Ben Hession reviews Sydney Spleen by Toby Fitch
Sydney Spleen
by Toby Fitch
ISBN 9781925818758
Reviewed by BEN HESSION
Sydney Spleen is the latest collection of poetry by Toby Fitch. Its title alludes to Charles Baudelaire’s volume of prose poems, Paris Spleen. Whilst for Baudelaire, there was a desire to import the expansiveness and consequent wider palette of nuances of prose into poetry, Fitch, in his collection, utilizes a mix of styles, including prosaic lyricism and a continuation of his experimentations with form and language as seen in Rawshock and Bloomin Notions of Other and Beau. The latter, in turn, owe more to the likes of Mallarmé, with their intrinsic strategies of deconstruction being explored in Fitch’s essay, Aussi/Or. The poems in Sydney Spleen are an acutely intimate response to a period of personal challenges for Fitch, with many focusing on the effects of a city wracked by the concurrent disasters of the 2019-2020 bushfires, the COVID-19 pandemic. Fitch writes with disarming candour, and his skill in intimating his experiences capture the unease that for many permeates the recent cultural memory.
Fitch does not attempt to re-write the individual pieces of Paris Spleen in a contemporary, Sydney context. However, he does, in this collection, share something of the spirit of Baudelaire, with work that is ‘always unsettled, always shifting and recoiling at each new and unforeseen experience.’ (MacKenzie, xv) As we see, in the collection’s second poem, ‘New Phantasmagorics’, the prosaic rhythms present a clear but restless movement of the personal amid the pretensions of a city:
My eyes are barcodes. I have one partner,
two daughters, one dog, three debts.
The city’s an organ ablated from the world. (4)
Importantly, the same poem acknowledges that the city occupies contested space, noting the attempted erasure and re-erasure of its Indigenous people, a people whose broad and respectful connection with the land is replaced by one where entrepreneurial concerns have become of primary interest:
At Mount Annan, a Stolen Generations
Memorial is maliciously damaged. Mass piles of
exoskeletons are deposited on the Kurnell foreshore.
*’Hard hit’ aquatic species* include soldier crabs,
urchins, soft sponges and coral like bryozoa.
Never profitable enough to become a priority. (6)
The potential for financial exploitation of the land is further explored in the ironically matter-of-fact prosaic poetry of ‘Beneath the Sparkle’ where the Plutonic railway tunnels become a place for plutocratic opportunity:
God knows land above ground is too
expensive for anyone to buy, let alone cultivate and
be creatives on. And so, a fresh kind of colony in the
underworld is being floated by the minister. Whatever
happens, He on behalf of the State is determined to loot the
underground property market so that, even at the cost of
raiding the surplus, the lake will retain its cool. (11)
The colonial-capitalist conceptualisation of land, as noted here, is further examined in ‘Pink Sun’, where a suburban setting and the material hubris of settler culture and rhetoric is deconstructed through puns, broken colloquial speech and the visual contrast to the impact of the bushfires which recurs as a surreal and nightmarish refrain:
at peak hour
pink sun
black sky
you can return now
for eternity
‘cause you’ve stood up with the Hellsong
hung loose and come out the other
sideline without a hose
to fan the arson online with
cooked roo matching
the way you beer every burden
yet still leave time to cash in
on the outskirts
milk the handshakes of town just look
at the beautiful housing bubble
blooming and pearling as marbled meat
at peak hour
pink sun
black sky
you’ll fly back for Sydney’s
sparkling water (32-3)
In ‘Dust Red Dawn’ Fitch acknowledges an Indigenous sense of place expressed by Country. Here, its physical displacement in the dust storm of 2009, is not only representative of the disruptive effects of colonization, but also in what Meera Atkinson has recently described, while discussing the poem, in her essay in Cordite Poetry Review, as a ‘mash-up between the spectres of colonial trauma and climate trauma’. (Atkinson 4) The impacts of these both draw the individual perspective into a wider scope of disruption, as well as presaging disaster to come:
Country in its teeth. When the dust-red dawn
dwarfed Sydney it was much redder than this
orange-grey haze people are dissing on the tweets
like it’s nothing, like there aren’t still tonnes
of it settling on every windowsill, millions
of airborne specks turning sinuses to rage.
As a two-year old, Evie was afraid of specks;
Couldn’t comprehend them. She used to point and scream
At any tiny fleck invading her bath-time and –space–
they were alive, could morph into other forms. (68-9)
The sense of interconnectivity we see here is reinforced later:
… How do I talk to my daughters
about all the tiny beliefs being part of the big ones,
about tipping points that have already been breached,
about the version of history they’ll inherit
that can’t go back to time immemorial and that’ll
probably soon completely cease reverberating
through the future’s waters….. (69-70)
Finally, the piece returns to re-affirming the Aboriginal identity of the place where the city sits, noting the consequences of a seemingly deliberate colonial ignorance in reading the land:
I return to land, watch the specks we picked up
get whisked over Gadigal and out to sea,
tiny flecks of red and black subsumed back in-
to the ongoing fallout and wash-up. (70)
As we can see, Fitch’s solidarity with Indigenous custodianship of the land is more than a purely political concern, it is a recognition of its respect for environmental interconnectivity – that’s also covered elsewhere in the collection – and the human responsibilities within it.
Against this, is the national political landscape and its priorities, with its constructed identity of Australianness, itself a largely white-Anglo import with subsequent variation. In ‘Captain’s Cull’ (34-40), verbal slippage is used to parody this, associating it with the Australorp, which the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary defines as an ‘Australian breed of [English] Orpington fowl.’ (ACOD 82)
In an interview with Elena Gomez in Cordite Poetry Review, Fitch has stated that, among other things, poetry ‘For me it’s to make meaning of my world and the world around me – to make sense and critique.’ (Gomez 1) In one sense, this can be seen through a broader level of interconnectivity as demonstrated by streams of consciousness poems, where random and disparate phenomena are rendered as part of a whole, not only within the context of the body of the poem itself, but via Fitch’s perspective. One finds this in such poems as ‘33 Fleurs du Mal of Sydney’, ‘Pandemicondensation, or Dreams Refusing to be Sonnets’, and ‘Planned Obsolescences’. In this poem, there is a preparedness to detach oneself, through his children’s imaginings, from the world around him, which, itself, presents a seemingly unsettled space:
Safeguarding the future requires believing in one. Official
sources say. Bats no longer live rent-free in my head,
though I allow them to sublet. After being detected in the
deepest point in the ocean, microplastics were found
near the death zone of Mount Everest. Meanwhile, heads
of dog sculptures in cemeteries are even more moss free
‘cause people keep petting them. Cancel culture remains a bone
of contention. Not unique to this year, the world’s investment
in protective technologies was dwarfed by its spending on
ice cream. Moving to Net Zero, the ghost in my heart chips
away at its cell. That things just go on is the catastrophe.
This morning I asked my daughters to get dressed.
No, they replied, we’re making The Hidden World.
After a split second of apoplexy, I couldn’t fault them. (76)
On another level, making sense of his world has also meant examining his own position as non-Indigenous person on unceded Aboriginal land. In ‘Dust Red Dawn’, he acknowledges his own family’s “background in colonial poesis.” (69) In ‘January 26’, there is a distinct desire to be elsewhere, when the only available time to celebrate his first daughter’s birthday, coincides with the date of invasion:
and each time round this endeavour seems more designed to fail,
transporting us to where we were destined to be
from the moment a race with pale skin dropped anchor
and shook the sandstone, struggling and still unsure
of learning how to start over again, how to walk this back,
uninvite ourselves from this hot, manicured parkland,
then navigate through a capital ablaze
with idylls of our own making. (72)
It probably should be said that not all references to the personal sphere in Sydney Spleen are contextualized within the cityscape and the larger world it represents. The unsettled experience, for example, that is a lack of job security is explored in ‘A Massage from the Vice Chancellor’, where the managerial language of Fitch’s employer is deconstructed through puns and visibly interrupted stanzas, which break down the usual patterns for reading poetic lines. These serve to highlight a lack of fixity, and thus the impersonal nature of the communication and indifference to the consequences for the staff to whom it is addressed:
Since I wrote to you on ___, regarding projected
our new ‘new normal’ austerity budgie shortfall
measures your staff while a prudent app roach
Time frames of great magnitude should poke
your you in the coming days about what this
moans for your impact option, which national
has arisen intake, as outlied. agents have roles
We anticipate some to play in flattering your
deferral, loads curve, but also in minimising our
Inter- goading principle; and that, of course, is
to increase the rigour. We are currency to emerge
on track to achieve only core from this timely
maintenance. And so crisis and for your extra
thank you for ordinary faculties in sustaining
managing department head. Yours, _______ (43)
In this poem, the spacing speaks as much as the words used and what is implied. The interaction between text and the page seen here is characteristic of much of Fitch’s work, and, again, this, in turn, is elaborated upon in ‘Aussi/Or’. Of course, the more strident examples of these are in the visual punning of Fitch’s shape poems, to be found in this collection, such as ‘Spleen 2’, ‘Spleen 3’ and ‘Spleen 4’. In ‘Mate’s Rates’, shades of political compromise radiate out of an ideological black hole.
We see the strategies utilised in these poems have been reconciled toward a more demotic sensibility, bringing to the fore the otherwise latent politics of language and its constructs which had been seen in previous collections. This, itself, is reflective of the overall shift in tone to be found in Sydney Spleen.
The pervading sense of the current collection is probably best represented in the choice of the expansive ‘Morning Walks in the Time of Plague’ as the concluding piece of the collection. Here, the family as a basic social unit is set against a world estranged by COVID-19. Restrictions resulting from the pandemic have meant the local playground is no longer a place to play in. Instead, ironically, the children are forced play among the gravestones of Camperdown cemetery.
The prosaic rhythms offer a sense of casual intimacy and paradoxically, detachment too, as the narrator casts his all-seeing eye over a sequence of episodes of life. The detachment is heightened by the details of the new ordinary where a rising death toll is juxtaposed against the children’s imaginary world of unicorns and ‘alicorns’ with its escapist ideas of space being similar to the ‘Hidden World’, found earlier in ‘Planned Obsolecences’. In a typical scene we see:
A fallen leaf makes a crunchy blanket for the girls’ unicorn
toys. Grass blades as food and padding on a small square
sandstone plinth. Frankie and I sit on a much larger plinth,
shoulder-to-shoulder and doomscrolling, comparing news,
including the story of a young boy who died of the virus in
London.
Minky rips a branch to shreds. Frankie jumps down to play
chasey with the girls, running with a sense of abandon
only urban wildlife could rival. She chases them to the
FORCEFIELD, a flat grave surrounded by a knee-high cast-
iron fence. (94-5)
And later, we find:
We prefer bunnies today as we follow the chalked
direction along the footpath−hopscotch, run, left-
foot hop, right-foot hop, jump-jump-jump, now do it
backwards, and then, ‘the circle of the silly dance’. With
dozens of others in the park, Evie, Tilda and I could be
doing the Danse Macabre above 18,000 skeletons, part of a
community-vs-immunity Breugel painting. (96).
The poem ends with lines that reference previous scenes, intermingling the real and fantastic, as if what one actually encounters and what one creates in response are both part of the same, authentic experience. The parody of Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ adds humour that is in keeping with this sense of authenticity:
Turning and now not turning, both the girls’ scooters’ back
wheels have come off their axles. The centre cannot hold
… and out beyond the FORCEFIELD, running in widening
circles around the plinth I’m on, Frankie and the girls
are each now out of sight, out of earshot, as I yell into the
cemetery air.
The gravel driveway crunches its broken star shards
beneath my feet, the same gravel that sent Evie and
Tilda sprawling the other day, beneath the giant bamboo,
the Moreton Bay Cthulhu and the line of Canary Island
palms like massive spiky lollipops, all of them swaying,
rustling, then headbanging in the wind as it picks up from
somewhere in the ground-glass sky. (99)
Phenomena, and their perceptions, pass fleetingly, yet are interconnected within the narrative. They are swept up into the ether, to be not unlike the clouds mentioned in the epigraph to this collection (taken from Baudelaire’s ‘The Foreigner’). And yet, articulated and agglomerated together, they form a conscious, human whole to be shored up against the ruins of a particular period of time.
Arguably, though, the period has not completely closed. Whilst the bushfires have been extinguished, the effects of climate change on the weather and the Earth remain a persistent threat. A cure for COVID-19 and its variants also remains elusive. Atkinson notes the particular ability of poetic texts to ‘have the power to bear witness to the threat and trauma produced by social-injustice crises.’ (Atkinson 2) Further, she notes how the poetic response remains relevant in the present, as trauma, itself, breaks down the boundaries of time. (Atkinson 3) In Sydney Spleen, Fitch offers nothing that might provide us with redemption in the face of disasters which beset us. He can’t. However, he does remind us that we are not alone in what we suffer. Indeed, the whole planet suffers with us. What we see depicted in this collection is a kind of resilience, which, again, is a highly personal response. Our survival, of course, shall always require collective action.
Citations
Fitch, Toby. Sydney Spleen, Giramondo Publishing Company, Artarmon, 2021.
MacKenzie, Raymond N. Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen and La Fanfarlo, trans. with introduction and notes by Raymond N. MacKenzie, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis.
Atkinson, Meera. ‘Writing Threat and Trauma: Poetic Witnessing to Social Injustice and Crisis’, Cordite Poetry Review, 15 September 2022.
Gomez, Elena. ‘“The amorphousness of meaning-making”: Elena Gomez Interviews Toby Fitch’, Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2022.
Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997.
BEN HESSION is a writer and critic based in Wollongong, south of Sydney, Australia. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Bluepepper, Marrickville Pause, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing and the Don Bank Live Poets anthology Can I Tell You A Secret? Ben Hession is also a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.