wings ink-tipped – is poised mid-thought before
a thermal, formal arc: wind’s calligraphy in the sleight of bird.
These are necessary moments of light relief. The collection returns to a more sombre note in the last poem, “Time of Houses,” a lyric sequence exploring the existential ideas of habitation and home, man’s tenancy on this earth. The sequence sifts the different meanings of “house” in relation to different stages of life and ends memorably with “Apocalypse House,” recapitulating the key motifs and images and resolving tentatively the conundrum raised by the opening poem. It is a solution that we all expect, but the way Holt broaches it is arresting, unaffected, and makes us pay attention to a common truth – that we must love one another or die:
You leave in the time of houses always assuming
you need not say more than a ration of farewell,
nor shake out the pit where your head emptied out
into pillow, not smooth out the sheet’s seismogram
of ripples, nor pack your things into boxes, your hair
from the plug, not pre-prepare in lines in my tongue
every is into was, nor unfocus your face caught
and framed into that of the stranger you were but
once, nor snuff out the synapses I light for our love,
little bonfires of love, man’s first type of home.
In its Auden-like affirmation of human love, the poem answers the questions explored in the earlier poems and also imparts what Yeats calls “a unity of being” to the entire collection. The book has a wonderfully coherent feel to it: the man/ wolf theme explored in different variations, the subtly orchestrated leitmotifs of art and death, and the way inexpressible truths are intuited or glimpsed rather than overtly stated. Yeats says that man can embody the truth but he cannot know it. In their persuasive music and electrifying imagery, Holt’s poems embody the deepest truths of the human condition.
Holt possesses a rare Mozartian grace and range: witty and light, erotic and playful, sombre, meditative and elegiac. Her mastery of form is exquisite and exemplary; she has devoured and assimilated Donne and Shakespeare, and is able to turn inherited forms into something uniquely her own. Holt has set very high standards in her debut collection, not just for herself, but for Australian poetry.
(Parts of this review, written entirely by the author, are reprinted with permission from the Judges Comments 2009 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Dilip Chitre is and Indian poet, artist and filmaker. He has published thirty books, five of which have been translated into German. He has won several prizes and awards.
I have been drawing, sketching, and painting since my early childhood when I also started playing with words. My father collected books of all sorts and he being a printer and publisher by profession, some of the books he collected were examples of excellence in book production— illustrated books, art books, atlases, almanacs, catalogues, photographic books—and so on. They fascinated and intrigued me. I spent hours browsing through them. They were the beginning of my visual education as well as my verbal education.
I used to spend a lot of time in my father’s printing press and his master printer, Baldev Bhoi would give me tins of printer’s ink with their little left-over contents. I would also get left over cut pieces of various sizes and kinds of paper. These were the first art material I used. From Baldev I learnt how to mix inks to produce secondary colours and shades from red, blue, yellow, white, and black. Making different kind of greens by blending blue, yellow, red, and black was my favourite learning exercise. We had lots of trees and plants in our surroundings and the varieties of green I saw there made me want to reproduce many of them.
My father purchased an 8 mm movie camera and a projector, as well as a box camera, and being the eldest of siblings I got a chance to make five-minute silent movies and to make black and white portraits and landscapes, action snapshots and images of monuments. I used a baby pram to take tracking shots and pans and zooms that were not possible to shoot with the fixed focus lens of the camera. I was already innovating techniques to overcome the limitations of the basic equipment in my hands.
In the 1950s, after my family moved from the idyllic princely state capital Baroda to the congested big city then called Bombay, our financial circumstances changed for the worse. I could no longer afford to use water colours or fine quality pastels or crayons or pencils. I started writing poetry which costs much less to practise than the visual arts. However, I continued to work out charcoal drawings, pencil sketches, and pastel compositions often scouring the city at night in search of subjects: Irani restaurants, suburban railway platforms, beaches, and even cemeteries and crematoria.
During my late teens, I made friends with like-minded poets who were also visual artists. All of them were much older than me—-in their twenties or early thirties. Arun Kolatkar was one of them. Through Arun I met Bandu Waze, Ambadas, Ramesh Samartha, and Baburao Sadwelkar. I started visiting the Artists’ Aid Centre at Rampart Row, the Jehangir Art Gallery, and the campus of the Sir J.J. School of Arts. I met very senior academic artists such as Shankar Palsikar who liked my work despite my not being a trained artist, as well as the then upcoming professional artists such as Mohan Samant and Vasudev Gaitonde.
A little later, I met Bal Chabda and started observing artists at work in his Gallery ‘49 on Bhulabhai Desai Road. My friend Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, now a senior art critic, introduced me to Ebrahim Alkazi and his theatre group. I made friends with Nooruddin or ‘Nicky’ Padamsee and his younger brother Akbar Padamsee, the painter.
Bombay of the 1950s whetted my appetite not only to see art but also to practice it myself. I worked on paltry salaries as a tutor in two colleges and as a sub-editor in a daily newspaper. Acceptable quality art material still remained beyond my means. It was only when I went to Ethiopia in 1960 as a high school teacher of English in secondary schools that I got a chance to handle oil colours. In one of my homes there, I painted a mural on the wall of the living room, much in the spirit of prehistoric cave artists.
Back in Bombay in 1963, I returned to the cramped space of the big city once again. Wanting to live independently of my joint family, I lived with my wife and my small son in leased rooms in different parts of the city, eleven months being the standard period of lease. Living space competed and collided with working space, but now I had corporate jobs that I was forced to take up to pay exorbitant rents and support my small family with a growing son.
Undaunted, in 1969 I purchased twelve large canvases—-the largest was 180cmx180cm—-oil colours, linseed oil, turpentine, and a set of brushes to start painting the way I had always wanted to. My first one-man show was held in the now defunct Gallery Rampart on Rampart Row. I shared the gallery space with Bhai Patki, who was my colleague in an advertising agency where he was Art Director and I was Chief Copywriter. This show opened on September 17, 1969—-my thirty-first birthday.
Two of my twelve canvases were purchased by Air India International on the first day of the show: Green Divided by Itself and Erotic Textures. Some of my titles irritated The Times of India art critic, Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni enough for him to comment on the title A Painting for God’s Bedroom as frivolous, though The Sapphire Symphony the diagonally placed 180cmx180cm work dominated by subtle cubes of cobalt, ultramarine, and cerulean blue with a large, off-centre, vermilion dot was generously called by him a masterpiece. I still recall Akbar Padamsee telling me that the dot, instead of being vermilion, should have been cadmium orange to make the painting perfect. The greatest compliment I got, however, was from Professor Shankar Palsikar—-revered as a Guru by his art students. He came with his students, saw the entire exhibition, and said to me half-addressing everybody within earshot, “ I wanted my students to see how a genuine artist dares!”
I was vastly encouraged by the overwhelming response to my first public show, but I did not dare to take the plunge into the uncertain life of a full-time painter yet. My job in advertising gave me a chance to script, edit, and direct ad films just then; and I needed practice in that medium before I could realize my dream of making independent documentary and feature films on themes of my choice.
Later, I switched from advertising to the position of Creative Executive in the Art Department of the Indian Express Group of Newspapers. I contributed articles and edits to the paper, too (e.g. Editor S. Mulgaonkar asked me to write an obituary tribute to Pablo Picasso that appeared as the second edit on the editorial page on the day following the news of Picasso’s demise).
In September 1975, I joined the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa along with about twenty writers from as many countries. When I went into the artist’s materials shop in downtown Iowa City, I was surprised to find two of my poet colleagues—-Peter Clarke from Cape Town, South Africa and Ahmed Muhammad Imamovic from Bosnia-Herzegovina buying paints and canvases. It struck me that the three of us could hold a show of our paintings in Iowa City and in a flash I thought we should create a new interactive art form in the spirit of jazz-—the quintessential American genre of music. Peter and Ahmed agreed enthusiastically.
I coined the term Triple Triptych for the new form of painting. Each one of us was to do one initial painting and the other two were to improvise on the same theme in their own style. The size of the three paintings was to be uniform. As the space allotted to us by the University of Iowa’s museum of modern art was limited, we could only exhibit three triple triptychs ( nine paintings in all) plus some of our individual works.
The show was successful beyond our expectations. The President of John Deere Incorporation, a giant multinational company that manufactures tractors and other farming equipment, purchased a triptych entitled Non-migratory Birds for the company’s headquarters at Moline, Illinois that has a formidable collection of paintings and sculptures. Each of us sold some works. The Des Moines Register Weekly carried a cover story on the new art form—Triple Triptych that was credited to us.
I returned to India at the beginning of 1978 but resigned from The Indian Express, where I had a lien on my job during the Emergency, to work independently as a writer, artist, and filmmaker. I was consultant to a small advertising agency owned by a friend and wrote scripts for short films for another.
In 1980, I travelled with two other writers—-the late Nirmal Verma and U.R.Ananthamurthy—-to the then Soviet Union, Hungary, West Germany, and France to explore possibilities of reciprocal literary exchange through translation. The visit gave me a chance to visit legendary art museums such as the Hermitage, the Louvre, the Berlin museum, the Alte and the Neue Pinakothek as well as the Lembachhaus in Munich, the Impressionist museum in Paris— and so on.
Seeing art on such a scale actually disoriented me in the end. When I tried to fall asleep, I saw such an involuntary cascading slide show of random images of paintings that I was unable to stop. My brain was fatigued by the art I saw. I was like a starving man from a famine-stricken land invited to a gourmet feast that turned him into a glutton who ended up with indigestion. From then on, I learnt to savour art by avoiding to see too much of it in a short time, something that I had already been doing with literature and cinema.
In the 1980s I decided to focus my energies on making a full length feature film to realize a crying creative need. I knew by then that cinema was the most expensive medium of self-expression and that even to make a small budget feature film, I would need to raise a few lakh of rupees. I decided to take my chance by entering a screenplay in the annual scriptwriting competition of the National Film Development Corporation. I paid five thousand rupees to my friend, Bhau Padhye and purchased the first option on adapting his short story Godam before I set out to work on the screenplay.
I spent a whole year working on my script and in the process spent all my meagre savings. In 1982, my script won the NFDC’s national scriptwriting award which carried a cash prize of Rs 10,000 and, more importantly, a guarantee of 100% finance if I wanted to make the film myself.
Friends such as Satyadev Dubey and Govind Nihalani agreed to work without fees and I found an exceptional Art Director in Uday Joshi, a practising architect. My son Ashay was an apprentice cinematographer learning under Nihalani and my wife Viju looked after costumes and properties. My daughter-in-law Rohini worked as my script and continuity assistant. Several young and eager people wanted to assist me as apprentices and, always a teacher, I took as many of them on board as I could.
NFDC bureaucrats were reluctant to let me make the film and created a lot of hurdles. I had planned to shoot the film in early 1983 before the summer began because the location I had chosen was intolerably hot and dry from mid-April to June. I borrowed Rs 100,000 at an exorbitant rate of interest from the market and started the film. I presented a fait accompli to NFDC and eventually they released part of the budget and continued to release funds till the film was completed.
I finished shooting Godam in two schedules amounting to a total of thirty-four days and finished dubbing and post-production in ten days. It took us a month to edit the film. Alain Jalladeux of Les Festival des Trois Continents chose Godam as the official Indian entry in the Nantes Festival—as it is known. However, the NFDC bungled again by not sending the film to France in time for the festival and it was shown the next year, 1984, when it won the Prix Special du Jury for Direction. I was 46 when this happened.
My award for Godam was announced by the festival jury on December 4, 1984 and on that very day the media started bringing in initial reports of the horrible industrial disaster in Bhopal, where I lived with my family then. My son Ashay lived with us in my bungalow opposite Bharat Bhavan and his wife Rohini was six months pregnant. The two—or rather three—of them were in the city where thousands were believed to be dead, or maimed and crippled for life. Bhopal was cut off from the world. There was no way I could communicate with Ashay who was not only my only son but also my Chief Assistant on the Godam project. Viju, my wife, was as helpless as me. She was waiting in Mumbai for me to return from France.
Our small family world was shattered. Eventually, Ashay and Rohini flew to Mumbai and were immediately examined by several medical experts. As for treatment, none of them had a clue. A homeopath who had clinics in both Mumbai and Pune and had long queues of patients at either place, gave Ashay an out of turn priority in his Pune clinic. That is how we moved to Pune.
My tenure at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal as Director of its poetry centre was brief but extremely stimulating. In that multi-arts complex—the brain child of Ashok Vajpeyi, the Secretary of the Bharat Bhavan trust—-I had for colleagues the painter and thinker J. Swaminathan and the theatre director and producer B. V. Karanth. Bharat Bhavan became the hub of creative activity in the fine arts. The cream of Indian musicians, dancers, singers, actors, painters, potters, sculptors, ceramicists, and poets visited and presented their work at Bharat Bhavan. If the terrible Bhopal disaster had not affected, uprooted, and traumatized my own family, I would have continued longer there.
However, my son’s lung capacity was reduced overnight to a mere 40% due to exposure to the lethal gas— methyl isocyanate. No physicians knew how to handle the effects of MIC or reverse them. We moved to Pune where a homeopathic physician offered us the only hope of treatment for Ashay, Rohini, and their unborn child. In 1985, I resigned from Bharat Bhavan and decided to settle in Pune. Already suffering from chronic hypertension and unstable angina, I had to undergo an emergency angioplasty in 1989. That was the next turning point in my creative career.
The only way I bounce back in adverse times and difficult circumstances is by painting or writing in reaffirmation of my faith in life and its indomitable creativity. Crises spur me on, sooner or later. I write poetry and create art mostly in self-defence or in search of self-realization. The whole outside world impinges on my creative conscience with its political conflicts and cultural stagnation. I seek my way out by going into myself and re-emerging with what seems to me a way of saying I am.
From 1985 till this day, I found in Pune a whole range of visual images that came out on paper, wood, and canvas. I am a senior member of Friends of Visual Arts in Pune, an informal group of artists working in different media, in different styles, and using different techniques. We hold group shows in Pune and over the years we have established our presence. On my sixtieth birthday in 1998, Friends of Visual Arts held a special exhibition in my honour. Two years later, Bhaskar Hande curated my one-man show at the Solo Art Gallery at Churchgate in Mumbai. It was called Paintings of Bhakti.
My present show is the first presentation of my work by a reputed professional gallery. On view here are my works of the last twenty-three years. Friends who wish to remain backstage are behind this exhibition of works selected out of over a thousand drawings, sketches, and paintings that use a variety of media and surfaces: oil and/acrylic on canvas, canvas board, and paper; watercolour on paper; crayons and pastels on paper; marble dust, crushed stone, and epoxy resin on canvas; oil on wood; mixed media on canvas and paper; charcoal, pen, and pencil on paper—-and so on.
I am self-taught, self-driven, and seek self-realization through art.
However, I am not a self-proclaimed artist.