Selected Reviews by Tim Metcalf
Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000
Stephen Oliver
HeadworX $21.95 192pp
ISBN 0-473-07388-9
Consistently in step with his times, Stephen Oliver has released a fine selection from five books of poetry. Fans will want this book for its first class presentation, index, and thirty-three pages of new poems.
About half way through his opus, Oliver moved from Auckland to Sydney, and he asserts his identity as a transtasman poet on page one. Perhaps all New Zealanders have the sea in their blood. The reflections that are light waves provide an infinite surface for simile, and the depth for metaphor that the painter also seeks. His first book, from&INTERVIEWS, reveals an assured and cohesive poetic that he confidently directs for the next twenty years. The light of two harbour cities is the backdrop to inspiration:
“Outside
I view the world as a hall of mirrors day by day the land distorts.
( /still life )
The image, logically, is central to Oliver’s work, and it is here that he shines, as in ‘Autumn song’
“…the unexpected
partitions of light emerge
the airy carpentry of autumn.”
The second book is titled ‘Earthbound Mirrors’. Auckland scintillates at the quayside. Sometimes Oliver is conversational, as if talking about his work around the café tables. The title piece has the flippancy, and the odd lines that needed editing, that also characterise these poems:
The arse end of nowhere has got this
geological radiance, the likes of which
make an unwritable thesis.”
…
“…there ain’t nothing new on a metaphor”
In book three, “Guardians not Angels”, the light coheres, and Oliver allows a trickle of the emotional universe to leak into his work. Stylistically free and capable, writing of the British painter Turner, his title poem concludes a personal insight with the disturbing clarity of a de Chirico:
“Continuous, the unseen figure
stumbles out of the park
made perfect by a perfect hand
and under a scapula moon chases
thought toward contentment.”
Oliver’s style changes again, to a witty approach to love, in his next collection, Islands in the Wilderness: A Romance. He maintains an intellectual distance from his relationships, and, as in earlier books, any anger or other extreme of emotion is suppressed.
“significance came later, after the
laughter swung on a boom
around the room.” p97
There is a broader interest in politics as it applies to individuals in history, and Oliver places himself more precisely within his milieu. This is true of the final collection, Unmanned (1999) too, where he turns to a polemical poetry. The human experience of being a poet is grounded in “Myth and Mariolatry”:
“The sun is spinning
clockwise for hope. One
cloud out of nowhere-then a
drape of blue that might
be the sky.”
Unmanned is also a beautifully constructed soliloquy on time and light. In the new poems light reflects back upon itself to perfuse the work. Oliver by now is a skilled evocateur of landscape, which as ever is internal. There are no other characters, but for those snowbound themselves in the Russian tundra.
Onto the expanse of white that confronts us Oliver has arranged his lines to create a vision for his reader. Crisp, coruscate and coherent from the outset, his collection is an enjoyable and thought-provoking ride through the hall of bent mirrors that was transtasman poetry in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Tim Metcalf lives near Bega. His third collection, “Into the No Zone” is due from Ginninderra in October.
John Kinsella (ed.) Michael Dransfield: A retrospective, UQP, 2002, pp102, pb, $ not provided, ISBN 0 7022 3298 X
I came to Dransfield with a suspicious mind. I had read some of his poems here and there, and put him in my basket for drug-taking darlings of ‘the set’. Here he kept company with Jim Morrison of ‘The Doors’ and the early Robert Adamson. These young men were allowed liberties in their personal lives and in their writing for the sake of their entertainment value as much for the scent of the muse they exuded. Adamson alone lived and matured to the clarity of ‘The Clean Dark’. Dransfield I am now certain was on that same path to a consistently fine poetry.
It has long been my habit not to read introductions to poetry and fiction of any time or place. I hope any suspicions of revisionist history, and of the prominence given by the publishers to the editor on the cover of this ‘retrospective’, were thereby sidestepped. I did my best to encounter Kinsella’s Dransfield fresh. A considerable ignorance of his life and work was of great assistance.
To answer the important question about Dransfield: I found a poet. In today’s parlance a developing writer with a sound theoretical and practical understanding of his craft, awaiting two further developments to transcend to a full and powerful maturity. The first of these was to shed self-consciousness, guilt, and overt reliance on Celtic myth and the great names of English poetry. The second was to survive the emptiness many great and sensitive intellects encounter on their journey through life. Dying of a heroin overdose, likely suicide according to his poetry, at 24, Dransfield managed nevertheless to leave a worthwhile legacy.
Death, its nature and its imminence, provided a major theme for Michael’s work. The heroin needle and premonition of an early death add great strength to his poetry in retrospect. ‘Dear Charles’ is strikingly beautiful poem from this point of view:
…; looking up, i saw nothing,
nothing, and when i woke a raven sat regarding me. white
bulbous
clouds massed at its head. i think constantly of death.’
Some poems are perhaps included only for their direct reference to deliberate overdose. ‘First Casino poem’ is a loose farrago of images and ideas that is not well organised; or revealing, but for the reference to Basho suggesting an intellectual comprehension of emptiness. His ‘Chaconne for a solipsist’, in tune with Samuel Beckett’s ‘Texts for Nothing’, is a bleak mental landscape where ‘An exit glitters brightly in my hand: …’. An excellent prose poem, it demonstrates an innovative interest in verse, something Dransfield never, no matter how black his world, surrenders.
I think that Dransfield’s most successful poems are those cast in shorter forms. Kinsella’s retrospective, a see-saw of colour and pleasure versus blackness and death, is balanced by the cryptic ‘Flying’; an excellent place to sit this particular bone of contention. For reasons I cannot identify, the image does stir me, and help draw me into his world. Love poems are another sign of a poet at work, and ‘Pas de deux for lovers’ and ‘Trees’ are both moving and satisfying to the poetic intellect. Dransfield clearly found a visual delight in nature, but even in its tranquillity dead leaves are signals from the near future.
One reading of mine of Dransfield is that he suffered major depression. Notable in this regard is the lack of an ‘I’ in many poems. Michael often refers to himself from the detached distance of the third person. No doubt intravenous heroin use and poetic images galore would have clouded the issue when he was alive, but he seems too organised to have had a significant psychosis such as schizophrenia.
Ultimately, fascinating though the drug use and foreknowledge of, even desire for, death are, it must be the poetry that stands alone when the author is gone. Dransfield battled on through everything to achieve this in ‘Damages’; ‘The city theory’; ‘Before the hour of streetlights’; ‘Play something Spanish’ and ‘Illness’.
John Kinsella’s retrospective has done for me what it should: alerted me to a poet I had disregarded, and placed him on a pedestal among others of a more appropriate size.
As both Michael and Basho knew, we cannot escape our selves. Nor can we see them clearly. We all die. So my reading was corrupted despite myself, largely by my experiences in psychiatry and emergency medicine. I feel pleased to have survived long enough to have chosen a different interpretation of my self, and to have encountered Dransfield seriously. I am pleased to have found my mind is still capable of changing, and to have had the time to re-examine everything else I hold to be true, again and again.
Dreadful sorrow, Michael Dransfield.
Tim Metcalf’s third book of poems, Into the No Zone, will be available at Ginninderrapress.com.au from October 2002
800 words
(Many thanks to Craig Powell for correcting me on the cause of Michael's death, which was from tetanus, not overdose)
Frieda Hughes (2001)
Stonepicker
80pp FACP ISBN 1-86368-336-4 RRP $19.95
In the winter 2002 issue of Art and Australia there is an image of a mouth, opened like a purse, bulging with five spherical pebbles. The ragged crust of lipstick is likely more noticeable in the black and white still than it would be in the original video art by Ann Hamilton called ‘Untitled (mouth/stones)’.
From the garble-fardel of art-speak we learn that in Hamilton’s 1993 film the stones juggled ‘interminably like a front-loading washing machine, causing improbable thoughts to pop into the mind’(1). The still would have made a wonderful front cover.
‘Stonepicker’ has stone at its core. Stone is one of a number of antonomastic characters in this second collection from Frieda Hughes. Stone’s character has not yet agglomerated into a stable entity. Stone has a soul and a mind; it has vengeful thoughts and has skeletons in its cupboard; it speaks a runic language.
In the poem ‘The little war’, ‘Victim’ and Killer’ are clearly articulated characters. In ‘Outfit’, Long Black and Short Red are talking clothes on silent, emaciated adult. This metaphorical anthropomorphism loses focus again whenever Tiger qua tiger, tiger stripe, slashed flesh, and the talking wound in ‘The writer’s leg’ pops his head around a tree.
Such an adult stands on the gibber plain of the front cover on this FACP edition. The picture, that has a wonderful texture to it, recalls the outback WA Hughes maintained a studio in for some time. Poet, painter, and author of seven books for children, she has worked hard to survive the double-edged sword her artistic temperament has confronted her with. The sword is sharpened by the ghosts of her parents Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
In an article for The Guardian (2) Frieda Hughes talks about the burden and blessing of her vicarious fame. Like her father, I thought some of her poems excellent, and others in need of some structural work. Frieda writes of her struggle with poetry that led her to the conclusion of many poets before her: it was there and she had to express it.
Just as the children’s writer comes out in the aforementioned poems, the painter seems important in others. Occasionally I had the feeling that symbols were being used as if they were in a painting. Sometimes my reaction was that poems were structured like art that consists of directly juxtaposed panels, each a self-contained work. Good poems. like ‘My Face’ suffer from this treatment. In ‘Drinking’:
‘…my canvasses unroll
Like open wounds,
And the words of poetry
Spill salt on the bloody parts’.
Ann Hamilton’s image evokes for me the wounds and mouths that are prominent in ‘Stonepicker’. Mouths are sinister, and double as wounds and vaginas as if in an Angela Carter fairy-tale. ‘Beetle’ is like this: truly grim.
‘Stone picker’; ‘Drinker’ and ‘Fear’ are very good poems, and ‘The wound’, Jezebel’, Laugh’, ‘The bird cage’, and ‘Silence’ are psychologically intriguing. Sometimes a good poem is spoilt by being disorganised. Examples include ‘Beauty 2’, ‘Visitants’, ‘My face’, ‘ and ‘Left luggage’. Some poems are not interesting. Occasionally a rhyme or half-rhyme distracts the free flow of verse, as in ‘Soldier’ and ‘Sunset for Roc’.
The cover painting and the good poems in this collection have made me receptive to Hughes’ next poetic and visual work. However, like a reviewer in Stride magazine (3) I wondered about the editor’s restraint. After the excellent parting shot from Dorothy Hewett, ‘Halfway up the Mountain’, ‘Stonepicker’ risks raising the spectre of literary nepotism for FACP.
On the back there are two true statements: that there are fine images, and that Hughes’ poetry is come out of siege. ‘Stonepicker’ will appeal to those fascinated by the genetic lineage of its author, the theories of Carl Jung, the druids and their descendants, and those who believe that genius is a momentary condensation of mind in the cloud-field of consciousness.
(1) Art and Australia vol 39 p636
(2) The Guardian 3/10/2002; www.guardian.co.uk
(3) www.stridemag.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/2002/jan/hughes.htm
Four views of the country
Swinbourne H and Winters J(2001) Pictorial History: Bega Valley Shire. Kingsclear/BVSC. 124pp $21.95
Ubrihien N (2001) Bega Valley Characters of Yesteryear. Self-published. 48pp $19.95
McGregor C (2002) While There's Leaves in the Forest. Ginninderra. 204pp $22.00
Chittick L and Fox T (1997) Travelling with Percy: A South Coast Journey. Aboriginal Studies Press. 202pp $48.50
The Bega Valley Shire, embracing the eastern ranges and coastal lands of far south New South Wales, is the focus for these books. The Pictorial History relies upon an excellent range of photographs to speak their thousand words. The thoroughly researched text of this first-rate coffee table book for locals exemplifies brevity as the soul of wit. A worthy update to Bayley’s 1942 ‘History of Bega’, it is one of approximately twenty local council history books released by Kingsclear (www.kingsclearbooks.com.au) to mark the centenary of federation. The foreword is signed by the popular administrator of the shire, Rod Calvert, who replaced a council so inept and corrupt it was dismissed in 1999-one of the tit-bits there was no room for.
Ubrihien has put together a simple book after years of being told by his family and friends to do so. His philosophy of humour has no doubt brought him through hard times on the farm as well, and it is a pity this small, very nicely presented book omits them. The culture that produced that humour, for all its arrogance and certainty, may well prove shorter lived than it anticipated, so that works like these may well loom larger in the final analysis than some might allow. Would that we had a book like this from the whalers, the gold-fossickers, the wattle-barkers, the loggers and the power brokers in town!
Ubrihien and McGregor strike a ‘gentlemanly’ tone throughout their joke-strewn recollections. Sons of settler families, many a scandal will pass on with them. Nevertheless, a hostile reading of ‘politically incorrect’ country humour could easily be constructed. The quirks and blind spots of oral history are also on display. It is typical of the aging memory that childhood and early adulthood are remembered clearly (independent of factuality), and that it trails off after that. That the retrospectoscope has rose tinted lenses is also well known. Neither of the jokers take themselves too seriously. “Charlie Boy told some weird and wonderful stories. He told them so often I think he really believed they were true himself” notes Ubrihien at the start of his hilarious duck-shooting tale.
McGregor and Ubrihien seek to reassert the’ Aussie Character’: the good natured, hard working bush larrikin. Both are funny. McGregor frames his yarns with his own story, told roughly chronologically. The result of collaboration with local oral historian and author Margaret Evans, an experienced and level-headed stylist, his is the funniest oral history I have read. By chapter 32, the first sentence, “Some peculiar things happened in Brogo”, sufficed to set me chuckling.
Being funny, however, is a funny thing. Decidedly unfunny things happen, but the reader is always encouraged to laugh, not cry. The family history is fascinating for the way it parallels a white history of Australia. The McGregors, one concludes, were gluttons for punishment, but men for a’ that. Despite persecution by the English at home, the John who sailed to Australia in 1837, on a voyage with 20% mortality, fought for them in the Crimea under the aristocrat moron Raglan. After ten years he took up dairy farming by hand in the wilds of Brogo. His great grandson Charles finds himself fighting the Japanese at Balikpapen. It is when he is landing under cover of a naval barrage that he participates in a bigger history:
“I needed a steadying hand to prevent me falling flat on my face. There were a lot of loud bangs and some nasty little splashes here and there. That rather scruffy Yank patted me on the shoulder and said ‘Good luck, Aussie’, and I have been pro-American ever since.” p178
Silence is at the core of the most moving of these books, a ‘pure’ oral history of Percy Mumbulla. The text abounds in paradox. Humble son of ‘King’ Biamanga, he found himself at the centre of the land rights debate, yet unable to express himself in the white man’s language. A representative of an ancient oral tradition, Percy did not like to talk much. Both black and white want to preserve a culture, but their methods conflict. That which the white man wants is not in the end made available, despite his best intentions.
Paradox is part of life for the Australians who have coped through this staggering transition. Aboriginals recall themselves suppressing their language, speaking English, so that ‘the welfare’ would not take them away. There are skilled loggers, soldiers, Christians, employees of the United Aboriginal Missions that ‘dispersed’ children, and those glad they were raised away from alcoholic parents. The people even suffered a mini industrial revolution of their very own, when bean picking was mechanised in the 1970’s.
Percy’s life is Christ-like. Towards the end he has a stroke:
“I was working on night shift with someone who doesn’t like aboriginals. Everything she says are the real traditional things that were said by our parent’s generation. To play a joke on me, she went down and covered Percy in white powder, and then said to me when I’d just come on duty, ‘We don’t have any aboriginals here. No blacks in this place.” p185
Oral historians have a feast here. Characters like Captain Cook, Ned Kelly, and the Man from Snowy River become incorporated into stories. There is an oral history of communication with animals. Reconstruction of a language is underway but has its difficulties. As several interviewees say, aside from the deliberate (and devastatingly effective) policy of elders and government to suppress it, they were all too young when the last fully initiated people were alive to be interested.
McGregor and Chittick & Fox are rich in association and humanity, and, read together, offer much for contemplation. Both men demonstrate perseverance and adaptability. Both teach humour as strength in adversity. Yet Charles and Percy lived around the Bega valley for eighty years and did not interact.
Geoff Goodfellow Poems for a dead father, Vulgar Press, 2002, pp72, pb, $ not provided, ISBN 0 9577352 9 4
The subject of this most recent collection from Goodfellow interests me greatly. In his very moving opening poem, his predominant family memory is of happiness and security. The tragicomic moment of honesty, when together they joke about the forthcoming cremation of John’s brandy-soaked corpse, allows the reader to release a carefully controlled emotional reaction as mirth. Geoff’s skill reminded me of Sharon Old’s art in The Father. A book or two more on this subject would help redress an imbalance in contemporary Australian Literature.
This does not, however, mean a flood of books. Like Geoff’s style, and elegant sparsity would be more ‘Australian’. John was fond of language and it’s tricks, and this is one of the most significant themes than flows through the book. As his son remarks in the opening ‘Poem for Johnny’:
‘…if you had any air in those
clapped out lungs today
you’d have likely yelled out
nonsense.’
The verbal games between father and son are recalled with a painful humour. The two share the ability to suffer pain and laugh about it, even though at times it is akin to watching a split stump somersault to crush one’s big toe.
‘…always in an unconventional
way he’d say
put the wood in the hole
& if you didn’t twig or didn’t
move he’d add
listen opium were you born
in a tent?’
In ‘No complaints’ and ‘Work it out’ that rough and uninformative introduction to manhood many receive is remembered. The wry humour of “Things have changed’ is contrasted with the sad soliloquy of “It all happened in Copley St.’:
‘when things get tough for me
today
I think back to the good old days-
& I always look forward
to tomorrow.’
John Goodfellow trained as a glassblower, and was also a boxer. In ‘Grace and Rhythm’ his poet son demonstrates the same combination of delicacy and punch. He handles the father-son dialogue and the good and the bad with expert timing and balance. All the family members are honestly portrayed as their father’s children. Though in this collection mother is a shadow, the psychological damage of war inflicted upon generations of Goodfellows is vividly acknowledged. The final poem, ‘A Mirror to my Childhoood’, goes off
‘like
a handgrenade into the duck egg
blue wall’;
the harshest critic will be silenced by the final stanza.
Any such book tells us as much about the son as the father. This is dealt with head on in ‘I’m no orphan’ set two years after John’s death. Both have contrary parts to their natures, and their relationship was a fruitful one creatively. More years passed before this collection was released, so that the poet has achieved that distance that settles to a greater limpidity.
Recently I saw it written that readers surely do not naturally read poetry as a collection, but first reads selected works in the finest journals, I have been awaiting the next example to prove my aggrieved feelings to the contrary. Goodfellow’s book is one of those best read as presented: a collection as an artistic whole.
Goodfellow has a sparse and accessible style. His subject alone makes Poems for a dead father worth reading. A second approach will reveal the colloquial and metrical pleasures, and the depth of meaning and experience of life that underpin the deceptive simplicity of these poems.
TIM METCALF’S third book of poems, ‘Cut to the Word’, will be released by Ginninderra in October.
Stephen Oliver Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000 HeadworX 2001, pp 192, pb, $21.95. ISBN 0-473-07388-9
The five books from which this selection was made, and the thirty-three pages of new poems, ensure a hearty feast for both fans of Oliver and those fascinated by the evolution of poetry in the Antipodes.
There is from the outset an emphasis on a ‘transtasman’ poetic. Set largely in the harbour cities of Auckland and Sydney, the antics of light dominate the images that Oliver so skilfully evokes. From book one, he demonstrates and assured and integrated poetic:
‘This time of year the clouds could be happening
while the days spin you/me different ways’
Oliver treads precisely, careful not to trip over anybody’s feelings. His own are suppressed in the ‘post-modern’ structures typical of the late 1970’s:
‘These structures of/distance/balance/perspective
tarnish their plaques owning (not us)
:words that doodle in cloudstrokes
to remake the boundaries & the commonplace of seasons’
Poems of Auckland, recurrent images of horizon as metal bar, buildings and earth as deceptive platforms, and light shining through glass and across the ocean are the main preoccupations in the second book, Earthbound Mirrors. Oliver’s painterly sensitivity observes the world with an introspective and impressionist eye.
A lack of engagement with other humans softens as his poetry progresses. In Guardians, Not Angels, Oliver uses colour without fragmentation of light. He constructs a sturdier poetry in the title work and ‘Queen St. Riot’ to position himself more exactly in his society. In some of the best poems of this third collection, an empathy for like souls emerges. These emigrants also feel dislocated and uncertain of their grasp upon language:
‘If you’ve the right equipment you become
the man without qualities, a prism in your hand
You don’t know the weight of heartwood,
And, who do you love anyway.’
In Islands of Wilderness: A Romance, Oliver speaks poignantly of the failure of the intellect in human relationships. His words have no power to move his woman, but gain as poetry by expressing this. There is a strengthening interest in history, the poet establishing himself ever more precisely in his milieu. There are laments for the Gulf War and the execution of Lorca.
In Unmanned (1999), his fifth book, a poetic and a politic are combined to create a polemic I was not always comfortable with. In ‘Cultural Misappropriation’, for example:
‘Beware the polemicists
who define and so divide, who aggregate
authority unto self where before lay none.’
Unmanned is also a beautifully constructed soliquoy to time and light. It is as if Oliver has walked from his stained glass chapel into a simpler yet more poignant world:
‘…and a delayed flight
fills in for the evening star of autumn.’
Stylistically Oliver changes with each book and keeps smart step with the best of his times. A life long interest in light combines with a skilled and mature poetic, so that the New Poems excel with images of day and night. A freshness and whimsical humour permeates this later work.
Oliver’s is a poetry of Antipodean space: an infinitely varying seascape for reflection enclosing something like a painted desert:
‘Hidden in the sand dune of his dream
the child engages his
fancy for the unattainable, the man he
wishes to escape in
the coming years…’
Ultimately, Stephen Oliver succeeds grandly as man and poet of the last quarter of the 20th century. As he commences with an established rhetoric, I would recommend this collection to connoisseurs of the poetry of Australia and New Zealand, and to those wishing to reflect upon the urban experience of these nations. It would also make an excellent reference text for the post-modern woman sharing a house with a poetic man in our glittering cities.
A book I can do without
Thinking about A Little Book of Calm raises my pulse. I don’t think my blood pressure rises because I flush with ire. My pressure is normally 120/80. My doctor says that’s good enough, so I don’t think there is too much danger. Nevertheless, I have taken the precaution of not owning one of these white paper gems from the ‘guru of calm’.
This preposterous marketing slogan, adopted from a review in The Sunday Telegraph, has so disturbed me from the peaceful epicentre of my psychological being that I have had to write it all down…an ancient therapy my mother told me about.
The book is about three inches square, but the problem is its circularity. What if I once more had to join the ranks of those drudging unfortunates working for the money to pay for the book they need to cure their need for the book? It is like a mini power pack to boost the roundabout of stress in the modern world. Paul Wilson’s vision of millions of critically stressed workers reaching into their pockets for a furtive saying from his little book, so that they can get through the next part of the day, is sinister. His is the new rosary to keep the merry-go-round whirling, spinning lots of glittering bucks from it, many of which fall into the guru’s pocket.
Wilson sits happily in the centre of his own mantra, and though undeniably compassionate in outward form, preaches acceptance of your situation. Here is the crux of the problem. Nearly all stress management books begin with a statement that accepts stress as a simple fact of life. One can either cope with it or not. Stepping aside from the manic economy we have constructed is not an option.
In this way I find books like this disconcerting. They are not empowering. Oddly there is a moral dimension lacking. Its substitute is a bland sort of mass capitalistic humanitarianism. The authors diminish their own calm as they party and laugh on the way to the bank.
There is nothing here for the stress-damaged mind but the perpetuation of a myth. A very recent myth. Stress is real; the myth is that our society is inherently stress producing. None of the hundreds of other forms of society history teaches us about can help us. We are condemned to read this book.
I wonder what good book was knocked off Penguin’s list by this cheap way to earn lots of money: the stress control book as a bite-size temptation, the cute counter book like lollies at the supermarket checkout. Did Wilson have it all worked out? In this year’s sequel he says he directs a Sydney advertising agency, and acts as a ‘strategic consultant’ to ‘major corporations’.
Self-help books we need less of, and more energy directed into rebuilding a society that does not require them. A society that is managed by fulfilled human beings, not numbers. In which the ‘self help’ phenomenon is recalled as the psychological disaster of individual isolation it represents. And in which our rat-like ability to create then feed off our own weak and injured is remembered as evolutionary history.
If you feel the need to buy the book anyway, beware! Do not buy it. Do not lend it to a friend. Sit down and talk instead; and if you find it in the public library refile it under ‘woodwork’.
Laura Jan Shore (2002) Breathworks 74pp Dangerously Poetic Press
ISBN 0 9581314 0 6 RRP $16.95
Breathworks is the first release of Australia’s newest poetry press, the wonderfully named Dangerously Poetic, which takes its name from readings held at Byron Bay over the last few years.
It is the cyclical labour of breathing that unites this almost perfectly balanced collection. The poems form a parabola of inspiration, suspension, and exhalation. The reader is immediately privy to the inner world of an anxious and insecure childhood of ‘suffocating classrooms’ and conflict with both mother and self-image. In ‘Exile’, ‘Barbie’s pert nose’ is bitten off, and in ‘History Lesson’ the unspoken fears of menarche and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 are dramatically counterpoised: both poems leading up to the sharp gasp of ‘Deliverance’.
At 16 Shore is suicidal in New York. The mature poet of decades later perfectly conveys the detachment of extreme mental distress as
‘she stands on the sill
twelve stories high
and jumps,
I am the fire escape,
the invisible black metal grate.
I share her hollow laughter
at that two foot fall.’
The shy teenager, an uneasy intimate with failure, relates to H.D. and Emily Dickinson in her quest to accept her blossoming physical and psychological selves. Older women and the Goddess Aphrodite are mysteriously charged acquaintances. Boys, mothers and passions create a dangerously intoxicating mixture of sensations in the adolescent mind. Any sensitive woman would identify immediately with this part of the book.
Shore left the USA in early middle age for the rainforests of Northern NSW. It is here that the long raw breath in pauses. Trembling ‘at the privilege/ of being here’, her ‘lungs hostage/ to steam of decay’, she finds the intrusive ‘mind’ of Buddhist thought can leave her in peace, ‘with no particular purpose, no intent’, so that she finds ‘suddenly/ green is enough.’
This central core of poems balanced upon the held breath soon turns to the expiration necessary for the continuation of life. More anxieties about the purpose, or even right, to life surface. Relationships with lover, lawyer, dying friend and the domestic environment intrude upon the serenity of the rainforest.
The pinnacle of the book for me occurs at the skilfully sustained metaphor of the dying fire in ‘Because you do not call’. This poem moved me to tears. I do not believe anyone could demand more of poetry than this.
Without losing its structural integrity, without ‘trailing off’, Shore finds her way to an acceptance of self, and a refreshing joy in humanity. In the masterful ‘Waterborne’
‘The babies have come
from another shore
so slippery with blessing,
no shame can stick.’
This poet’s collection leaves the reader ready to take their own inspiration, to re-engage with a chronically wearing world. Clear, concise, never sentimental or didactic, Shore picks her way precisely through the prickly vines that entangle peace-of-mind. Her work seems to me to have embraced a pure sparsity of language and a direct honesty of expression that is contrary to much of the work of her contemporaries in her nation of birth. To my mind this makes her more Australian than American.
Breathworks can be seen as the result of a reverse ‘brain drain’, the product of a slowly growing US artistic diaspora. If Dangerously Poetic can maintain this exceptional standard, poetry down-under has much to look forward to.
Tim Metcalf
makeovers
John Malone
Seaview Press
www.seaviewpress.com.au
ISBN 1 74008 129 3
RRP $12.00
This book was rating well before I made it to the first poem. My not-a-poet partner drew its warm mauve cover from a yellow envelope. She touched it, sniffed the new pages, then bent them back all before I could; and soon was chuckling heartily at the verse within. When finally eased from her clutch I found myself grasping a well-bound, clearly printed volume of free verse enclosed by an unpretentious cover. A reassuring stable of dead and alive literary journals and newspapers, including the indefatigable Gawler Bunyip, and a thank you to Graham Rowlands for editing the collection, fill a welcoming page of acknowledgements.
makeovers’ 61 short poems are organised into five sections embracing the life and memories of a middle aged suburban man: his schooldays in part one; work as a teacher in part four; and sex and relationships in the two central sections. The final section returns to a delicate domestic poetic, embedding within it a nod from the urban to the natural world.
Malone will delight those seeking a poet with a sense of humour and a playful style; a poet who does not suffer the black gulfs of psychiatric torment or the self reflexive sleeplessness of academia; a poet who won’t mind you tagging along as
‘…on he goes
in his hand a miniature spade
and a blue bucket
of hope’
One Perfectly Round Ear
Some early pieces seem to me apocryphal jocularities of the contemporary dinner table, represented in poem format. ‘Warnings, ‘Answering machine’, and ‘When Too Much News is Barely Enough’ are well crafted but lack the noumenal undertone I seek in poetry. Others, ‘Mannequin’, ‘Skinhead’, and ‘makeovers’ are poems by their dentine alone.
Malone strikes the balance best between the agony and the ecstasy of a Catholic schooling. We feel with him the sting of the Muse’s whip, when after a classroom flogging he watches
‘…that black
strap inserted back into the cloth
like a spent penis.’
Man in Black
Mercifully gaiety is his dominatrix, an indicator that Malone was not the boy being flogged. In a frivolous mood, ‘Mid life crisis’, he asks with many others where his crisis is? He feels guilt at not having one, yet this lack in life is a sign of contentment, something it is unwise to take for granted. Nevertheless, the signs are there was an inability, at times distressing, to fit in to the abusive system that has created many fine artists, and so many more silently suffering souls for its own redeeming.
In ‘Morning Meditation: Raj Yoga’ Malone stands confidently as poet. An attempt to break free common amongst his generation fails through an inability to maintain detachment. This moment of enlightenment is portrayed with the clarity of honesty. In ‘The Other Woman’ love speaks joyfully, without once dropping its name. Family relationships are opened up for us to identify with in poems such as ‘Streak’, ‘Then’, and ‘Ark’.
Part three continues this jaunt through life and everything. ‘Mrs Skinner’ is there: an excellent evocation of unwarranted boyhood guilt. ‘My Dad’ is a good beginning towards redressing that neglected story. ‘Here’ and its sequel hint at the head-spaces beyond the shelter shed, only for the text in part four to retreat to a set of five poems from the schoolmaster. There is fun and sound advice here for any writer, and a pleasure in teaching poetry that waves enthusiastically from the page. Even the despairing post-post-modernist poet will be cheered by the quirky ‘On Browsing Through a Class Set of Mainly Modern’.
I enjoyed the wordplay between title and text in many poems. Occasionally an image was unsuccessful for me: ‘the desiccated sliver of moon’; and a simile is bare:
‘…the ribs of the toaster
Glow like a bar radiator.’
Retreat
makeovers reads aloud well. I invite people to try it: around the kitchen table with a wine or two, in the classroom, or on community radio as I have. Comfortably priced and likely pleasurable to the non-poet, makeovers would be a gentle way to introduce a friend to modern poetry.
Malone will leave the literati aloof, the bon vivants smiling, and the rest of us quietly entertained, alone or in company. I have detested the taste of Brussels sprouts for 41 years. It had never occurred to me to embody one, to enjoy poetry Malone’s way:
‘…spoiling
for a fight as they tumble
like marbles onto
the floor, little green foot-
balls begging me to sink
the boot in;…’
Brussels Sprouts
Tim Metcalf lives in the Brogo near Bega on the far south coast. His collection ‘Corvus’ is available at www.GinninderraPress.com.au
Tim is host to ‘The Star Chamber’, a poetry and music program on 93.7 EDGE FM in the Bega Valley and surrounds. He has promoted a poetry book each week for over two years. Anyone wishing to have work featured should send their book or CD to him at PO Box 180 Bega NSW 2550.
