Of the biographies of poets, it is that of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) which continues to perplex and confound. Why is it that someone so gifted should abandon poetry at the age of twenty-one for the life of a trader, filling his head with accounting ledgers rather than visionary poetry? Why did he, in 1876, enlist in the Royal Netherlands Army, taking an arduous journey to Java, only to remain there for a few short weeks before returning to France, most probably, though not conclusively, on the vessel The Wandering Chief ? Jamie James, novelist and critic and resident in Indonesia, turns his attention to those few short weeks. In his exquisitely written and presented little book Rimbaud in Java, James invites us to explore the very nature of poetic consciousness through the writings and journeys of this poet of the modern. He has succeeded in taking the reader on a journey by Rimbaud’s side, from the poet’s early days at school in Charleville in France, to his desultory wanderings in Europe, to his love affair with poet Paul Verlaine, and finally to the possible trajectories for his brief journey through Java. The book concludes with an enthralling account of the pervasive influence of Orientalist imagery on the art and literature of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while at the same time connecting it with Rimbaud’s exposure to that current of thought.
In all its dizzying brilliance, it is the great work and the giving up of it which entrances us. How would Rimbaud be viewed say, if he had died at twenty-one, a poet of youthful masterpieces, a poet whose life was tragically cut short? In such a case the response would be overwhelmingly elegiac. It is the giving up, these journeys-trajectories without art which alarm, fascinate and compel us to hazard an answer. As James demonstrates, there is a sense that the trading, the journeys have become for Rimbaud’s readers part of the work, part of the way we perceive it. A trader in Abyssinia, a fugitive in the wilds of Java, are they not unwritten Illuminations in which we search for the touch of the pen on the paper, for the hand dictating the invisible words? We are drawn into the character of an artist who appears both impetuous and strong-willed, mercurial and knowing, and in regard to his legacy, the creator of a poetic persona both indifferent and calculating. As James so eloquently puts it:
The aesthetic, political and psychological reasons are much more rewarding to the imagination [than his status as a fugitive] …Rimbaud was already on his way toward a mythic identity as a protean hero, capable of becoming whatever one wanted him to be. The glamour that has attached itself to Rimbaud’s odyssey-in-reverse, the reason some people care so passionately about reconstructing the itinerary of his ceaseless efforts to escape from home, partakes of the magnetic attraction of his poetry (67).
Jamie James originally conceived the project about Rimbaud’s missing weeks in Java, of which no convincing explanation has been established, as a novel, as an account of his lost voyage, but the number of directions in which the narrative could run ‘saw disaster lurking’:
Above all it was the prospect of writing dialogue for Arthur Rimbaud that terrified me: he probably ordered a cup of coffee like anyone else, but who knows? Perhaps he made ordering coffee an interesting little event. Every previous attempt to put words in that pretty little mouth that I was aware of had ended in unintentional burlesque … (75)
On taking a ‘Rimbaud pilgrimage’ through Java some years ago, James writes that he could ‘do little more than tread in the Master’s known footsteps to the vanishing point’ (75). In his journey from Batavia to Semerang and to Salatiga, site of the army barracks where Rimbaud was billeted, the author found that, ‘The decommissioned train station in Tuntang [from where Rimbaud would have continued by foot to Salatiga] was the only place I sensed Rimbaud at my side’ (77). James delicately guides the reader through Java, from Batavia’s old port district of the still-extant Sunda Kelapa, to the capital’s colonial streets, to the compellingly rich landscapes of rural Java – those of Rimbaud’s ‘peppery and water-soaked lands’ (54) of ‘Democracy’ in Illuminations. He evocatively presents a ‘scorching two-hour march’ from Tuntang to Salatiga, with a glimpse of what Rimbaud would have seen, ‘The soldiers passed through terraced rice-fields, swampy lakes where carp were farmed, and small settlements of bamboo houses in the forest, sited beside the creeks that crisscrossed the dense jungle’ (54). A fortnight after that march, Rimbaud had disappeared, leaving his military uniform behind, probably wearing ‘a flannel vest and white trousers, standard colonial mufti’ (54).
It is at this point in the narrative that we reach the unknown, moving from that which can be faithfully portrayed, to a return to a deeper engagement with the enigma of the poet, and his protean consciousness, as he disappears from view. The only known account of these missing weeks is by his first biographer, brother-in-law Paterne Berrichon, who had noted that Rimbaud’s gaze ‘remained fixed with obstinacy on the Orient’(39). In a tale which James amusingly characterises as Rousseau-like, Berrichon claiming that Rimbaud ‘had to conceal himself in the redoubtable virgin forest, where orang-utans still thrive. They taught him how to live undercover, to survive the attacks of the tiger and the tricks of the boa’ (29). The misplaced orang-utan and boa pale beside the reality of what, as James points out, any reader of the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace would know, of the tropical jungle crawling ‘with tigers and rhinoceros, monitor lizards and crocodiles, pythons and kraits’ (70). As for Berrichon’s fable, would it be possible to imagine Rimbaud telling a gullible confidant this story? Could we add the helpful orang-utan to an imagined unwritten text?
Did Rimbaud plan his escape during that fortnight domiciled in the barracks, concealing himself near a port before embarkation back to Europe? Was it the sheer reality of what confronted him in colonial Java, of what he had previously captured in A Season in Hell: ‘The white men are coming. Now we must submit to baptism, wearing clothes, and work’ (69) that compelled him to up and leave? Did he travel to Darwin? Did he visit opium dens, encounter monks at spiritual retreats, trajectories acting as a coda to what had been written, to what would no longer be written? Rimbaud in Java concludes with a lively survey of the Orientalist imagination in France, covering the bizarre fantasies of writers such as Eugene Sue and his improbable Oriental prince, Djalma, the centrality of the East in the art of the Romantics and its importance to the Parnassian poets (of immediate connection to Rimbaud) such as Leconte de Lisle. Baudelaire’s aborted voyage to Calcutta is amusingly recounted, as is the Javanese painter Raden Saleh’s depiction in a letter to a friend of Paris as an exotic paradise, ‘Paris is a garden at the centre of the universe, full of fragrant and delicious flowers and fruits…’ (113). A text previously unknown to this writer is mentioned, Balzac’s imaginary My Journey from Paris to Java (106).
Throughout his book Jamie James has included quotations from Rimbaud’s poetry ‘at every plausible occasion’ (12). He is right to have done so, as his translations are excellent, comparing favourably with John Ashbery’s recent Norton translation of Illuminations (2011). Rimbaud is depicted with much love and respect, as well as with delight in the way the poet has left his readers with the enigma of his disappearance. In this indispensable book, Rimbaud in Java leaves us to consider the tantalising question: did Java in fact represent the very image of the hallucinatory which Rimbaud had determined to leave behind forever?
JENNIFER MACKENZIE is the author of Borobudur (Transit Lounge 2009) reprinted in Indonesia as Borobudur and Other Poems (Lontar, Jakarta 2012)
Arcadia: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011, 317p
ISBN 9781921875120
Reviewed by VRASIDIS KARALIS
Almost twenty five years after the last anthology of Greek Australian Poetry, Nick Trakakis’ recent publication comes to cover a considerable gap in the bibliography and at the same time in our understanding of how “Greek-Australian” poetry has evolved in a quarter of a century. Trakakis’ book is an impressive selection from young and not so young poets who either celebrate their origins or seem puzzled by their hyphenated identity. Trakakis stresses that “as editor, I was not in search for a Greek-Australian poetry (whatever that is) but only for poems by Greek-Australians” (p. xv). The statement itself shows the scope and the perspective of the volume.
Thirty five poets are selected—most of them writing in English. In the previous generation the poems of S.S. Charkianakis, all written in Greek, not only celebrated the existential euphoria of being Greek in the Antipodes but in his best work, the Delirium of the South (1988) for example, Charkianakis encapsulated the new frisson with which the Australian experience had infused Greek language. The poetry of Dimitris Tsaloumas on the other hand with its border-crossing bilingualism established the poetics of hybridity that we see now permeating the new poets in this book. Most of the poets in this collection seem to be the children of these two founding fathers.
The subtitle ‘second generation Greek-Australian” is another decisive marker in order to understand the scope of the anthology. Trakakis notes that the most common experience in second-generation, “or perhaps malady”, is an intensified dichotomy about belonging; this feeling framed the “dual nature of the second-generation” as he mentions and gave the title to the book: “born and nurtured under southern skies, we nonetheless gravitate towards the light of the Aegean” (p. xvii).
The reader of the poems is indeed impressed by the diverse tonalities in their poetic voice, the polymorphous linguistic experiences, indeed the completely new poetic abode expressed now in English. It seems that this generation, fully educated and formed in Australia, finds fearlessly and passionately its poetic home in the language of Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray and Judith Wright. They feel so much at home in their language as mush so as to take liberties with its potentialities, to recreate its rhythmic patterns, and to reinvent its musical patterns.
I feel that most poems maintain a strong sense of orality: the poems of George Alexander, George Athanasiou, Phillip Constan, Katerina Cosgrove, Komninos Zervos and Angela Costi are texts to be read aloud, indeed to be dramatised. A very strong performative element permeates their language, asking for its musical orchestration and corporeal expression. In other occasions, the poems are heavy with references, puns and experiments indicating a complex and somehow tense relationship with linguistic articulation. Anna Cuani’s poems for example frame almost a tragic vision of an adventurous transculturality. Peter Lyssiotis’ elliptical verses also frame an innovative relationship with English based on nuances, silences and omissions.
The same but from another perspective can be said about Tom Petsinis’ work: his poems articulate a profound existential vision about human experience that transcends national designations: “It’s time, leave your solitary work, /stop tapping syllables on your forehead./ Remember, the letter conceals,/ and images are worthless forgeries of God.” (p. 253) M.G. Michael’s poems also come from another way of being: their epigrammatic and semantically charged verses construct a new gaze over human homelessness through the perspective of eternity: “he was marooned/ on a large white tear/ sinking fast–/ all the while praying /for a passing/ isle of driftwood” (p. 231). Nick Trakakis’ poems meanwhile verbalise the shivering of human mind in front of the mysterium fascinans—the mystery of awe-inspiring otherness: “Do relationships ever die/ or do they merely fade to grey/ losing their colour/ their vibrant glow and fervor/ refusing nevertheless to let go/ hanging on to the last breath/ waiting in half-lit subterranean caverns/ completely hidden from passers-by/ venturing every so often/ to emerge unexpectedly/ shockingly/ in that verb you inflected in a way you didn’t recognise/ in that feeling of remorse that was never yours/ in that truthful answer you would never have given/ in the morning smile that doesn’t belong to you.” (p. 288). Also poems by Georgina Crysantopoulos, Melissa Petrakis, Rachael Petridis Chrisoula Simos, Helena Spyrou, Vassili Stavropoulos, Vicky Tsakonas and Panayiota Vertkas express in diverse ways and from different perspectives the liberating feeling of being at home within the English language. The feeling is extremely poignant, as Rachael Petridis writes: “Family is language” (p.244)—or maybe the other way around?
We must also point out the harmonic architecture of Tina Giannoukos’ Sonnets, the traumatised sensibility in Andrea Dimitriou’s verses, the agonistic assertiveness in Koraly Dimitriadis’ poems and the emotional density in Konstandina Dounis’ words. They all show that the old sentimental plethorism characteristic of first generation writers has been replaced by a balanced command of language, a symmetrical expression of feeling and the sense of a strong personal presence that cannot be refuted or overlooked. In Dounis’ poems, beyond the theme itself, the reader can feel the most central element of Greek poetics: the exploration of the phenomenality of light: “the sound of the dice/ falling rhythmically/ onto the marble board/ tempting strawberries/ languishing voluptuously / in porcelain bowl/ northern haze/ enveloping partial view/ through concrete mantle/ golden walls framing / fateful players/ within their iridescent glow.” (p. 110). And if a generalisation could be made about such a diversity of voices and poetics, the exploration of the enchantment with luminosity intertwined with the poets’ entanglement in the labyrinth of contemporary ambiguities expresses the central axis of most works included in this anthology.
Other poets experience a profound nostalgia for a long-long past not necessarily in Greece; the dream-like photographs of Evelyn Dounis-Hambros and the anger in Luka Haralambou’s words express the wide range of emotional re-enactment of those painful memories. Zeni Giles’ tranquil meditation on death and Luka Haralambou’s poetic revisionism of history frame an interesting polarity between generations and idiosyncracies. Nicholas Kyriacos’ sensitive depiction of ephemerality and Adam Hatzimanolis’ hamletian soliloquies also express creative experiments with language whereas Efi Haztimanolis’ serene subtlety frames a profoundly private vision of being.
Special cases amongst the poets anthologised are Dean Kalimniou and Christos Galiotos. Kalumniou’s writes in Greek and his minimalistc versification stretches language to its limits; it seems that his verses are confronting the ineffable and struggle to frame something that language evades and hides. Galiotos’ poems in both languages indicate the dichotomy of the poet expressing feelings of been “Greek” through English words. As Komninos Zervos put it in 1990: “nobody calls me a wog anymore/ i’m respected as an australian / an australian writer/ a poet.” (p. 304) Nevertheless several years later he will revisit the question: “look! up in the sky. / it’s a bird. it’s a plane./ no…it’s SUPERWOG […] “…who/ disguised as con pappas,/ mild mannered fish monger at a great metropolitan shipping complex/ fights a never ending battle against macdonalds,/ Kentucky fry chicken, and the american take away.” (p. 312) Obviously the transition from the simple to the super must have marked the real difference in poetic identity over the last thirty years.
By all means not all poems are of the same quality—but it seems that there is a distinct progress from the endless quantities of poems written in the previous decades. The works included in this anthology are primarily works of poetry and secondarily hyphenated/Greek-Australian literature. First of all they are pure poems and only afterwards poems belonging to a specific tradition or forming a special group. Consequently they all frame not only the profound emotion of self-recognition and self-assertiveness but at the same time impose upon their readers the ethics of transpersonal acceptance beyond dominant perceptions of difference and alterity. Indeed a distinct aspect of these works is their elemental similarity with parallel cases in the dominant Australian literature—a similarity, with Italian or Polish Australians for example, that needs to be explored and analysed; only then we will be able to realise that these poets are Greek-Australian poets indeed but their genuine space can be found within the heterogeneous tradition of Australian literature, as long as we still accept national literature as a valid conceptual framework.
Furthermore, the main characteristic of the anthology is that it is consisted of poems written after reflection and meditation. They are not any more characterised by the artless spontaneity of most works written in the sixties and seventies; they are not elegies to a lost village or a distant motherland, heavily idealised and mostly expressed through the nostalgia of loss and the trauma of displacement. Most poets look around their immediate environment: they experience the urban and rural landscape of Australia as their personal existential reality. The Aegean light is an internalised force: it illumines their gaze as they search around their neighbourhood and throughout their very intimate habitat. There is a strange absence of sensuality indeed of sexuality in most verses (the presence of which characterises the best poetry in Greece of the previous century). What most poets have adopted from Greek poetic culture is a sense of history; through such historicism they define themselves and their sensibility. Religion is also strong, not so much as spirituality but as an offspring of the Orthodox liturgical tradition, mainly to be precise as ritual language and less as spiritual quest. We must also stress the absence of the tragic as an existential dimension in the poems: emotional lyricism is probably the real poetic space where they emerge from. Judith Rodriguez in her insightful preface notes that: “Greek-Australian poets engage the huge problem: where is home, if the entire world is accessible? How do we know it, become its people and find and keep the traditions of leave-taking and home-coming?” (p. xii).
Indeed that’s the ultimate dilemma for the poets in this anthology: not only where they belong but where they are and experience themselves. Most of them struggle to attune themselves to the tension they feel as they stand at the intersection between collective space and personal temporality. The poems precisely frame the new poetic gaze over the self and the world as it is formed during a transition from a monocultural tradition to the polycentric openness of contemporary postmodernity. The poets recreate the extremely polymorphous osmosis in which the Greek experience is manifested as a distinct dimension of English; or indeed their personal appropriation of English through the sensibility of their origin. Probably we need a new conceptualisation of literature not only based on language in order to be able to appreciate the contribution of these poets to the renewal and the reinvigoration of Australian poetic experience.
This elegant, well-designed and beautiful publication establishes a new problematic about poetic language, belonging and memory. It deserves closer study and Mr Trakakis our admiration.
Professor Vrasidas Karalis is the Chair of the Department of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Sydney. His research has been in Modern Greek, Byzantine, Cultural Studies and more recently New Testament Studies. He has translated Patrick White’s novels into Greek (Voss, The Vivisector, A Cheery Soul).
Reading Rosemary Dobson’s Collected in those few short (and now poignant) weeks between its delayed appearance and her death at 92, I was particularly struck by how little these poems, beginning in the mid-1940s, have aged.
Most of the crucial ones, I was familiar with from having read her earlier collections and hearing the poet read them quite often over the four decades she lived in Canberra. It’s always a particular pleasure for a reviewer to be able to have in his or her auditory memory the sound of the poet presenting and interpreting her own work.
In Dobson’s case it was invariably a quiet, unassertive voice, almost shy but with an underlying confidence in the material — which she felt no need to “tart up” with histrionics of any kind. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature called this being “restrained and decorous” but this is to sell her way too short. Some others were inclined to mutter at poetry readings about “poets not reading their own works well” (not as well as Shakespearean actors, for instance) but in Dobson’s case this criticism was misapplied. She read quietly because (unlike much of, say, Dorothy Hewett’s oeuvre) Dobson’s are quiet poems. Quiet — and thoughtful. Quiet — and often wryly witty.
It is probably this decibel deficiency that caused her to be somewhat overlooked at times among that remarkable generation of Australian poets who emerged just after World War II — and who proceeded to dominate our poetry scene until the late 1960s (and beyond, in some cases). Many of them, such as David Campbell, Judith Wright, Francis Webb and Douglas Stewart were Dobson’s close friends. Others included James McAuley and A.D. Hope. Still others, such as Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Hewett (also born in the early-1920s and delayed by housewifery and politics respectively) were to emerge later — in the early 1960s.
While all these poets had distinctive and personal voices (that was a part of their greatness) they also shared some important values and preoccupations. Most had a metaphysical dimension to their poetry (even the atheists); many were concerned with art in its broadest sense — and with Australian history (particularly the role of voyagers and explorers). Dobson’s interest in art was perhaps more intense than that of the others since she, unlike them for the most part, wrote ekphrastically about particular paintings — often from the Renaissance period. Indeed, A.D. Hope, as a critic, was initially inclined to undervalue Dobson’s work for precisely this reason.
Looking back now with almost seventy years’ hindsight, we can see that it was only in her first book, In a Convex Mirror, that Dobson’s work appears at all dated. Here, at the age of 24 in the last two years of World War II, she was very much part of the zeitgeist and one can fairly readily imagine a number of the poems in In a Convex Mirror being written by someone else in the group.
Dobson, in this book, consistently uses the strict forms characteristic of Australian poetry at the time (though not necessarily of American poetry). There are phrases, even in highly successful poems like the title one, that could almost as well be attributed to, say, Judith Wright or A.D. Hope (“The hidden spaces of the heart”, for instance, or “Time’s still waters deeply flow”). There are inversions of word order — not intrinsically objectionable but much more popular then than now (“And words to wiser silence pass”).
On the other hand, in this same poem, we also have an example of Dobson’s evocative compression when she writes of how angels “Inflame a Dutch interior”. Such images already foreshadow the mature Dobson who was to appear so convincingly in her next book, The Ship of Ice (1948). Although the title poem can seem melodramatic in parts (“a bride of ice in a ship set southwards”) it is in Dobson’s second collection that we encounter the poet who will present through to her last full collection, Untold Lives and Later Poems — with which she won, at the age of eighty, The Age Book of the Year award. It is in The Ship of Ice too where we first see Dobson’s best-known, though somewhat atypical, poem, “Country Press” — which, fittingly, was read at her funeral.
Reading Dobson’s Collected from that second volume onwards, one is struck by the sheer consistency of its artistry, its author’s personal qualities and preoccupations. There is a tone of voice (quiet, meditative, wry at times) which is effortlessly maintained. There is an unstrained range of cultural reference. And there is her constant feel for narrative (even within the lyric) — culminating in Untold Lives and Later Poems (2001), arguably her best book (though not as technically formal as her earlier ones).
It was in this last full collection that Dobson’s empathy for others became most apparent. It comprises a persuasive set of observations of, or vignettes about, a considerable range of people. They are not types but individuals whose often low-key lives (and fates) have something important to tell us. Written in a flexible blank verse and in relatively plain diction, enlivened occasionally by a more colourful image or turn of phrase, these poems are very different from, and much more relaxed than, the ones with which Dobson began her career back in 1944.
In this context we can see that David McCooey is correct, in his Introduction to Collected,in stressing Dobson’s concern with the “the half-seen, the ghostly, and the half-understood”. Dobson, despite her insistence on the “simple” was never one for the trite. It is likewise appropriate for McCooey to quote from an interview he conducted some years back with Dobson where she insisted: “Simplicity, clarity and austerity are qualities I hold to.” She had no desire to complicate or extend poems unnecessarily — or to set up false barriers for readers. Communication was important to her but so was the complexity and elusiveness of what was to be communicated.
In Collected’s final poem, “Divining Colander”, Dobson says: “And here, in Age, I feel the need / Of some Divining Colander / To hold the best of all since done / And let the rest slip through.” In some ways, despite her characteristic modesty, this was a false problem. The divining had already been done in compiling the individual collections. Inevitably, there is some small variation in quality throughout the book but it is moving to see that, at the end, Dobson had so much that was worth retaining, that met the two criteria mentioned in “Divining Colander”, namely “style and worth”. It’s gratifying, too, that a small but indicative sample of the translations she did (in tandem) from the Russian of Mandelstam and Akhmatova and others during the 1970s has been added at the end.
Even if In a Convex Mirror is less remarkable than its successors, it is probably the right decision to have included it — not just to make a contrast with the more authentically personal poems to follow but to emphasise with what assurance Dobson began her career (even if some of that first collection’s techniques and concerns were borrowed or shared).
At 358 pages, Rosemary Dobson’s Collected is a book to be savoured over several weeks; then shelved for ready and repeated reference. With the (now often unavailable) “Collecteds” of her other eminent friends and contemporaries, this comprehensive and well-designed book, issued just a few weeks before its author’s death, will remain an important part of our literary heritage. Indeed, in the first few weeks after Dobson’s passing her Collected was on a best-seller list or two.
Despite their disparate appearance in journals over several years, and anthologised in Best Australian Poems, the poems in Night Train give the impression of a well-conceived, pre-determined collection. Night Train is not a capricious collection of dissimilar poems sutured together to suit the elegant necessities of book publication. The poems fall effortlessly into their particular arrangement. In their tonal and thematic correspondence, they make NightTrain seem like one long compositional moment. A mixture of forms sounds the collection’s stylistic range, from a well-executed pantoum to well-crafted, free-verse poems. The language crosses the boundaries of the reflective and the lyrical without straining meaning.
The collection is in three parts: “Topography”, “Interiors”, and “Splitting space”. Each part features a sequence: “Introduced” in the first part, “Five Easy Pieces” in the second and “Elegy” in the third. The sequences contribute to Night Train’s structural unity. In particular, two of the sequences, “Introduced” and “Elegy”, echo the haunted in Night Train. Each section throws a different spotlight on the shifting terrain of Night Train: “Topography” figures the larger landscape; “Interiors” places the inner space of perception under pressure; and “Splitting Space” invokes the liminal.
The collection’s title, Night Train, is intriguing. It has several popular culture references. At its simplest, the title refers to a train that runs at night. The cover depicts what appears to be a train rushing towards us at night, blinding us with it lights. Read off its own eponymous poem, “Night train”, a poem about a train journey, the collection begins to resemble a hypnotic train journey through the shifting terrain of these poems. In his essay, “Railway Navigation and Incarceration”, French theorist Michel de Certeau writes that motionless inside the moving train we see motionless things slide past (111). Trapped inside the moving train, we dream (111).[1] The speaker in Night Train feels as if is immobile on a moving train watching immobile things rush past. These are intensely observant poems. The poems become the speaker’s imaginings inside the moving train. The travelling train is a speeded-up metaphor for the speaker’s kinetic consciousness. The entire collection begins to resemble a dream. In the eponymous “Night Train”:
The carriage sashays and groans,
freeway lights arc
and you pass the outer rings of suburban Saturn,
the depopulated moons of stations. (12)
This speculation turns ominous when:
Entering Geelong, as if you’ve clicked Start slideshow, you see chain stores,
shopping plazas, empty car yards.
The hospital you were born in.
The school where you were clapped
and buggered, the church
where you begged forgiveness.
Your whole life. (12)
The “Topography” section contains fourteen poems. The opening poem, ‘Rain, back road’, sets the tonal mood of the section and the collection itself. It is meditative, sure and surprising. The final line “To drown well is art” (3) can be taken as emblematic of the collection’s lyrical reach. This section expresses an ambiguity in the horizon of Night Train. The speaker is conscious of the complexities of European presence to remain merely celebratory of the landscape. The speaker knows that the terrain of Night Train is not innocent. It is too saturated in the implications of European presence, like the sheep he finds “strewn /along the gully, / gutted mattress of a former self” (4), to yield to mere surface appreciation of its natural and not-so natural beauty.
Night Train is not a polemical collection. The speaker does not proselytise, preferring to let the image do the work of figuring the alien. The sequence “Introduced” in the first section articulates this enigma of the alien in Night Train: the dead rats that ‘No matter how deep, / in the night / something dug them up’; the canola that is ‘There, suddenly perfect,/ as if sprayed from a can’; the foxes that are more often seen ‘flung / on the shoulder / of a newly widened road, / accessorising / progress’ (6-9).
The poem consists of seven sections, each bearing the title of one introduced species. In its troubling intensities, “Introduced” articulates the wry aporia of belonging and non-belonging. It also resonates with questions of violence and non-violence. In apologia, the speaker says in relation to the non-native bees that “We had heard of gentle smokings, / like those of a peace pipe” (9), but in place of the gentle, there is the violence of ‘a cube of pyrethrum, / cans of home brand spray’ (9). Yet the poem also asserts the beauty of the alien, rendering the poem complex in its figuration of the strange. As the speaker observes:
Later we swept bodies,
removed the strange cumulus
of hive. It was like something
from a sci-fi. White, alien,
beautiful.
(9)
In this section, Lynch also articulates the impasse of a European sensibility in a non-European landscape. In “Queenscliff-Sorrento ferry”, the speaker boards the ferry from Queenscliff with its ‘confidences’ and sails:
toward Sorrento, inviolable
in its all-weather whiteness,
its occidental logic and unimpeachable veneer
(21)
The trope of the antipodes takes a wry tone in “Continental” when the poet’s companion turns a map upside down (13). In his rendering of his companion’s words in “Back Beach, Point Lonsdale”, the speaker recalls the intrusion of the alien into the landscape:
It could be the eighteenth century you say, except for those cranes almost canons pistolling to port.
(19)
In its undertone of menace, the image of the Jaguar XJ moving, like a marauder, through the landscape in the poem, “Jaguar XJ 4.2, 1979”, is unsettling. In its figuration of the alien in the landscape, the poem also becomes an articulation of European nostalgia:
Yet it has a memory of northern forests,
yearning to search out old shires.
You can imagine a fondness
for Keats, Ted Hughes,
scarlet runners and poached artichokes.
(14)
The poem concludes on a difficult note:
As Anglophile fogs unfurl
across drought-stripped paddocks,
cells of coastal cancer divide
on metal skin.
(15)
The second section entitled “Interiors” places the inner landscape of observation under pressure. In the poem, “Sonnet”, the speaker observes that “Where the road withered / Lay a Switzerland of the heart” (32). This sensibility repeats in “Small things that lie ahead” when the speaker proffers that “The sun polishes hard surfaces, /every shadow is solid and still” (38). The repetition in particular of the line “We collect mail, and the years pass” (35) in the pantoum “Blood plums” reinforces the collection’s existential dimension.
The poem “Noise”, in the second section, can stand as a statement on Lynch’s tonal and chromatic aporias, his quietness and loudness, and his imagistic leaps:
Noise is fluorescent yellow, electric orange
and alarm bell red. It is licorice allsorts.
It is the green line on a cardiac monitor.
Then there is white noise. Like white light
when all the colours become one.
Noise like that is quiet. The colour
of bleach, the colour of death, the colour
of 20,000 tones stripping away.
Quiet can be black too. The colour
of absolute silence. The dial tone
before the Big Bang.
My wardrobe will now consist of black and white.
Like an old-time nun or priest
I’ll pass my days in silent prayer
embryoed in rhythms of monotone chant.
Sometimes I want my words ironed flat,
the soundwaves in space a waveless sea.
I want the universe to smell of starch again.
(29-30)
In particular, what emerges in the above line is an almost synaesthetic consciousness. The image becomes acoustic and vice versa. This coupling of image and sound occurs throughout the collection. In the first section, in the poem, “Topography”, we hear as much as see the yellow vibrancy of the canola:
The canola
is fitful, shutting down
for half a year before its furious
yellow electrifies the fence.
(4)
Throughout Lynch eschews the clever ending, or twist, for a more mutable poetics. At their end, many of the poems can be redrawn. Lynch is playfully aware of this when he suggests in the last line of “Blast” in the third section that ‘Now, here is my opening’ (50). This lack of closure contributes to the paradoxical movement and stillness of Night Train. The last line in “Blast” is also a reflection of Lynch’s wit. The speaker in Night Train resembles frequently a man with a mirror whose breath that fogs up the mirror also animates the world that stares back at him. In the stillness of the speaker’s mirror, all is paradoxical movement. Lynch’s wit contributes to this play. In “Plunge”, again in the third section, the speaker says:
An expensive trick with mirrors
or they are right
who say glass is liquid.
Perhaps the underworld is cool and turquoise
maybe the sky upside down
where we start flying.
(62)
Lynch himself ironises this mutability in his poems: their movement and stillness. In “Plot”, in the second section, the speaker says:
There is movement and there is stillness.
It’s almost a reckoning of love
but I just can’t count the ways.
(34)
In a counter-movement, Lynch undoes frequently the lyrical through his notation of reality. In “Subsequently”, also in the second section, the speaker remarks:
Sometimes I tell myself
unoccupied space
can be a good thing:
a notepad with unbroken blue lines,
the concrete expansion of a suburb,
a window.
(39)
Lynch also plays with a restrained lyricism, as in “Saline solution”, in the first section, in which the speaker observes:
Salt and water become the ocean.
It’s an alchemy like want and consent
yet still we can’t discern
the quality of blue
or the rip in the heart.
(17)
In poems like “The big wave”, in the third section, the analytical and the lyrical are in dialogue:
See their eyes following, almost swooping (if we take some licence),
recognition taking wing.
He feels seaweed desperate at his ankle.
Note the sea at this penultimate moment is speechless,
its one thought roaming between thigh and neck.
(61)
The third part of Night Train becomes a haunting meditation on transience. The poems shift in location from the rural landscape of much of the “Topography” section or the inner space of perception in “Interiors” to the corporeal reality of mortality. The hearse moving through the street in “Yellow brick road” articulates the transient. This section echoes the haunted landscape of the first section and the metaphysical landscape of the second. It allows for that existential edge that gives Night Train its intensity. The poem, “Yellow brick road”, highlights the existential challenge of Night Train:
So slowly she now travels Ormond Road
with headlights on at noon.
Confused perhaps by the journey
or the destination.
(58)
Bringing together Lynch’s poems disseminated through various journals over several years, Night Train takes us on a multifarious journey through the shifting terrain of its poems. The poems never drop into stillness but remain animated. They articulate a contemporary experience of the outer and inner landscape in a language that is mediative as it is attentive.
[1] Michel de Certeau. “Railway Navigation and Incarceration”. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 111-114.
TINA GIANNOUKOS is a poet, fiction writer and reviewer. Her first collection is In a Bigger City (Five Islands Press, 2005). Her poetry is anthologised in Southern Sun, Aegean Light:Poetry of Second-Generation Greek Australians (Arcadia, 2011). Her most recent publication is the sonnet sequence in Border-Crossings: Narrative and Demarcation inPostcolonial Literatures and Media (Winter, 2012). She completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. She has been a recipient of a Varuna Writers Fellowship. She has read her poetry in Greece and China.
While searching online for new collections of Australian poetry in 2008, I came across Heather Taylor Johnson’s debut collection, Exit Wounds (Picaro Press, 2007). As an Australian residing in the United States, I was immediately intrigued by Taylor Johnson’s bio – she is an American who moved to Australia in 1999, married an Australian and is now raising children in Adelaide. As an Australian living in America, married to an American and raising a child in Texas, I sensed that I would find much to connect with in Taylor Johnson’s work. When I read Exit Wounds, I was pleased to find a collection of wonderful poems about expatriation, family, loss, belonging, acceptance, distance and establishing a new life in another country. When given the opportunity to review Taylor Johnson’s second collection, I was eager to discover how her poetry has developed.
Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town addresses many of the same themes as Exit Wounds; however, the new poems are set in the United States rather than Australia, focusing on experiences, events and relationships during 2010, a year Taylor Johnson spent with her family living in Salida, a small town in Colorado. The collection contains forty-eight poems, some of which have appeared previously in journals including Mascara, Transnational Literature, Five Poetry Journal and Page Seventeen. Taylor Johnson’s poetics favours personal poems less than thirty lines in length, although she also composes the occasional prose poem. She experiments with stanza and line length, sometimes adhering to a specific pattern, such as the eighteen couplets of “Everything is Possible Today,” at other times incorporating stanzas and lines of varying length, as well as spaces within lines, as she does in “Ladies’ Night at the Vic.” Taylor Johnson often employs punctuation minimally, but it is never totally eschewed. The overall result is a style that is casual and playful, yet not highly experimental. Taylor Johnson’s diction favours the vernacular and is always accessible; her poetry invites and welcomes the reader into her world, never excluding or pushing away.
The physical environment in Colorado, especially the Rocky Mountains, plays a major role in Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town. The opening poem, “Salida,” establishes the focus on nature: “You have always been – / when the sun rose / as the trout swam / before the Rockies had a name.” Throughout the collection, the poet and her children, husband and friends are frequently depicted outside enjoying nature, marvelling at the mountains, playing in the snow, riding bikes, swimming in waterfalls, being caressed by “a sexy wind” (“Amongst It”) “while lazing outdoors, always outdoors” (“We Are All Consonants”). Thus, Taylor Johnson combines nature with the personal in a manner reminiscent of the British Romantic poets. The collections’ title highlights the personal focus of the poems, many of which are love poems to Taylor Johnson’s husband. The poet repeatedly celebrates love, joy, beauty, motherhood and family life.
In “We Are All Consonants,” Taylor Johnson mentions Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman, and she also quotes Angelou in “Morning After,” while Rita Dove and Erica Jong are both named in “I will give you soup.” The acknowledgment of the influence of feminist writers is not surprising, especially for readers familiar with Taylor Johnson’s previous work. Taylor Johnson’s poetry celebrates many aspects of womanhood, including the physical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional. Additionally, the acknowledgment of Angelou’s influence points to the inspirational aspect of Taylor Johnson’s work, which can be clearly seen in “Ladies’ Night at the Vic” and “I will give you soup.” Inspirational poetry is disparaged in some quarters, and the challenge for a poet like Taylor Johnson is to write about such topics without doing so in a manner that is trite, overly sentimental, or simply uninteresting to anyone who does not know the poet personally; whether or not Taylor Johnson’s work crosses the invisible border is purely a matter of the individual reader’s taste.
The engagements with the issue of expatriation in the new collection reveal an evolution in Taylor Johnson’s poetics. Rather than the exit wounds of her debut collection, the poet’s expatriate status is acknowledged and accepted, but not lamented. In the humorous prose poem, “An Ode to American Microbrews,” the speaker describes her accent as “hybrid” and “hemispheric,” signalling recognition of a changed identity and suggesting that the new hybrid status is an addition rather than a subtraction. In the same poem, the speaker declares “I love my country,” referring to the United States, but plans to mail the labels steamed from the beer bottles “back to Australia.” In “Love Poem,” an American flag is “torn to shreds” by the wind while the Australian flag flies solidly beneath it, perhaps suggesting that a choice has been made regarding allegiance. Throughout the collection, Australia is positioned as the permanent home of the poet, and America is presented as a temporary dwelling-place and former home. Nevertheless, the dark side of the expatriate condition is never far below the surface; in “Distant Cousins,” a poem about visiting relatives in Aberdeen, Washington, Taylor Johnson writes:
Sadness catches in my chest as I inhale Pacific mist
wonder if we’ll see each other again,
Australia so far it bends even time.
At our age we think about these things –
family, mobility, the hesitation of each day.
Funerals also too easy to imagine.
Despite acknowledging the dark side of life, Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town is an overwhelmingly positive collection. Taylor Johnson obviously enjoys and appreciates life and has the admirable ability to find joy in the everyday. Her ability to experience simple pleasures, rather than merely observe them, is evident in “I ♥ California”:
Cold patches in the lake
and oh, the water, how we drank
the runoff of the Sierra Nevada
how we caught it from the river
(The phrase “oh, the water” seems to be borrowed from Van Morrison’s “And It Stoned Me,” in which the phrase is used repeatedly.) The physical pleasure of engaging with nature is also declared in “Love Poem” when the speaker exclaims “it’s this sun my god licking me / I’ve been drunk on it all day.” Taylor Johnson also clearly derives a great deal of pleasure from reading, writing and publishing poetry. In “Book Launch,” the speaker declares, “Poetry / you move me to silence / … / I wake with you, all day / mine, others, friends, those dead / all day you, and the rest is life.” The poet’s joy is abundant in the final stanza of the poem:
Oh the bound book! The published collection!
The reason to wear my frock!
Poetry, you sly unspoken pearl,
tonight I wear you like a necklace.
For her second collection, Taylor Johnson has moved from one fine publisher of Australian poetry to another. Interactive Press has produced an eye-catching colour cover featuring a photograph of a turquoise flower with pink and red leaves lying in the sand. The back cover is adorned with a photograph of a smiling Taylor Johnson and blurbs from Chris Ransick, Jill Jones and Libby Hart. Interactive Press are to be commended for producing a beautiful book, but the choice of font, especially the cursive style of each poem’s title, strikes me as lacking gravitas. Similarly, I found Taylor Johnson’s use of spaces and forward slashes within lines distracting and affected. The spaces may encourage some readers to pause a little longer between phrases, but the forward slashes do not seem to add anything to the poems, appearing more decorative than substantive. Nevertheless, it is the content of the poems that matters most. I particularly admire Taylor Johnson’s willingness to write honestly about the personal and her ability to develop her own individual voice without regard for movements, trends or critical snobbery. Taylor Johnson has produced another fine collection of contemporary poems that deserves a wide audience and multiple readings.
NATHANAEL O’REILLY is the author of two chapbooks, Suburban Exile: American Poems and Symptom of Homesickness, both published by Picaro Press. He teaches Australian, Postcolonial, British and Irish literature at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.
What a peculiar thing the meditative lyric is. How different in spirit from Basho’s instruction to poets: “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn.” Of course, Western art has generally been practiced in a more “Faustian” spirit. And as it happens, Stephen Edgar’s collection has a poem which takes Oswald Spengler for its speaker:
The animalcule in a drop of dew—
And so diminutive
That if the human eye should look clear through
That globe there would be nothing there to see—
Although it only has a blink to live,
Yet in the face of this is free;
The oak, in whose vast foliage this dot
Hangs from a single leaf, is not.
Although the speaker usually resembles Edgar himself (or someone of his generation and nationality), the Spengler poem is typical in that many poems here have as their explicit occasion or premise a scene which is mute in itself – a quiet seascape, as in the title poem – on which the poet projects his recurrent themes.
Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,
The water swells against the sand,
“The Red Sea” begins, before ending, once more, with sunset:
And sunset’s dye begins to spread
[…] As though hoping to disown
The blood of all the innocents he’d shed
Macbeth incarnate or his grisly clone
Had stooped on some far shore to rinse his hand
Thematically, time and death are everywhere in this collection. Edgar is a poet unafraid to hit the thematic nail on the head: an attitude which, parallel to a use of form that most contemporary poets would rather be gagged and bound than emulate, is what pre-eminently marks Edgar’s style as classical.
Edgar’s syntax forces one to read intellectually. His formalism, often remarked on, is the most obviously distinguishing characteristic of his verse. But on a deeper level he is distinguished by his discursiveness: there are no songs in this book; every poem is a meditation.
The dominant mood in this volume is of nostalgia – and for more than the just the lost time of personal history but for a “Western” civilisation that now, in the twenty-first century, exists ambiguously between a life and death of its own. We live in a time that is experienced as peculiarly atemporal in the confluence of images mediated by technology. Indeed, the representational power of technology is a theme in more than one poem here. “Man on the Moon,” for example, televisually recalls Plato’s parable of the Cave:
Crouching in Mr Langshaw’s tiny flat,
The whole class huddled round the TV screen.
“Living Colour”, similarly, deals with
Torch-haunted rallies conjuring the tribe,
The pavements lined
With adoration’s awful unison;
And the corpses piled like clothing,
a mere four lines fully disclosing the deterministic mediation that was already lurking in the final line of the first stanza:
This Munich, underneath the flawless blue
The poem is hereby located self-knowingly within a genre of cultural representation in which Steven Spielberg outshines Anthony Hecht.
Throughout The Red Sea the reader is stuck by the extent to which Edgar’s language and style, despite their universalistic formality, can be culturally specific to the point of parody. In “The House of Time,” for example, a door opens in some quaint manse of the mind, and we meet
his aunt
Playing a Polonaise by Chopin
Badly. “Lenore,
We know you think you can, dear, but you can’t.”
Behind an image, a register and a rhythm (in what is a psychological, rather than an historical poem) it is possible to highlight a potent, though self-effacing cultural specificity of which Edgar, as a late representative of an Anglophillic poetic tradition stretching back through Peter Porter, and A.D. Hope, is perhaps unaware.
Associated with membership of an ethnic group in decline within a given territory goes, understandably, a sense of unease in respect to those on the advance:
Among the suburbs summer has its way
And foreign scripts on once habitual
Shopfronts flash to remind
The jogging passenger that still today
Continues the old ritual
With a new but undeflectable endeavour,
For all that childhood has resigned
Granting that Edgar is a classical poet, childhood here must signify innocence in the sense of blissful ignorance (as opposed to its romantic signification of limitless possibility). His use of the politically incorrect “foreign” signals a stoic alienation before the changing cityscape—and what are we to make of “endeavour”?!
In an Australian poetry scene to which Ouyang Yu contributes his “Invading Australia” sequence, Edgar’s WASP-ish propriety, his eschatological themes and his persistent tone of alienation and melancholy are surely just as interesting, from an ethno-poetic viewpoint, as minority or immigrant perspectives.
But it may be that the ironies and implications to which I have just pointed are more in the nature of complicities. Edgar is, after all, a kind of literary Velasquez, whose Las Meninas is the subject of “Diversions of a Painter”:
But art begins here to bamboozle.
What seemed a portrait on the wall
At first glance is, on close perusal
Really a mirror after all.
In the same way, Edgar’s are always flowers that have the look of flowers that are looked at. Take, for example, this characteristic likening of the natural to the artificial, the real to the representation:
You stood beside your gloved and hatted mother,
An undeciphered pictogram
You’d almost take to be another
Ghosting the grainy footage.
The end of this insidious process, in which, perhaps, Spengler’s philosophy of technics plays a supporting role, is that –
You’re caught between
Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.
By description after description the human subject recedes, as though rendered obsolete by technological advance, and the classical reserve of Edgar’s style threatens, at least in principle, to morph into something as de trop as Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”:
From “Midas”:
And truly it was out of him they came—
Too soon not at his bidding, precisely where
And when and how he wished each one to tease
The nerve of his delight, but ever more
Autonomous, unchecked, incontinent.
A poem like “Midas” possesses as much autonomy as, perhaps, it is possible for a linguistic artifact to do; one probably wouldn’t describe it as unchecked or incontinent, however!
Alan Watts, in The Wisdom of Insecurity, speaks of ‘the confusion of Ouroboros, the mixed-up snake, who does not know that his tail belongs with his head.’ This condition, Watts suggests, is characteristic of civilised humanity as such. Edgar makes reference to many myths and mythical beings in The Red Sea, and though the autophagous snake is not among them, ‘Midas’ quoted above, may have a similar point. What it is, I will not be so earnest as to make explicit, except to say that Edgar is a civilised man – and he knows it. As for his classicism, Edgar doesn’t make what is difficult look easy; his strength is to make it look exactly as hard as it is.
JAL NICHOLL is a poet whose work has appeared in The Age, Cordite, Mascara and elsewhere. He lives in Melbourne and dreams of escape.
The editor notes a review of Stephen Edgar’s poetics, which does not emphasise an ethno-poetic reading, appears in issue six.
All Just (2012) is David Herd’s second collection published by Carcanet Press (the first being Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir (2005)). The epigraph by Giorgio Agamben foregrounds the volume’s key theme which is to explore what it means to be political in contemporary times: “The thought of our time finds itself confronted with the structure of the exception in every area”(n.pag.) In many respects, All Just is Herd’s response to the epigraph to Agamben’s own book State of Exception(2005): “Why are you jurists silent about that which concerns you?” Agamben views the state of exception as the site of uncertainty or “no-man’s land” between the legal and the political.(1) As he points out, the state of exception is a structure in which the law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension and is increasingly a dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. Perhaps the most obvious example is the U.S.A. Patriot Act which “allowed the attorney general to ‘take into custody’ any alien suspected of activities that endangered the national security of the United States.” This Act, as Agamben points out,” “erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being.” He or she becomes simply a ‘detainee,’ the “object of a pure de facto rule”(3). In “Fact,” Herd notes a similar erasure of rights in the British system: “when a detainee/ from the Dover Immigration Removal Centre” is not entitled to attend his own bail hearing and the bail hearing is “officially un-/recorded”(27). The poem foregrounds the dehumanisation involved in applying the letter of the law under a state of exception. In transposing the legal statement to verse form, chopping it into lines, and framing it through William Carlos William’s whimsical imagist poem, “This is just to say—”, Herd undoes the statement’s objective, totalising force as rule.
In his essay on Kafka, Walter Benjamin proposed that “[t]he law which is studied but no longer practised is the gate to justice”(qtd in Agamben 63). That is, justice is approached not through rejecting a law that no longer has any meaning, but “in having shown that it ceases to be law and blurs at all points of life.” Agamben argues that only a “studious play” with the law will be that which “allows us to arrive at that justice […] a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical”(64). He continues, “To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of ‘politics.’” For Agamben, politics has, of late, been contaminated by law, “seeing itself, at best, as constituent power.” However, in Agamben’s view, “The only truly political act […] is that which severs the nexus between violence and law”(88).
This may seem like a lengthy way to getting around to talking about All Just but necessary, I think, in order to demonstrate just how significant and pressing a task Herd takes on. Herd dedicates All Just to Alpha, a synonym for “beginning” or first of a new use. It is a utopic gesture. The opening poem, “3 a.m.,” considers what Alain Badiou might call an evental moment of Rimbaud writing,
What he imagined was a vanishing point,
A tenacious correspondence between diverse spheres.
Or rather, a kind of serenity [eue’maneria, beautiful day]
The new politics which remains largely to be invented.
That’s what it’s all about,
3 a.m.
Candle. Birds. Trees. Bread.
Seized [s’est chargé],
Already the staccato.
Just about, merely
Circulating. (11)
The elements of this “new politics” can be found in terms, “3 a.m.,” “Candle,” “Birds,” “Tree,” “Bread.” As Agamben notes, language too can be cut from the confines of grammar although it gains meaning through discourse or through “merely/ Circulating”(37). In seizing these mundane words, Rimbaud stages an act of violence and challenges their normal use. In so doing, he reveals language as an empty space. This “staccato” is the suspension of the law, by which there is the possibility of “Just about”, a possible glimpse to the “vanishing point” of justice.
The collection’s title All Just suggests that the poems within might be viewed together, studiously or ‘just’ playing with, or layering one another towards the state of justice. As such, they can be approached singularly but have additional charge if read serially. Sometimes, this might be a recurring word, such as “plum.” Tying the poems between each other and back to William’s “This is just to say”, Herd ranges from a state of potential in being “plumready”(23) or “When the plums were first ready”(31) to that of destruction, with an image of plums smashed in other poems. In some cases, the connection between poems is made overt (such as through a play on title) and could be seen almost as variations. These are poems where words and phrases are extracted and rearranged, a process of condensation that encourages (Objectivist-like) a heightened attention to the remaining words and to their surrounding space. The following two poems is an example of this pairing:
Ecology
Along the broken road
nearby the disparate houses
where summers, coming into purple
the mallow blooms,
scattered,
carting children,
complex tools and fishing nets,
women,
‘environment acting’,
stop and exchange;
beneath wires where
afternoons
goldfinches gather,
‘Adoration of the Child and the Young St John’,
nearby the outbuildings,
a variant,
slipped open early,
‘based on conflict’,
as morning comes;
where seagulls stand
allover into language,
where mallow blooms purple along the broken road,
scattered, disparate,
‘beautifully economical’,
you stood one time
struggling
to arrive at terms. (32)
Ecology (out set)
What stands discrete
scattered against the outbuildings
mallow goldfinch complex terms
and you, stood there
not knowing if you’re coming or going
‘beautifully economical’
‘hostile world’ (33)
The first poem foregrounds being located in a particular place and time, one that seems to be of a Kentish seaside town and with the modern parent’s responsibility of “carting children” around. The poem, on one level, can be read as a glimpse into the privacy of the living being, situated between the aesthetic and the functional, between natural cycles (the seasons, life and death) and human degeneration. Yet on another level, the poem is focussed on its own artifice and, indeed, doubles up on itself in recycling its own terms and being ‘beautifully economical.’ The poem ends with “you stood one time/struggling/to arrive at terms,” questioning at one level, the terms of governance and the state prescribed to the ‘normal’, but at another level, asking what the living being might mean in relation to words. This is also reflected in “[W]here seagulls stand” being made “allover into language.” The second poem is an act of condensation from the first poem, intensifying attention to a few words and phrases. Attention is now drawn to the emptiness or white space surrounding the words. The words and phrases are “[w]hat stands discrete” out of a traditional verse form. One’s relation to these terms and phrases is less easy to navigate without poetic conventions, such that one is cast into “not knowing if you’re coming or going”. In placing terms like ‘hostile world’ in quotation marks, Herd foregrounds their clichéd over-use and possible emptiness.
A further poem, “One by One,” both enacts and reflects on Herd’s multiplication or fragmenting of poems, stating:
The poem splits,
It has no desire to become a nation,
It traffics in meanings, roots among stones,
Mallow,
People,
The things they have with them,
Corrugated outbuildings
Along the broken road. (37)
In the poem’s second stanza, the immigrant is marked as “it,” splitting identity “To begin again”(37). Identity papers are, of course, a way of positioning within and binding a living being to nation. The tendency of documents to ‘fix’ a person has been well-theorised. A number of poems in All Just explore the relationship between living being and documentation. “Sans papiers,” for instance, considers how the history of migration does not lend itself to empirical or juridical analysis because of the lack of documentation:
Where parts of the message must have disappeared
With time but also through violence, errors in transmission
So it couldn’t be framed how much movement there had been (12)
Herd puts tension on words (language) and genre (form), testing their degree of circulation and separation. Occasionally he merges words together into neologisms such as “seagullsallover”(52) and “sweethairbefalling”(55). In these instances, words are literally brought closer together, whereas in other cases, he tests word “scattering” against the blank page. He parallels the experience of making sense of linguistic terms with the difficulty of negotiating terms between two individuals. All Just is a wonderful collection because it has poetry that does what many do not, meditating upon the long-term nature of a ‘holding place’ in which to live (of intimacy, “[m]aking a home”(53) and “establishing a living”(53)). The articulation of personal structures, both their fragility and routine nature, is tenderly and eloquently set out. Not only this, but there is also a contrast between the efforts required to maintain connection and security against an alternative transience of life that marks those moving across places, such as refugees. The difficulty of knowing ‘where one stands’ both in space and affect, whether it requires particularising or details, whether one can choose where one stands, is perhaps the condition of being modern and is explored in All Just in a way that is resonant and haunting.
All Just articulates the ambiguities, uncertainties, and intersections between living beings and the structures that bind, including that of language itself. Herd suggests that “what we need surely/ Is a new kind of document equal/ To the places we constructed between us.” One might add, and to the dynamics between ourselves. All Just attempts to write just that and in doing so, is affectively moving, linguistically playful, and emphatically political.
Works Cited
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
David Herd. Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2005.
—–. All Just. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012.
This is Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne’s second publication. Her first, People from Bones, was co-authored with Bron Bateman and the new collection, Domestic Archaeology, “has been ten years in the making and aims to take you on the journey of infertility and out the other side with your optimism left firmly intact.” Pilgrim-Byrne is indeed true to her aspirations and it is the unflinching exposure of the personal that makes this collection so charming. What seems striking about this collection is the anthropocentric inventiveness; the way Pilgrim-Byrne’s use of nature adds layers to her personal poems.
We Mums
A third of Laysan albatross pairs are female and have been known to couple for up to 19 years.
We’re Laysan Albatross People
co-operatively breeding a new generation
of squawking individuals
(39)
Domestic Archaeology offers the reader a detailed review of Pilgrim-Byrne’s biographical experience and her familial landscape. Fertility / infertility are a central theme and throughout her collection weave a sequence of poems which document the author’s personal journey through four and a half years of IVF treatment with her same sex partner and the eventual birth of their daughter. Pilgrm-Byrne is writing for and from her times. The subject matter of her poetry is unique in its approach to universal themes and their expression in the contemporary world. She uses her poetics to specify and detail the experience of same sex motherhood in lyric and metaphoric layers.
26092007
the slice of her abdomen
the slick and slip, pull and tug
your quivering arrival
delivers the (other) mother
(16)
Domestic Archaeology is a triptych, each territory of which is exceeded in size by the next. These sections chronicle the journey between and beyond fertility / infertility. When viewed as a whole, this narrative appears to begin in medias res with “Venus of Willendorf … Her vulva trapped / between fold and fat, / a luxurious peak / of convergence” (9); this ekphrastic poem also featured in The Best Australian Poetry 2009 anthology.
Like layers of sediment the three subdivisions within Domestic Archaeology, “Excavation”, “Fauna” and “Cataloguing”,invite the reader into a process of unearthing, discovery and construction of narrative.
For those who came before
I feel as if I have let you down
scrubbed out all your hard earned
physical hand-me-downs
broken the chain–a thousand years
of pox on me.
(…)
Yet here’s an intriguing thing about families
–similarities are not all hard-wired
and in our daughter we see facial expressions,
overexcitement, or the flourish of a hand gesture
that have been gifted from you by me to her
a precious package of inheritance.”
(18)
Despite the intimate focus of the narrative, this collection never slips into self-indulgence. In part, this is because the very personal and confessional material dominating the content is tempered with works such as “My Maiden Aunt’s Lips” and “Snake in my laundry room (4am)” which view the author’s immediate surroundings through a wider lens. Perhaps this is the most obvious in Fauna which consists of a series of poems which are deft and analytic in their examination of various living creatures. Any risk of sentimentality is also avoided through Pilgrim-Byrne’s wry sense of humour.
I’m going to build a monument to infertility
where there will be no penises no breasts.
There will definitely be no vaginas–
though there will be lips
and they will be pursed and cinched
and of course, downturned.
These lips will not be dusted red
and they will not be plumped,
they will be … blue
(14)
Domestic Archaeology deals with powerful emotions and the experiences of grief and loss. These poems appear alongside the ecstatic; harmony is found between the felicitous tone of these works and those of the darker poems such as “Home” written “In memory of Rafferty James Manhatan Downes 15/7/11 – 30/7/11” and “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.
And I learnt that if there is a God
prayer isn’t the language he understands
because if this Kris guy, after two years of living on the cusp of Hell
has been sent home to make books and videos for his sons …
if there’s no hope for him
then we’d all better learn to let the light in.
(69)
The longest poem in this collection is “Juvenesvcence, variations on a theme”. In this nine part piece aphorism and powerful imagery combine in an impressive whole.
business students learn
how to rule the world, the arts kids shape it
scientists (for better or worse) change it
(42)
… Listen
like drums
with their skin pulled tight
how the young sound
(47)
The poem from which this collection takes its name is an excellent one from which to draw the essence of Pilgrim-Byrne’s solo debut. Here, evocative imagery meets the uncluttered strength of her free-verse.
Like excavators
we sift through simple ruins
carefully
cultivating people from bones.
(50)
Domestic Archaeology is the third collection released by Grand Parade Poets, a press which believes poetry “must be at once elitist and democratic since it brings high-powered imaginative entertainment and intellectual pleasure to those willing to meet it at least part of the way. Grand Parade Poets wishes to publish poets of music, passion and intelligence”[1] and, like Pilgrim Byrnes herself, this publisher also delivers what it promises.
[1] Wearne, A. An Accidental Publisher: Alan Wearne on Grand Parade Poets and Christopher Bantinck, [16.11.2011] spunc.com.au/splog/post/an-accidental-publisher-alan-wearne-on-grand-parade-poets-and-christopher-bantick
More than any collection I’ve read recently, Keri Glastonbury’s work takes us along for her travels – we are the notebook in her back pocket, and accordingly, she wants us to remember a few things with her. And what an excellent trip. It’s a rare thing to find energetic exuberance combined so well with sharply calibrated specificity, and when this appears in poetry you know you’re in for something good.
now I’ve been toNew Yorkit’s official: no lack left!
& though I can’t lose my nostalgia, I can’t hide my relief
at the ambivalence I feel the strategies I imagined I
learnt for nothing?
(87)
Grit Salute is Glastonbury’s first full-length collection following chapbooks hygienic lily (1999) and super-regional (2001) and the distance between them has resulted in a collected that is super-honed. Questions and asides pop out constantly in these poems; they do seem to speak directly to us, as though she has somehow managed to melt the page off (like a transfer or temporary tattoo from a showbag) leaving just the words, and it’s all we can do to converse with them. There are ‘literal’ geographic travels here as well as poetic; the volume is divided into segments that include those titled and located in hygienic Italy, anti-suburb, triggering town and local/general. I would argue that the beautifully named opening group of poems ‘8 reasons why I fall for inaccessible straight boys every damn time’ is a destination just as recognisable to many of us as a European holiday (‘Take me to Unrequited, I hear the capital is lovely in the Spring…’).
The references that I always hope for are presented in spades. When looking for something new, in poetry (as anything else), I genuinely want to see things being woven in that are ripe for the plucking. I want to see work that tells me it’s of our time. I’m not talking about tokenistic inclusions, that operate like a time-and-date stamp, but nuggets of observance that beg to be put in a poem. It feels too simplistic to call these ‘pop culture’ as they are presented with lightness and a solemnity that surprises at exactly the same moment that it reassures. This is content that has the confidence to assume I know what it’s talking about. And surely this is the idea, to take for granted the importance of these thematic strands. (And it is only because I don’t see it as much as I would expect to, in ‘published’ Australian poetry, that I feel need to mention this at all.) So much is held in small fragments, such as ‘we did the sydney scene so differently’ (‘Glory That’) and ‘you never did grow up to be that carol jerems photo of a topless woman some oedipal hitch with identity’ (‘The Red Door’). The shorthand of ‘this is how I see it/sometimes we’d fuck to guitar pop/ sometimes to ambient electronica’ says more about whole decades of people’s lives than three lines should be able to contain, and yet retain nonchalance.
There is a fair serve of teenage rural memories, which can difficult to do without just seeming sentimental. Somehow it never veers towards this, despite evoking and evoking until you’re not quite sure which are Glastonbury’s ‘memories’ and which are mine. Or indeed, the second-hand memories of my friends, which she seems to have carriage of also. I know these people, and I know the attendant feelings. There are farms with tennis courts, and twilight barbecues with local squattocracy, with Glastonbury even somehow getting away with ‘your once best friend is now a companioning house frau at least she’s made it into town and is no longer “stuck out there”’.
Perhaps it’s unfair of me to have sliced up the lines of the work in the way I have; the small quotes do nothing to show the fabric they make in whole poems, a style further enhanced by the running together of lines into blocks of text. I love the manner of reading this can create, where you need to run your eye back to check whether something was an ending or a beginning. Of course it’s both, and this just sweetens the deal. ‘Triggering Town’ (from the section of the same name) shimmers with this all the way through:
…the flouncey skivvy
a show of rare authenticity which sees you investing appreciation
into perceived flaws you hope disqualify the beloved
to everybody except you generous arbiter of redoubled fantasies following a familiar maternal loop she’s not
trying to get out of interaction the moment it snares
her like everybody else is around here…
As well as journeys, the collection gives us many hints that choices, or the slipping away of choice, is as fine a parameter as any for the creation of strong and feisty poems. We can’t always see where we’re at, while we’re in it, and never more so than at the point of history where we are overloaded with information, and stimuli, and people in all their heartfelt and oversharing modes. Poetry does its job when it takes some of it and places it just so. Not to understand ourselves (God forbid), just to see. And to hear how it sounds when it’s arranged better, with cooler syntax and humour that sidles up to you and gets it right. Grit Salute has loads of style and exclamation marks to burn, and deserves much attention.
MELINDA BUFTON is Melbourne-based poet and occasional commentator on the creative process. She is currently undertaking postgraduate studies in creative writing at Deakin University and has most recently been published in The Age, Steamer and Rabbit.
When Mal McKimmie’s debut collection Poetileptic was released in late 2005, I attended the launch at Carlton theatre where I had just seen Oscar Wilde’s Salome. A small, high-quality audience of esteemed poets, editors and friends were treated to the birth of a book which had to fight and kick to be born, being from a West Australian poet in the East without extensive connections. As a result Poetileptic deserved to be born many times over, and perhaps it was in certain quarters, although it was telling that most of the Melbourne ‘scene’ preferred a simultaneous launch of a sound poetry collaboration featuring home-town standard PiO. Poetileptic was positively but sparsely reviewed, and ignored in the haphazard process of national prizes, unlike its successor which was recently awarded The Age Book of the Year Award for Poetry.
For many readers The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems, will be their first contact with McKimmie. Others may recall Dorothy Porter’s selection of the Howard-era satire ‘Jubilate Agony’ in Best Australian Poems 2006, his appearance on ABC Radio’s Poetica also in 2006, or ‘The Higher, the Fewer’ in Meanjin last year. A reader doesn’t have to have read Poetileptic to enjoy and engage with The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems, but they should be aware that the two collections are thematically, structurally and metaphorically conjoined to a greater degree than most first and second collections, not least because the ambition of the poetry is greater than most first and second collections.
The Brokenness Sonnets I, which opens proceedings, is reproduced in its entirety from the middle section of Poetileptic, with some title and order changes and the addition of a twenty-fifth piece, ‘With my dream-catcher I caught the dreams,’ where the dramatic voice is that of a woman lost in imagined past lives:
my past is my present and I am
famous in it. Who can claim as much as that?
Ssshhh … There I am up on the screen,
am I not beautiful? Goodbye Father —
No, I am happy here, here I am free —
Out on a limb, dancing in the light all day,
like a cartoon character that has sawn
the tree away. O my mad lost daughter
While this resounds with a gravitas akin to the other voices of human brokenness in the sequence, its insights also correspond thematically with the only sonnet in the Other Poems section, ‘Doomed Youth — Newmarket Railway Station, Melbourne’:
What happiness for those who live as chattels?
— Only her monstrous personalised ringtone,
Only his triumph in playstation battles
Can make them feel they are not owned, but own.
No poetry for them; no words of power;
No New Idea, save the magazine
That shrill, demented Rupert in his tower
Excretes to supplement the TV screen.
Here, updating Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, the displacement of a whole persona into borrowed fame in ‘With my dream-catcher I caught the dreams’ has become the displacement of a print culture into the digital, with the self as borrowed celebrity. The first is near-mad, the second near-collective. Little separates them, and yet because ‘Not by poets, but by prose-police / Shall their history be assembled piece by piece’, opportunities to delineate and question this are not so easily downloadable. The reference to ‘owning’ is especially poignant given the use of the word in gaming circles to mean ‘mastering’ or ‘beating’, as depicted in the recent mockumentary Pure Ownage.
Yet poets themselves are hardly absolved. Some poets’ borrowed celebrity is repeatedly stung in a piece which marries apiological allegory and ars poetica, ‘The Higher, the Fewer’:
Poetry is now the only difference between
Those who write poetry & those who do not.
Fear of this is why poets read to poets and are happy.
She said of her 500 Facebook friends:
‘They’re not a swarm, they’re a print run’.
Ouch. But to characterise this poet as broadly cantankerous, with a didactic attachment to the margins via form is akin to ignoring the loved hearth of a house you refuse to go in because roof glowers at you.
Love and joy are at the centre of McKimmie’s world, and their compression by layers of irony, cruelty and injustice only makes their eruptions more vivid and volatile, audibly so in the reactions of live audiences. Consider these:
Come, bring your newborn to me. I will hold
a river, like a baby, in my arms. (‘Yes, he will become Narcissus. It is’)
In Calcutta the beggar I could not shake was Art.
God fell from my head. She rose in my heart. (‘Escape from the Rat Gods’)
Unfurl the white flag of your surrender:
she waits for you as patient as a mirror,
but she is not a mirror, she is free.
And you love her as the wave loves vast the sea. (‘Requiescat in pace’)
Despite the pitfalls of taking lines in isolation, these snippets from The Brokenness Sonnets I indicate the deeper project of McKimmie’s work and also serve to explain why he cares enough to write the more scathing social pieces in the first place. ‘The Higher, the Fewer’, having dispatching its Facebook poet, continues in this vein with a nod to Blake:
The anonymous reader is the true apiarist, humming
From page to page, cramming his pockets with pollen until he’s
Jodhpur-thighed, trailing legs shaped like hams & is become a bee.
He might be living in a house on fire, smoke might have
Pulled a grey Salvo-Army blanket up to his chin & tucked him in,
But in his sleep, one by one or two by two, like the zzzzzzzzzz of a
Gentle snoring, bees slip from his mouth, his dream
& swarm into the shape of tomorrow.
Everything seemed like an accident:
All I did was keep bees & sleep, bees & read, sleep & bees.
Writing was only to stay awake in the smoke. Now what am I?
(Somehow saw the bloom in slow-motion,
Caught a glimpse of the locksmith opening the flower.)
There is a strange, oblique transference of identity from reader to sleeper to poet to smoker to lover to reader of all that these identities entail through the bee allegory, its Old Testament honey through the hive voice reminiscent of Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World more than any Plathian beekeeper. Is it any accident that ‘The Higher, the Fewer’ is followed by the final, and spiritual, poem of the book, ‘Three Readings Heard in a Temple’?
Like, but also beyond, his voices in The Brokenness Sonnets, McKimmie is a poet who resists the easy path and thus resists easy encapsulation. This sonneteer writes about bikies, DNA and the Internet in the same breath as religion and myth. The free verse raconteur also writes against his greatest asset, that of sustained compression, in three sections of ‘homunculi.’ These, although tiny, are not always fully formed enough, and I find some, such as ‘Like windows / Souls don’t just happen’, to be nowhere near the quality of others (‘Fish are subatomic physicists, separating O from H2O. / (I saw them doing it.)’; ‘“This is Lazarus. / I need an outside line.”’). Of highest quality still is ‘Lapsed Corona’ from ‘The Brokenness Sonnets II,’ a multidimensional masterpiece whose communing with the reader I’ll leave as a private affair, other than to recommend the work as one capable of the same immense religio-dramatic absorption as Francis Webb’s ‘The Canticle.’ And, like Webb, in The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems, the heavy weather is also the transcendent sun.
In just two collections, this poet has outstripped many more venerated poets and, while he takes his time doing whatever comes next, we should take some time with his works, because there are parts of them that are necessarily beyond their creator –and there can be no higher praise. If Mal McKimmie is not recognised as an integral part of the front rank of twenty-first century Australian poets by his next collection, I’m in the wrong game.
The Brokenness Sonnets I–III & Other Poems was awarded the 2012 Age Poetry Book of the Year.
TOBY DAVIDSON is a West Australian poet, editor and reviewer now living in Sydney where he is an Australian Literature lecturer at Macquarie University. He is the editor of Francis Webb Collected Poems (2011, ebook 2012) and author of the upcoming study Born of Fire, Possessed by Darkness: Mysticism and Australian Poetry (Cambria Press).
Rimbaud in Java
