April 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Indigo Book of Australian Prose Poems
Ed Michael Byrne
Ginninderra Press
ISBN 978 1 74027 650 4
Reviewed by ED WRIGHT
The American poet Charles Simic once commented in Verse magazine that “Writing a prose poem is a bit like trying to catch a fly in a dark room. The fly probably isn’t even there, the fly is inside your head, still, you keep tripping over and bumping into things in hot pursuit. The prose poem is a burst of language following a collision with a large piece of furniture.” Having emerged through the rebellious anti-formalism of late-nineteenth century French poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the prose poem has maintained a sense of the unconventional, and of the enigmatic given that it exists in the slippery spaces around what might be poetry and what might more aptly be described as prose.
An anthology of Australian Prose Poems is a neat idea, so power to Michael Byrne for getting this one together. There are some tremendous poems here; ones that have eschewed the lines of verse in favour of the sentence and paragraph, but still manage to shift the readers’ angles of thought as all good poetry should.
Stand-outs include Joanne Burns’s dramatic monologues, most notably ‘marble surfaces,’ which takes us into the inner world of a butcher; John Scott’s extracts from the longer work, ‘Slippages,’ and Peter Boyle’s fragments of fantastic logic, such as ‘Philosophers and Other World Leaders.” Other big guns of Australia’s poetry are to be found here too. The poems by John Forbes and John Tranter are great, as is Tom Shapcott’s ‘Concert Arias.’ Poems of lesser known poets such as Tatjana Lukic’s ‘Sleepless in Canberra, or George Huitker’s ‘The Soccer Coach Gets Philosophical’ are also worth discovering.
While Byrne brings to our attention some great poems unfortunately, as an anthology, this collection is something of a letdown. The great problem is its sheer unrepresentativeness. There are far too many baby boomer poets, and too many works from lesser practitioners within this set. A gender division doesn’t seem apparent since gender division since Ania Walwicz, Vicki Viidikas and Anna Couani are all included in the volume, but of the 43 poets represented, 36 are boomers. Of course the new Australian poetry of the late sixties is known for its championing of the form. However, even if Gary Catalano was the sixties poet known specifically for his prose poetry, he is not a strong enough poet (despite Les Murray’s panegyric) to warrant ten outings in this rather slim 150 page volume.
Worse still is that some of the included here read more like misplaced paragraphs than prose poems. Deprived of the space created by verse lines, some become afflicted by a dense banality. Tim Metcalf’s ‘The Airman Rolls’ away begins for instance:
‘I have always found conversation a little stifled when wiping clean the papery skin of the incontinent. First my potential partner in conversation is rolled away with their back to me; and second trying to hold my breath disrupts the natural flow of words and the pauses in between them. So I say little, mouth breathe to avoid the smell, and ask myself the same question over and over again: ‘where is the poem in this?’
Others are reduced to reading like . . . regular prose. There are stray travel observations that resonate little. Geoff Page’s “Cathedral in Castile,” for example, or Gary Catalano’s ‘Theatre,’ which is set in Paris. Perhaps the problem here is that these poems are anchored in an era when travel retained its rarity. When to name such places cast an aura and granted their invokers absolution from a still extant cultural cringe. However, other poems based on travel reminiscence, notably Phillip Hammial’s ‘Pygmies’, with its witty self-awareness, and Judith Beveridge’s ‘Flower of Flowers’ with its sheer sensuality transcend their localities and linger in the mind.
Some of the weaker poems in this anthology are cute but ultimately throwaway thought pieces. Catalano’s ‘Books’ is one example. It starts off “Books must prefer their own company to those of human beings, who rarely use them in the proper or appropriate way.’ The cuteness of the idea comes a cropper in the execution of it, particularly through the clunkiness of using both “proper” and “appropriate,” and in the extension of a small idea into a conceit.
If Byrne had cast his net a little wider, he could easily have found more memorable stuff, more variety of it, and this anthology would have been much improved. Given he is not a babyboomer himself, it’s hard to understand why he hasn’t done this.
Another problem with this concentration is that it denies the Australian prose poem a sense of its own narrative or development. The only pre-boomer poet included here is Bruce Beaver, and while this reflects the emergence of the genre in the sixties, Byrnes’s selections give little idea of how this sub-genre may have developed in the almost fifty years since this seminal cultural moment. Placing the poems in an obvious chronological order may have helped the idea of such a narrative, especially as the included work of younger poets feels scattered and arbitrary.
Alternatively, Byrne might have narrowed his criteria and restricted the anthology to the sixties poets. Then it would have worked as a particular distillation of a generation. But to present this as “the (Indigo) Book of Australian Prose Poems” is to infer limits that don’t exist. While he must be commended for retrieving so many excellent poems and putting them together in the context of their genre, it’s hard to be satisfied as a reader when you are left thinking that this anthology could have been so much more.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
warming the core of things
by Nora Krouk
Hybrid Publishers
ISBN: 978192166543
Reviewed by BROOK EMERY
Over the last few months, while all the wise futurists have been forecasting the decline of the book and the ascension of the virtual word, I’ve been thinking about why I’m so attracted to books, specifically to poetry BOOKS, to collections of poetry. I’m not much good at reading poems on the web and I often feel dissatisfied when I read single poems by various authors in journals and anthologies, even in hard copy, even in canon-making anthologies such as The Norton. To me, in these formats poems seem to be isolated, un-contextualised, orphans. I find myself reading one poem after another subconsciously saying things like ‘Oh, that’s not bad’, ‘Yeah, I quite like that one’, ‘There’s not much in this one, is there?’ and flipping (or scrolling) to the next one without really engaging with the poems or feeling involved. I find myself hanging out for a book of poems by the one author so I can get some sense of narrative and coherence, a feeling that the poems speak to each other and enrich each other, a sense of the voice, and personality, and world experience behind the poems.
These considerations came back to me strongly as I was reading Nora’s warming the core of things for the first time. This is a book which invites you to enter and share a life. It is a book which, poem by poem, builds into a unified and challenging consideration of what has been observed and experienced over many years. It is a book in which the overwhelming feeling is ‘warmth’, literally and metaphorically. Such warmth is doubly attractive and welcoming at a time when a lot of poetry is cool, detached, clever, and sometimes seems to have lost touch with that really basic responsibility of poetry to reach out, to connect, and to explore what it is like to be human in our thoughts and feelings.
Warming the core of things is a book which is intimate, confessional (if you like). It celebrates the personal, the familial, and the emotional, it concerns itself with the relationships between people over time. It makes me think of lines from Jack Gilbert’s poem, ‘Highlights and Interstices’ where he writes ‘… our lives happen between / the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual / breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about / her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.’ Like Gilbert, but in a very different way, Nora raises the everyday to moments of insight and appreciation. And like Gilbert, despite what he says about himself, Nora does remember both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Two of the things she and Gilbert remember and feel acutely are love and loss.
The first section of Nora’s collection is titled ‘In Memoriam’ and begins with a delicate poem to her husband Efim who died in 2008. The poem ends with the simple, dignified statement, ‘I miss you’ but this section is no simple, romanticised portrait of a long marriage and the death of a partner. It is clear-eyed, emotionally honest and vivid in its realism. It notes the tensions and ironies and ordinariness in lines such as, ‘she hates to leave him alone / yet itches to step outside’ (‘They are together most days’), in the white chair that waits ‘brazen with coloured cushions’ (‘Slumped in a chair’), in the ‘bare bottoms and other bits’ and the ‘inmates with anguished eyes / [who] search for themselves / [and] stumble over the shards’ (‘Ward 15’). The section expands to take in other deaths, other inevitabilities, and below the surface of them all are the perennial human questions, ‘Why?’ and ‘Couldn’t it have been different?’ Usually the questions are implied but sometimes they are explicitly stated as at the end of the poem ‘Blue Doona’ when Nora asks, ‘Couldn’t you just live?’ It is worth remembering that question from an early poem when you come to the last poem in the book. I’ll say something about this later because it reveals a great deal about Nora’s vision. These poems, these wishes, are moving, touching, but Nora doesn’t live in fantasy, she knows that what happened has happened and nothing can change it or take away the grief because, as she writes in ‘Birthday’, ‘Love is the most pitiless feeling of all’. To really understand the import of this statement, to unpick the relationship between ‘pity’, ‘pitiless’ and ‘love’, you not only have to read the whole poem but the whole collection. Only then will you appreciate the wisdom and emotional intelligence of this collection. Nora is a participant in these poems but she is also the thoughtful observer and interpreter. These are poems in which the border between life and art is more porous than is often the case. It takes courage, assurance and depth to be able to write, ‘My dearest dearest difficult / husband My love’ (‘What should I do’).
The capacity for love leads to an indignity at injustice, especially the injustice done to the individual by the impersonal forces of history. It is there explicitly in some poems and is the context in which the personal happens. Nora has lived a memorable life and she remembers and can see, at this distance, things as they were, that ‘The good times in Shanghai / [were] a 20th century masquerade / as the world burned’. Nora also sees, for example in the poem ‘For Leon K’, how the effects of not knowing – ‘What did they do / before his boots were filling with blood’ – can reverberate through the decades and continue to hurt, even cripple. Nora is witness and rememberer of a father who had to break with his Polish past, of a mother ‘buried in Chinese soil / without a headstone / during the Cultural / Revolution’ (‘A short visit’), of massacres in China, experiments on humans in Harbin, of atrocities committed in war. That the personal is the political is a bit of a silly phrase but Nora’s poetry reminds us that we are all part of events that seem to have happened ‘over there’ or ‘back then’ or to ‘someone else’. Reading these poems we are reminded that no man (no woman) is an island.
Warming the core of things changes gears somewhat in the second section which is called ‘Renewals’. Here the warmth and love which were manifest within the sadness and grief are expressed in a sensual joy in beauty and in a determination to appreciate the bounty of nature. Here the poems are overflowing with wisteria, lavender, roses, gardenias, asters, food, friends, and the warmth of the sun. In the first poem ‘A smile is hovering over our street’ (‘A young woman’), in another ‘this day is / a glob / of honey / a pouring warmth’ (‘Dust on the silver chimes’), in another ‘ Like that butterfly / drunk / on sun / I claim it all: My sun!’ (‘Like that butterfly’), in another Nora is ‘… grateful to Fate / for landing in the sun’. (‘Memory’), and in ‘Shanghai Sydney’ Nora is ‘moving through an amazing puzzle / picking a piece / here on my palm / wishing I knew a psalm / or a prayer of thanks // For everything’ (‘Shanghai Sydney). This section of Nora’s book transforms as well as renews.
If warmth and wisdom are the two dominant qualities of this book, it is the voice of the poems which makes them so attractive. Nora often jokes that her Russian typewriter mischievously makes syntactical or idiomatic mistakes in her poems or, perhaps, even writes the poems without her intervention. I don’t quite believe her because I hear her voice in so many of the poems, in little statements and questions, especially questions. I constantly hear Nora asking herself what she knows, what she has learnt, what she then believed and now believes, what she can do about fate, the inevitable. This is most notable in the third section of the book, ‘Transitions’ in which Nora has a number of conversations with God, humorously wonders about chaos theory and deals with a number of more or less philosophical issues. So many of these poems have a quality of consideration and reconsideration which is made explicit, appropriately near the end of the book, in the poem ‘Once I could plan or act’. This is not dogmatic poetry but the book does grope towards tentative, provisional answers. This testing of ideas can be seen, for example, in Nora’s identification with the sasanqua in ‘Sasanqua in May’
Gold tipped unblinking lashes
in floral faces
focus determination
to bloom to hang on
through alternating currents
of chill air
tucked in the permanence
of green leaves
over the strewn wax petals
trampled to death
they cling to relevance
to celebration of
Here and Now
without blinking.
I know the feeling.
A similar hard-won understanding or, at least, acceptance occurs in the poem, ‘Discussions about God’ where she writes ‘My slender beautiful / jacaranda comes / into bloom slowly / It blooms and sheds / sheds and blooms // Is this the answer?
For me, a baby boomer born and raised safely in Sydney who has not known depression, revolution, war, dislocation, internment, expatriation or, on the other hand, the high, fashionable life, who has taught history but didn’t live it, these poems make me realise how little I know, how little I understand, how little I have experienced.
Here is where you have to remember that early poem.The last word in Nora’s book is ‘live’ with an exclamation mark and that feels appropriate and significant to me. As does the epigraph to the last section of the book, a Ukranian saying, ‘Wishing you good health, warm bread, and peaceful skies’. In its entirety, warming the core of things is full of life; it endorses and celebrates that Ukranian saying.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Out to Lunch
by Andy Kissane
Puncher and Wattmann
ISBN:9781921450204
Reviewed by ANDY JACKSON
Among other things, Andy Kissane’s poetry in Out to Lunch focusses on suburbia, public transport, family, television, the beach and sausages. So, why am I surprised to be moved? And, not only moved, but challenged?
That the visceral, emotional experience of this collection is accompanied by such a sense of surprise is to me a reminder of how much I have still unconsciously bought into the myth of novelty and obscurity. Kissane writes accessible, unpretentious, often humourous, subtly thoughtful poems. They use language that isn’t a long way from the vernacular, what you might overhear at the food court or the pub, eavesdropping. But it is a language carefully calibrated to heighten the sense of the momentous within the everyday. Not to eclipse the everyday, but to attend to it – something like the effect of a film slowing down, heightening the meaning of small gestures, glances and events. It is a deliberate effect, sure, but it’s entirely unforced and natural – as in “Visiting Melbourne”, these are poems seemingly “sung / by lungs that never pause to think of breathing”.
This comes out intriguingly in “The Earlwood-Bardwell Park Song Cycle”, his ambitious and accomplished response to Les Murray’s “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” (which Kissane rightly reminds us is itself a response to the Wonguri-Mandjigai Song-Cycle of the Moon Bone). Whereas Murray’s poem is an attempt to fuse Aboriginal storytelling with a European-Australian attachment to country attuned through annual holiday-making, Kissane takes a more modest and respectful tack. It contains something of the same grammatical structure and heightened attention to place, but it maintains Kissane’s characteristic clarity and light touch. His “Song Cycle” is the Australian suburban world as it is lived day to day. It begins “the long holiday is over”, and flows through all the regular movements of traffic, work, home, shopping, crime, birdlife, the small epiphanies gained and missed. Near its climax, the poem speaks “of the people who gave Gumbramorra Swamp / its name, the Gwiyagal people, who were here first and are still / here, who fished and lived and moved in this place, here”. In this, it is not only a revision but a critique of Murray’s epic reach, baulking at a presumptuous appropriation of an indigenous worldview.
Most of the poems in Out to Lunch are structured in a taut and concentrated casual way, reminiscent of Robert Hass or Billy Collins, yet arguably even more deceptively casual. I say ‘deceptively’ because very often the sensation of a Kissane poem is of someone sitting beside you to tell you what has happened to them, and just as you’ve entered into that familiar world, something twists or jolts you into somewhere exhilaratingly unexpected, though on second glance intuitively connected. For instance, “Falling through the Hoop” contains a string of scenes and memories that touch on the life of “Heinz”. It moves from an image of skinny-dipping at Elwood beach, to “a suspension bridge across a ravine”, then to Heinz’s sudden suicide. At this point, Kissane, as he often does at moments like this in his poems, recedes into an admission of ignorance – “some moments / resist, no matter how you worry / at them, or pound them, they will not / answer, they will not come back”, aware that the reader will understand that these “moments” are also the people who he has lost.
To me, this is one of the most intriguing aspects of Out to Lunch. Many of its best poems, while rooted in autobiographical specifics and a familiar suburban milieu, grapple honestly with the suffering of others, and with the limitations of that grappling. The poet is clearly aware of, and uncomfortable with, global inequalities, and acutely aware of the great distance between his own life and the lives of others. His poems apprehend political complexities through the very intimate lens of empathy and imagination. The very real dilemma of attempting to integrate global realities with daily routine is vividly evoked in “The Colour of Starvation”. Here, Kissane remembers watching as a teenager a documentary set “somewhere in Africa or India, where many people / were poor and starving” and his subsequent anger at his family’s material comfort, acknowledging how easily an awareness of the other slides into self-consciousness. The poem weaves this story into a meditation on William Morris, 19th century artist, textile designer and socialist; the poet’s desire to write about sweat-shop labour from the comfort of his desk; and the pleasures of food, beautiful objects and sunlight. The poem leads us towards a familiar, uncomfortable compassion and refuses to provide solutions. As these juxtapositions build through the course of the book, as a reader, I begin to want the poet to attempt some leap towards resolution or provocation, but Kissane eschews definitive answers in favour of the clarity of the poem’s evocation of reality. Or, to put it another way, he overtly recognises the relative impotence of the poem to directly affect injustice – thereby allowing it to have impact in the affective field.
Throughout Out to Lunch there are small, concentrated statements of poetics, either implied or in the case of “Joy and a Fibro Shack” overt. The poem begins with an exploration of poetry as “like the difficulty of building a house / without a plan, a wood, a hammer”, moving further into the metaphor, until the deliberately prosaic lines “Is a poem a palace or a humpy? / I prefer humpies, furnished from a daggy couch / reclaimed from the council clean-up”. If this was the extent of the poem, it may feel underwhelming, but it shifts gear, as Kissane often does, through memory into a secondary metaphor that is just as clear and subtle, while also refusing resolution. It ends with the poet “up at 3am, / walking the kitchen, walking the hallway, walking / the lounge room, holding a baby / who would not stop, would not stop, / just would not stop crying”. We know that the poet is in control of this poem, but at its closure, we are left also with his awe at the wildness and hunger of poetry.
The question is, what holds this collection together? How could it be said that these poems are out to lunch? This is perhaps my only serious qualm with the book – the title. The suggestion of daydreaming in Out to Lunch certainly alludes to the shifts and leaps which provide much of the energy and surprise of the collection. And it also hints at the “Meat Matters” series of poems, where meat in its various cuts and recipes is given centre stage (which is sometimes quite funny and memorable, but also left this vegetarian a little cold) . But the idiom to me is too much rooted in the negative or apologetic, bringing to mind someone who instinctively wants to escape from the everyday with their imagination, someone unconcerned with the world as it is and their responsibility to it. This is not Kissane.
This, of course, is a minor issue. Kissane is a great craftsman, the writing finely shaped yet always fluid and naturalistic. Out to Lunch was deservedly shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize – the poems are warm, subtly complex and humane. Its peculiar and ongoing resonance comes from its full immersion in reality and memory, where moments of detail remind us of the constructed and limited nature of the poem, moments that foreground ignorance, that imply that life goes on through not knowing.
Leaving Home is to my mind perhaps the highlight of the collection. It epitomises Kissane’s ability to fuse the quotidian with surprise and understated emotion. From a domestic family scene where –
The oven door was permanently ajar,
hanging by its last hinge, when my mother
crossed the kitchen and planted a kiss
on my father’s bristly cheek…
to a magical, yet matter-of-factly stated transformation –
‘At last’, she said to herself, ‘I have managed
to get my priorities right’ – and with that
the feathers sprouted from her scapula
and her dentures dropped, orphan-like,
from her lips…
ANDY JACKSON’s collection, Among the Regulars (papertiger media, 2010) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. In late 2011, he will be an Asialink resident at Chennai, India. He blogs at amongtheregulars.wordpress.com
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
amphora
by joanne burns 
Giramondo Publishing, 2011
ISBN 9781920882631
Reviewed by IVY IRELAND
quadrillions of singing atoms: joanne burns’ amphora
joanne burns’ most recent collection, amphora, could almost be a gold-bound book of saints, if it weren’t for the utterly human myths also seeping through its pages. The collection’s amphorae are filled to brimming with hagiography, angelology and quite a bit of effortless nostalgia. In fact, burns’ well-loved quirks and smarts flood out of this collection, unable to be contained by the ancient vessels of the title. Dipping into the overflowing liquids of the ceramic jars, the reader discovers not only the holy waters of poignant scientific enquiry, but also the pink lemonade of PopThink. There is a great sense of questing after the divine threading throughout these poems, even if it is the divine discovered in such suburban tasks as trimming the unruly Bougainvillea or sucking on lifesavers during rosary.
What strikes me most when reading burns’ work is her tenacious grasp on the humble quotidian, her understanding of the layers beneath the hours and her willingness to unravel the cosmos into quarks and photons without losing her grasp on self and home. “streamers”, burns’ collection of koans, koannes, give the most intimate examples of this:
weigh the rice before you boil it
how else can you catch up
with yourself
“rung” is, to my thinking, the stand-out poetry sequence of the collection. The ladder is the subject of this humble, yet unrelenting, enquiry into what goes up and what comes down. Jacob, Yeats and Miro feature here, of course, but it’s burns’ own nostalgic reflections that contain the best clue to the importance of this everyday tool:
great thorny branches of bouganvillia leap and lurch
towards the sky; junglegreen and purple riot in the air.
i try to prune them. cut them back into some kind of
order no topiary, after my father dies; his ladder is my
ladder now
And yet every lofty, perhaps enlightened buzz-moment, such as:
yeats knew the disloyalty of ladders
the vanishing of rungs in the windy spaces
of old minds; who end up after all those heady
moments back down on hands and knees across
familiar rubbled ground, small hearts picking through
the rags and bones of diminished time;
is craftily snatched away again by simple memories from the human psyche box:
but me. i look for an easier solution. enough of biblical
endurance and ordealism. i climb down the ladder
of memory.
Throughout amphora, burns tackles even the most typical Christian icons, such as saints and angels, with her witty, playful antennae intact. The opening poem (from the aptly named “angles not angels” section) of the collection, “pitch,” claims:
… i don’t want an angel with huge wings
that rustle, i need someone quiet who likes to dust and shop and
vacuum while i recline and dream up poems and skim through
dictionaries and roget’s there is something about the sight
and thought of those angel wings in most religious art
that makes me shudder
suggesting that it is the typical domestic joys that truly keep the divine (and the poet) afloat in this sea of the extraordinary. And this book of poems is awash with the extraordinary, simply packed to the brim with mini-insights that eek out of the “pleroma” and into the mind of the sage sensitive enough to capture them and distil them down for the everyday reader. Even the almost-accidental, scattered and observational poems of the final section of the collection, “this week next week the week after” contain snippets of insight that can only be described as near-mythological or Zen-instructive:
you can’t rely on the sky
to help you sort it out it just hangs
there like a lout sucking on a milk
shake and letting it all happen the burning years
and again:
the poems are running
running away running from
that dread of having to explain
themselves, those lists of
food ingredients they’veread on the back of packets
instant noodles for example;
The blurb on the back of burn’s book states that “from… common things, from familiar words and phrases… burns draws attitudes that define a way of living – gladness, openness, curiosity, acceptance and above all sensual delight.” Indeed there is a delightful gladness skipping throughout the pages of amphora, even in the midst of the most sardonic observations. Yet I would add that, even through all of this all-consuming openness, there’s a sense of mocking the openness, as through nothing is sacred because everything is. Everything is, thus, worthy of the air-knives of burns’ observational skills because the simple holiness contained within these mocked saints and abjured louts will act as their own necessary shields.
amphora is a mini-world of quarks and paradox, dissecting gods and saints alongside the contents of a school lunchbox. And the variations in theme are almost equivalent to the variations in form. burns’ trademark prose poems are still to be found here, yet she seems to play a lot with lineation in this collection also, as evident in “raft”:
i dream of the Gnostic pleroma
before the light and dark fissure,
the superstitious rifting: eternal hymn
Throughout amphora, however, nothing remains in stasis. It is a book of changes: mercurial, honest, undoing itself at every turn. Even the glorious realisations contained in these stanzas of undulating internal rhythms and rhymes are undone in the next instant:
…pleroma,
foremost world of fullness; did the gnostics eat
grated carrot?
Reading through amphora repeatedly (and consider yourself warned: this collection will need second and third reading), I discover that, for me, it’s not the vast, eclectic field burns is plucking her poetics from that packs the most punch (though I must say I am wowed even by the neologisms). Instead, the true magic lies in the intimate realisations, in the nostalgic, expounded memory-shards that unfold from these poems. These snippets of insight into the specific journey of one human psyche, such as this image from “relief,” truly sing:
the smell of that old school chalk. how time slips
away but the smell doesn’t. smell of your teenage
slip singeing after you wrapped it around your
bedlamp late at night on a school day, anxious to
conceal your awakeness from your mother while
you devour ‘the picture of dorian grey’. giving the
gods of reading lust the slip as a burnt offering.
I feel certain that the great gods of reading lust will accept joanne burns’ latest offering with all the zest it deserves.
IVY IRELAND is a part-time cabaret performer, creative writing tutor, harpist, magician’s assistant and Ph.D candidate. Ivy was awarded the 2007 Australian Young Poet Fellowship, and has had her poems published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Ivy’s first solo poetry publication came out in 2007 and is entitled Incidental Complications.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Colombine, New & Selected Poems
by Jennifer Harrison
ISBN 9781876044657
Black Pepper Press
Reviewed by SUSAN FEALY
For Jennifer Harrison, discovery occurs through play with language and in Colombine, New & Selected Poems we see a dialectic stance to her investigations.
The tensions of mind/body, freedom/constraint and the lyric ‘I’ /modern awareness of its language medium appear in a variety of metaphoric guises.
In ‘The Wheel’, from her first collection, Michelangelo’s Prisoners, the poem introduces us to a body that has been impinged upon by medical science:
Under the tongue, after meals
the little pill melts. A mongrel dog
infects an embryo with its indolent lick.
We can bear it we say. Look now
at the human genome, a shiny new ship
emerging from the dock.
The body has been infiltrated by a mind that is ‘ambitious’ and seeking ‘a perfect pot’ but which, in its very certainty, may change what is inherently a soft, organic substance. It is tempting to see this as metaphor for Harrison’s poetic. Her erudite interest in the mind’s processes and in language (the medium of her perceptions) conflicts with a sense of being that is fluid and disrupted by such investigation. How the creative process mediates the two is seen in her work. As a psychiatrist, she is attuned not only to her mind’s processes, but to those of others. She gives us many languages by speaking through the lens of others; languages wrought by a rare attunement to the multiplicities of perception.
‘Aus-lan’ is a poem of intimate encounter with the mind of another. It is also a celebration of a transmission of mind that seems to reduce the gap between mind and body experience more so than spoken language:
I hear a quiet voice in my hands
in the silence when I am speaking
and foam, rubber, snow and glycerine
seem softer in the fingering span
than spoken words falling short of what they name.
This poem’s celebration of the mind’s different ways of knowing is also a comment about how direct in-the-moment experience through the senses is attenuated and distanced by language. Yet, in the same poem, with a magician’s hand, she offers us in words a child’s pre-language experience:
I once saw a baby catching sunlight in his hands—
everywhere the child touched
he laughed at what he could not touch
until language wheeled his pram away
and he learned that silhouettes and sun
were called chair and where.
Different languages for suffering, how it is shaped and wrought by the mind and body, are explored with astute and compassionate insight in Michelangelo’s Prisoners. We see in ‘Hysterical Blindness’ a code for surviving trauma where:
Her eyes punch back memory
as though what has happened
happens only if you look.
This is contrasted on the next page with ‘Amok-runner’s Mother’, a monologue of a mother perplexed by the violent gaze of the media and by its images of the victim’s female relatives. She survives the distress of her son’s killing spree by making him and his victims the ceaseless subject of painful rumination while protecting herself from the full, violent separation of his loss:
…No solace
and still I call his murders—mine.
I leave sound on
for emptiness, too, is a violent companion.
In ‘Cancer Poem’, language’s multiplicities and apparent freedom offer solace from the painful bondage to a body scarred by breast cancer:
Need no one. Need words that are
shuffled for comfort, meanings that multiply
defying the rudderless air.
A refusal to be pinned by male aesthetic portrayals of women, and investing in the creative process and its constant movement seem means of resilience in ‘Michelangelo’s Prisoners’:
She will look her father in the eye
a clear gaze which travels into his
so that he remembers Florence
where Michelangelo
left his prisoners unfinished
to state with impossible perfection\
that it is not the anguish of the chiselled stone
which matters.
It is the standing-still which kills.
Poems selected from Cabramatta/Cudmirrah take the reader on a road journey where Harrison is uneasily distant from, and somewhat repelled by a return to her childhood suburb of Cabramatta where ‘furry dice swing’, ‘my grandmother serves tea on a plastic cloth’, and ‘ceramic ducks fly by trifecta on the wall/ the plastic roses smell of tripe’.
The road shapes this sequence; we are moved through the rub of the real as Harrison revisits the suburb where as a teenager she breathed roadie culture. Memory fragments of men and adolescent boys are charged with danger and animal physicality: ‘I saw a man decapitated by the guard-rail and from the corner of my eye I watched/ a bikie gang called the rats, each a silver-studded/dirty-jeaned, black booted grizzly/ gulping beer as they lounged over petrol tanks/like they were shiny young bulls’.
The road also conveys the flattening predictability of suburbs where ‘your car’s a burrow’ and where ‘this road flattens/sterilizes everything—an efficient /movement of cartilage, stretch of vocal cord/even the wind can’t alter the pitch of its voice’. The road as metaphor allows the poet’s engine–mind to become the subject of its own travel:
travelling now for years
without arriving at the place you left
you can’t arrive because it’s gone
and possibly did not exist…
Towards the end of the poem, the poet finds an uneasy identification with the ignition of the engine, the attention-seeking car and the rhythm of the ride. All seem akin to the journey of making a poem. The final repetition of the jingle underlines her control as driver–poet as she evokes, yet drives away from, a world where little has changed:
the minute you put a key
in the ignition
a word on a page
you feel the engine strip down…
…
and the rhythm of your words
finds you pronouncing what you know:
it’s King John here calling for a copy
you flick I’ll switch
go down Brother Butch
go down Brother Butch
go sweet
Harrison is literally closer to her childhood in the selection from Cudmirrah: up close and intimate, as opposed to distant and travelling through. She stays to investigate the subtle detail in the micro-world of rockpools, examines sea creatures and her memories of foraging in the sea. In its formlessness and random offering of tiny treasures the sea seems a metaphor for the unconscious mind. All this is the opposite of the predictable and crass she finds in the suburbs, as is her intimate memories of childhood conversations with her grandmother, and Moss Wickham, a childhood mentor and gypsy of sorts. Her investigations often include her fascination with adult perception and memory. In ‘Rockpools Referred To and Illustrated’ she nestles in the lull of rockpools:
I lie between backshore
and foreshore (as though between
the pages of a scarcely remembered
oceanography book)
The shells of her childhood are recalled through a culturally referenced lens that is afloat with her adult love of language such that words, like shells, become celebrated things of fascination:
And tapestry cockles
with vestments of Florence
(oceanic scribbled faces
anti waistcoats from Portugal
lips from a brothel…
Her stream of consciousness leads to the insight that the rockpools ‘are boring now’. The poem ends with the somewhat clichéd ‘It depends what you see when you look’.
An investigation into how her childhood imagination (with its story making and language play) is its own fecund journey away from, yet also representing, the primitive world of the body is found in ‘Electra’:
…I dream
flat on my back, as an animal does, and
hundreds of kingfish swim in fertile pairs
gliding over wrecks where gold coins
dance in the fists of statues
Poems selected from Dear B, her third collection, comprise a long sequence titled ‘Boston Poems’, likely written sometime prior to the publication of her first collection. These poems are often memoir fragments, accessible and immediately affecting. For example, in ‘Diary, Boston, October 1190–June 1991’:
I ask questions
but more arrive
later when I’m at home
alone in the dark with my cells
There is also a long sequence of ‘poems as letters’ each titled ‘Dear B.’ This collection has been named by some reviewers as her weakest, yet Dear B was short listed in the poetry category for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, the ACT Book of the Year Award and The Age Book of the Year Award. The loose narrative coherence around the themes of suffering and survival, the particularity of place, and the raw pain of the cancer poems likely made it distinctive.
Sometimes poets find the perfect container to hold the content of their poem and sometimes, even more rarely, a perfect container across a whole collection is found. Folly & Grief is a dazzling example of the latter. Its blurb describes the collection as ‘beauty under pressure’, a descriptor that captures something of what good poetry is: distilled emotion and tensions held by the precision of word-music, line and form. The definition acknowledges that effort is exerted to effect this balance.
The street performer motif is perfect for Harrison in so many ways: it showcases her strengths of mental agility and capacity for acute, humane observation of other people. It is also a rich way to explore her ‘looking over her own shoulder’ self-awareness. As poet, she is observer/mirror/audience and performer. The street performer motif allows examination of language as the purveyor of human truths and its slippery, shiny, fabulous capacity for play, artifice and disguise.
This selection from Folly & Grief omits the longer, more meditative poems. We are treated to an exotic, glittering, array of lively characters and beautiful artefacts presented with precise, imagist language and occasional flashes into the surreal. The poems are in free verse and almost all of those included have the precision of a regular stanza structure. Harrison’s cultural erudition, her considerable experience as world traveller and her interest in how language’s multiplicities offer freedom, inner travel and play all come together within the street performer motif. The success of this collection lies in the way that the poems’ polish, energy and agility match that of their subjects.
‘Funambulist’, the first poem contains in microcosm many of elements of this collection. Harrison seems closely identified with this tightrope walker, whose task is not to touch for pleasure, but rather to locate the performer within a structure and design: ‘we have touched only the details of maps’. It is a place of work, and perhaps of self-prescribed healing. The funambulist carries:
a black cat, a peacock, a box of rain,
a streak of lightning,
a ladder, a pipe, a coffin, a fan,
a pumpkin, a skull, a book of law.
The list of words evokes the sensual quality of real objects, as well as their symbolic, mythic, magical properties. Harrison’s list focuses on language’s mutability; on its capacity to carry the weight of our mortality and its magical ability to transcend it. As this poem progresses its sings increasingly within each line with alliteration and assonance, taps with end rhyme, and momentum carries like a roll call into battle:
and a globe, a bag of nails, a carton of crème,
a rolypoly of doves.
I carry the city, the cleft mirror,
the faked fight of the fist on the drum.
The final, resonant ‘the faked fight of the fist on the drum’, evokes the control and tension of art’s balance between violent inner impulses and order.
In ‘Hand, Chainsaw And Head’, Harrison balances mothering her soon-bored children with her entrancement in a juggler’s ‘steady touch’ of ‘ a macabre salad’ of ‘chainsaw, a rubber hand and plastic head’. Then, like the performing artists, she too is travelling (driving her children home). She observes, with consummate skill as poet, how nature is both a quiet performer (‘A star drags the ceiling of a cloud’) and an observer: ‘Wanting to be entertained, the landscape leans in—watching’. As the juggler–driver, she is alert to how close safety is to menace as laden lorries ‘sweep past like mescaline thunder’ and inner demons may lurk inside ‘The gossip of a child asleep’. This poem’s long-lined tercets balance the quiet tensions, the three things juggled and the three main players (Unfortunately, due to editorial problems, the effect is a little marred by one stanza losing its three-line structure.)
It is no great surprise to see that Harrison’s tighter lines and regular stanza structures in Folly & Grief progress to even greater use of form in her new collection. Nor does it come as a surprise that there are two long themed sequences; they appear in her earlier collections Dear B and Cabramatta/ Cudmirrah. The second sequence, ‘Colombine’ centres on the major female character from Commedia Dell Arte. She is the wife of Pierrot and the lover of Harlequin.
Colombine’s story is structured, almost mannered, by twelve–line poems divided into three quatrains. Each poem is linked with the next; a phrase from the proceeding poem becomes the title of each successive poem. The container melds with the cultural artifice of Colombine herself and is the starting point to investigate her. How do you understand someone who is both a mask and a woman? You have to inhabit her form and contours: you have to inhabit her bones.
In the first poem, Colombine tells us ‘ I’m a body/frost-stilled to the form of twig, eyelash, grass—all is outline’. Harrison explores how it is possible to be a woman yet also be all artifice, all mask, all a purveyor of the culture she travels through, yet reflecting some the deepest desires of her audience: this is the role of the performance artist.
Colombine’s raison d’etre is disguise, artifice and vagrancy: she lives outside of any community, yet she is also defined by her roles of wife and lover. This love triangle seems represented in the three-stanza structure.
Colombine is not bound to any community or place: she is always moving through. Thus, the Colombine lens refracts via contrast something about how human identity is woven to person, place and community. It is an ambitious, complex work: at times obscure, often achingly beautiful and often moving, because Colombine is a woman; she is replete with desire. She experiences longing, and deep distressing loss as she lives some of the myths and stories from history. They are reborn in her.
Colombine’s story starts with her birth and progresses linearly through time; story fragments are lived and suffered, but over the years, just as a mask and glitter are hard, she also hardens. Colombine’s curlicue and ornate language of artifice (what else could it be?) is replete with metaphor and symbol, and often tied to historica, mythic fragments. We learn of her husband Pierrot’s aesthetic purity: ‘He sleeps immaculately in the dark, bathed in glow/like winter branches under snow’. He is ‘the shadow who wastes between the shroud and the angel’ and ‘In him, there is too much whiteness—too much absence’. She accepts his gift of a Chinese bowl: sensuous, erotically charged, elegant, fragile: cracked yet still whole:
Long-tailed birds wash their feathers against
the bowl’s celadon hip. It has washed against me
like a cuttlefish; like the precious amethyst of a bishop’s ring.
It’s cut my heart with its shimmer, its flaws of skin—
…
I am sunk into the drowned flower of its sex,
hurt by the crack, licked by the lip; the rim copper bound.
The apparent cost of drinking from it, is to suckle and then lose her infant daughter to the plague. Named ‘Genevieve, /‘white wave’’, she becomes, like the child’s father, out of the reach of Colombine’s desire. With a shocking, self-empowering action she severs her breast ‘the sense I loved best: its tickle/ beneath Pierrot’s thumb—its milky amaranth’. This action and its consequences evoke the self-blinding of Oedipus, and the singing of Orpheus. She ‘fashions a new breast from wool’ and embroiders it with scenes from her porcelain bowl. Unlike freer Orphic singing, her destiny is to harden progressively: ‘she is gravel collected’.
Colombine remains elusive, but as a performer of stories she carries the possibilities for her rebirth and survival. As Colombine exits, Harrison as story teller returns something of the private woman behind the mask:
…She tells a story already told.
Elsewhere she might be whole. In her story. Not here.
Poems encountered in any new and selected invite a measuring of each against the others: some as stand-alone are obscure and lean towards prose. Yet, ‘Colombine’ as a sequence is a remarkable, original achievement and is worthy of being extended and published as a single volume. When ‘Colombine’ stands alone her resistance to easy meanings can be better understood on her own terms.
Harrison’s poetic concerns are somewhat encapsulated in ‘Fugue’ a sequence of seven pantoums (within the larger section titled ‘Fugue’). The form of the pantoum seems organic yet integrates an ancient cultural heritage. It provides a kind of endless recurrence, waves that both bring in and take out, and so the form is ideally suited to elegy and memory. The repeated lines bring greater musicality. The greater constraint, and perhaps the organic form of the pantoum, give rise here to simpler language which is at times unusually outspoken. Comment about asylum seekers, and sexual relationships among some male prisoners in Changi are found here. There are also pantoums in which colour and symbol drift memories of emotionally complex nuance from her childhood.
Her recurring interest in place is found in the ‘Fugue’ section. Harrison is located within her family while journeying locally and abroad. These poems seem confident, at ease, closely observed, playful, at times even humorous. The rubber hand juggled in Folly & Grief and perhaps a mannered Colombine are re-found with softer edges in ‘Busker And Chihuahua, Chapel Street’:
and his white Chihuahua elegantly avoiding all eyes—
disdainful as a mannequin to out-mannequin God.
The poem ends on the image of the busker’s glove ‘tossed on a pale blue blanket/like a hand begging all alone on the sea’.
In Colombine, New & Selected Poems, themes and characters recur and within some new poems, lines repeat as part of the form. In its entirety, this volume is somewhat like the sea itself. Where will Harrison travel next? Perhaps her process will be like that of the roadside potter, ‘pushing each cup to the point of destruction’—with all the grit and glitter of Colombine herself.
SUSAN FEALY is a writer and clinical psychologist who lives in Melbourne. She is the winner of the 2010 Henry Kendall Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared The Best Australian Poems 2009 and The Best Australian Poems 2010.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Swallow
by Claire Potter
5 Islands Press
ISBN 978-0-7340-4159-3
Reviewed by PHILLIP ELLIS
There is a thing called midnight, within which we may awaken and listen to the sounds of the night that are heightened by the darkness. And we may remember that one of the functions of poetry is to heighten, not so much the sounds but other aspects of our lives and world through sound, to the point that they seem not only unfamiliar but new. This is the sort of effect that Claire Potter’s Swallow has for me, as it develops itself from the opening piece, “La Haine des Fleurs” to its last, “A While”. And this is an effect that is, for me at least, welcome and worth understanding further. So that the awakening to the world which happens, as a result, and when it happens, is understood and prepared for. And the whole is an orchestrated awakening of our insight into the world, through a set of images that appear, disappear, and reappear through the poem: swallows, bees, and so forth. I say poem, rather than poems, because Swallow is a livre composé, the book of poems whose whole comprises a single poem, that formed created by the Symbolists and introduced into Australian poetry with Christopher Brennan’s Poems. So it helps to dip into Swallow, keeping that point in our awareness, and to understand something of its pleasures, and its need for a wider audience.
H. P. Lovecraft defined art as an “elegant amusement.” By this he meant the role that pleasure plays in the effects of a piece of art or poetry. Swallow, like all great poetry, delivers much. The following lines, from the second section of “La Haine des Fleurs”, are immensely pleasurable
and stars
and storm lightning
and a stranger who opines neither to stay nor to leave
but squat inside an acorn tree within the gravity
of a feathered cape
Likewise, the opening line of “Glass Bead Meadow”, “Into a curved field of grass,” is also immensely pleasurable; the whole of Swallow is marked by these flashes and passages where pleasure is invoked and made memorable.
Yet the rest of the poem is not measurably weaker: the whole of Swallow is of a uniform standard, with no pieces being real failures. There is no sense, as there is with Brennan’s Poems, of a piece having been written solely to find a place in some predetermined scheme. There are, that is, no poems forced into place; everything reads as if it fits naturally and easily into the whole, and the design of the whole poem diffuses to a point of almost transparency. This is testament to the skill and ability of Claire Potter, both technically, and in terms of the wider sense of the poem’s ethos and narrative lines. And the end result is a poem that is unmistakably an almost perfect poem; for example, the first strophe of “Highest Tree” reads:
she fell
from the sable carton box
into which she had been
wrapped
The weakest line of this strophe, and of this piece, is that fourth line — “wrapped” — which remains a strong line despite that. The weak ending of the previous line, with the almost sour note with the break between the auxiliary verbs, and the adjective on the following line, is actually strengthened through the firm sounds of the consonants in “wrapped” in a word that essentially puns on “rapt” as well, widening the effect of the lines. The result, that is, is no bum note. The effects of lines and passages like these, as a result, involve risk, risk in language and risk in technique. Claire Potter takes those risks, and, as a result of her strong editorial work on the poems, she succeeds.
Yet I wrote that Swallow was an “almost perfect poem:” there is no real chiaroscuro among the poems. The register of “A While”, the last piece of the poem, is essentially identical to “La Haine des Fleurs”, and all of the other poems between. And it is this lack of contrasts in the tone of Swallow that effectively prevents it from being perfect: in this aspect, the fact that this is Claire Potter’s first full-length collection becomes apparent, so that, while there is much to commend the poem for, there is still an area where work needs to be done, and where improvement can be made. While it may be said that the uniformity of tone does strengthen the poem, helping to lend to it a strong sense of unity, it does, rather, lend a uniformity that effectively prevents Swallow from exploring more than a narrow register of emotions.
That said, having read Swallow no less than five times, and having dipped into individual pieces, I can say with certainty that it rewards rereading. The poem, like all great texts, is capable of being found to be richer each time we return to it, and this is a clear mark that this is great poetry. Each time I have read it, I have found my understanding of the poem’s meanings and structure becoming fuller, so that what I experience each time is a poem that means more to me, and that means more through me as well. I cannot read the opening lines of “Ladies of the Canon” —
Far from where antique cycads sleep
I wonder about nests in a circular park
wonder how the downy baskets creep
through vines and weedy bulrushes
wonder how a nest might float
carrying five speckled pledges under midnight’s coat
wonder how a bird might cheat
and drink its music from the canon
— without experiencing the same sort of frisson that I receive from great music. The effects of the rhymes and the departures from them, at the start of this poem, is part of that, and it magnifies the pleasure to be found in these lines and in the piece as a whole.
While my emphasis, here, has been on pleasure, there is more than just this aspect to Claire Potter’s poem. Swallow is pleasurable, yes — we can see it in such lines and passages as “fire-flies and other insects webb-wagged from the air” (from “As Regarding Rhythm”) or “a pear takes shape” from “Promethean Fruit”, or the following passage from “A Truth in Lilies”
We mark our descent
from the secretly divine to the scarcely arrived
with lashings of pollen
But there is more than just pleasure to this poem. There is a very strong, and very real, engagement with the outer world, whether it be the world of cycads and parks, as cycads and parks, that we find in “Ladies of the Canon”, or the world of language, as in the poems of Judith Wright that also underlie this same piece. When we are aware of the allusions, whether they be covert or overt (for example, in the “drunken boats” of “An Asra Bird”, or the Asra bird of the piece’s title, for example), we can read the poem’s relations to other texts. And in this way it is no different from other poems. The whole, in a sense, alludes to the wider worlds around it, in such a way that, once read, a change has been effected, and we look at the world and ourselves in new ways. It is not that the wider world has been changed, but our perception of it has, and this is one of the major functions of great art.
There are many things which should give us pleasure: poetry is one of them. And the poetry of Claire Potter, in Swallow gives quite a large degree of pleasure. This is in large part due to the uniformity of excellence among the pieces. As stated, there are no real failures among the pieces, and the end result of this is a poem that does not fail as a result, or which is less of a qualified success than other, similar poems. Yet there is no real sense of breadth of tone among the pieces; this is, accordingly, the only major weakness of the poem as a whole, and I hope that it will be remedied as Ms Potter progresses as a poet. In addition, the fact that Swallow rewards repeated readings, and that it also changes our perceptions of the worlds that it engages with, enables us to argue that Swallow is not only a strongly pleasurable poem, but that it deserves a wide circle of readers, because its insights and pleasures are both strong and lasting. My poetic world, as a result, has become wider and richer, and I hope that Ms Potter will develop into a strong and important part of the Australian poetry scene, even if I judge solely from several readings of Swallow alone. There is much to commend here, and there is much that is worthy of both praise and our time. Let us then remember Swallow, and allow it to remain a strong and essential part of our poetry reading, lest we become impoverished as a result of neglecting its clear and present pleasures.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Circus
by Ken Bolton
Wakefield Press
2010
ISBN: 9781862546899
REVIEWED BY RAE DEE JONES
For thirty years Ken Bolton has shown tenacious dedication to his chosen art. Apart from producing a series of volumes of poetry of unusual consistency, he also edited the magazine Magic Sam. When I read this recent volume after browsing through some of his earlier poetry I was struck by the remarkable invisible evolution in tone and content.
Take the typical first poem from his first volume, Blonde & French (Island Press, 1978):
Living brilliantly: outside –
the green/ so blue, & the green
is so bright & the wall it is clinging to
is totally in shadow but only just
because the 3 small horizontal lines /of
louvres/ have caught the midday sun,
though they jut out only a little, & shine
a brilliant white a painterly tour de force like
3 single white strokes of a loaded brush ….
Already there is the precision and ‘objectivity’ of language, while the verse is permeated with flat, po-faced irony. The poem hints at humour, but is too severe to allow it through. The images are light and deft while the tone advises the reader that there is much to be taken seriously. Even when describing desire:
I want an insanity
to enclose me :a quote/ from Robbe-Grillet’s
The House of Assignation: Lady Eva “he will
be driven mad if she continues to give in
to his phantasies” I want that – that particular
arse slowly
The quote from Robbe –Grillet effectively distances the reader, and perhaps the author, from comic (or romantic, or lustful) intensity.
Now read forward thirty two years to Circus, where we find a single long poem constructed seamlessly as a novel, with themes and characters acting independently of the person (but not the manner) of the author. While the blurb acknowledges his debt to Robbe-Grillet, the imagery is much less detached. A major link throughout the poem is the search by the Assistant Foreman of a small and rather seedy travelling circus for the forever missing last tent peg. There is always this missing peg! In the last verse, he succeeds. While the search goes on, there is a lot of character development and action, much of it hilarious. My favourite character is the thoughtful elephant, who is introduced while searching for a hypodermic in his body while contemplating the possibility of having AIDS:
He hums the great Dion di Mucci tune.
The Wanderer,
Thinks of Christopher Brennan, a man killed by a tram on his way home.
Rummages in his straw.
He raises his foot,
Looks for the syringe,
But cannot find it.
Good.
The singing elephant is a wonderful comic creation who ambles about, glumly addressing the big questions of …:
When I read that doggone letter, I
Sat right down and cried: She said now daddy I hate to leave you
But I’m in love with another guy –
Da-doot-doot doot,da doot-doot doot!
The elephant is a wonderful comic creation, who reminds me more of the cockroach Archie in the Don Marquis classic Archie and Mehitabel than Robbe-Grillet. Sexual activity is presented differently:
In the dancer’s caravan Regina Xo is naked astride a man. It is Giorgio Verzotti,
Olivia’s fiancé
Should this be happening?! Moments later Olivia comes in.
Giorgio! She is glad to see him and soon is in the same position. See, she laughs,
Mine are much bigger than Regina’s. Regina smiles – she is making a pot of tea.
The humour is robust throughout, especially in the scenes where the strong man, Ulysse, dives into a water tank from great height:
He lived for danger, Andrea told Gina and Tomaz.
That modified tank, … Giorgio began. His dream
Was to dive in and disappear. It needed an awful lot of plumbing.
– Secret passages, side tanks …
Once he dived and much of the water had leaked away,
It took a long time to come out.
We thought the trick had worked
And he would ride up on his motorbike, smiling.
He was concussed. Julie Lautone looked in
And he was floating about on top.
Children were impressed.
Man of strength- Man of wonder.
Two characters are watching daytime television (which the elephant is also observing through a window, between their heads), a movie which could afford a wonderful opportunity for serious and slightly portentious observation. An old movie, featuring Gilbert Roland, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, about a circus. The conversation is as follows:
“One of Beckett’s favourite actors,” Attila remarks.
“Brecht, I think,” says Tomaz.
It is too stupid and they turn it off. Gina reads the men their star signs.
The elephant looks at a mouse near the caravan’s tyre.
But he does not really see it. He is thinking about Peter Lorre’s lines in Casablanca–
“Rick, Rick, you’ve got to save me!”
Then he laughs …
Ken Bolton’s poetry has evolved to the point where he has written a fine verse novel with strong absurdist elements and tight control over character, dialogue and timing. There are not many books of poetry that I could imagine being turned into a film. This is one. And it is definitely poetry.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Porch Music
by Cameron Lowe
Whitmore Press
December 2010
ISBN 978 0 9757762 7 8
REVIEWED BY ANNA RYAN-PUNCH
Cameron Lowe’s first book of poetry, Porch Music, showcases his ability to deftly navigate both the natural and the surreal in this striking collection.
The book is divided into two sections. The first, Balloon Days, is a series of sometimes intensely personal poems, and highlights Lowe’s admirable talent for elevating the domestic to the unheimlich. These pared-back pieces are deceptively accessible, but can alter our gaze with a single word; push our perspective from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Easy is perhaps the most minimalist example of this. The poem opens with a very simple image, depicted monosyllabically: ‘You wake with her hand/on your back’. The following two couplets continue in this vein, but the final three lines transform this pure image: ‘her hand is a thing known/without turning,/a thing, a small easy thing.’ Great import is brought to a small moment, without the need to add further images.
Sardines takes disparate images and weaves them together in a unexpected and complementary fashion. It throws us from the abstract notion of an economics of emotion to the oddly olfactory image of sardines, and back again:
and let’s call that love
following a free market model
in which emotions float deregulated
like a tin of sardines in brine,
always ready on the counter
for a quick and easy sale, or
a sudden move in interest rates
that leaves us hopeless in denial.
The poem forms a neat, hard whole, juxtaposing ordinary images to create profound strangeness.
Counting is a more narrative poem than many in the collection. The initial taciturnity of the poem’s subject will be familiar to anyone with a reticent father or grandfather:
There were things learnt and taught of course,
outside things; to turn a sheep for crutching
and an ease with dogs, an understanding
that much in life is better left unsaid.
But the final stanza moves the poem into another realm:
…speaking of things left unspoken,
the shrill screaming of shells
in the jungle and the warm
welling blood, or our need,
deep in the night, to love.
There is admirable delicacy in this exploration of what lies behind stoicism; moving us as readers from comprehension to true understanding.
While Lowe’s skills in traversing the romantic and beautiful are a highlight, there is also a sly humour and practicality that curls through these poems. Lowe’s level-headed attitude locks onto the absurdity of the ordinary, and plaits humour and romance into something that is often as moving as it is funny.
Summer is perhaps my favourite example of this. It is essentially a love poem to summer channelled through that humble Australian symbol of the season – the barbequed snag: ‘The smell of sausage on the wind/from a distant backyard brings you erect’. We are displaced as readers by the evocative commercial images:
…wetsuits slide like quicksilvers
towards the waiting water, which viewed
through a screen is as beautiful as a bottle
of Coke and just as sweet.
The successful marriage of absurdity and truth in the final lines gives “Summer” a lovely tension between humour and beauty:
…As the day’s
heat softens into an evening there’s that
sausage again, adrift on the hot breeze,
whispering: it’s summer, it’s summer.
“Self-portrait” also displays Lowe’s trademark dry humour. But in this poem, it is less explicit; captured in surrealism (one of several poems that nicely anticipates the pieces in the second part of the book):
Note how my hairstyle resembles the 3rd Apostle
at Port Campbell – see
through heavy fog –
and how the moth circling the lamp becomes a dog
chewing an old bone then the telephone rings:
it’s you
and I turn into a postcard,
my mouth shaped like a tourist’s smile
a sort of distant, disremembered quote.
The notions of appearance and façade in this poem are intriguingly rendered – a hairstyle appears as a rock formation; a spinning moth throws up an image of teeth gnawing; a fake grin becomes cardboard. The ordinary is once again extrapolated into the strange and new.
Like the title of the first section of the book, Lowe’s poems often rise like balloons. His brief pieces are imagistic in nature, filled with the ‘clear edges’ that Pound advocated. But Lowe’s touch is with the soft, rather than ‘hard light’ of imagism. The nature of light itself threads throughout the poems, as do images/landscapes associated with it: sea, summer, mirrors. While this lightness of touch accentuates the quiet power of the more successful pieces, it leaves others (eg. A Sunday, Another Sunday, Paling Fence) feeling a little slight. They remain as ‘images presented’: evocative, but stopping short of the full transformative exploration that characterises the better poems.
The first half of Porch Music is, admittedly, the ‘easier’ half. The second section, The Corrosive Littoral, is a series of poems based on paintings by Australian surrealist James Gleeson. While they stand alone as poems in their own right, I found it more revealing to look up each painting, and read the painting and poem in tandem, with the book held next to the screen. To flick our gaze back and forth creates a dialogue between painting and poem, a language which locates each within the other. The Corrosive Littoral poems are mostly prose poems; dense, highly imagistic and often playful. On occasion they read too much as a pure descriptive of the painting (eg. Spain); they can feel like a walk around the story of the canvas without elevating response into interpretation:
…And you, her lover
stood above her as she lay there, stood and walked and
passed her by. And leading you on, to distant
mountains shaped like a sleeping man, were the hooded
ones…
But the more successful poems in the Corrosive Littoral section are among the most striking in Porch Music. We inhabit the corrosive littoral throws up images reminiscent of From Here To Eternity:
Practice love on this beach in the old-fashioned way:
they’ll make a movie if the price is just right…
The painting is thus made familiar to us, and then Lowe makes it natural:
Under extremes, he
explains with clouds in his brain, the algebraic sum of
all things: in a cyclical process the answer returned is
always something or none. Even so, she whispers, we’re
falling apart.
Making the surreal into something personal is the achievement of this part of the book, and one that Lowe’s down-to-earth style is made for. In a way, The Corrosive Littoral is the reverse of the Balloon Days section of the book – the second half takes the unheimlich and makes it heimlich.
A standout poem in the second section is “Congratulations on the maintenance of an identity” (a play on Gleeson’s painting titled “Coagulations on the maintenance of an identity”). Notions of father, son, woman and child interplay throughout the poem to create an effect that not only leads us through the painting, but lifts it into something that raises goosebumps:
…For the
man there is a dream of blue sand and even though
long dead there the child still stands, holding a string to
the deep-diving moon that does not stop. Don’t cry Dad,
I said, seeing in his face my face and feeling the shame
of a father’s tears and the shame of having cause those
tears. Dad the moon doesn’t stop…
The notions of confusion between child and adult, woman and man, the ‘maintenance of identity’ in both are delicately layered in this poem.
Porch Music is a quietly complex collection – a book that understands the humorous divide between city and country, the oddity of domestic turning to exotic, and the easy slide from the organic to the strange. It is a book that is by turns accessible and difficult – a collection of consistency and contradiction.
ANNA RYAN-PUNCH is a Melbourne poet and reviewer. Her previous publications include poetry in Overland, Westerly, Island, The Age, Quadrant and Wet Ink.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cow
by Susan Hawthorne
Spinifex Press
ISBN: 9781876756888
Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON
Let us begin with the cover: Cow could be framed and hung on a wall. It’s intricate and delicate depictions of cows set amid tapestries of bright and pale pinks, purples and blues attempt to prepare us for what’s inside – namely beautiful and intricate weavings of bovine tales – but one can never be prepared for something so encompassing, so bold and sensuous as this.
With ancient Greek and Sanskrit traditions as inspiration, Susan Hawthorne indulges in the cow. The cow is at once mother of the calf and mother of the Milky Way. This gives Hawthorne a lot to work with and, owing to an obvious large amount of research and an apparent immersion into the cultures’ spirituality, she delivers a most comprehensive and emotive ode to the gentle and stoic beast we, in the Western world, too often think of as commodities.
There are four ‘strings’ (or sections) to the book: ‘the philosophy cow’, ‘what the philosophers say’, ‘what the lovers say’ and ‘what Queenie says about the philosophy cow’. Some of the strings are further subdivided into the likes of ‘Queenie’s dilly bag’, ‘Queenie’s tongue’ and ‘Queenie’s loves’. Each segment balances out the last so succinctly and sets us up for the next so unassumingly that, as a whole, the structure is continual; it tells a story. Stirred by the Tamil Sangam tradition of akam, we are ultimately faced with a series of poetic monologues with titles like ‘what cows and calves say’, ‘what Sita says’, ‘what Io says,’ ‘what she says about tongues’, ‘what the linguist says’ , and so on. By circumnavigating the world and fusing the many names and places, and their stories, into one cow-philosophy, Hawthorne gives us an amalgamated mythology, and it comes off so clearly. There is love and there is language. There is longing and sensation. There is domesticity, history, land, and body. Each of these certainties flow beautifully not from one to the other, but from one into the other. One should not attempt this collection over a long period of random readings, as can be done with most books of poetry, but rather as one would attempt a novel: continuously.
In presenting her readers with a highly logical structure to an extremely wide-ranging collection of the history of the cow, Hawthorn thus gives us a history of the world:
I’m grazing near a human encampment
time has rolled in
on a day the length of all time
I give birth to the folding universe
my milk flows away through the night sky
galaxies spin and twirl form and unform
as the dance of creation and decreation proceeds
small creatures have come to look at me
they watch the white liquid spill on the ground
it flows like a river forming stars
my calf the size of the earth drinks and grows
stumps and stumbles testing new-found legs
kicks and kicks and the earth wobbles
in that kick she has found power.
The above is taken from the poem ‘what Queenie says’ and it not only exemplifies the importance of creation stories to Hawthorne’s work, but it also sets us up for a feminist perspective (‘in that kick she has found power’). I can’t imagine reading Hawthorne from anything other than a feminist perspective after my introduction to her in 2005 with The Butterfly Effect. That collection opened my eyes to academia in poetry, as Hawthorne successfully made excessive use of footnotes so that her research would not be swept away in a cursory reading. I still count the book among my favourites but Cow has mastered something that Butterfly could not. In Cow Hawthorne has taken the academic feminist out of the spotlight and put her in a less focused glow. In doing so I feel the academic feminist is now much stronger in the work because she can be found in the roots of the poetry, in the unseen foundations of the verse.
In ‘what Queenie says about the Catalogue of Cows’, for instance, one feels the intensity of sister-power:
this is how it begins
the poet says we roamed arcadia
spread out over the hills
and across the plains
wherever feed was plentiful
we travelled with our daughters
close by our side
the bullocks we sent off after a time
their existence more solitary
…
we were oracles
our pronouncements not to be messed with
our names were listed
Nicothoe Aellopus Ocypete
Harpys and Ocypus
Propontis Echinades Storphades
we were the turning ones
you can see it in our tracks across the land
Unlike in Butterfly, any notes on references to names, places and stories are found in the back of the book, rather than in footnotes at the bottom of each page. This takes away any urge to interrupt the reading of a poem to make full sense of the poem. For the above, the
notes section points out that ‘these names are listed in Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women’. So we’re learning something here about feminist folklore (the academic shines through) but what makes this poetry feel less forced as both academic and feminist is that the significant women of antiquity are not human; they are cows. In this Hawthorne has traversed the realm of the cerebral and captured something much more fleshy, albeit magical. The mother-cow as mother-earth as every-fabled-female-deity gives this spiritual journey complete grounding. If I am confused at any given point I think cow and female and I am back on track, because in this colourful world Susan Hawthorne has created, cow and female are everything.
Not only does she draw from Sanskrit and Greek mythology, but there are references to Australia, America, Spain and Lithuania, to name but a few. All traditions fit surprisingly organically into the totality of the story of the cow; however the abruptness of the sound of the German language caught me off guard in every use. Fortunately I don’t doubt Hawthorne’s need to include anything German (I wondered if she, herself, was German). It did, after all, give her a chance to address the Holocaust in the ‘history of the cow / history of the universe’ context, and even that connection is unsoiled: think genocide, think beef. My point is that Hawthorne shows no fear in her spiritual depiction of the cow as universal and essential. Yes, they are in Germany as well as in India as well as in Greece. They are on land as well as in water (Australia’s own dugong) as well as in the heavens. And, through her use of personification, they are us. I for one will never look at a cow the same (what more could the poet ask for?) Cow is so monumental in so many ways I’d be shocked if it doesn’t win at least one major poetry award for 2011.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Domestic Sublime
by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
River Road Press
Audio CD Nov 2009
Reviewed by ANDREW CARRUTHERS
George Orwell’s defense of broadcasted poetry in his essay “Poetry and the Microphone” (1945) was, amongst the efforts of Marinetti and Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh (founders of Zaum), one of the more impassioned cases for shifting the balance from printed to oral forms in poetry in the first half of the Twentieth Century. In this convincing essay, Orwell was not claiming that the movement from literacy to orality was a backwards movement — some kind of necessary step back into a primitive world before literacy in order to solve its problems — but simply that the advantages of broadcast at that moment were too alluring to be dismissed. For Orwell: “By being set down at a microphone, especially if this happens at all regularly, the poet is brought into a new relationship with his work, not otherwise attainable in our time and country.” Given the circumstances (particularly the trials and fortunes of his BBC program Voice) Orwell’s radical argument in favour of spoken word poetry was not to view print as doomed or inferior, nor did he want to risk again mounting the “phonotext” (to use Garrett Stewart’s terminology) on the tyrant’s pedestal (he cites Doctor Goebbels as one lasting impediment to public approval of broadcasted poetry). Rather, sounded poetry sets up a paradox concerning the listener and broadcaster: “In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of ONE. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually.” On the paradoxical nature of the one and the many in broadcasting Orwell could not have been more percipient: spoken-word poetry brings to the relationship between the listener and the word a certain intimacy, an intimacy perhaps unmatched by print.
The River Road Press, started up by Carol Jenkins in 2007, is responsible for a series of releases of contemporary Australian recorded poetry, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s CD of recorded works The Domestic Sublime (River Road Press, 2009) is another in the series. Wallace-Crabbe has recorded his poetry before, and collaborated with composer Damien Ricketson (A Line Has Two, 2004). In The Domestic Sublime, the cadences of his voice move with measured rhythms and a becalming timbre, revealing a new intimacy to known words. Though we are not strictly in the domain of broadcasting here, the nature of the Compact Disc format is no different to other recorded/microphonic artefacts in that the conjectural audience is an audience of both many and one, and in this sense both a “domestic” and a “sublime” audience.
The disc’s title poem “The Domestic Sublime” (a suite of five poems) is in a way a coating as much as centrepiece. Neither at the extremes of psychopathology nor critique, the form everyday objects take here seem closest to that which the last line of Philip Larkin’s poem “Home Is So Sad” exhibits with regard to the poet’s deictic placement: “The music in the piano stool. That vase.” (Collected Poems, Faber, 2003). In Larkin’s line, the object speaks for the word, or like an object, the word stays still while the poet’s eye/ear is cast from object to object: the said deixis of the that. Similarly, in the suite “The Domestic Sublime,” the sound poem “Saucer” (and you will recognise it as a generic “sound poem” once you hear it) is littered with like-objects, whose chordal arrangement of “cup”/“mug,” and “plate”/”saucer” (spliced with “slip,” “splash,” “drip,” “slop” “tip” and other deictic/domestic indices) resembles a Wittgensteinian language-game. “Sad without a cup,” as the last line sounds, leaves the word trailing behind its object, the saucer without its cup, reading-out the meaning from the language that holds and contains it, turning the word from its object. If the cup and saucer can be transposed to the binary of word and sound, what we witness here is a turning and tuning of the word and its domestic object-associations to its pure, “sublime” sound. “Who first spotted the lack,” the slip between cup and lip, a slippage of meaning (or the lack in signification itself) is the kind of first line that almost has to be heard to be understood.
What of the reading itself? To varying degrees the text remains a base for interpretation, a score to be read. A recording by a poet is still an interpretation of the text. In “Wanting to be a Sculptor”, the last line is modified (or de-gentrified) from “that would be the shot” (as it appeared in Whirling [1998]), to “that’d be the shot”, and the effect is that the shift to the colloquial recasts the lines retroactively set before it. Before, there was the call:
to invent a ceramic language
to encourage silver and brass to dance
articulating air
As a kind of material/iconic optics of desire, these lines are recast in the sense that the possibility of (mis)hearing the emphasis as “that would be the shot,” is eliminated, rendering the idiom more consciously vernacular than privately desirous of a material, ceramic language. Is such distanciation any surprise when one is being scrupulously listened to? Or is this a curiosity peculiar to subjectivity itself? Similarly, the last line of “The Bush” (originally in For Crying Out Loud [1990] “fluted with scalloping surf/and every step a joke.”) finds its variant where “joke” is replaced by “quip”, again foregrounding the vernacular, the spoken, and in particular retaining the plosive consonance of step/quip. Modifying last lines is not sacrosanct in Wallace-Crabbe’s book. My personal favourite is Wallace-Crabbe’s reading of “An Die Musik”. The rhotic trill of “vib[r]ating” brings to the word a sonic immediacy. A sonic immediacy especially given that the word’s referential circuit onomatopoeically draws the listener into the world of the “phonotext” as if it were something not reducible to inscription (or that, if it was, the immediacy as such of the performed word outdid its predecessor in the stakes of performance). With the line “There’s always pathos to our comedy” Wallace-Crabbe voices an audible, knowing smile. It is worth reprinting the last stanza:
Listen. A texture delicate as lace
Repeats the long-gone master’s melody.
These ringing notes are all we know of grace
But repetition has its lovely place.
Tact, texture, text. Texture, here, is afflated, exhaled, delivered in refrain. An echo of death is audible too, recalling the line that read “riding the breath of death” from “The Speech of Birds” fifteen tracks earlier. Qualified earlier by the line “You can’t get back to the lawns of infancy”, repeating the wise advice of psychotheoretical systems, Wallace-Crabbe delivers tact by reassuring us in the refrain that to resist going “back to the lawns of infancy” ought not stricto sensu cancel out the place of repetition in poetry. For poetry’s relation to repetition — and in particular the psychoanalytic resonances of that relation — reflexively enter Crabbe’s poetic thinking. Thinking in the purest sense, for in a curious reversal of ekphrastic trajectory, what “one is often tempted to say” (from “Mozart On The Road”) enters the frame of its own saying. “Travel narrows the mind, one is often tempted to say,” as the phrase goes, thinks its phraseology. Or, the problem of the self, of subjectivity — surely familiar and yet always foreign territory to Wallace-Crabbe — are here conjured up as poetic sound-bites that put thinking and saying/poeticity together, while simultaneously drawing them apart. Indeed the issue of subjectivity, as Wallace-Crabbe puts it in his book Falling into Language (1990), involves an estrangement from self, an attempt to get outside the self to look at it:
One rides within oneself. Sometimes, too, one stands outside for a while, leans aside or flies aloft, trying to get a look at that self (112).
Intimacy for Wallace-Crabbe, then, is double-sided. To be “oneself” is to look at that self from outside, from the standpoint of the other, as in a mirror, to be at once inside and outside. Meaning, rather than being something that one finds ‘within oneself’ is, in the poem “We Being Ghosts Cannot Catch Hold Of Things”, personified as a “blind god/who limps through the actual world/seeking any attachment,/looking for good company.” Meaning resembles an outsider seeking contact, contract, company. And in “Stardust”:
Meaning is only a bundle of signs
That parallel and light the real,
But would they then be in the real?
[…]
Then signs are double wise at once,
Being inside and outside what they picture
If one follows the line that the real is that which cannot be symbolized, signified, assigned meaning, then the relation between meaning and the real is one of both insolubility and dependability. Reduced to a bundle of signs, meaning is both external and internal, of the real and external to the real. Considering the audition of words, meaning is both external and internal to the sounds words make. Transliteration would be the word. Elsewhere there is the sense that landscape, what lies outside the domestic, is something of an echo of the transliteration occurring between speech-act and sign, sound and sense. Such echoes can be heard in “Grasses,” where the Whitmanian trope of leaves (or Shelleyan apropos of “Ode to the West Wind”) makes its appearance alongside the “common urban transliteration of landscape” which, read within this context of recorded voice, puts the playing of language into a broadly metonymical embodiment of landscape as the text waiting to be sounded, read out, broadcast:
Sternly avoiding the asphalt, treading on grass
I pick my pernickety way across
this common urban transliteration of landscape,
the oddly broadcast parks and median-strips,
saluting the god of grass with the rub of my feet
What Wallace-Crabbe calls the “thought-voice” in “Mozart On The Road” may be something like an “inner voice,” the voice privy to the self, but also the voice of the other, the stranger who is writing, perhaps waiting to broadcast the self. Being before a microphone, being set down, prepared, perhaps even with the lines of a text-score set out before the poet, is to speak to or towards another archive of recordings. Another archive of course in the sense that the double bind of written and spoken literature, a bind that goes way back, perhaps before the self (“Before the self fully was, there were texts” [Falling into Language]), may reveal the self’s origins in writing. As the pre-symbolic subject speaks to an imaginary audience of one, and enters the world of spoken texts via a transliteration of sorts, as the poet broadcasts the parks and median-strips of an urban sublime, the Whitmanian troping of grass touches, as it were, Wallace-Crabbe’s poetic feet. To broadcast one’s voice out as a poet is to draw words, language, in toward a sonic immediacy, and as a consequence toward poetic intimacy. However “oddly broadcast” poetic space becomes under the jurisdiction of voice, certainly there is a case for taking up Orwell’s challenge to the poets — to open up their voices to a listening public — without inhibition. With projects like PennSound putting the sound back into poetry, the field is open for more poets to do the same. Correspondingly, the River Road Poetry Series is a copacetic venture that will give more listeners more of the voices in Australian poetry.
ANDREW CARRUTHERS is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney, his research area includes poetics, sound, rhetoric, and recording in American poetry from William Carlos Williams to David Antin.
