August 22, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Bejing Spring
by Pan Zijie
maninriver press, 2015
ISBN 10: 0987473352
Reviewed by OUYANG YU
Shortly after I received a copy of Beijing Spring, in Melbourne, for reviewing, I got on my way to Canberra for a visit and read the book in one go on my flight there. Immediately, a number of things, quite suggestive absences, caught my attention: there are no blurbs on the back and no author biog, things that one reads before one plunges into poetry.
Other things emerge, in the book, and, now, a few days after, from memory, without reference to the physical copy of the book and perhaps out of sequence, too: beginnings of lines or sentences that serve as high-lighted titles, some in larger font sizes than others; Beijing Spring, the title of the book, that reminds one of a similarly titled pro-democracy political magazine based in New York, known as《北京之春》（beijing’s spring）, and that is also a reference to the period of political liberalization in China in 1978 and 1979; retelling of stories in martial arts films; letters to an unknown recipient, or perhaps the poet himself, or, as suggested at Amazon online bookshop, ‘to a famous revolutionary poet’ (http://www.amazon.com/Beijing-Spring-Zijie-Pan/dp/0987473352/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456873105&sr=8-1&keywords=beijing+spring%2C+pan+zijie ) from a ‘sister’; and travels around Beijing in a ute.
But if you take it to be a book of political poems you’d be wrong although the cover photo suggests blood and flowers, symbols of revolution, when, on closer inspection, they actually are the debris of firecrackers, with the bluish smoke of blasting in the background. This book, by its very absence and anonymity, has managed to achieve the purpose of creating a mine of hidden treasures, written in poems, prose-poems, letter poems or story-poems, for the bewildered readers to dig for themselves. One I like in particular tells the story of a dream,
In another dream
you’re in an inn where
you’ve come to meet a stranger
You ask the innkeeper whether someone
is waiting for you, the innkeeper
is blunt, he doesn’t know of any
one waiting for you.
No, a lot of others are waiting for
food and wine
Why is someone waiting for you? (p. 21)
And that left me smiling wryly, at this dream that doesn’t seem a dream but that remains a dream because it’s titled a ‘dream’. Quite a number of poems feel like that and it’s an interesting, endearing quality.
There are other poems that I like, too, such as ‘She says it stinks’, ‘Pretty Girl’ and ‘Dear Brother’ (p. 65).
One was left with an uncomfortable feeling, though, when one finished reading the book. Questions keep coming up: Why is the poet so unassuming, keeping such a low profile that it almost feels like the book was written by an anonymous person? Is there a deliberate statement being made through this anonymity and suppression of one’s own identity? Why did this reader feel an affinity with the poet and his book?
I did my homework and found out about the poet. He was originally known as Zijie Ken Pan, born in 1956. Having published his first book of poetry, Vostok & This Could Have Happened to You in 2002, he did his PhD in creative writing in 2006 at Macquarie University, with his thesis titled, ‘Representations of Chinese men in Australian fiction 1973-2000: an analytical interpretation and a novella.’ A second book of poetry appeared in 2015, In Another Time. A number of poems were published in such diverse magazines and newspapers as Southerly and The Australian, though the poet’s name had changed from its anglicized version to the current Chinese pinyin version of Pan Zijie, the same way Leslie Zhao, Australian-Chinese short-story writer, on returning to China to become a playwright based in Shanghai more than a decade ago, reverted back to his original Chinese pinyin version of Zhao Chuan.
It seems to me that the poet is engaging in a process of de-Australianization, or, to put it mildly, a process of resistance, of not wanting to be known as part of all that, of wanting to go it all alone no matter what, and of connecting to one’s past with one’s own stories or poem-stories that are being suppressed or suffer the risk of suppression in a country one is a migrant in. Can I also suggest that the press, Maninriver Press (Man in River Press?), is also part of that process, being apparently, and proudly, run by Asian-Australians, or even migrants, something that I always admire and hope for as many of my books were published by migrant-run presses, such as Papyrus Publishing, Wild Peony and Brandl & Schlesinger, to name but a few?
That the word ‘Australia’ is never mentioned once in the book adds to the impression that this is deliberate and, if that is so, the strategy works well. Again I think of Zhao Chuan who, in a number of meetings we had, hardly ever mentions Australia while his work is being shown around in other European countries such as Switzerland and England.
While I looked in vain for the word ‘Australia’ in the book, I managed to find tropes evocative of the country, in lines like this, ‘to stay small harmless nations’ (p. 65), or this, ‘The winds come from the north. Always dry, in strong gusts pushing and bending trees’ (p. 60), and this, ‘Refugee may be a long way, some things will become burdens, a country, a home…’ (p. 56), ‘refugee’ being a subject Pan once wrote about in a poem, found here (http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/archives/v2/e2/panzk.htm ), although not a major concern in this collection.
The major concern, to this writer, seems to be a preoccupation with the creation of the poet’s own mini-autobiographies; about ‘us little folk’ (p. 35), be they stories about ‘Beijing Metro’, in an eerie dreamlike situation where ‘He shows a photograph of five heroes. Himself as Zhu De…’ (p. 7); about ‘toads’ whose ‘venom’ is squeezed for ‘medicine’ (p. 11); about this ‘I’ who’d ‘get a job teaching English at the Beijing Language and Culture University’ (p. 14); about stories based on the martial arts (Wu Xia) films in which nothing is said but everything seems to have been said, another impression of mine; and about letters sent by Sister to ‘Dear Brother’ in a sequence of what is known in Chinese as tongti shi (poems written under the same title).
And, last but not least is the interesting fact that Chinese words in pinyin share the same importance of English words by not being put in italics, thus not being made to look strange, such as ‘xiangchun’, ‘guqin’, ‘pipa’ and ‘siheyuan’ (p. 17), all immediately known to me, eliciting an instant smile on my face, though that may baffle the monolingual English-language speakers in this country and elsewhere. But who cares? A migrant is not a required explanation. He or she is, to borrow one word image from the book, an ‘invisible cloud’ (p. 57), that ‘drive(s) away the devils’ (p. 70).
Before I wrap up, I must quote Pan as saying, in a remark that may shed some light on his poetic presence through political absence—e.g. identity politics and etc, ‘I found myself as a person of colour who theoretically shouldn’t have been here.’ (https://twitter.com/mascarareview/status/667161990645743616?lang=en )
OUYANG YU has published over 55 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translation and criticism in English and Chinese languages, including his award-winning novel,The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002), his collection of poetry in English,The Kingsbury Tales (2008), his collection of Chinese poetry, Slow Motion(2009), his book of creative non-fiction, On the Smell of an Oily Rag: Speaking English, Thinking Chinese and Living Australian (2008), his second novel, The English Class (2010), his book of literary criticism,Chinese in Australian Fiction: 1888 1988 (2008), and his translation in Chinese, The Fatal Shore (forthcoming in 2011).
August 6, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Painting Red Orchids
by Eileen Chong
Pitt St Poetry
ISBN 978-1-922080-66-0
Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE
Painting Red Orchids is Eileen Chong’s third collection in six years. Born in Singapore, she has lived in Sydney since 2007. Although her Chinese roots run deep she is also very much a citizen of her adopted city and country.
The influence of classical Chinese poetry, from various periods is strong, both in Chong’s tone and, to a lesser extent, in her content — or so it would appear to this reviewer, judging from translations he has read over the years. Chong works with an awareness of this tradition but her particular achievement is the way she is able to be faithful to the specifics of the eras involved and yet still sound contemporary and universally relevant. There is nothing archaic here.
A fine example of all this skill occurs in Chong’s four-part poem, “Magnolia”, a monologue from the viewpoint of Hua Mu Lan who dressed as a man to take her father’s place in the emperor’s army and rose to the rank of general during the Northern Wei dynasty (386 – 536 AD). A stanza in the first part, dealing with the need to hide her menstruation, is particularly graphic: “I carry a skin of water and squat in the grasses. / Now it it safe to loosen my robes. Carefully, I clean myself. / Even in the dark, my hands are sticky with blood.” The link between this blood and the blood soon to be shed in battle is more than a little poignant.
In the second part of the sequence, Mu Lan describes her first kill, a chicken back in her childhood: “I carried her to the back of the hut, her heartbeat / pulsing in my palm. Her feathers so alive against my skin.” In the third section, Mu Lan defines her role explicitly: “Not for me the embroidered magnolias of marriage; / I give birth to nothing but blades, arrows and death.”
It is believed that, after twelve years of warfare, Mu Lan returned to her village. The poem’s last stanza reveals an interesting ambivalence: “If I were a hawk I would take off, wing towards / the west and the setting sun. I would hunt only / to survive, I would feather a nest, I would fly.” There’s a nice balance here, and throughout the poem, a rejoicing in the exploits of a notable proto-feminist and a clear sense of what she had to give up in order to achieve them.
A different, but no less convincing, Chinese element in Chong’s poetry appears in her poems about Chinese cuisine — its preparation, cooking and consumption. In poems such as “Cooking for One”, “Xiao Long Bao (Little Dragon Dumplings)” and “Sun Ming Restaurant, Parramatta”, among others, there is clearly a relish for tastily-cooked flesh that might well make a vegan curl back in disgust. Parts of these poems, as in “Xiao Long Bao (Little Dragon Dumplings)”, for instance, can also read like a (well-written) recipe: “Finely shredded young ginger topped / with black rice vinegar and a dash of soy / form the dipping source.” At the end of her dumpling poem the poet talks about the acute gastronomical response of her non-Chinese lover to what he has just eaten: “I still remember the look on your face when you ate / your first little dragon dumpling. Sudden understanding.”
“Sudden understanding” is not, however, a resolution that conveniently arrives through another important strand in Painting Red Orchids, i.e. Chong’s poems about a break-up with one long-time lover and the beginnings of a new relationship. These poems are arranged in a cluster but also recur through the book. At the end of “Adrift”, for instance, the poet talks of how “The mussel man / clutched the paper-wrapped package / to his chest and said, Bless you, lady. / I need all the blessings I can get — / I am adrift, far from rock and shore.” In “Taboo”, shortly afterwards, she reflects: “How much did I want? / All the years, and none. // Your foot on my calf, / heavy in the dark. // Your breathing laboured, / my heart withdrawn.”
Some sort of explanation is offered in “Split Moon”: “I said the word and broke us — / but chiselling away at our foundation / were years of the unsaid; of silences / drawn out and covered over. // Did I do it right? I do not know. / The moon does not speak. / We have divided the whole, / we are left with less than our halves.”
Poems of this kind, with slightly laborious images like “chiselling away at our foundations”, speak to an almost universal experience but are often difficult to bring off aesthetically. Almost all poets write them at one stage or another (and they can often be effective therapeutically). It doesn’t seem fair that they are not always among the poet’s best work. The injunction that the subject of Chong’s “break-up” poems calls for in “Last Leaf”is instructive. Her female narrator starts by saying: “I’d said yes / You then said no poems / A poem falls: / the last leaf of the season.” It’s possible hurt pride or her ex-partner’s need for privacy were not his only reasons for saying “no poems”.
Some of the most memorable poems in Painting Red Orchids occur when Chong’s Chinese materials or vantage points are seamlessly integrated with something more western, sometimes with a deal of surrealism thrown in. The last six lines of “Dream Fish” are a good example of what is most characteristic about this eloquent, engaging and continually-developing poet: “We only kissed at the end, the moon watching / the old scene play out. Mosquitoes and two people / discovering how to taste each other. In the bedroom / bright with lamps, roses shed their petals in half-arcs // around the vase. Pollen dust and the taste of musk. / You released the fish — its escape: a rapid beating of drums.”
GEOFF PAGE is a Canberra based poet and critic. He edited Best Australian Poems 2015 and his latest collection is Plevna, a verse biography, (UWA).
July 23, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
brush
by joanne burns
Giramondo Publishing
ISBN 978-1-922146-71-7
Reviewed by NAME
‘It must give pleasure’[1]
It should be no surprise that I am a big fan of joanne burns’ poetry. Although brush is not a New and Selected per se, it is a excellent introduction to her work and a substantial confirmation of the poet’s talent and importance in Australian Literature.[2] This is burns’ sixteenth volume of poetry; her first title Snatch was published in London in 1972.
burns herself describes the volume as an ‘anthology of poems… written over the last five or six years’. It is a kind of sampler of her styles/forms and themes and in its compactness, brush is close to that wonderful rare thing—a perfect book. Divided into six sections, the ‘multifaceted’ collection encompasses the poet’s familiar preoccupations: language, society’s foibles, contemporary urban life, along with some more unusual personal recollections. These range in tone from the fiercely satiric to nostalgia ‘brushed’ with her trademark humour. Sometimes described as ‘acerbic’, burns’ work is always marked by a gentleness and compassion that understands the frailties of human beings and includes herself as one of them. There is an enormous amount of play in every poem that results in a singular lack of closure mimicking an illusive and unstable modern reality devoid of comforting truths.
Each section is made up of poems similar in theme and often similar in style. ‘brush’, the title section is subtitled ‘a series of day poems’ and each can be characterised as journal-like, although varying in line length and structure. These focus on the daily, often mundane activities that trigger various ‘epipthanic?’ observations, ‘such little things obscured in domestic/mess’ (‘verb 39). The first, ‘zip’, contains the telling line: ‘…that sweeps you into/neon’s rhetoric so what is it that you need to see in/such illumination’.‘tier’, a reflection on Anzac Day suggests ‘all you have/is what you have’ while ‘dues’, about a visit to the ‘office of births deaths & marriages’, ends with ‘lotsa death certs but how/sweet the sleep after/though not the snore’.
There are numerous allusions to poets and writers—resonances which set up a dialogue between the past with the present: long/black with nietzsche…9 grain goethbread’; the terror of a hopkin’s sonnet’ and significantly a reference to Neruda’s Elemental Odes:
this morning
i pull my 33 year old copy of neruda
off the dusty shelf estante polvo and turn to “oda al tomate”
where assassinated tomatoes become stars
of the earth in less than 2 pages el tomate astro de terra
Very few poets can do this.
burns can, for example, even make vacuum cleaning interesting and entertaining: ‘swirls of lost hair crumbs and/ missing peas/ no divining in the beige down there’ (‘frame’ 38) but she does it with aplomb—a crazy randomness of selection, odd details and her inimitable sense of whimsy.
As society seems unable to learn the lessons of the past (let alone from any of its great poets), the first section of the book, ‘bluff’, ghosts a future in which everyone, especially ma and pop investors, are doomed: ‘you ought to be/congratulated mums and dads for feathering your nests intoned the presidential spectacles/s/ from a harbour newsroom’. At once hilarious and grim, ‘does your portfolio ache’, this section comments on the financial world where specialist terms abound familiar and mysterious as ‘hedge fund’ and ‘bull market’. burns plays with and puns on the jargon (indeed one of the longer sequences ‘corrida’ explores notions of the bull fight) inferring an impending capitalist Armageddon while the theme from Casino Royale plays in the background:
some still believed it was best
to trim the hedges some were tight lipped
about the rosy picture — and this could
wipe out any benefit from the plan to divide
the good from the bad everyone was happy
though about the 19 billion sound rescue package
the final comment ‘we misjudged how quickly
syllables could turn around’
The central section ‘road’ is a wonderful bricolage of urban images/scenes which illustrate burns use of sound—assonance, alliteration, rhyme and half-rhyme to construct her poems.
past the front door packs
of paris hilton wannabes looking likely in sunfrocks
skim along the streets toward skinny lattes (‘sibilance’, 49)
One of the most interesting sections ‘delivery’ is unusal for burns because of its focus on the autobiographical. The poet has always and often sprinkled personal details in her poems using a first-person ‘i’ that could be herself or everywoman. ‘a later page’ [not quite after Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’], is a wonderful take on that famous poem
there was the saturday evening post and maybe
the new yorker in the modest waiting room, nothing
to alarm me – or perhaps the wait was pretty short
at uncle bob’s
…
but those sharp eyes and mouths of racy laughter
bouncing off the walls dismissive and derisive
drill through collapsing years
‘comb’, a sequence of five poems, recalls past innocent times of boyfriends and beaches where
even the sewer outlet water, its stream
etched into the beach right down to the surf,
could not stain bondi’s ascendency
…
which was always as big as
tomorrow, or something wider
more thrilling than time –
The poems in the final section ‘wooing the owl (or the great sleep forward)’ are as one might expect, about sleep and dreams. (I wonder if there are any statistics on how many poets suffer from some form of insomnia?) The title poem asks the existential question:
to think like a pond
or a puddle
ponder this how many
sleeps til death
Frequently reviewers revert to using definitions when they have little to say or have trouble getting started and I confess I have used this ploy in the past. But nothing could be further from the facts regarding brush. For such a slim, compact collection there is so much to say that any review space is not sufficient to do it complete justice.
However, a look at the actual word ‘brush’ is enlightening and reveals quite a bit about burn’s methods. I came up with approximately eight definitions—brush obviously can be used as a noun or a verb—but checking in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, I found three more uses that were not known to me: colloquially it can mean ‘a girl or young woman’, a fox tail, and most interestingly ‘a piece of carbon or metal serving as an electrical contact especially with a discharge of sparks’. Now of course none of this would be a surprise to an avid reader of dictionaries like burns whose work often simultaneously holds all the meanings of a word in a poem or freely associates them to construct a kind of surreal/absurd narrative. Take ‘road’ for example from the section of the same title:
i am surprised by
my new interest in apples especially pink
ladies peak hour is not like the other peaks
burns’ work is a brilliant alchemy of objective reality and creative imagination, at times critical, philosophical or gnomic but always following Stevens’ dictum about what poetry should be:
It must give pleasure.
Notes
[1] Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, Collected Poems, London: Faber&Faber, 1966, p398.
[2] According to the media release ‘[t]he publication and promotion of brush has been assisted by an Australia Council Midlist Authors Grant, designed to showcase the writing of established Australian authors like Joanne Burns, who have made an important contribution to Australian literature, and to make readers more aware of the quality and character of their work as it has developed over many years.’
NICOLETTE STASKO has published seven collections of poetry the most recent under rats with Vagabond Press. She has also published books of fiction and non-fiction. Currently she is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney and is finalising her next collection.
July 21, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Special
by David Stavanger
University of Queensland Press
ISBN 978-0-7022-5319-5
Reviewed by MICHELE SEMINARA
This book is dedicated to the dead
who are bravely living
(and to those who wake wild-eyed in the dark)
So begins David Stavanger’s first full length collection, The Special, published by UQP as wining manuscript of the 2013 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. As the dedication suggests, this book is an unsettling read; one feels, intentionally so. The poems deal with what is dark and broken in the human psyche, informed, presumably, by the poet’s own personal and professional experiences with mental illness. This is Stavanger’s first serious foray into the world of ‘page’ as opposed to ‘performance’ poetry (a distinction he eschews), the leap between these two hotly fought over territories no doubt entailing a certain risk of the poems falling flat on the page. Yet while the book may, on first reading, appear somewhat stylistically and tonally ‘flat’, upon deeper reading it becomes clear that this has less to do with Stavanger’s poetry not transitioning well onto the page, and more to do with the nature of what the poet is trying to achieve. When exploring states of mind such as depression or psychosis, an emotionally disconnected, disjointed, or even dissociated style of poetry may indeed be the perfect mode of expression.
The Special encompasses a variety of forms such as free verse, prose poetry, found poetry, centos and some pieces which read more like flash fiction. The poems are often inspired by and allude to popular culture, drawing on newspaper articles, rock music, film and even a questionnaire from the dating site RSVP. While this lends the book an accessibility which will appeal to many who might not traditionally read poetry, it does not necessarily mean that it is an easy read. Stavanger pulls no punches, tackling challenging issues—such as mental health, terminal illness, dysfunctional relationships, the inevitability of death, the meaning of life and the meaning of even getting out of bed in the morning—head on; although he does sweeten their delivery with liberal doses of irony and dark humour. Take, for example, the title poem of the book:
I have seen enough stomachs charcoaled
to put me off life-drawing for life
one week a patient launched himself from the 5th floor
didn’t even put his hands out
hit the concrete with his face
Sometimes the future looks brighter
if you don’t look at all
(‘the Special’, p7)
The narrator’s tone is for the most part unnervingly flat, as if he were walking through life on automatic pilot, everyday experiences appearing odd or even grotesque and requiring herculean amounts of effort to accomplish. Discordant images are juxtaposed, leaving a lattice of gaps which the reader may—or may not—choose to fill with meaning. The phrases are short, snappy, satiric and self-aware. Take, for example, ‘out of danger’, one of the many ‘list’ poems of the book:
thinking. using a microwave. drinking. not drinking. voices
from the pillow. not talking to yourself. talking to yourself.
talking to taxi drivers. parenting. going to a lecture. enjoying
it. declaring yourself a legend. believing it.
(‘out of danger’, p4)
This could be read as glib, superficial, lacking in attention to the craft of rhythm, rhyme, metaphor and line break; the sort of poetry which might sound impressive in a well delivered performance but can read like a string of clever sound bites on the page. Alternately, it could be read as an artful expression of a depressed and disembodied state of mind. The list-like nature of the syntax suggests a sentience disengaged from the world, one of the zombie-like ‘dead’ from the book’s dedication propelling themselves through life without fully entering into it. Everyday objects and events appear at once discrete and absurdly connected, the juxtaposition of images suggesting meanings which are both humorous and sinister. Strings of short sentences paired with a dead-pan delivery create a cinematic effect, as in the piece ‘home visits’, which adopts a hard-bitten, film noir style of narration:
Doorbell rings. I have driven thirty minutes south across
town. They say there is a heatwave on its way but it is already
here. Thirty-eight degrees. I ring the doorbell again. This part
of the city seems full of animals but there are no insects to
be heard and the concrete cracks when you walk on it. The
pool next door is empty. Something has gone down here and
people won’t talk about it.
(‘home visits’, p22)
As if watching a film the narrator observes his own actions and reactions, removed by dark humour and irony at a safe distance from his own experiences. The lifeless tone of Stavanger’s poems gives the effect of dissociation, but also conjures up the spectre of the odd and sinister lurking beneath the everyday. We see this in the poem ‘sleep, hit me’, inspired by the David Lynch film Blue Velvet.
c. stay in the car. hard to the wheel.
wait for my call. don’t answer the phone.
hit the horn. never break. matches lit burn.
(‘sleep, hit me’, p24)
This sense of disembodiment is reinforced by the recurring absence of the personal pronoun; many of the poems lack reference to a unifying ‘I’, merely listing the thoughts and perceptions which the absent ‘I’ may be experiencing:
Invite my father to the funeral
ask him to take the hand of a stranger
make sure that stranger is me
(‘the will’, p66)
When the narrator does refer to himself, it is often in the form of the self-consciously observed ‘you’ or ‘he’:
at the school gate
there is always another one waiting
the bag heavier when you put it down to talk
about holidays and time shares
and you could have shaved
taken off your glasses, opened with their name
(though faces evade you)
(‘someone else’s shoes’, p50)
Here the speaker is literally talking himself through life in a way that most of, at times we’ve similarly struggled to function, would be familiar with. The connection between mental health and the quality of our internal self talk is something Stavanger explores convincingly in The Special, probing the relationship between the language of inner dialogue and external experience, and also the relationship of the official languages of diagnosis and classification to our internal perceptions. For example, in the poem ‘survey’, the absurdity of multiple choice questions and answers highlights the limitations of language to contain and express our deepest and most traumatic experiences. It also suggests how a disjunction between experience and the language used to define it can cause further emotional trauma and alienation.
8. Every Monday I look forward to
a) others going to work
b) going to work with others
c) watching spiders eat birds
9. I use social media to
a) tell you how you are doing
b) show you I am doing fine
c) communicate with the dead
10. Bleeding from the nipple
a) no
b) no
c) no
d) yes
11. To be human is to
a) wear the right name tag
b) shower daily
c) give what you can’t give
d) fold back into the white
(‘survey’, p40)
When you consider that this poem is one of three in the book created in response to interviews undertaken with Mummy’s Wish, a support group for mothers diagnosed with cancer, it becomes even more poignant. How can a mental health survey ever adequately assess or express the feelings of women dealing with such challenges? The act of circling answers which in no way relate to the depth of your experience must indeed feel absurd, and Stavanger’s use of form and tone in the poem artfully evokes this.
The intense subject matter of The Special might make for heavy reading, but Stavanger’s dark humour, while it doesn’t always hit the mark and can occasionally appear pat, works well to leaven the darkness of the poems. ‘I have nothing in front of me’ the pilot flying the plane in the first poem of the book, ‘optimism’, warns us—and in many ways The Special can be read as an exploration of our human reaction to the existential spectre of nothingness. When contemplating the end, either imminent or protracted, what do we human beings do? As Stavanger does in his poetry, we often use humour as a kind of reflexive defence mechanism. This literary trope is something Stavanger’s work has in common with absurdist and existential Cold War literature such as ‘Waiting For Godot’, a literature which, like Stavanger’s, arose in response to fear of annihilation and a vacuum of inherent meaning.
Yet it is not all doom and dark humour; there are thematic and stylistic progressions in The Special. While the poems do descend into the void, they also, in a distinctly Stavanger-esque fashion, rise up again, the narrator choosing to author his own type of meaning, especially towards the end of the book. Here, the tone shifts, growing less cynical and more engaged, the dark humour lifting as the speaker steps back into his body and his life. Referring to himself more frequently now as ‘I’, he no longer attempts to merely assemble himself into the simulacrum of a human being, but seems to actually feel like one. He also begins to reinhabit the roles of father, son and partner, referring to family members as ‘my’ and ‘we’ instead of the formerly used objectifying ‘you’.
my son tells me this stick is a bird
smiles and sets the bird free
it takes flight
we watch it soar to the ground
sweep into the afternoon
it is spring and the mothers are in full bloom
a flock of sticks lies in wait beneath the swings
my head is clear and we are singing
(‘cactus’, p74)
By the last poem of the book, ‘sky whale’, a calm — but not numb —acceptance has been reached: ‘They lied / there is no whale in the sky / the ocean is not blue right through’ Stavanger tells us. Alright, he seems to be saying, so things are not what we would want them to be, but does that mean they are nothing at all? The narrator at the beginning of the book would have answered in the affirmative and warned us that ‘there are never enough parachutes’ to go around in a crisis (‘optimism’, p3), but now we hear from a more mature voice:
I don’t care who gets angry
there have been such times of hate
this place is the last place to hide
no longing left to hang from the nearest branch
we drift dive, sleeping side by side
in the black house across the river
I wake up living
(‘sky whale’, p 77)
A book dedicated to the ‘dead / who are bravely living’ now ends with the words ‘I wake up living’. Although a tone of resignation remains, it is no longer nihilistic. While there is perhaps no inherent meaning in life, while we may ultimately live and die alone, we are at least living ‘side by side’, and there is some comfort in this. Relationships are flawed and ephemeral places to shelter, but at least they offer some kind of sanctuary, and maybe this is all we can hope for. In a book peopled with the living dead and the disconnected, the narrator has resurrected himself, consciously choosing to create meaning through connection to self and others. As Stavanger writes in one of the last, untitled pieces in the book:
In accidents the passenger always dies
I hand you the keys
MICHELE SEMINARA is a poet, editor and yoga teacher from Sydney. Her writing has appeared in many online and print journals and anthologies, and her first poetry collection, Engraft, was recently published by Island Press (2016). Michele is also the managing editor of creative arts journal Verity La. She blogs at TheEverydayStrange and is on Twitter @SeminaraMichele.
July 19, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Engraft
by Michele Seminara
Island Publishing
Reviewed by ANNA COUANI
Not so long ago, publishing a first book of poetry was akin to dropping a pebble into a bottomless well. Today, although the poetry scene is a confined one, Engraft by Michele Seminara finds itself in a much more vibrant situation. After only a few months, the book has been launched four times in Sydney, Melbourne and Newcastle and has been widely publicised in social media. Engraft was launched by Martin Langford in Sydney, Saba Vasefi at the International Women Writers Festival in Parliament House in Sydney and by Anne Walsh in Newcastle. The people at Island Press, all from the old Poets Union days, all volunteer labour, as well as other collaborators in Michele’s literary network, should be commended for their level of organisation and promotion, usually something peculiar to the major presses.
Because of online publishing and commentary and the democratising effect of it, it’s so much easier now for a writer to be embedded in the literary scene and become a voice within it rather than having to wait on gatekeepers to allow admission. The embeddedness of this book is partly due to the fact that Michele, as a mature person entering the literary scene, has quickly moved into editing and publishing, working with Verity La and publishing reviews in online journals such as Mascara. And she is able to sell her book from her own blog, a testimony to the loosening of the publisher’s reins, maybe only possible in the small press context where the author is more empowered.
Michele’s maturity and life experiences inform the poetry and are crucial to it. The cover of the book, an image of a flower made of petals with multiple uplifted hands like a supplicant, belies the work within it. Not the work of a supplicant, but of someone who has entered the literary scene and gotten down to business. This approach is evident in her poem Slip where she exhorts:
Oh be still, Ruth, I admonish, and do not lie
at the master’s feet — but rise
from your fate and know that you are God!
If you were asked — to turn that corner,
walk into that room, say yes
to that dance — would you?
Or would you answer
(quickly, so as not to wake the unborn) — No!
Then watch in awe as this life slips away.
The title Engraft is an appropriate one for the collection. It suggests the mature perspective of a writer who understands the conundrum of originality and how we’re all writing inside a set of conventions. But it also refers explicitly to the fact that some of the poems are hybrid. Some are found and remix poems from the texts of other writers, mostly iconic writers of the past like Kafka, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Lowell, Plath, Joyce, Duras. In some cases, the language Michele uses mimics the slightly archaic language and conventions of some of those writers. In a sense, this process matches the emotional intensity that Michele injects into her work, departs from the prosaic, the deadpan. In Engraft, she rewrites Shakespeare’s sonnet 15:
Man is conceived upon this sullied stage
and like a seedling grows, but then decreases.
He vaunts his youthful sap in brave conceit,
till wasteful time decays his day to night.
Everything holds but a little moment –
even your perfection cannot stay.
So I’ll make war with time and as he takes you,
make love, and with my pen engraft you new.
The subject matter of the poems often seems intensely personal and autobiographical but then it’s not quite clear whether that’s because she’s assembling lines from other writers, finding equivalents to her own experience in their work, or simply writing in a high emotional key about her own experience. There is substantial inflected affect throughout the work and a mood of excitement and enthusiasm. There are a number of poems about writing and the need to write. In the poem, Dog, the writer compares herself to a dog driven to sniff in the long green strands/of its siren-muse,/burrowing to inhale/the prized and pungent self. She cleverly alternates between being pulled into writing like a sniffing dog but then also being jerked back out of it:
World jerks my neck, master to
slave, and drags me
from word’s wonderment
There are allusions to highly dramatic events and interactions, drawing the reader into a seemingly autobiographical disrupted narrative of some sort. The work is tantalising but you’re left thirsting for facts of the writer’s life, curious to know what all those dramas are, that are suggested but not made explicit.
ANNA COUANI is a Sydney poet, teacher and visual artist. She a was involved in small press publishing and writers’ groups from 1975 till 1992. Her most recent chapbook is Small Wonders (Flying Islands Books, Macao, 2012). She currently runs an art gallery in Glebe, Sydney.
July 16, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
terra bravura
by Meredith Wattison
Puncher & Wattman
ISBN 978-1-92145-063-1
Reviewed by WILLO DRUMMOND
The blurb to Meredith Wattison’s terra bravura states that the collection differs from her previous work in that it is “fully autobiographical”. This position is announced boldly from the very first line, and resonates throughout the volume, with a complex weave of visual and narrative threads stitching this collection – and its subject – across time, memory, and history. From European beginnings to the vast dry centre of Australia, to domestic details past and present, terra bravura explores the complicated web of identity back through the poet’s father, now living with dementia, to her paternal great-grandmother.
In length on par with Wattison’s previous collection Basket of Sunlight, the volume consists of 52 poems and two essays, many of which have been previously published and/or anthologised. It was interesting to note the quartet of poems in the volume that had appeared in Best Australian Poems from 2009 to 2012. Production here is even more minimalist than Puncher and Wattmann’s usual clean and restrained style, with every poem in terra bravura presented title-less, each identified in the contents pages by first line only.
The opening poem, “I have come for the helium esoterica of the desert”, sets the tone for the volume with admirable force. There is a vastness to this whole collection, an echoing spaciousness, with language often raw, brittle as the “furred corsets of white bone” (11) the subject encounters by the side of the road on a pilgrimage to her ancestor’s grave. This poem, and several like it in the first half of the collection, pricks and spits the complex memory of a brutal family matriarch:
She is the split stone to step from
to Europe;
here is the bitterness and violence
of work and poverty,
here is the puller of our unborn feet.
The desert light lays her
absolutely bare,
each dilated grain of smooth stone
rubs and clings against another.
I try to fathom her
in her burst-knuckled,
Pre-Raphaelite,
predestinate
terra bravura.
…
Her brutalised son,
his brutalised son. (12)
Wattison’s work has been called “sharp-angled” in the past (Harrison 67), and this continues in terra bravura. Woven throughout the volume however, there is also a sense of play, a lightness of touch. Poems such as “Contrapuntist Johanna’s” (18-20) contain surprising moments such as the teasing half rhyme: “It blazes like the blazes. // What can we make with this?” (18) An irreverent indulgence in historical Australian idiom follows: “She went to blazes/ went to guff/ went to billy-o” (19), before we are deftly returned to the overarching tone of the task at hand:
I am a still–hunted fringe dweller;
ululant
swan skinned,
…
my time disproportionate,
sublunary,
my cold-toe words pulled underground,
my violet-fingered, contranatent industry. (20)
In an article for Poetry magazine, Billy Collins discusses Matthew Williams’ notion of “aesthetic intimacy” (287) in autobiographical poetry: the seductive suggestion of reader-speaker transparency often at play in such work. In terra bravura, a layer of intimacy is certainly there, but Wattison, with her density of imagery, cultural allusion and sheer virtuosity of language, makes the reader work for the experience of it. The vast landscape of her lexicon often others the tongue in attempting it. The reader can find themselves wrestling with this fierce, shifting ‘swan-skinned’ subject. This is of course as it should be, in a work concerned with the mercurial nature of memory, autobiography and family lore.
Although initially quite enamoured of the ‘title-less’ presentation of the volume, my main concern in the end stemmed from this same publication decision. With no typographical markers as to when poems begin, the reader can often find themselves lost throughout the collection, half way through a new poem without realising it. Again, all of this is perhaps for intentional effect, echoing the way memory and myth interweave, spill over, never retaining anything resembling boundaries. In trying too desperately to contain the past we can find ourselves in a hallucinatory place, where “goats/ “cr[y] like exhausted women/falling.” (13)
As you progress through terra bravura, a layering of imagery, repeated motifs – swans, peeled fruit – becomes apparent. The effect is sedimentary, like the silting of memory and identity. Autobiographical threads untangle slowly across the collection, across the expanse of generations. Reviews of Wattison’s earlier work have noted the way her collections “impresses accretively” (Harrison 67), and this continues here. Similarly, the domestic, a regular theme for Wattison, remains present, peppering and anchoring the otherwise expansive tone. The essence of the mother-son relationship is rendered in exquisitely domestic terms in “As a boy my father”:
My father
forced,
obedient,
…
hated her
for what she’d done,
loved her
like salt
like gravy. (108)
In the ‘open letter’ included at the end of the volume (130-136), Wattison claims the “images… in [Allen Fisher’s mixed media work] ‘Sputtor’… were a catalyst for [her] fearful and joyful six year old self; her sharp experience and memory resurfaced” (131). Finally able to move through the creative impasse in which she found herself leading up to publication, Wattison wove a childhood perspective throughout the collection. For this reader, it is these ‘childhood’ poems which provide the energetic shifts that drive the reading experience of terra bravura. Poems such as the poignant “I comment on the ginger flowering freesias” (109), offer a vulnerability that yolks the whole collection together. While the more abstract poems in terra bravura are certainly impressive, in imagery, cadence and precision of language, it is these glimpses of domesticity and autobiographical intimacy which provide the more satisfying access points, and give the collection its forward momentum.
Overall, accessing these poems can be thorny work. No less, however, than the journey undertaken by their author. Reading terra bravura, we wear some of the subject’s wounds “under the cutting cutter moon” (28) and thus become participants in the ritual of Kaddish performed by the collection. These (nameless) poems bristle with the oppressive emotions of family lore, and so they find their way into you, across flesh, resistance. Sometimes it may sting a little; all the better to remember them.
Works Cited
Collins, Billy. “My Grandfather’s Tackle Box: The Limits of Memory-Driven Poetry”. Poetry, Vol. 178, No. 5 (Aug., 2001): 278-287
Fischer, Allen. “6 pages from SPUTTOR”. Yellowfield #7: 41-46
Harrison, Jennifer. “Poetry Survey”. Island #118, 2009: 62-73
Wattison, Meredith. Basket of Sunlight. Puncher & Wattmann, Sydney, 2007.
WILLOW DRUMMOND is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Macquarie University. Recently migrated from the wilds of the NSW Blue Mountains to the shores of Sydney’s Parramatta River, she has weathered previous lives as an actor, singer-songwriter and arts administrator. In 2014 Willo completed a Master of Research thesis examining the ethics of the lyric mode in Australian ecopoetics; “Cooing to Robert Adamson” formed part of this work. Willo’s writing is published, or forthcoming, in Cordite, Meniscus, The Quarry, Australian Poetry Anthology and Bukker Tillibul. Further details at www.willodrummond.com.
July 16, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hollywood Starlet
by Ivy Alvarez
dancing girl press
Reviewed by ROSE HUNTER
Each poem in Ivy Alvarez’ chapbook Hollywood Starlet features a female star from years past, for example such screen icons as Rita Hayworth, Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield, and Greta Garbo. Recognising these famous names is one of the obvious pleasures of the book, and it led me to wonder firstly about the title, since all these women graduated well beyond the role of “starlet;” all became fully-fledged stars. Merriam Webster defines a starlet as: “a young movie actress being coached and publicised for starring roles.” Other definitions include the idea of aspiration or ambition, for example (Macmillan): “a young woman actor who wants to become a star.” All these poems are involved in the act of becoming, as well as desire (the word “want” is one that comes up often). They are a mixture of biographical details of the star(let), along with what might be the autobiography of the poet, or made-up material.[1]
The first poem, “What Vivien Leigh Dropped,” features Leigh and “Larry” (Laurence Olivier) on a boating picnic. Thinking about the first line, “Larry’s Hamlet; I mouth Ophelia” – I thought I remembered that Leigh and Olivier starred in a film version of Hamlet, but when I googled to double check I found out they didn’t: the 1948 film featured Olivier as Hamlet and Jean Simmons as Ophelia. A further google search turned up this snippet (I’ll include the whole quote since the tone is sort of offhand amusing-devastating, a tone that is also found in Alvarez’ book): “Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, had assumed she would play Ophelia, but Olivier told her she was too old at thirty-three. She pointed out that he was virtually forty himself, but he hired the eighteen-year-old Jean Simmons for the part. She required intensive coaching from Olivier himself. Vivien Leigh took it for granted they must be having an affair.”[2]
Knowing this, the opening line has more meaning; it makes me think of Leigh mouthing the lines, but not actually getting to play the role, although apparently she did play Ophelia to Olivier’s Hamlet in a famous stage production. The meanings of the lines will be multiplied in this way, for readers with more knowledge of Hollywood film history.
The poem continues, locating us in a seemingly idyllic scene. There’s a hamper, fruit, and wine. Everything is drifting along in a slumbering rhythm in the first stanza, wonderfully assisted by the sounds of the poem, complete with a lazy ditty, “Fiddle-dee-dee” – until everything changes in the second stanza, particularly with these lines:
I take an apple and consider it. —Ow! My tooth!
Something small falls in. Not to be outdone,
Larry yells about a splinter in his palm.
The pain’s woken us both.
What a pair we are. Look how far
the shore. And now we must row.
The sounds are lovely here. All those “o’s,” strung together in a pattern of consonance, rhyme and slant rhyme. A big “oh/ow” hangs over this poem; a sort of pastoral scene in a boat that takes a sudden turn toward something darker. Again at this point we could bring in any knowledge we might have about the life of Vivien Leigh, for example the fact that the star suffered from bipolar disorder as well as tuberculosis, the latter illness claiming her life at the age of 53.
The verbs attached to the titles and the “What?” forms all the titles take also provide readers with narrative interest, prodding us to ask the question, in the case of this poem: What did Vivien Leigh drop? – a question that the poem suggests answers to on various levels. On the first level, maybe she drops the apple because of the sudden pain in her tooth, or maybe her tooth, or a part of it drops out (less likely but possible I think), and/or, of course, something larger than this has occurred, something that has taken them far away from the (literal and non-literal) shore. Throughout the book the endings of the poems open up like this, creating rich and suggestive ripples.
The poems are immediate and vivid, told in the present tense, and begin in medias res. The tone is frank and conversational, inclusive, and at times conspiratorial:
On bended knees, we search
for the too-large ring I dropped.
Well — I search. Spencer’s stalked off,
nursing his grudge, perhaps to salve it with alcohol
(“What Katharine Hepburn Lost.”)
These are entertaining as well as finely-crafted poems with lovely sounds and a frequently wry or dark sense of humour. As in the Vivien Leigh poem, there’s a lot of internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and a fair smattering of end rhyme. A couple of times I thought the end rhyme risked being too much [for example, “I spot a chapel in the shade / covered in lichen’s dull brocade” (“What Ingrid Bergman Wanted”)], but this sort of large effect is dropped in sparingly, and there is a sensitive rhythm created with respect to the distribution of different types of rhyme. I’m just going to list some of my favourite lines here that illustrate some of these things, for the pleasure of it: “Forget the girls who wait. Before I turn to stone, / I drop it in the foam. Borne along — it’s gone.” (“What Rita Hayworth Threw Away”); “Crack it open. Inside, the embryo / duckling feathered in soupy broth, / unseeing eye a full stop. / Have you ever had a broken heart?” (“What Frances Farmer Ate”); “I bare my legs to mosquitoes. It’s not their fault / they need to eat. Let them feed. / I am full-blooded. And there is more of me to give.” (“What Betty Grable Gave,” with a wonderfully irreverent reference to those famous legs.) I can hear Sylvia Plath in the sounds of these lines; it’s not a surprise to read that Alvarez lists her as an influence.[3]
The scenes come across as so many “exposures,” in the dual sense of a take, a scene, or a vignette plucked out of a larger whole, as well as in the sense of revealing something – about the star(let), and the poet. The chapbook ends with the only person/persona who stayed a starlet in name rather than a star: Norma Jean, the early identity who became one of the most iconic stars of all time, Marilyn Monroe. In a way all these women are split like this, several times over: what they became (stars, myths), what they were before they became this (starlets), as well as what they might have been between and around that, and how all these identities might intersect or combine with the identity of the poet Ivy Alvarez/“Ivy Alvarez.”
And, of course, everyone could have been and is something else altogether. Here is the alternate trajectory the last poem offers, for the woman who became “Marilyn Monroe:”
A neighbourhood dog pants after me, all teeth,
eyes me adoringly — even as I wrinkle, stooped,
grow frail, loose — halt and stutter.
Becoming more anonymous with every step.
Notes
[1] Alvarez affirms that the material is autobiographical: “The personal-seeming narratives … constitute elements borrowed from my own life, though these are imbricated with what I have gathered, whether fact or rumour, about these women.” http://peril.com.au/back-editions/what-olivia-de-havilland-wished-for/
[2] http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/five-oscars-oliviers-hamlet#sthash.f7yHeu5Y.dpuf
[3] http://piecedwork.com/ivy-alvarez/
ROSE HUNTER is the author of the poetry books You As Poetry (Texture Press, Oklahoma), [four paths] (Texture), to the river (Artistically Declined Press, Oregon), and the chapbook descansos (dancing girl press). She is from Brisbane, spent many years in Canada, and is now in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. More information about her is available at Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home.
July 16, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nothing Sacred
by Linda Weste
Australian Scholarly Publishing
ISBN 978-1-925333-22-0
Reviewed by ASHLEY HAYWOOD
Nothing Sacred, a novel in free verse, spans an historical denouement: the decades precipitating the climatic assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, and the eventual fall of the late Roman Republic. After Caesar’s death, a second triumvirate was formed which would be the last oligarchy before the Roman Empire was established under Octavian Augustus. After history lessons and Shakespeare and HBO, it can be difficult to image that the major dramatis personae of this time were actually living and breathing this end of an era. What would it have been like? Is it possible to imagine Caesar, Mark Antony, Cicero and Catullus, to name a few familiar names—and all of whom are ‘players’ in Nothing Sacred—free of set design and stage effects, character direction and costume, as like you or me dealing or not dealing with the signs of political and social unrest?
Linda Weste introduces lesser-known historical figures alongside major figures of the late Republic in Nothing Sacred, her first novel. This narrative manoeuvre helps to disrupt theatrical expectations of this historical period. Weste’s climax is not the assassination of Caesar. She sidesteps stage doors and curtain calls, and takes the reader into the ‘dung-smeared’ streets of Rome. We know the streets before we’re seated in scenes with the Senate, listening to Cicero’s orations; before we’re among spectators at the Circus Maximus, where we witness the slaughter of exotic animals for entertainment, including a family of elephants, ‘tucking the calves / between their legs’, a ‘Collective armour: / This behaviour, from beasts?’ (‘Gargantuan’). When the blood-lust crowd doesn’t cheer this time, but hurls abuse at Pompey their General, we have some understanding of their empathy. After all, we’ve seen Crassus at work, for example, refusing to douse yet another fire ‘raging through the insulae, / the rootless apartment blocks’ unless he stands to make a profit. (Caesar, Pompey and Crassus formed the First Triumvirate alliance.)
Weste shows us the streets of her Rome through siblings Clodia Metelli (assumed here to be the Lesbia of Catullus’ poems) and Clodius Pulcher of the politically elite family Claudii Pulchri. On the way to their mother’s funeral, we meet them: ‘Father’s hired mourners to wail: won’t allow / his children to beat themselves with grief // But when the stranger drops to her knees, / and ululates in hoots and howls …’ (‘Awakening’), it is as if the siblings memories were distributed along with the coins; ‘When she tugs her hair / and complicated webs tangle her hands; / When she pounds her forehead on the stones …’ (‘Awakening’), a sense of diffusion and entanglement is felt, which extends throughout the narrative, interconnecting multiple narrators, the city and its inhabitants. Clodia narrates the suite of Prelude poems, establishing this sense of connectedness with city motifs: ‘labyrinthine streets’, ‘sprawling crossroad[s]’, ‘huddles of shapes’, and of dead things, ‘Sooner or later, hooves or wheels compel it all / into the drains’, and even her mother’s tomb is ‘Where everything and nothing / is.’
Clodia and Clodius are nodal to Weste’s telling, but they are two among several homodiegetic narrators, and two among, at least, nineteen named characters (the reader will be grateful for Weste’s Dramatis Personae). As the reader becomes familiar with Weste’s language patterns—similar but different for each narrator like Rome’s streets—they begin to read like the intercommunicating parts of a singular organism. With this in mind, Nothing Sacred is receptive to the collective distress of a city, or receptive to fissures, anticipating the ‘psychological gulf that opens at the end of an era’. Ted Hughes wrote this thinking of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (published in 8 AD during the time of Augustus, and around the same time Christ was born) in an introduction to his Tales from Ovid (1997). These fissures are corpulent in Nothing Sacred. They form and fan out from the body-politic head of Rome, Palatine hill where Rome’s elite reside. At times, these fissures as subtle as hangnail, as in ‘Hard to Swallow’:
On the near side of his thumb, what’s that? A flap of skin
flags his unhinging; the epitome of everything
he must gnaw at in frustration.
Other times, these fissures infiltrate the munera, spectacles at the Circus Maximus. As mentioned above, the death of twenty-some elephants shock the crowd into empathy (‘Gargantuan’). And the hippopotamus, through Clodia, mimics the crowd:
The beast’s deep-throated reverb-
eration, a slow, course chuckle,
heh heh heh he-gh
like traders sharing dirty jokes in the marketplace
heh heh heh he-gh
If being at the Circus Maxima is ‘all about nisi videre et videri / seeing, and being seen’, what are we are really seeing when: A thin grey eel curls upward out of its mouth / and suddenly I can’t hear for squeals! (‘The Beast Within’).
Weste moves in the spaciousness of the page-as-canvas, often freeing her verse (and her characters) from the tyranny of the left margin in waves of stepped lineation and spacing toward the right margin, and back again to the left or centre fold. These movements across the page give a kind of topography to characters’ ruminations and gestures. Take ‘The Circus Maximus’, for example:
Cicero stiffer than a plank:
‘We …
… are not
facin-a-ted
with death,
it’s near-ness or avoid-ance.
We are fascin-a-ted
By vic-tor-y,
Cae-lius.
Vic-tor-y.’
There’s a grisly
cruck
cruck
cruck
as Cicero cricks his neck
That’ll be … my turn … over.
‘Auronius told me the other day
Twenty-nine gladiators from German-ia
str-angled
each other
to avoid the ring …’
(‘The Circus Maximus’)
The rhythm of Weste’s verse relies on styles of poetic repetition, especially: alliteration, anaphora (word repetition), assonance (vowel repetition), and homoioteleuton (repetition of the endings of words)—styles associated with Catullus’ poetry, as well as the contemporary poetry of late Republic. Styles of poetic repetition, or figures of speech, serve to heighten emotional intensity before serving rhyme. With free verse, if rhyme predominates, poetic urgency can risk loosing its grip. Sometimes this is felt in Weste’s verse. But it can also be a tool, for example, when Clodius’ ‘grip’ is challenged: ‘The heated floor, the wisps of steam / That musky mildew smell; / But no conspirators as far as I can tell’ (‘Right Hand Man’).
Often Weste allows her poems to slip in their meanings when end lines are left without full-stops, or with ellipses, or with a verb in its present participle form; such as, when ‘The beast surges through // Sideswiping red mud’, the crocodile gets to keep the human leg she’s won (‘Crocodilius’). Or when we hear Clodius’ last wishes for his enemy Milo: ‘To bob along like bloated meat // a nobody nudging the bank (‘Malediction’). The next poem ‘Obsession’ opens: ‘By the time we reach the shrine’.
Nothing Sacred is a network of character narratives, which can challenge readers’ orientation, though Weste deploys a number of literary techniques to help the reader distinguish who is speaking, who is listening; most often, characters are named in dialogue. We also come to recognise characters’ speech patters, such as Cicero’s drawl, and Catullus’ Capote-like nips and desires, especially in the ‘Working the Room’ poems (I’m not the first reviewer to see Truman Capote in Weste’s Catullus). If I felt disorientated, it also felt like a necessary confusion, and this was what led to my thinking about characters’ narratives as parts of an intercommunicating body, a writhing city and its inhabitants, sensing its fissures.
The tone of Nothing Sacred is like an extended denouement, a prolonged pre-climax, made more playful with, but not necessarily sustained by, Weste’s interest in sexual metaphor, or Latin ‘vulgarisms’, most of which are listed in an interesting and useful Notes section. Character tones range from playful to conspiratorial, deliberation to preparation, vigilant to radical. But the overall tone, or sensation, of coming-to seems to be sustained by Clodia, who is all of these actions, feeding the narrative’s (or body’s) momentum more than any other character; in a way, the narrative is Clodia’s body, whose voice opens and closes Nothing Sacred.
Weste’s verse novel adds to the still increasing number of published verse novels by Australian poets. Recent others include, The Petrov Poems (2013) by Lesley Lebkowicz and Jake (2008) by Judy Johnson on the Torres Strait pearl shell industry in the 1930s. The verse novel resurgence in Australia was largely led by the success (far-reaching readership) of Dorothy Porter’s verse novel The Monkey’s Mask (1994). The contemporary verse novel is an attractive entry into poetry for new readers—for its readability—which Nothing Sacred delivers, and more for the reader of poetry. Overseas, verse novels make best-seller lists; for example, Omeros (1990) by Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, and, more recently, the experimental verse novels The Autobiography of Red (1998) and Red Doc> (2013) by Canadian poet Anne Carson. Nothing Sacred is for an international audience (as much as an Australian one) for its historical material and contemporary verse. Somewhat comparable to Weste’s historical material is Peter Rose’s The Catullan Rag (1993), so far as both poets similarly understand Catullus from his poems (and extensive literary research on the poet). The potential of the verse novel reaches as far back as its ancient origins (Gilgamesh, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey, epics during Augustus’ Rome by Virgil and Ovid) and as far forward as contemporary verse. Weste makes use of both arms’ length, manipulating historical material in its time and place to be re-seen, effectively giving us a new experience of the late Roman Republic.
April 3, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hook and Eye
By Judith Beveridge
Braziller, Ed Paul Kane
ISBN 978-0-8076-0000-9
Reviewed by MICHELE SEMINARA
Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye is a collection of previously published poems selected to showcase the highly regarded Australian poet’s work to an American readership. The poems are for the most part imaginatively — rather than autobiographically — conceived, lyrical while still remaining largely outward looking, and full of the sensual imagery and sound-play for which Beveridge’s work is prized. Yet what is most striking about the book, comprised of work written over a twenty-five year span, are the enduring and distinctive spiritual concerns of the poet, and how these inform her praxis.
As Maria Takolander points out in a recent review[i], the book’s first poem, ‘Girl Swinging’, seems deliberately placed to give the reader insight into (perhaps even guidance for entering) the poet’s creative practise.
I often think about
the long process that loves
the sound we make.
It swings us until
we’ve got it by heart;
the music we are.
(‘Girl Swinging’)
The process of creation rather than the creation itself is paramount, a process which (like Beveridge) ‘loves’ playing with ‘the sound we make’ and which ‘swings us’ until we come to understand, at a heart level, ‘the music we are’. There is a profound desire for personal transformation: the speaker, longing ‘to be a symphony / levitated by grace-notes’, turns quietly within, ‘listening to myself’ until ‘that feeling comes / of being lifted into the air’. Takolander has convincingly argued that lyric poetry is fundamentally a poetry of embodiment and senses a paradox here in the way the remembered sensations of the girl’s body ‘swinging’ generate the adult speaker’s spiritual disembodiment. Yet it is not merely sensory experience which leads to this state – it is the poet’s attentive focus upon the girl’s sensory experience which foreground a form of mindfulness and lead the narrator of ‘Girl Swinging’ to her own kind of lyric elevation. Beveridge’s poetry could perhaps be called a poetry of conscious embodiment; here, physicality acts as tool for deepening the narrator’s awareness until she rises into a space of ‘…clear singing / …above / the common rattle / of chains’.
The life of the future Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, and also that of his antagonistic cousin Devadatta, are the subject of Beveridge’s previously published poetic sequences ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’ and Devadatta’s Poems , extracts from which appear in this collection. In one such poem, ‘The Kite’, narrated by Siddhartha as he progresses towards enlightenment, the image of a boy expertly controlling a kite in the wind suggests how he might gain similar control of his own errant mind – how he might learn to make it ‘sing’.
Today I watched a boy fly his kite.
It didn’t crackle in the wind – but
gave out a barely perceptible hum.
At a certain height, I’d swear I heard
it sing. He could make it climb in
any wind; could crank those angles up
make it veer with the precision
of an insect targeting a string…
(‘The Kite’)
The word ‘hum’ here carries dual meanings. It evokes the same sense of musicality, of ‘singing’ as an analogy for poesis as in ‘Girl Swinging’, yet it also carries a spiritual meaning. ‘Hum’ is suggestive of ‘Aum’, an English translation of the Sanskrit symbol ॐ, which, tellingly, has no exact linguistic meaning but expresses the non-divisible unity of of the body, speech and mind of an enlightened being. It is mantra, or enlightened sound, believed – in the Buddhist tradition – to vibrate at frequencies capable of setting up harmonic resonances within the mind/body of the practitioner, frequencies capable of unblocking internal energies obstructing an experience of our true nature – ‘the music we are’. In ‘The Kite’, Siddhartha has an epiphany when he realises it is not through the practise of asceticism, or withdrawal from the world of the senses, that he may learn to make his mind ‘hum’ like a kite, but by directly and consciously engaging with the world. Like the narrator of ‘Girl Swinging’, Siddhartha’s mindful focus upon sense perceptions hones his awareness and helps his mind ‘fly’.
The dual meaning of the word ‘hum’ is revealing and offers a way of understanding Beveridge’s poesis as a type of sacred ‘singing ’. She states: ‘Sometimes I want the effects of my poetry to be subliminal, as if the poems were tuning forks vibrating at a pitch just out of ear-shot, but which are secretly changing the structure of thought and feeling.’ [ii]
As the practise of mantra and chanting in many spiritual traditions attests, sound is a powerful tool for mental transformation; perhaps, for Beveridge, poetry, like mantra, is a form of spiritual practise.
The poem ‘In the Forest’ further explores the theme of the transformative power of mindful observation:
… But sometimes,
watching a butterfly emerge, I sense
my own eyelids flutter in the strange
puparium of a dream. O, I don’t know
if I’ll ever wake, changed, transformed,
able to lift on viridescent wings.
But as I watch, I feel my mind enter
a vast space in which everything
connects; and a grasshopper on a blade
of grass listens intently with its knees.
(‘In the Forest’)
This poem, narrated – like ‘The Kite’ – by Siddhartha, is reminiscent of the famous story by Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou, who, upon waking from a dream of being a butterfly, ‘did not know whether he was Zhou who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou’[iii]. In ‘In the Forest’ we once again encounter a distrust of the conceptual – ‘I don’t know’ the speaker tells us; a focus on the power of observation when co-joined with pure sense perception – ‘I watch’, ‘I sense’; and an emphasis on how one must ‘feel’ one’s way into the ‘vast space in which everything / connects’. To ‘feel’ is to experience emotionally as well as physically, suggesting that perhaps the two must unite if Siddhartha is to enter the ‘vast space’ of enlightenment. The synaesthetic image of the grasshopper listening ‘intently with its knees’ symbolises the interconnected nature of this vast inner space. However, the image is not simply expressive, but a scientific fact: grasshoppers do indeed listen with their knees, implying that for Siddhartha the mental state ‘in which everything/ connects’ is less a fantasy than an achievable reality.
The spiritual world view which informs Beveridge’s poetry is evident not only in her choice of subject matter and the meticulous detail of her imagery, but also in the way she uses an array of speakers to narrate her poems. In his Note On Judith Beveridge at the beginning of Hook and Eye, Paul Kane remarks that Beveridge has said she is ‘not at all interested in writing about herself’, observing that this ‘attitude of self-effacement…opens up the world of the poet rather than the poet herself’. It also opens up the concept of the ‘I’ in a way that many Eastern spiritual traditions do; by using imaginative characters (Prince Siddhartha, Devadatta, various fisherman) to ‘author’ the poems in the book, Beveridge explores and shifts around the ‘I’ in ways which suggest ‘I’ is not a set concept. Certainly, as a poet, she is more interested in inhabiting the ‘I’ of others, in examining what it is in the human psyche that unites us.
Of course, not all of Beveridge’s poems deal overtly with Buddhist subjects. ‘To the Islands’ is a poem which uses the spiritual metaphor of rowing to a far-off shore as the basis for both an auditory meditation and a manifesto on how the speaker plans to journey:
I will use the sound of wind and the splash
of the cormorant diving and the music
any boatman will hear in the running threads
as they sing about leaving for the Islands.
(‘To the Islands’)
The speaker of this poem eschews conceptual knowledge as a method for undertaking her journey, admitting, ‘Look – I don’t know // much about how to reach the Islands’, instead layering auditory image upon image, each becoming more subtle – as the mind that perceives such subtle sounds would need to be, and as the mind that reads them gradually becomes:
Meanwhile I’ll use the sound of sunlight
filling the sponges and a diver’s saturated
breathing in the lungs of an oarsman
rowing weightless cargo over the reefs.
The strength of imagist poems like ‘To the Islands’ is that they allow the reader to experience for themselves a process of mindful awareness. It is common in Beveridge’s poems for the syntax, like the mind in its ‘watching’, to meander, the lines cascading over the stanza breaks and the sentence structures never quite concluding . This sense of flux is expressed, unsurprisingly, to greatest effect in the watery poems of the book – the ones excerpted from ‘Driftgrounds –Three Fishermen’, where the images don’t so much build as flow, often in the progressive tense, giving the reader the experience of flowing along with the narrator.
The mouth of a little fish had just sipped away a star
from the river, a lyrebird was opening the day, volunteering
to be a bell. We were watching an egret prod at the nutrient
dark, its beak one tine of a fork catching what floats, just
as the sun began cracking the trees awake. The bird’s song
reached us, then it sharded into the river’s cold glass.
(‘River Music’)
In poem after poem of Hook and Eye we are similarly invited to ‘watch’, ‘hear’ and ‘feel’ experiences directly along with the poet via her sensual imagery, syntax and sound play. The effect on the quality of our own awareness is cumulative, subtle, yet palpable; we can feel our minds slowing, focusing and deepening.
In a guest post for The NSW Writers’ Centre on poetry and spirituality Beveridge wrote:
Throughout history, poetry has always been the most powerful and effective form for addressing and exploring deep spiritual questions. Partly this is because poetry is connected so intimately with the breath. Poets know that the breath can act as an interpreting spirit, something which will help move, uplift and carry lived experience into rhythms and tones which allow both writer and reader to feel as if they are in communion and intense dialogue with the world around them.
Poetry as an art form employs repeating structures of sound, image and rhythm, and this patterned approach enables both writer and reader to access knowledge in non-discursive ways. Patterns can lead to insights and revelations which may not be attained or reached through logical or rational methods alone. [iv]
Beveridge could be describing her own poetry here: it is she who is the master of ‘show don’t tell’, not merely imaginatively presenting a scene but subtly shifting her reader’s very perception. Like Grennan in the poem ‘Grennan Mending Nets’ the poet helps us to feel our own minds ‘drift’, to experience how good it is ‘to just let fish and weather turn [our] head; to sit and work / taking thread from warp to weft’. Reading Hook and Eye we find ourselves shaking our heads the way the eponymous Delancey does, ‘just working / it slowly – like a sieve at the water’s edge’ of Beveridge’s poems. Or perhaps if – like Beveridge in her writing – we have been especially attentive in our reading, we may find ourselves, like Devadatta in the final poem of the book, ‘At Rajkote, After the Rains Retreat’, emerging from our poetically induced meditation with an awareness so sharp we ‘could reckon / a hare’s smell down to a point, accurate as a compass’; have our thoughts come ‘as airily as insects skimming / over a pond’; or experience ‘a peace come over’ us which has ‘the equanimity / of snow’. If poetry is capable of inducing such sublime experiences, surely it is the poetry of Judith Beveridge.
Notes
[i] Takolander, Maria. ‘Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye.’ Cordite, 16 June 2015. Web. 10 August 2015.
[ii] Takolander, Maria. ‘Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye.’ Cordite, 16 June 2015. Web. 10 August 2015.
[iii] Mair, Victor H. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. New York: Bantam Books, 1994. Print.
[iv] Beveridge, Judith. ‘Making Space for the Inner Life: Judith Beveridge on Poetry & Spirituality.’ The NSW Writers’ Centre, 2013. Web. 5 August 2015.
MICHELE SEMINARA is a poet, editor, critic and yoga teacher from Sydney. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Bluepepper, Tincture Journal, Regime, Seizure, Plumwood Mountain and Social Alternatives. Her first collection, Engraft, was published by Island Press this year. Michele is also the managing editor of online creative arts journal Verity La.
March 4, 2016 / mascara / 0 Comments
Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945
by Michael Farrell
Palgrave
ISBN 978-1-137-48571-7
Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD
Michael Farrell’s Writing Australian Unsettlement is necessary reading. It is a welcome contribution to a small field. However, Farrell’s work has several areas that are problematic and that are also symptomatic of wider issues concerning poetry and politics in today’s society. It should be seen then as a starting point, an opening up, rather than a definitive statement or end of a conversation.
Part of the modern and contemporary poetry and poetics series edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis for Palgrave Macmillan, the aim of the book is to ‘unsettle’ Australian poetics. This is taken here to mean the work of undoing assumptions, firmness, bedrock as it is currently constituted in Australian literary criticism, particularly in a nationalist canonical iteration. Farrell returns to ideas of unsettlement time and time again, giving a variety of definitions, particularly in the introduction. Somewhat later in the work he states:
The hunt is on for new, formerly useless poetries, perhaps poetries in Perloff’s terms that are ‘by other means’; other languages and genres (like diaries) that may, if not constitute a new ‘model of a national Australian literature’ at least foster new reading and writing networks of the history and the contemporary that attend to different literacies, including that of the visual. (84)
This is a book then not only about content and form, but intended as a sort of speculative methodological reading enterprise. This is through examining poetry from the colonial period from Bennelong’s letter from 1792 until various twentieth century texts until World War Two. For a review that discusses the contents of the book at length please see Matt Hall’s in Cordite.
As worthy as that enterprise is, that desire to make a ‘new’ thing, Farrell is also indebted to, if not limited by, past discourses, languages, tropes, motifs. Indeed, it is one of the ironies that he deploys the following quote from Martin Harrison early in Writing Australian Unsettlement:
Borrowed terms like ‘pastoral’, ‘urban’ and ‘landscape’ for instance, may work very differently or simply may not work at all when applied to Australian poetry. (1)
It is ironic because over the course of the book, Farrell relies, too much in my opinion, on imported, metropolitan theory, framing and quotation for legitimacy. Witness the repeated use of ‘______ says insert quote’ from Freud to Bataille to Deleuze to Sontag (117, 157, 171). These are often used without criticism – theory remains deployed rather than challenged – and one apparent result is that the observation of poetry cannot stand alone without participating in an elaborate citation ritual that only reaffirms the canon of European continental theory. To buttress the continental theory is the North American field.
Consider the following passage:
Meanwhile the critical tools have also been developed to begin to read this work, whether as ‘exophonic’ or appropriative writing, or in terms of visual prosody (Perloff); in terms that resist the dematerialisation of language and parataxis (Silliman and other language writers); through theories developed from visual poetry (Cluver, Willard Bohn); theories of space, textual criticism, and archival work that read the page as a page rather than as a hoist for a message, that recognise the freedom of handwriting and resist the hegemony of typography (Davidson, McGann, Werner and Howe); or that account for the ‘non semantic’ (Forrest-Thomson). These theories themselves draw on criticism associated with concrete poetry and works such as ‘Un Coup de Des’ as well as the histories of the avant-garde. (83)
If Europe is good for theory, North America is good for the academic work of today. Primary among these is Marjorie Perloff, who supplied a blurb on the book’s back cover and who is invoked with regularity. However, Perloff seems to me to be the arch settled and settling critic of the white American avant garde. As a node in the network of contemporary writing, one might question not only her relevance for work on colonial Australian poetry but also her politics. Witness recent criticism of her by Mongrel Coalition, Fred Moten, Kim Chen, C A Conrad and others.
This heavy quotation and reference is evident throughout. I recognise how it mocks some undergraduate idea of academic writing and enables assemblage, a defining part of the work, to be meta-commented upon. Yet this seems at odds with an independent impulse, with autonomy as a political and authorial subject position as possibly enabled by the Harrison quote early on. This is, of course, not to establish a false binary between voice and assemblage either, or to dismiss a speculative enterprise. Paradox is, of course, not a failing in and of itself, but the implication of such importation is to undermine the importance of the local. It might appear global, but it is possibly a colonised manoeuvre. There is a lot of Australian literary criticism in the archive and reading against the paradigmatic straw man grain might have enabled a different perspective. As it stands one can find in Clement Semmler or Vincent Buckley or others, a complicated way of reading that might not be as settled as Farrell makes out. This is supported by the lack of discussion of the Australian field in general. To take only genocide studies what of important work by Attwood, Reynolds, Tatz (161)? The broader question to ask then is: why can’t we apply an unsettled reading to theory and field and not only poetic text?
This framing is despite the fact that Farrell is a very adept close reader. When it comes to the Australian poetry in and of itself there is nuance and insight. Readers should pay attention to his criticism of Norman Harris’ ‘Letter to Jim Bassett’ (104) and drover bush texts (186). This insight is there too in the section on Ngarla songs. However, in some of the Indigenous sections there is slippage that I think is symptomatic of Australian academic culture more generally (25). In one passage that talks about the democratic semiotic possibility of the equals sign Farrell writes it ‘resembles Indigenous philosophy rather than settlement sentiment’ (80). I would be interested to know how one can sustain such binarism. There are several other moments like this. This collapsing of specificity may, though not necessarily, be read as an ahistoricising gesture, for it collapses important distinctions and arguments. How should ‘we’ collapse Roe and Neidjie, Bandler and Pearson into a thing? It flattens the diversity in other words, which people on the inside of the discourse may find important. This is not, though, a defense, in a positivist sense, of linearity, or of cleanliness, just a comment on the need for consistent attentiveness to frame and context. Indeed, the heterodoxies, contradictions and complications of a thing, if it could be said to exist, called Indigenous philosophy remain submerged in Writing Australian Unsettlement precisely because the texts quoted are Freud and Deleuze not Indigenous people themselves as they exist in ethnographic and self-authored texts (see Deborah Bird-Rose, Sally Treloyn, Magabala Books (Various).
Mascara readers may be particularly interested in chapter 3, which examines Jong Ah Sing’s The Case. Farrell writes against other critics, who ‘in demonstrating their concern with The Case’s biographical and historical significance, largely treat its poetics as a barrier to truth and usefulness, rather than as a contribution to a remarkable assemblage of a new kind of English, and of a new kind of poetic text’ (66). Instead Farrell makes the compelling claim that the poetics of Sing’s work are important in and of themself and ‘how Jong’s inventive practice unsettles notions of Australian writing’ (67). It is one text I would like to seek out for myself, particularly for its visually arresting style that Farrell discusses.
Settlement as a word has currency in academic debates now, but the elasticity of its deployment in this work, undermines a politically astute and historically attentive reading. You can’t build an empire on sand, but nor can you build a humpy on water (see 157). Notwithstanding its problems, Writing Australian Unsettlement, is a major intervention in the dialectic of un/settlement and makes for entertaining and challenging reading. It is necessary for those with an interest in Australia, avant garde reading techniques, colonialism and poetry.
ROBERT WOOD has published work in Southerly, Overland, Plumwood Mountain and a variety of academic journals. He is currently completing a PhD at UWA and is a regular contributor to Cultural Weekly. His next book, heart-teeth light-bitten crownland, is due out from Electio Editions later this year.