Gemma Parker reviews Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks

May 11, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Where We Swim

by Ingrid Horrocks

UQP

ISBN 9780702263408

Victoria University of Wellington Press, NZ

Reviewed by GEMMA PARKER

Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction, an exploratory memoir that combines travel narrative and nature writing with meditations on ecology, community and responsibility. These meditations revolve around a series of immersions in waters both local and foreign as Horrocks and her young family swim in their native Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as abroad, in Colombia, America, Australia and England. In each of these journeys, Horrocks interrogates and urges exploration of the world and of ourselves in order to begin to imagine other futures, other ways of being. Horrocks connects the waters in which they swim to deeper ecologies, and embeds her narrative in family and domestic life. This book navigates the author’s despair about a near-future that will be devastated by the effects of climate change, but also the importance of connection, community and courage. 

Where We Swim begins with a solitary morning swim at Mōkau at the mouth of the estuary in the early autumn of 2017. Horrocks quickly refutes some possible presumptions we might have about this swim, about her, about this journey, about the book – she is not a strong swimmer, this book is not about mastery, but also, this is not a straightforward travel narrative. The author explains that her original plan for the book was to write about a series of swims from Wellington to Auckland, framing her search as looking at why we swim, but that she abandoned this as too rigid, too traditional. “At some point in my solo swimming journey,” she writes, “I felt there was a problem with it. It sectioned off swimming and water, and ecology, from daily life. Swimming alone seemed not to get fully to the heart of things” (p. 5). And so rather than why we swim, Horrocks weaves for us an intimate journey as she interrogates not only the waters in which we swim, but also the we, and the where.

The book is structured in chapters that revolve around family and travel, and immersions and submersions in other ways of being – other climates, languages, cultures, societies and environments. These immersions and submersions are often risky, slippery and dangerous, as Horrocks finds with her first swim at Mōkau. But they are also necessary – and it is this element of necessary risk and necessary immersion that forms the heart of the book. 

After the initial swim, the book offers a series of vignettes and reflections from daily life: a visit to her parents and a swim at a local beach that hinges on a meditation on intergenerational tensions, ageing and illness, and a waterlog journal that revolves around the excitement of a whale in the local harbour. Horrocks offers a complex portrait of identity and personal responsibility, and the imperative the author feels to submerge herself in the environmental crisis – to put her body on the line, whilst embracing and interrogating the networks of knowledge and myth and the families and communities that sustain her.  

The book is at its richest when Horrocks depicts her young family abroad. Travelling overseas with children is often exhausting and confusing, and Horrocks immerses us in the discomfort and anxiety of her journeys whilst allowing the travel and the place to push her into new currents, new experiences, new ways of seeing.  In the Amazon, they are confronted by how little they know or understand about the journey they have undertaken. What they had assumed was a five-minute walk to their accommodation turns into a two-hour hike, without sunscreen, water or insect repellent. A chartered boat ride reveals itself to be a rickety canoe without life jackets on choppy waters. Horrocks captures these painful moments of anxiety in generous detail. Once the moments of perceived risk pass, the beauty of their surroundings floods in. The writing continues to switch like this with dizzying variety, between poetic description of the exotic locations they travel through, meditation and reflection on the ethics of adventure tourism, and Horrocks’ own navigation between allowing her children to experience the world as it is whilst trying to protect them from harm. 

Where We Swim is partly about questioning our roles and responsibilities to each other and to the planet, but it is also very much about our ability to bear witness and to be curious about other ways of being. The trip to Arcosanti in Arizona is part of that quest, and Horrocks takes the time to present a complex portrait of this experimental community in the desert. Horrocks and her husband stand in the gift shop waiting for their souvenir to be wrapped as the attendant, a member of the community, begins to tell them about the charges of sexual assault that have been levelled at Arcosanti’s visionary founder, the Italian architect Paolo Soleri. They listen carefully to this young man whilst keeping an eye on their twin daughters who are wandering around the gift shop, hoping to shield the girls from this complex testimony, whilst also committing to bearing witness.

The trip to Perth involves deeper investigation into Horrocks’ research into solastalgia, environmental catastrophe, precarity and ways of writing the apocalypse. After a return to the English coastline where she once lived and studied, the book returns to the local waters of Aotearoa New Zealand, to ageing and illness, the passage of time, what we love and what we stand to lose. In the final pages of the book Horrocks is on the shore, contemplating an evening swim, and finds herself reluctant to get into the water. She asks: “Why do this – why take off layers, casing, seal? Why make oneself? Why even consider exposing limbs and hair and goosebumped skin to the sea? Why hold out my breathing life – and that of my family – like this, when one could just have stayed at home?” and then goes on to conclude: “But it has turned out that I need this – this stripping down, this immersing. It feels necessary to keep attempting it. It doesn’t now feel possible to live a life of only footpaths beneath one’s feet” (p. 194).

One of the most satisfying elements of this book is the fact that the author finished it just as the pandemic began, in 2020, and yet the final section, ‘Coda’, feels completely integrated into the entire text, the inevitable conclusion to this meditation on community, environment, travel, family, responsibility, empathy and courage. Horrocks includes a variety of scholarly and literary sources throughout the book. Some are explored over the course of pages, while some seem inadequately presented, such as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and Pip Adam’s The New Animals, which are only tantalisingly introduced. The incorrect claim that Adelaide is built on the north side of the river Torrens (p. 118) has no impact on the quality of the writing, but it does undermine the reader’s faith in the accuracy of the details that underpin the work.

Nevertheless, Where We Swim is both brave and rebellious. It grapples with ecological despair, with the complex demands of identity and responsibility, and deals honestly with the dubious ethics of tourism and travel, with hypocrisy and contradiction. It is an honest attempt at exploring the world and waters beyond the comfortable limits of a life – an especially comfortable life, as Horrocks admits. There may be elements of this book that seem under-developed or incorrect, but the core project is admirable: the author is committed to her responsibility to immerse herself, and her readers, in waters despite the risk, the danger and the discomfort. 

GEMMA PARKER is an award-winning poet, teacher, PhD candidate and student member of the J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. Gemma is one of the co-founders and managing editors of the new Adelaide literary journal The Saltbush Review. She lives and works on Kaurna Country in Adelaide after many years abroad.

Matthew da Silva reviews Southerly

May 11, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Writing Through Fences: Archipelago of Letters

Southerly 79.2

Brandl & Schlesinger 

Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA

It was while reading this issue of Southerly 7.2 Writing Through Fences— Archipelago of Letters that news emerged of the Australian government’s decision to allow some refugees in its care to resettle in New Zealand and for others to be released from a Melbourne hotel. It was as though the entire country gave a sigh of relief, attacks on the government coming thick and fast. Then the question of why it hadn’t happened sooner was overshadowed by Britain’s government announcing that it would establish an offshore processing regime with Rwanda as the linchpin. The problem of inequality had raised its head once more as another country tried to come to terms with its own attractiveness. It seems like the flow of migrants is unstoppable. Politicians’ job is to deal with it. 

But they have help from the community, who are the ones, in the final result, who put them where they can make a difference. While lives – like those of the people featured in this issue of Southerly – had been damaged, the damage to Australia’s reputation remains unequal to the task of dimming its allure. 

On social media, people have become hardened around talking points. Emotions are raw and feeling runs high with every indication that it will continue to do so. But is art the same thing as politics? I often wonder these days because the lines seem to blur and I worry that we’ll forget the reasons why we need art.

A Slate tweet of 21 March (7.04am) contained a headline and a comment: “200 Priceless Paintings That Belong to Russia Are Stranded in Paris. Will France Give Them Back? Art isn’t politics, but what if Putin wrote the preface to the exhibition’s catalog?”

Art isn’t politics, indeed.

Or Jay Rafferty’s tweet at 6.31am the same morning that went, “Bukowski affected my work a lot when I was younger, I think “The Laughing Heart” was one of my formative poems. But I, as many of us, have wised up. No hesitation in saying he was a dickhead with a few good poems and that’s probably the best compliment I can give him.”

Poor Charles, removed from his pedestal after all these years.

Can you still be a poet without being Virtue’s exemplar? Can you implement policies designed to stop drownings at sea and still stay friends with half the electorate? And what do we really want from art? Don’t we want it to answer questions for which conventional responses cannot serve? Questions that journalism, for example, cannot answer. What sorts of questions? Questions about that thing we easily label as the “soul” or those about the less easily described characteristics of a universe, the nature of which appears intent on releasing its last secrets slowly? Where, to posit the biggest one of all, did it all start?

Are poets to be limited, like 18th century’s Alexander Pope, to things pertaining to humanity, or do we risk considering other possibilities? Pope, for his part, didn’t accurately anticipate the liberation that sat on his doorstep but we seem to think we can see the future.

On the other hand I think about the possibility that Southerly’s appearance at this time (issue 79.2 came out last year) presumed a change of policy by Morrison and his colleagues. Are the publication and the refugee resettlement announcement somehow linked? When you read in this magazine accompanying material that illustrates the depth of the problem facing the government you come across evidence why their switch might be advised. A passion from such a deep reserve coming so close to the surface – printed on paper and distributed by mail to thousands of letterboxes – must give the authorities pause. 

Discussions about Aboriginal sovereignty stand as a rebuke to politicians of most stripes. While the works featured in this issue of Southerly are not all of equal quality, this reviewer welcomes conversations, even those which are subversive. Hatred cannot be allowed to overcome collegiality, otherwise we’d all be invading others’ households without even knocking on the door, putting our feet up on the coffee table and asking rent for what isn’t ours. Like some son of the Vikings. 

We have to respect diversity and its rules. Diversity is in fact a strength, and the ability to entertain multiple solutions to pressing problems is a hallmark of pluralistic democracy. The mainstream must always tolerate the margins.

Each of us has a voice. The voices you hear if you read this issue of Southerly are however normally silenced, and this is part of the beauty of this issue, curated by former detainees Hani Abdile, Behrouz Boochani, translator Omid Tofighian and refugee activist Janet Galbraith. Even the editorial voice is worth reading, though it’s (hopefully) not the reason why you’d buy the magazine. Editors must be wary of attempting to train reluctant voices into a chorus or of conscripting a contributor to approve a view they didn’t themselves hold. Melissa Lucashenko walks this balance valiantly.     

I found pleasure in reading Hani Abdile’s ‘Oooh Old Friends’ though I couldn’t work out who the “friend” was, the poem skirting round the outside of names playfully. I think it was this aspect of the poem, which is regardless quite short, that drew me to it. Also short and elliptical is Mohamad Haghighi’s ‘Rainbow’ where the thing or person the poem is addressed to slips out of the reader’s view like a dream upon waking.

Sabaa’s ‘When?’ sits on more familiar territory (“When will I be free from detention? When will I see life outside the fence?”) but pinpoints the essential problem faced by legislators and advocates alike (“When will my country become a better place to live?”). There are occasional glimpses of the same ideas elsewhere, as in M.D. Imran’s ‘Lifelines’, which contains anecdotal evidence of the kinds of mistreatment causing refugees to go overseas to live. Imran is originally from Myanmar but now lives in Chicago, in the United States, following a period in exile in detention funded by the Australian taxpayer. 

The depth of feeling that animates his journalism finds echoes elsewhere in the volume, for example in Sad Proof’s ‘I Love You’ where the country known as Australia (which the editors are careful to characterise as stolen land) is posited as finding its lover in the refugee (“I want to tell you I love you, Australia”) who will fight for its rights “and not give a chance to make [it] poor like my country”. Reading poems like this person’s made me think of the way that deaths at sea have played out in the media, especially on television, which brings me to considering the ways that politicians on both sides have sought to formulate refugee policy. 

But there is little acknowledgement of these issues in the collection. Taking a leaf out of the playbook of more progressive elements of the commentariat, ‘Which Way to Go Back?’ asks Farhad Shah, and reading his poem you can understand a little more of the refugee experience. Less aggressive than some of the work in the book, ‘Which Way to Go Back?’ contains worlds and presents the comfortable reader – the sort of person who buys Southerly, who even bothers with poetry in the first place – with additional puzzles. 

Its way of creating a dialogue made resonances with other poems, as though it were a familiar trope. It would be refreshing to think that the book was able to set up a dialogue, and perhaps this stage has already been reached.

The best poems in this book, like Abdul Samad Haidiri’s ‘Home – Where Else to Go?’ contain more than just a complaint, though always there is the bitterness of the outsider to flavour the work. In such poems you get to see something essential about the species, for having a home is an essential part of being human, in fact not only animals but even plants favour certain types of habitat over others, or even can only survive under certain conditions.

Adaptation is part of the refugee’s game plan however, as we see in Mabsud Masan’s ‘To Corrupt the System Is to Have Compassion’ which uses elements of Pidgin in a creole designed to give a taste of life on Manus Island. It’s a bit rebarbative but entirely comprehensible, our discomfort – it would be strange to eliminate all traces of the voyage – enhancing the experience of reading the journalism. A short piece by notable advocate Behrouz Boochani demonstrates this writer’s ability to pack a punch into a smaller space.

Farhad Bandesh (with Melita Luck) uses poetic language that draws heavily on the natural world to create a picture of the refugee experience that adds lustre to the whole. It’s as though because the desire for the goal is so complete there are few ways to communicate the depth of feeling that constitutes reality for someone in his position. Absolute joy, complete abandon. Hatred, fear. Like in a Hollywood gangster movie, or some rich concoction where the fate of civilisation rests in the hands on a renegade hero, and the only way to secure it is through extreme violence, we’re able with these poems to get down to essentials. But the experience is no less rich for the simplification that takes place. As in Shiharan Ganeshan’s gentle story (short fiction rare in the book) titled ‘Flute’, which is a kind of fable about class, art, meaning, and fate that is laced, as in an old Arabian-night story, with magic and with its own brand of suppressed yearning. 

I wish that every person who wanted to come to this country had easy passage, and in fact on a blog years ago suggested opening up a refugee processing centre in Jakarta. Unfortunately I probably lack requisite experience and insight and can only write meagre reviews of wonderful books of poetry and prose – with a few delightful artworks added for good measure – but if I can encourage one person to read this issue of Southerly I’ll be happy.

MATTHEW da SILVA was born in Brighton, Victoria, and grew up in Sydney. He has Bachelor of Arts and Master of Media Practice degrees from the University of Sydney and lived for just under a decade in Tokyo. He has two adult children and lives in Sydney.

Winnie Dunn reviews The Kindness of Birds by Merlinda Bobis

March 3, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

The Pigeons Are Taking Over: The Kindness of Birds

by Merlinda Bobis

ISBN 9781925950304

Spinifex Press

Reviewed by WINNIE DUNN

Ibis

The beloved bin chicken is always feeding off scraps of bread whenever I walk to Fairfield station. Because it is a sin to throw away the sacredness of bread, those leftovers become a well-meaning gesture shared by members of the south-west Sydney community. I clutched my copy of The Kindness of Birds (Spinifex, 2021), a short story collection by Merlinda Bobis, as I watched the ibises peck peacefully between pigeons for crumbs. 

Short stories are like ibises. Ibises are displaced from their homes due to global warming yet they still choose to stay in large groups and consistently work towards common goals. Likewise, short stories are in themselves self-contained. But when interconnected, their morals, moments and memories take over time and space in a deliberate way for the reader. Short stories aggregate like a flock (Bobis’ collection has 14 individual stories) and yet are shunted to the margins when one thinks of books (short story collections are the least sold or noticed in our industry). 

It is the image of the ibises gathering together which I carried into my reading of Bobis’ latest work. Her collection is a series of small gestures, revelation of cultures and feathered symbolism that make up the book’s overall theme – kindness and its many forms in the face of adversity. 

Pigeon

The title of this review takes inspiration from Vietnamese-Australian writer, Shirley Le. It was her narrator’s opening line in our co-written play, Sex, Drugs & Pork Rolls (UTP, 2021). Used as a symbol for British colonialism, the pigeons flock at the narrator’s Yagoona home window, leaving  dirty marks on the glass. Yet, the pigeon is remarked by the narrator’s mother as “much nicer” than the native magpie – the magpie in this sense being used as a symbol for First Nations people’s sovereignty, which was never ceded. As migrant settlers who are writers, it is a constant privilege to know how best to respect this sovereignty, when and where to tell our own stories, and when we are taking up too much space. 

In this way, Bobis acknowledged and paid respect to First Nations people’s sovereignty throughout her collection. The stories ‘Candido’s Revolution’ and ‘My Tender Tender’ especially speak to the complex history of colonialism, migration and sovereignty on this continent. 

It is the singing of a folksong, reimagined by a Filipinx poet named Remy, that stays with me as I read ‘Candido’s Revolution’. An infamous Manilaman pearl diver hums from atop a tree, “Dandansoy bayaan ta icao” (p54), capturing the attention of Mary (1893 Australia would simply refer to her as “a native woman”). Without a shared language between them besides the complimentary phrase, “Can-do good song” (p55) they still look at each other through the trees. The initial allure they shared is eventually cut short by racist laws and the call for a revolution in the Philippines. For The Kindness of Birds, this interaction marks the historical beginning of inter-cultural dialogue between First Nations people and Filipinx migrants – a connection that is often left unrecognised. 

This connection continues in the short story, ‘My Tender Tender’. One of the main characters Uncle Freddy Corpus, swears on the Bible when he tells Nenita of their shared Asian ancestry – she Filipina and he Filipino and Yuwuru. After telling stories to Nenita of miraculous feats of diving to survive the perils of colonialism, Uncle Freddy Corpus eventually “takes out various memorabilia from [a] satchel. He opens one: it’s a copy of a marriage certificate of his Filipino grandfather Servo Corpus Felipe and Yawuru grandmother Maria Emma Ngobing. She’s speechless, honoured […] touched by this gesture affirming their Philippine connection.” (p82) In this way, Uncle Freddy and Nenita’s intercultural dialogue shows how us settlers should act as we walk on stolen lands – nothing but intent listeners, sharing only when asked and only when it will foster healing. 

Colonialism would have us all believe that there are only pigeons at the centre of history, Bobis’ writing shows us how wrong that is. 

Common mynah

In Tongan culture, an omen of death arrives in the form of a bird entering our houses. One summer, a common mynah flew into the open doors of the top-storey balcony and flittered in circles on the living room ceiling. Even with the doors wide open, the petite brown blur still struggled to find the exit again. ‘Shoo-shoo-shoo!’ my aunty Lahi pleaded, her doughy belly rolling as she battered a straw broom above her head, hitting the plastic chandelier as she did so. ‘Fuck!’ Lahi swore, sweat dripping from her short strands of brown-black hair and into her freckled and frumpled face. Hearing someone swear, (that someone being technically my mother in Tongan culture), made me stifle a giggle. The mynah gave a series of squeaks before finally finding the open balcony. I watched as its fluffed mass disappeared over the streets of Mt Druitt. 

Within the short story ‘When the Crow Turns White’, a half-dead bird is carried into parliament injured from the hailstorm raging outside. Two cleaners of Filipinx heritage, Orla and Corazon, wrap the crow in white cloth remarking, “Climate change is scary.” (p14) Throughout their debates in the empty chamber rooms about legislations, the constant arguing of old white men and the winds of change with the first Aboriginal woman elected into the house of representatives, Corazon holds a secret. She is a descendant of crows, a unique culture connection that makes her a born healer. From acts of miracles long ago, she still has memorised the chant, “Ilayog, ilayog ang ilo sa bagà. Ilayog, ilayog ang sakit ni padabà. Fly, fly away the poison in the lungs. Fly, fly away the pain of the beloved!” (p20)

So what happened when the mynah visited us? My grandmother died a week later from a heart attack. 

And what happened when the crow flew up in a bundle of white cloth within our parliament? A series of “bipartisan”, “polite” and “caring” (p25) MPs across the political spectrum seemingly overnight. 

Why? Only the birds know.

Bat

The mammal (not a bird) that started COVID (racists love to use this as an excuse to call east and south-east Asian people “dirty”). The pandemic is threaded throughout Bobis’ short story collection – a grandmother and grandson are quarantining in an apartment together after returning from a trip to the Philippines (‘Grandma Owl’), a lover’s well-meaning yet blasé attitude towards mask-wearing (‘My Love, My Nerūsē’) and a nurse holding a pained patient’s hand even as it went against protocol (‘Angels’). It is these small gestures, hidden between dialogue, that readers should pay close attention to when reading The Kindness of Birds. Bobis’ work on the subject reveals it was not COVID that reshaped our society but rather all the small acts of kindness individuals chose in order to look after each other. 

Pelican

The only school assignment my father ever helped me with was a cardboard presentation about pelicans I did in Year 2. We printed out blurry Google images of the impossibly large white birds and glued them (using a mixture of flour and water) onto purple cardboard we bought at the Plumpton Newsagency for two bucks. 

My favourite story in Bobis’ collection is ‘My Father’s Australia’. Nenita (a recurring character), stares at the tailored suit she had once bought for her father. The suit, a pasalubong (homecoming gift), was given to her father with the intention that he would wear it when he took his first steps in Australia. In its navy hues, Nenita remembers how her father lived “on tilted earth” (p91) at the base of volcano in Legazpi, fixing people’s aircons in order to provide a better future for his children. In the suit, Nenita hears the memory of her father reciting in English, “To Oz, to Oz”(p92) for a trip that would never eventuate. 

The love between Nenita and her dad reminds me of the only time in my childhood when my father was not existing in survival mode (being a Tongan man with eight children would do that). When we spoke of pelicans, he seemingly had all the time in the world for me as we took our first steps in my education together. ‘To uni, to uni,’ my father, who dropped out of Year 12, would remind me after each school year ended. 

In this way, ‘My Father’s Australia’ is the standout of the collection. 

Blue-and-gold macaw

It was only when I moved to Fairfield in south-west Sydney that I saw the native parrot of South America. The suburb is home to a small yet strong Latinx Australian community. But it still didn’t make sense to me how the blue-feathered bird the size of a small television was caged away in a dilapidated second-storey balcony. 

What I found the most striking about Bobis’ writing, was how effortlessly she was able to reflect the true diversity of Australia without it ever feeling like it was forced or there simply for the sake of it. A woman Nenita passes by when swimming at the beach yells out “Jidoo!” (p222), Grandma Lou’s Chilean neighbour Matilda is the only person that calls Lou by her real name “Luningning” and reminds readers that as people of colour we’re always being interrogated for our skin, our accent and our names (p174). Nenita with her Latvian partner, who is always leaving her sweet notes like, “Gone walking. ♥” (p138) – a gesture that makes all the difference when choosing to grow old with someone. All realistic depictions of the inter-cultural connections we all share with neighbours, friends and even family. 

Halfway through my reading, I took a break and went outside onto my own second-storey balcony. I stared at the yellow underside of the parrot. Still wondering why on Earth a giant South American bird was flapping its wings with the sound echoing off the brick and concrete of endless rundown apartments. Laughing as I realised I was standing beside my own cultural marker – a potted frangipani tree.  

Rainbow lorikeet 

To me, the lorikeet is the kindest bird there is. Eternally squawking in bushes as if laughing. Eating with such fever and frenzy because they’re so cheerful that they hardly notice what is in their beaks. Darting in pairs across busy streets. Flocking in the afternoon sky so fast they become little black spots, dotting the daytime like stars. From Orla and Corazon, Lou and Matilda, Ella and Nenita and finally Remy and Belen – it was the sacred sisterhood of the women characters Bobis’ paired together that carried this collection. Remy put it perfectly in ‘The Air of The Times’ when she penned in poem: 

“So enter, sister,
without gun or armour,
still magnificent.” (p52) 

If the ibis is what I took into my reading of The Kindness of Birds, the Rainbow lorikeet is what I took away from it, long after I had turned the last page.

WINNIE DUNN is the General Manager of Western Sydney based literacy movement, Sweatshop. She is a writer of Tongan descent from Mount Druitt and holds a Bachelor of Arts from Western Sydney University. Winnie’s work has been published in the Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, SBS Voices, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Red Room Poetry and Cordite. She is the editor of several critically acclaimed anthologies, and currently working on her debut novel as the recipient of a CAL Ignite grant.

Claire Qu reviews Love & Virtue by Diana Reid

March 2, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Love & Virtue

By Diana Reid

ISBN 9781761150111

Ultimo Press

Reviewed by CLAIRE QU

The prim and vaguely Austenian title of Diana Reid’s debut novel offers a tongue-in-cheek self-description consistent with the book’s plentiful irony. Many labels could be applied to it: campus novel, bildungsroman, #MeToo novel, story of contemporary female friendship. Perhaps that is why it is so constantly self-aware, so unremitting in its parody of all the stock characters – the insecure freshmen, urbane professors, greasy suitors, and smugly ‘liberated’ women – that people these genres. It isn’t satire alone which saves Reid’s book from vanishing into the slew of Millennial Novels however; crucially, it also has heart. Though no sweeping epic or philosophical heavyweight, Love & Virtue is winning, clever, and self-deprecating.

The novel captures the first year of Michaela’s university life among elite Sydney high school graduates. At its frothy beginning, I’ll admit I shrank from what seemed a somewhat stale montage: house-parties, drunkenness, and superficial friendships. Modern social alienation, that increasingly common theme, crops up abundantly at the start of Love & Virtue, in wry narratorial observations. ‘Alcohol was useful for making friends,’ Michaela notes, attractive, ‘liquid-limbed’ friends who are ‘intelligent enough to realise that nothing is sexier to a young and fragile man than not understanding what he is saying’ (14, 17). The sheer, drug-addled stupidity of O-week hijinks is vividly evoked, along with a brutal projection of where it all too often leads: these bright young things ‘will grow up to work in banks, and then cheat on their wives with their secretaries, and have a panic attack when they realise they don’t have an inner life’ (48). Even throughout the scenes of fun, Reid peppers reminders of class privilege and ubiquitous sexism, a sweet-and-sour formula that could have rendered the novel dryly moralistic were it not for the heady and complex female relationship blooming at its centre.

Eve Shaw is the archetypal ‘frenemy’, and the whole novel is framed by her ambivalent friendship with Michaela. This fact alone merits praise in a world where significant literary relationships between women, while on the increase, are still a rarity. More importantly, the individual characters of Eve and Michaela, as well as their tense chemistry, are realised with rare charisma and authenticity. ‘[I]n spite of everything,’ confesses the latter of the former, ‘I’m still a bit in love with her’ (2) – and so am I. Despite being in many ways a caricature of the hypocritically ‘woke’ undergraduate, with her performances of selfless erudition and willingness to mine painful situations for ‘broader social benefit’ (292), Eve is eminently seductive. Her warmth and physicality permeate the novel, and her flashes of humour, generosity, and infuriating egotism are the rhythm the plot responds to. Michaela’s regard for Eve is, for me, one of the most unexpectedly likeable things about Love & Virtue. For, though we recognise a hollowness to Eve in the importance she attaches to being ‘both a person and an idea of a person’ (10), her own belief in ideals of aesthetics and ethics (also the name of a subject she takes) feels genuine. And if Michaela, cynical with our times, doesn’t appreciate Wildean self-invention, at least readers may.

It is Eve, too, who stands in the shadow of the novel’s twin dramatic centres, plotlines which at first appear to gravitate around two men. In this triangle of desire, triumph, and irritation lies Reid’s greatest achievement. Turning the marriage plot on its head, she presents instead a fiercely competitive homosociality between Eve and Michaela in light of which heterosexual romantic entanglements seem contingent. Through Michaela’s messy sexual encounter with a peer and her developing relationship with an older man, Reid explores issues of consent and power imbalances with unusual attention to the finer shades of guilt, pride, self-consciousness, and shame. Eve’s part in these episodes further refines the book’s nuanced discussion of consent, and it is her secondhand involvement in Michaela’s sex life which makes Love & Virtue’s treatment of the topic so fresh and believable. In the one case, Michaela’s anticipation of her friend’s shock and envy at being ‘if not beaten, then at least passed over’ (169) is deliciously vitriolic; in the other, Eve’s betrayal takes the words out of Michaela’s mouth, leaving her to mourn ‘[her] own version of events’ (294).

Personal crises, political and philosophical musings, and the affected gloss of first-year banter – Reid handles all these in unpretentious prose which warms from flippancy to eloquence as Michaela forges deeper emotional connections. The dialogue, in particular, is a stand-out, treading the line between stiffness and excessive glibness admirably. Reid’s experience with writing for theatre shows in the remarkable inflections of intimacy and attitude that she is able to give with conversation alone. It is also to this deftness with dialogue that we owe the sympathetic, three-dimensional image of Michaela; readers experience her wit, worldliness, generosity, insecurity, and occasional pettiness through her conversations with others, rather than learning of them by way of clumsy self-description. 

Reid has cited Donna Tartt’s classic campus novel, The Secret History, as a major inspiration for Love & Virtue, an influence perceptible in the aura of dark drama surrounding the mutually vengeful relationship between Michaela and Eve. Reid’s novel doesn’t quite achieve the symmetry between academic discussions and the surrounding plot so successful in The Secret History. An exchange between Michaela and her Philosophy professor hints at a theoretical understructure to the book’s critique of campus culture:

‘So Michaela, from where are we deriving moral knowledge in week ten, semester one?’                ‘I want to say “social constructs”, but that depresses me.’ (117)

The discussion stops there, curtailing the book’s generic potential for a blend of the abstract and the concrete. Excepting this minor shortcoming, however, Love & Virtue is to be lauded for its difference from its model. Reid has created her own kind of campus novel, candid and irreverent – a far cry from earnest dark academia stylings. At once typically Australian, with its Bondi panoramas and unsophisticated college party scenes, and crushingly universal in its dissection of institutionalised sexism, class privilege, and new adult identity formation, Love & Virtue is a poised debut offering. Reid’s novel is a timely reflection on the manifold ways in which the #MeToo movement has failed and a lively intervention in the ranks of increasingly apathetic Millennial fiction – and most importantly, it’s a really fun read. 

—

Cited:

Reid, Diana. Love & Virtue. Ultimo Press, 2021.
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. Penguin, 1993.

CLAIRE QU recently graduated from an honour’s degree in English at the University of Melbourne and is looking forward to continuing her studies overseas. Her interests include the Gothic, ecocriticism, and women’s writing, topics she hopes to explore in her postgraduate thesis. 

Dave Clark reviews Born Into This by Adam Thompson

February 19, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Born Into This

by Adam Thompson

ISBN 9780702263118

UQP

Reviewed by DAVE CLARK

As a technique pioneered and refined over the past hundred years, keyhole surgery involves a surgeon making small incisions in the skin, so tiny that at times it is hard to tell afterwards that something significant has taken place beneath the surface of the patient. It is a method used to diagnose health conditions, as well as to begin treating them.

From the first short story in Born Into This by Adam Thompson[i], I felt that I was in seasoned, steady hands. As the stories unfolded, each one was a penned incision, surgical and precise, cutting beneath the surface, diagnosing the ongoing impacts of colonisation/invasion. The writing within these sixteen short stories deftly slides beyond the synapses and impacts the heart.

I was surprised to learn that this was Thompson’s debut book. I was not surprised to see that this collection was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Queensland Literary Awards 2021, the Age Fiction Book of the Year 2021 and the USQ Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection. If his name isn’t familiar in your writing and reading circles, that will change once you get hold of his work.

Adam Thompson is an Aboriginal (pakana) writer from Launceston. He has worked for almost twenty years in roles caring for Lutruwita (Tasmania) Country and preserving culture and heritage. His passion for these endeavours clearly influences his writing and themes. His writing career has been gathering momentum over the last five years, with some of his short stories being recognised with writers’ festival awards. Born Into This is his first full collection of short fiction.

The sixteen stories in this book traverse across Tasmania, taking place on tiny islands, beaches, the streets of Launceston, in forests, at a funeral, in a school and a pub and suburban houses. Tasmania is a part of Australia not often captured in contemporary fiction. It is a refreshing insight into an often-overlooked region.

The characters within his book are blistering and humorous, compassionately created. Many of the characters are engaging enough to justify an entire book. The stories are fierce and political, leading to a collection that sizzles. It confronts. It takes tropes and myths and shreds them in an accomplished manner. It mixes world-class writing with his unique take on each character’s inner world. This is contemporary Australian fiction at its most impacting, sitting comfortably alongside the works of Tara June Winch, Melissa Lucashenko and the poetry of Evelyn Araluen.

Thematically, Thompson looks intently into the ongoing impacts of colonisation in current day Tasmania. As Noongar author Claire G. Coleman writes about in her recent book, Lies Damned Lies, colonisation/invasion in Australia was not an event. It’s ongoing.[ii] Any current writing about it needs to acknowledge this and challenge the power, privilege, and the very Anglo understandings of history. Thompson doesn’t tiptoe around this. The elephants in the room are pointed at and prodded. He does it with clever turns of narrative that lead the reader to see the world in personal ways that whiter parts of Australia can often turn a blind eye to.

For example, the second story, ‘Honey,’ looks at the commodification of language and how Aboriginal culture matters only to some when it can generate them a buck. The fourth story ‘Invasion Day’ takes places during a protest and has the line,

‘Looming above, like a love sonnet to colonisation, stood the sandstone monstrosity of Parliament House’ (p49).

Stories like ‘Jack’s Island,’ ‘Black Eye’ and ‘Time and Tide’ stride into the devastating, way-of-life-altering impact that climate change is having on the characters’ connection to Country. ‘Descendent’ wrestles with who gets to decide Indigenous identity and the persistent myth that Indigenous people in Tasmania died out with Truganini. The story seems to be saying that we were invaded, but not erased. Still here.

The experience of characters as minorities in their region often see them facing racism. As someone who has lived in Alice Springs (Mparntwe) for twelve years, I see and hear many acts of racism towards Arrernte people most days. Some of the acts are personal. Some are in way they are policed and treated in court or in the local shops, the societal structures that continue to try to kick them down to the bottom rung. It’s horrible to witness people and their families being targeted, based solely on their skin colour and culture. Those of us who are privileged will never fully understand what it is like and just how resilient people are living in the face of such ongoing injustice.

Acts of racism – the ‘in your face’ versions, the far-reaching political decisions, the removal of agency and the subtler, pervasive microaggressions – are shown and felt in many of the characters’ stories of Thompson’s book. The story ‘Sonny,’ about a white man who yells out ‘Run, Darky, run,’ (p101) to his friend on the footy field, sat heavy in my gut for days, sounding all-too familiar to instances around town.

It is deeply confronting – and necessarily so – to see how explicit and implicit forms of racism are still so prevalent. If, as a white reader of this book, we don’t feel sick and embarrassed and angry by Australia’s past and present, then we aren’t hearing the beating heart of this collection.

Tokenistic and paternalistic responses to colonisation/invasion are on display in these stories. ‘The Blackfellas From Here’ bitingly looks at the shallowness of acknowledgement of whose land it is, with Kat challenging James to hand over the deed to his house. It asks the question of what a deep acknowledgement of the past and present would look like. It shows that current political responses are still largely like acknowledging that someone has a flat tyre, but then just walking on by and doing nothing about it. Acknowledgement must be more than a cursory nod towards someone’s experience.

As a whole collection, there are many standout stories, including ‘Kite’ and ‘Born Into This’ to go with the ones already mentioned. On both the first and second readings of the collection, I felt however that the power of the book drops away in two of the final stories. As their own entities, ‘Time and Tide’ and ‘Morpork’ would find happy homes in many publications. In contributing to the overall theme though, it felt that these lingered in comparison to the crackling nature of the rest of it.

One subject that crops up regularly in the book is around survival. An example of this is the character Kara, secretly planting young eucalypt trees in areas that have been hacked away by forestry and mining companies. She contemplates this as she tends to the trees,

‘Natural survivors, like her own family, born into a hostile world and expected to thrive’ (p40).

Plants survive Tasmania’s climate as well as the brutality and the upheaval of exploitative human damage. These delicate pictures of flora and fauna are placed in many of Thompson’s stories, alongside their human equivalents. They are beautiful and telling reminders of people and culture that are deep-rooted, living and breathing in the present. Finding ways to survive, and thrive, even amidst significant change, Thompson weaves in his theme of hope. The reader is not left depressed, but more so, impressed upon: that there is horror in this country. And there is hope.

Several websites and interviews refer to Adam Thompson as an emerging writer. With a book this good, with prose and dialogue this splendid, ’emerging’ seems to be a misguided stamp. With Born Into This, he has well-and-truly added his works to the strongest writers in Australian contemporary fiction. To tackle content as heavy as the themes of racism and survival, and to do so elegantly and originally, is a remarkable achievement.

Notes:

[i] Thompson, Adam 2021, Born Into This, University of Queensland Press, Australia.
[ii] Coleman, Claire G 2021, Lies Damned Lies, Ultimo Press, NSW.

DAVE CLARK is a writer-poet with CFS who lives in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). He works as a counsellor and enjoys reading, photography and giving voice to quieter stories. His works have been published in Mascara, Imprint, Pure Slush Books, Adelaide Lit, Quillopia, Slippage Lit, Melbourne Culture Corner and Right Now. Twitter @DaveClarkWriter

H.C. Gildfind reviews Everything, all at Once

January 15, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Everything, all at Once

Ultimo Press

Sydney, 2021

ISBN 9781761150173

Reviewed by H.C. GILFIND

Everything, all at Once presents fiction and poetry from the ‘thirty writers under thirty’ who won the inaugural Ultimo prize in 2021. This prize asked entrants to explore the theme of ‘identity’—a pertinent choice, considering how central and contested particular identities (and the notion of identity itself) have become in cultural and political conversations. This theme is also apt, of course, for a collection that offers young people a stepping-stone in their journey to ‘come of age’ both as individuals and as professional writers. 

Each piece in this collection is preceded by its author’s biography as well as (with a few exceptions) a photo. This format is striking, not only because of George Saad’s vibrant design, but because authorial identity is usually presented by publishers in a more understated, post-textual manner. Whilst this format surely reflects the publisher’s desire to celebrate these writers alongside their writing, this foregrounding of authorial identity might also be intended to provoke readers to question how they read. Does writing on the theme of identity oblige an author to disclose (aspects of) their own? Should fiction and poetry be read in relation to an author’s biographical information? Does such information influence intra- and inter-textual interpretations? Or does a reader’s awareness of such information dissipate once they are immersed in a worded-world? 

With its central concern about the increasingly ‘performative’ nature of society, Seth Robinson’s ‘Watch me’ is a fitting story to open this collection. This story reveals a dystopian world where everyone is driven to perform their selves for ‘all-important Likes and LOLs’ (13)—so much so that they risk self-erasure. Is this the drum-beat to our lives, now: ‘Watch, watch, watch me’ (16)? Is our prime goal, now, to worship—or become—a ‘LED deity’ (16)? Is this ephemeral identity all that the world has left to offer young people? This story powerfully evokes the pain, paralysis and yearning that consumes ordinary people as they see human life and emotion commodified (or ignored) by increasingly pervasive—creepily invisible—techno-capitalist powers. 

Georgia Rose Phillips’ ‘New Balance’ is a witty and poignant reflection on the nature of love in this performative landscape. The narrator actively seeks a psychologist who will assist—rather than stop—her self-mutilating behaviour. She likes this psychologist who allows her to indulge in ‘vicarious entanglement’ (112) with her ex’s new life, which is painted with digital ‘spatters of self’ (110) online. Instead of trying to fix or improve her, this psychologist’s novel therapy is to accept the narrator as she is. Being oneself is a radical act in this story—as it is across the collection. 

Amelia Zhou’s ‘Bright’ tells the surreal tale of a woman who shuns public performance altogether. In a scorched world, where people are spot-lit by a never-setting sun, the protagonist slathers herself in sunscreen behind drawn curtains. She peeks out at her neighbours’ ‘durational performance’ (75) which is full of laughter, talk, play and endless, mindless barbequing (of food and themselves). Watching them, she feels ‘hungry and thirsty’ (74) and envious of their casual conspicuousness: such ‘visibility’ (72) is denied her, and she feels herself disappearing into an unwitnessed purposelessness. Is performance—in and for the sight of others—the only way to exist in this world? 

Charlotte Snedden’s story presents a woman who actively seeks overt performance. In a theatre group, where her role is explicitly scripted and choreographed, her self-splitting anxiety disappears and she can return her self to her body: momentarily, she escapes her ‘Schrödinger’s mental health crisis,’ where she is present and absent all at once (82). Amy Duong’s teenage protagonist also yearns for clearly scripted roles, seeking them in the theatre of work where she is directed by the ‘calm authority’ (65) of men: ‘Dennis had assigned her a new identity… and in that mould, she had finally been made real’ (62). Meanwhile, Matilda Howard’s protagonist explores the roles played in the traditionally feminine theatre of a wedding. Here, a young woman observes people jangling with the ‘shadow-bones’ (126) left by barely-masked pain and disappointment. By the end of the day—having endured the event’s swirls of fear, bullying, and status-anxiety—she can hardly remember her own name.

Vivien Heng’s ‘Now Only Colour Lives’ is a tightly-crafted story of a girl who speaks to the persistent ghosts of family. Like a number of pieces in the collection, this story shows a young person struggling to bear the ‘blood-soaked memories’ (22) that are inherited across generations: ‘… all that screaming, the kind that could make the stars blink… My childhood was no place for a child, so I was born old’ (25). The calm poetic language of this piece is tensely juxtaposed against the ‘raging heart’ (24) of its narrator, effectively evoking the self-repression that enables an already-wounded person to survive a country that might one day accept them—if they bleed out their Colour (27). 

Themes of race, migration and colonialism are also—and especially—present in the collection’s poetry. Dženana Vucic’s ‘Povratak/Return’ is an elegantly crafted sequence that tracks the shifting seasons of a daughter’s reunion with her father in a war-battered Bosnia, subtly exploring the ‘matryoshka reveal’ (138) of (re)learning how to relate to family and homeland alike. Gavin Yuan Gao’s poem forces readers to imagine being a ‘yellow-peril soul’ (144) in Covid times, when being Chinese in Australia suddenly means having ‘… an origin story no one wants / to hear.’ In this context, individuals suddenly represent both ‘an entire land’ (145) and a ‘devil who’s out spreading / his sick of sin’ (144). Alice Bellette’s ‘Blak Tourmaline’ addresses racism and colonialism with forceful refrains and pointed use of the second person: ‘i am here because i survived. / people like you don’t want me to survive’ (155). The concluding lines of her poem (‘it is not about me / it is about country,’ 165) resonate powerfully with a phrase in Gurmeet Kaur’s poetic dissection of the good migrant’s plight: ‘… This is not about / me. This is about you projecting onto me’ (178). All of these writers explore similar themes, but in very different ways and across very different contexts.

Ismene Panaretos’ story, ‘A Flake,’ also looks at how cultural and generational differences collide. ‘There’s no honesty in adulthood’ (94) the narrator laments, and reflects upon the banality of their friends’ Instagrammed lives. In this world, where gender reveal parties have become a norm, a person might become a ‘small time scandal’ (97) just for being who they are: ‘I feel like I will split in two’ (98). This story shows, however, that differences can disappear when people are most vulnerable: do we need to understand each other, to care about each other? Sebastian Winter’s poem also explores how questions of sex and gender can—or cannot—bridge intergenerational divides. In this poem, the transgender narrator’s grandmother warns them that their hormones will ‘berrate’ (185) them. The narrator labours to remain unaffected by the woman’s relentless ‘inquisition’ (185), though refuses to ‘justify’ how their ‘heart loves’ (184), and quietly decides that, in a world built from pink and blue, ‘purple will do’ (185). Franklyn Hudson’s ‘They’ painfully shows how the most brutal violation of a person’s bodily autonomy can forever change that body’s meaning: ‘My breasts are the worst part of me. / When I look at them I can’t ever stop seeing him…’ (203). The reader hopes, alongside these narrators, that they can find what they yearn for: a place in this world to ‘exist in’ (207).

The stories and poems mentioned here do not fully convey the variety of concerns and literary styles this collection offers, and readers will also discover skilful, sharply-observed and sensitive writing by Amy Taylor, Andy Kovacic, Jamaya Plackowski, Cassandra-Elli Yiannacou, Natasha Hertanto, Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn, Madeleine Gray, Robert Juan Kennard, Cherie Baird, Jennifer Nguyen, Shane Scriven, Aishah Maryam David, Josie/Jocelyn Deane, Coco Stallman and Lora Subotic. Together, these authors’ voices unite to make Everything, all at once a compelling polyphonic investigation of how ‘identity is everything and nothing’ (Quanita, 191) in a world whose seductions and coercions are often as ambiguous as they are utterly overwhelming. 

Information about the Ultimo prize can be found here:  https://www.ultimopress.com.au/ultimo-prize

H.C. GILDFIND is the author of Born Sleeping (Miami University Press, 2021) and The Worry Front (Margaret River Press, 2018). hcgildfind.com/@ltercation

Lesh Karan reviews Eurydice Speaks by Claire Gaskin

January 15, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments

Eurydice Speaks 

by Claire Gaskin

ISBN: 9780648848127 ] 

Hunter Publishers

Reviewed by LESH KARAN

I feather my empty rest with writing
I gave up relationships to right it
Orpheus didn’t have to make that choice

(sonnet 12)

When I read Eurydice Speaks, what struck me the most (among many other things) was voice, and how it plays out – skilfully – on so many levels. From the outset, there’s the word ‘speaks’ in the title of only two words – two words with so much power (which I didn’t realise until deep into the collection). But, first, I want to delve into Claire Gaskin’s writing style – her voice –  and how she dismantles and wields language to evoke emotion.

Not being ‘overtly funny or political’, Gaskin says she ‘had to learn to be striking in imagery’ when reading before Melbourne’s ‘loud’ and ‘male-dominated’ spoken-word scene of the late eighties. This I learn from listening to Gaskin in an interview on 3CR’s Spoken Word from two years ago, and it makes me think of how Gaskin’s reasons for writing sharp imagery also parallel the themes in her poetry: feminism and writing to be heard.

But it’s not just haiku-esque images that make Gaskin’s work distinct – it’s how she blends the images with surrealism and abstractions. At the crux of it, this how she evokes, artfully juxtaposing disparate lines to surprise and allude:

time smothers me with a pillow that smells of belief
a prodigal son and a mother you can’t return to death
I watch a man in a café check the stability of a chair
he has witnessed collapse
I turn my face up to the brain matter sky

(sonnet 16, Eurydice Speaks, 16)

Even though Gaskin’s poetry is precise and sparse, it paradoxically obscures, giving the reader – us – agency to create meaning – even to distil multiple ones – enacting Barthes’s infamous ‘the death of the author’. In doing so, I realise her poetry is, ironically, also an act of self-preservation.

While Gaskin carries her characteristic voice across much of her oeuvre – which includes a chapbook and four major works, including hot-off-the-press Ismene’s Survivable Resistance – in Eurydice Speaks, her third full-length collection, she also uses structural devices to intensify and reinforce voice. 

The overarching structure of Eurydice Speaks is a series of linked sonnets (57 in total) – where the final line of one sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next, and so on – that share the same subject matter and persona. As such, the collection can be read like a verse novel – which is further encouraged by the lack of contents page and poem titles (each sonnet is simply numbered in Shakespearean fashion) – with a clear protagonist.

The protagonist, of course, is Eurydice from Ancient Greek mythology. However, Gaskin refashions her into a contemporary one by giving her a voice. ‘Eurydice in the Orpheus myth, she doesn’t really speak at all, she’s just a part in Orpheus’s life, so to think about her speaking and what her life is like living in the underworld, is like writing myself into life,’ says Gaskin in the same Spoken Word interview. 

In this way, Gaskin places power in the hands of the feminine – to retell and reposition story – instead of her being silenced. Eurydice Speaks’ epigraph also suggests this:

‘Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.’ 

– Hélèn Cixous.

As previously mentioned, feministic and writing-as-existence themes colour Gaskin’s work. For example, in Paperweight, her second full-length collection, Gaskin writes, ‘eve as evidence that I am not responsible for rotting apples’ (from ‘fall of man’), and ‘I had to write myself back from the brink’ (from ‘gratuities’). But by melding her voice with Eurydice’s in this collection, Gaskin wears Eurydice as an avatar from which to speak up and rebel – ‘to speak from the underworld is seditious’ (sonnet 57) – and to reveal through the language of the underworld (which Gaskin’s voice befits): ‘my writing is an attempt to uncover the mirror’ (sonnet 8), because there is ‘a cloth over the mirrors / so the reflected moonlight / doesn’t attract predators’ (sonnet 6).

The collection’s cover also depicts the theme of the female voice: We see a woman holding on to a man whose face is turned away from her. She is tugging at his blouse, willing him to look at her, as if she has something urgent to impart, as if she wants to remain in the underworld. Because in the Orpheus myth, the gods tell Orpheus he can take Eurydice with him only if she follows him and he doesn’t look back until they’re both out into the world of living; but if he does look (which he does), Eurydice will be banished to the underworld for good. 

So why does Eurydice want to remain in the underworld? ‘the force of the underworld opens my mouth,’ is the last and first line of sonnet 46 and 47, respectively, suggesting that the underworld is Eurydice’s inner world, where her truth lives – a truth she wants to voice with abandon:

I willed him to look back
watch his back watch him check his watch
locked in that gaze of that banishment that liberates

(sonnet 57)

Eurydice speaks mostly in first person, but occasionally appears in the third – ‘Eurydice’s mother held her gaze’ (sonnet 14). Also, she rarely refers to the other characters in her story – e.g. her mother, father, brother and Orpheus – directly. These characters are mostly indicated through the use of pronouns whose nouns are not stated and/or aren’t given context:

I said she died instead of she got married
to wake to full emptiness love self-dawns
Nothing happens next. My
head is in his hollow between his
biceps and his pecs. My

(sonnet 9)

The use of orphaned pronouns and various points of view across sonnets paints an expressionist landscape of anguish and trauma in familial and intimate relationships – and how these relationships interweave and have a persisting influence on each other:

we found her wedding dress in a pillow slip
give up men was her message
a card from my father’s funeral marks the page

(sonnet 14)

And:

he douses me with name calling and corrections
in my forgiveness fantasy is haunted hope
the pain of promise and pride not relationship ready

(sonnet 38)

This ‘interweaving and persisting influence’ are performed structurally, too. Namely, in the absence of the sonnet’s conventional metre and rhyme, it exists through line repetition: Besides the linking aspect – of carrying over the last line of one sonnet to the first line of the next – Gaskin mirrors (repeats) lines from one sonnet to the next, but messes with them by interchanging the nouns (and occasionally the verbs) with uncanny ones. Like how uncovering the mirror reflects another (point of) view of the truth:

I stumble on steps flowing with water
we are only doing this because we love you
I dreamt my boots filled with water
leaving drags afterwards…

through polarities our life in pieces [last line]   

(sonnet 1)

through polarities our life in pieces [first line]
I stumble the stereotypes flow with wattle
we only do this because we lullaby you
I dreamt my bootlaces were film
leaving drags afterthoughts

(sonnet 2)

In the above excerpts, we can also hear the interplay of consonance, particularly, the ‘l’ and ‘w’ sounds. So, repetition takes place at a syllabic and letter level throughout the collection, too, adding nuanced layers to what is evoked. Gaskin’s masterful enjambment and lack of punctuation also means we cannot clearly grasp when a thought/idea begins, ends or continues – the effect of this along with the repetition build a sense of an ongoing echo, of a voice from the underworld.

Speaking of an ongoing echo, the last line of the last sonnet is also (mostly) the same as the first line of the first sonnet. This creates a circular effect, which brings to mind an image of an ouroboros, which in Jungian psychology symbolises immortality – devouring oneself to bring oneself back to life – and embodies the essence of Gaskin’s (and Cixous’s) notions on writing oneself into being.

Ultimately, Gaskin serves to make voice uncontainable by giving emotion and intuition the centre stage, subverting logic and patriarchal thinking. Because to read Eurydice Speaks is to submerse yourself in the (under)world of emotion – where the mind has no place, just the soundwaves of the heart and gut, for they don’t lie. And it takes a delicate and deft hand like Gaskin’s to do just that – one that evokes your inner world, rather than tells you what to think and feel.

LESH KARAN was born in Fiji, has Indian genes and lives in Melbourne. She is a former pharmacist who writes. Read her in Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Portside Review and Rabbit, amongst others. Lesh is currently undertaking a Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne. leshkaran.com

Jennifer Mackenzie reviews Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene

December 17, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

Anthropocene

By Sudeep Sen

Salt Desert Media Group Ltd.

9781913738389

Reviewed by JENNNIFER MACKENZIE

Sudeep Sen, the poet, is in his study — where he can usually be found when in Delhi, sequestered, engaged with the world. His companion is the neem tree, light refracting through the pattern of its leaves. The tree, provider of shade and solace, is now under duress itself. The climate, once providing a reliable indicator of the passing seasons (as in ‘Climate Change 1. Yesterday’ (29)) is now registering an unseasonal pattern. Experiences of extremes of heat and cold, sometimes unexpected torrential rain or no rain at all, flood the senses, and from left field, another crisis emerges, attaching itself to this disequilibrium. Contagion threatens everyone, disrupts the political landscape and the wherewithal of the populace; the body isolates, the body succumbs, the poet rallies.

Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene is a stellar example of what poetry can be in a time of crisis. The poet achieves this quality through his control of the essential poetic elements of image, argument and sound, underpinned by a sense of structure seemingly rooted in a consciousness of form and its possibilities. Sen’s awareness of form, the measure of the voice, is tied to a sense of design encompassing his facility with traditional poetic forms and their connectivity to other art forms, such as architecture, photography and classical Indian dance. It can also be seen in the design of the book, including its typography, undertaken by the poet himself. The depth of this attention enables Sen to successfully vary the form of the poems, opening up to the white space of the page to create a sense of variety, a kind of musical progression throughout the book, while the poems themselves resonate with the clarity of a bell. A variety of tone in the book is accentuated by its division into nine sections, including one devoted to a series of Sen’s own photographs, taken from his terrace at the same time of day. Throughout Anthropocene, there is a sense of the writing being done, of the scratch of the pen or pencil upon the page. ‘Fountain Pen’ (149), for example, effects the tactile pleasure of a nib slowly caressing the skin of a page, while what is at stake hovers, enacting crisis and on occasion, hope.

In the Introduction to the collection in Section 1, ‘The Role of the Artist is Not to Look Away’, Sen notes that: 

I spend most of my waking hours in the day (and night) in my book-lined study. The panoramic picture window across my desk is the lens through which I view the changing of seasons imprinted on the magnificent wide-topped neem tree. The bough’s intricate armature, the leaves’ serrated floret-pattern, the tree’s broccoli-shaped structure — all provide an exo-skeleton for my canvas — and the constantly-altering skyscape, provide a sideshow cyclorama. (19)

In Section 2, ‘Anthropocene | Climate Change’, Sen acknowledges his debt to Amitav Ghosh, and his work on climate change, particularly in The Great Derangement, in the poem Disembodied. Here, the body registers a vivid exposition of connection and disconnection to the world:

My body carved from the abandoned bricks of a ruined temple
                                           from minaret-shards of an old mosque,
              from slate-remnants of a medieval church apse,
                         from soil tilled by my ancestors.

My bones don’t fit together correctly                 as they should —
the searing ultra-violet light from Aurora Borealis
                         patches and etch-corrects my orientation —
magnetic pulses prove potent.

My flesh sculpted from fruits of the tropics,
                                                                       blood from coconut water,
skin coloured by brown bark of Indian teak.

My lungs fuelled by Delhi’s insidious toxic air
                         Echo asthmatic sounds, a new vinyl dub-remix.
                                                                                                              (28)

while the earth itself buckles under the strain:

Ice-caps are rapidly melting — too fast to arrest the glacial slide.
                  In the near future — there will be no water left
or too much water that is undrinkable,
                                                           excess water that will drown us all.
                                                                                                              (29)

The declamatory tone here is replaced by a number of short, sharp impressionistic poems in dense couplets, such as ‘Pollution’:

Neem’s serrated leaves
    outside my study

wear season’s toxicity
    on their exposed skin —

and:

unclean, unworthy.
    Neem, once acted as

a filter for us,
    now needs one herself.
                                                       (36) 

In a small counter-move, in ‘The Third Pole’ (42) a trip to the mountains near to the home in exile of the Dalai Lama presents a sliver of hope, an awareness of possibility:

Dharamshala is a few hours away

on foot, through pine wood paths.
      Prayer chants waft. In this thin air

floats an immutable magic — a hope,
      perhaps, to arrest the glacial slide.

Section 3, ‘Pandemic’, opens up to a further variety of form, embracing visual poetry, prose poems, the haiku, and even features an imagined play script. It begins with ‘Asthma’ (51), presenting an onomatopoetic exposition of bodily malady: ‘Wheeze whistles — piercing shrill pan-flute notes … My rib-cage tangled in its brutalist architecture’  and progresses to the global, to couched politics, in Anthropocene’s signature poem, riffing off Marquez, ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ (52):

In thousands, migrant workers march home —
     hungry footsteps on empty highways

accentuate an irony – ‘social distancing’,
     a privilege only powerful can afford.

Toward the end of the ‘Pandemic’ section, ‘Corona Haiku’ (62/63) extends this theme:

Rose Petals

     Fighter jets shower
flower-petals on the poor —
     why not food, money?

Hunger

     migrants chew dry leaves
off the streets — no food, water —
     national disgrace.

‘Obituary’ (55) sits between images of the widely published pages from The New York Times, with the epigraph ‘They were not simply names on a list. / They were us’. The sense of the global continues in the fine poem dedicated to Fiona Sampson, ‘Speaking in Silence’ (58), at once a celebration of and lament to the absence of friendship:

We speak in poetic phrases, punctuated by dactyls
and trochees, inundating line-breaks with half-rhymes —

this is the only language left, our private renga —
ancient codes dictating our syntax, not our accent.

This sense of connection through the modus operandi of poetry, and through a shared exploration of the natural world suggests a symbiosis of form 

It was centuries ago, yet I know this place well —
we have walked together in this slurry and squelch.

In the coppice, I picked a driftwood piece —
sculpt-etched by wind-water — a paleolithic

talisman I left on your rustic kitchen window.

Section 4, ‘Contagion | Corona Red’, consists principally of prose poems, plus a photograph of a still life, fine in composition. This section in the collection is intense, heart-breaking, and resplendent in a plethora of original imagery. A distillation of illness, mortality, hones in on what could be termed the structure of what is illuminated. In ‘Implosion’, the poet, desperately ill, writes:

On my bedside table, even the electric
bulb under the lamp’s hood cannot hold
its wattage steady with all the fluctuations
inside me – mirroring only mildly, the
tsunami inside.

I need to call an ambulance, but I hesitate.
More eucalyptus steam inhalation, Ventolin
sprays, mixed concoctions of ginger, black
pepper, turmeric and organic honey,
provide only a temporary respite.
                                                                  (79)

In ‘Fever Pitch’, a hospital story is measured in terms of glass, test tubes, thermometers, of assisted breathing:

This is the third thermometer I have
bought in a day, and yet I cannot trust it.
Twice before, the reading shot out beyond
the graduated scale itself, hinting either i
was heated to the point of insanity or it was
a case of the glass’s own neutral impotence.
                                                                  (82)

‘Icarus’ (92) and ‘The Legacy of Bones’ (94) are two of the most spectacular poems in Anthropocene, and both are deserving of a lengthy close reading. ‘The Legacy of Bones’ delves deep into form, into bone and blood, into writing itself, where ‘the singing of the eternal purity of bone music’ seeks to reside; there is a hard-won sense of release, from death and tragedy, a propulsion to universal song, a nod to Apollinaire: “It’s high time the stars were re-lit.”

In a master-stroke of design, and one of the pleasures of reading this book, is coming upon a series of photographs, taken from Sen’s terrace. Section 5, ‘Atmosphere | Skyscrapes’ opens up to an ethereal set of images, tethered to the accompanying snippets of verse from various poems in the collection. Section 6, ‘Holocene | Geographies’ takes on a global reach, reflecting the poet’s cosmopolitan positioning of his poetics. In ‘Driftwood’ (118), Derek Walcott’s home in St Lucia is celebrated, as is visiting friends in Herefordshire, immersed in a different climate, in ‘Witherstone’ (122):

Traversing a four-acre fenced land in borrowed Wellies,
                            my pugmarks leave a foreign imprint on this soil.
I find among the muddy squelch,
                            a piece of dead bark.
                                                                  (124)

Haiku is an exceptionally difficult poetic form, and Sen’s Irish-based ‘Undercurrents: 20 Lake Haiku’, are a personal favourite, with precision of language suggesting consciousness’ sheen:

lake’s blue-black ink
        runs deep, piercing sinews —
leaving scars, unseen
                                                                  (119)

The sequence suggests what is to come in Section 7. ‘Consolation | Hope’, where images of renewal produce a sense of joy and inner peace. In ‘The Gift of Light’, Sen writes:

The gift of light
     is life’s benediction

in these dark times —
     no matter what or where,

there is always light.
                                                                  (135)

in ‘Aspen’:

Forest fires conflagrate,
     but cannot raze

the incandescent love
     for my beloved
                                                                  (139)

and ‘Corona: Elliptical Light’ celebrates the perfection of form in the neem tree:

     Falling on new buds, the ray’s glare
splits open their perfect coronas —
     pollen shower-burst, an ochre flare,
                                                                  (147)

In Section 8. ‘Lockdown: Reading | Writing’, Anthropocene returns, after all this, to the act of writing. There is a pen in the hand, a sense of the bloom of writing, in ‘Handwriting’ (155), dedicated to Michael Ondaatje. In fact, inter-textuality is a delicate thread running through the book, with references to Brecht, Celan, Eliot, and others. Photographic images of paper, books, merge into statements on poetics and reading, of being at home in the world, Sen compares his sense of himself to the banyan tree with its ‘tertiary trunks and branches resembling fused stalactites and stalagmites’. (150)

Section 9, ‘Epilogue | Prayer’ concludes the collection with three short poems, ‘Meditation’,  ‘Prayer’ and ‘Chant’. Perhaps if Sudeep Sen’s method could be couched in a few words, then these few from ‘Prayer’ (172) could suggest it:

Prayer flags
                 flutter —

I try to catch
                 their flight —

their song, their words,
                 their flap.

*

Jennifer Mackenzie is a poet and reviewer, focusing on writing from and about Asia. Her most recent book is Navigable Ink (Transit Lounge, 2020), a homage to the Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.