Category Archives: Giramondo

Intellectual Exuberance and Dark Irony: Tina Giannoukos Reviews ‘Street to Street’ by Brian Castro

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Street to Street by Brian Castro Giramondo Publishing 2012

castro-cover-a4-264x300The intellectual exuberance and dark ironies of Brian Castro’s Street to Street make this another Castro extravaganza in story-telling. Street to Street is the unfolding of two lives gradually intertwining, the unfortunate biographer, Brendan Costa, and his difficult subject, the poet-scholar Christopher Brennan. In its disconsolate exhilaration and poetic melancholia, Street to Street is an ode to creativity and its spectacular and not-so spectacular fulfilment.

Brennan’s language, his metaphysical concerns, his difficult life, and the aleatory location of his poems in an unreal zone of abstracted time and space make him a liminal and challenging figure. He is the sort of hybrid writer that Castro is naturally drawn to — what he has called “writers who do not conform, either generically or canonically”. Such writers “trouble rather than entertain”. These “‘non-national writers’” are not necessarily celebrated: “they are suspect and ‘illegal’” (Castro, Brian. “Arrested Motion and Future-mourning: Hybridity and Creativity.” Southerly. 2008 68 3. Page 119). Brennan is a threshold figure of Australian poetry whose individual poetics and bohemian life remain sources of interest and discussion.

The narrator of Street to Street is Costa’s friend and colleague, known as The Labrador. He informs us that Costa, in his sixties and working on Brennan for over a decade, “was not offering a biography of Brennan, not even a minor, muddy one, pickling the stones of false memory” (17). This is familiar Castro territory of the hopelessness of auto/biography as testamentary evidence, a terrain explored so extravagantly but differently in Shanghai Dancing. Instead, Costa “was thinking of one loose thread: the way a life unravels, falls apart, becomes dissolute, not for all of the obvious reasons like alcohol or disastrous relationships or depressive illness, but through mood” (17). Life in Street to Street is a disappearing act, a dissolving reality, a matter of spectral possibilities.

To highlight the Labrador as narrator of Street to Street is to join in the exquisite play of Castro’s narrative hand. He so skilfully merges the identity of Costa, Brennan and the Labrador that the novella becomes another Castro sleight of hand. We might ask who is really telling the story, and it is sometimes impossible to tell. The merging of narrative identities raises the question of whose creativity is at stake: Brennan’s, his biographer’s, the Labrador’s or Castro’s own as the ghost behind all three, the phantom hand that elegantly traces the lines of fate that seemingly converge in the body of the Labrador, the storyteller who appropriates Costa’s life and his narrative.

Street to Street carries the sense of some primal scene of emasculation: Brennan stands utterly denuded before his wife and his mother-in-law while his biographer, Costa, is stripped bare by the female Head of Department. For both men, their lovers are a salvation of sorts, but what salvation can there really be? Brennan tears himself up in bed lying next to his young lover while Costa makes desperate preparations for the arrival of his. Castro may enshroud Brennan in the familiar fog of alcohol, but his triumph is to enter into Brennan’s despair in such a way that we begin to wonder what is the meaning of creativity.

A project within Street to Street is the dual critique of the university in the powerful interrogation of Brennan’s unhappy experience in his own time and Costa’s own scathing treatment in an increasingly commercialised academy. Castro himself is critical of the contemporary university, arguing that “deep thinkers and critics … have been turned into marketeers and petty bureaucrats” (119). Costa’s own unravelling is as devastatingly imagined as Brennan’s, undone by the academy and his own subject. Is the biographer morally responsible for his subject’s failings? Costa’s statement that “I am not defending the man … but I do stand for his contradictions” (137) suggests the moral conundrum of biography. To take on the life of another as biographer is to be implicated in that life.

Some of the most superbly imagined passages in Street to Street are those dealing with Brennan’s decay. In its compression, Street to Street is like a beautiful long prose poem whose jagged edge is a wider critique of what a literary and intellectual culture might be. The novella is part of Giramondo’s series of Shorts. Those familiar with Castro’s writing know already of his intense compressions and his paradoxical expansions. At its exhilarating best, Street to Street has the mesmerising power of Shanghai Dancing. Of course, Street to Street carries its own incandescent weight. It breathes the darkness of Brennan’s life, its highs and lows, its own iridescent hopes and shadowy despairs, with an ironic compassion for the domesticity the poet is enjoying with his young mistress, Violet Singer, before her terrible death. In the intensely imagined bond, Castro gives us the claustrophobic closing in of life on Brennan himself, a tragic-comic figure of his own poetic making: “Nobody noticed his muttering that he had finally found the Absolute” (139) which once was “the absolute imagination, placeless, unsullied by distraction” (84).

In the unravelling lives of Brennan and his biographer, Castro has perhaps too ready a subject for his own themes, the interrogation of writing and of the academy, but if that is the case, Street to Street is a disquieting reflection on our literary and intellectual culture. Brennan is no mere cipher for the interrogation of writing and its discontents, and Costa is not his straightforward double. Without sentimentality but much dark humour, Street to Street evokes the creative dangers of Brennan’s life and the philistine narrowness of his era as much as the creative dangers of his biographer’s life and the philistine afflictions of the contemporary era.

Castro imagines a life of Christopher Brennan and gives us a haunting narrative. His imaginative rendering of Brennan’s life and the biographer’s own reality, and the wider cultural forces in which they’re enmeshed, prises open the subject of what it means to possess an enriching intellectual culture. In its vertigo-like effect, Street to Street holds us in its dizzying grip.

-Tina Giannoukos

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Tina Giannoukos is a poet, fiction writer and reviewer. Her first book of poetry is In a Bigger City (Five Islands Press, 2005). Her poetry is anthologised in Southern Sun, Aegean Light: Poetry of Second-Generation Greek Australians (Arcadia, 2011). Her most recent poetry publication is the sonnet sequence in Border-Crossings: Narrative and Demarcation in Postcolonial Literatures and Media (Winter, 2012). She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne. She has been a recipient of a Varuna Writers Fellowship, and has read her poetry in Greece and China.

Street to street is available from http://www.giramondopublishing.com/street-to-street

Pushing Boundaries: Mark Roberts reviews amphora by joanne burns

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amphora by joanne burns. Giramondo 2011.

burns-cover-final-215x300Burns has been writing and publishing for almost four decades, her first collection Snatch being published in 1972. Over the years she has established a reputation for pushing poetic boundaries and for blurring the distinction between poetry and prose with her published work consisting of a combination of poetry,  prose poems and prose sequences.

Much of burns’ earliest work from the 1970′s was, in fact, poetry – though it was very much the experimental poetry that the ‘new poets’ were working with at the time. ‘carve her name with pride’, from her second collection Ratz, is perhaps sounding a warning to those of us who attempt to categorise and label her work:

the critics are coming
they’re here, they’re here

perception ‘n logic, linguistic deception
the cutlery’s laid, the dishes prepared

metaphors marinate, mashed metaphysics
roasted rhetoric phonetically fried
coffee dichotomy, Jane Austen cheese

…..sing a song of critics
…..bellies growing high
…..first class honours theses
…..hang the bones to dry

There is a playfulness in this poem, though very much tongue in check. It is interesting to consider that these days, particular after the publication of amphora, the critics have indeed been coming – in most cases to praise!

Burns very quickly, however, moved towards the short prose, or prose poem sequence and, in collections such as Correspondences (with Pam Brown, Red Press 1979) and Ventriloquy (Sea Crusie Books 1981), we find her at ease with the short prose genre – what might be called today ‘micro fiction’, but which was then very much prose poetry. In some ways the prose poem, and particularly the way burns approached them in the late 70′s and 80′s, could be seen as a political statement, something Moya Costello alludes to when she refers to the rise of the prose poem/micro fiction among Australian feminist writers during this period:  “I was trained in the art of short fiction in the early 1980s by being a member of the Sydney Women Writers Workshop who, to put it crudely, favoured experimental short prose over the novel, which was seen as colonised by patriarchy”.(http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1785#FNT6).

In part It is this background that makes burns such a fascinating writer. Boundaries have indeed been pushed (and in some cases broken completely), but her work has continued to developed and to suprise. Her latest collection, amphora, is further evidence of this development. It is a major work, complex and at times dense, but burns has remained true to her roots – amphora is also surprising and unexpected and difficult to tie down, just like much of her work stretching back to the 1970′s.

For example, while there are some very fine prose poems in amphora, I was also pleasantly surprised by the strength of the work that falls, for the most part, under the more traditional ‘poetry’ tag, especially those in the first section of the collection ‘ichoria’.

Even here, however, burns can’t help slipping back into the prose poem from time to time. In the opening poem, for example, we see her moving easily from a conversational poetic form:

i know an angel poem can be a cliché
but every poet’s got an angel somewhere
cruising through their work even if they don’t
admit it; ruffle the leaves of any old anthology
and you’ll hear angels speaking through the dust

to a lines that start leaning towards a more prose like structure:

my kind of angel comes like a flash of light a silver
wink  in the  dark a stroke  of  thought  behind the
brow down the  nape of the neck so slow it’s really
fast.it could remind you that you’re about to die if
you don’t move your arse

‘pitch’

In some respects this change from the ragged line breaks of the first section to the prose like justification of the second is almost like a gear change. It forces the reader to read in a slightly different way, by breaking up both the rhythm of the poem and the way the lines form across the page. In this poem, however, it also allows burns to insert a personal experience into a more general discussion. In the prose/poem section we read of how the poet narrowly avoided death when a speeding car heads straight towards her:

……………………………………..i felt too vague. in that
slow step to the right the prod of an instant angel
surely reached across to save my life

In reality the entire poem revolves around this central prose section. The personal experience in the centre lends weight to the more poetic discussion around dusty angels speaking from old anthologies or the fallen angel “who descended from a star then lost its light.” that take place at the beginning and end of the poem.

Burns uses the same combination of poetry and prose in ‘rung’ which is one of the most impressive pieces in this collection. The first section of this piece uses poetry, the second section starts using poetry and then slowly changes into prose. The rest of this piece then moves between poetry and prose. This actually works very well and creates a structure which allows burns to explore some complex notions of memory.

The ‘rung’ of the poem refers to the rungs of a ladder and it is the dusty of rung of her father’s ladder which opens the poem. This simple domestic object:

covered in dust, draped in
an ancient sarong, its rungs
to hang disoriented clothes,

Becomes a symbol  of the martyrdom of St Perpetua, an early Christian female saint who, in a vision while in prison, saw a narrow golden ladder reaching up to heaven.

But if the opening section of the collection is full to overflowing with catholic icons, burns’ angels aren’t the angels of spiritual belief, rather they are the angels of childhood memories – the result of a traditional Catholic upbringing.  In ‘Rung’ burns highlights the conflicting symbolic uses of the ladder. While for St Perpetua the ladder is the golden ladder stretching to heaven which the faithful must climb, for burns:

this ladder has no fine points sticking up towards
heaven.  i feel no drowse. No golden dream….

Rather burns questions the need to go up ladders, rejecting the

…………..…medieval images of sinners falling down
the ladder to hell and the lascivious instruments of
satan’s torturers…

for burns the ladder represents a chance to “…climb down the ladder / of memory”. The strength of this poem lies in the conflict between the images (relics) of a Catholic childhood, the stories of the martyrdom of the saints, their ‘visions’ of the climb into heaven and burns’ desire to move beyond these images to the recollections and memories which has driven much of her work over years:

……………………..…………………….not the tongue stretching
Up for the dry sticky host of a first communion gravitas
But arms reaching out for that first swim in deep water

While there is plethora of angels and saints in the first few sections of amphora, it is the consistency of the work through the entire collection which is its major strength. At 135 pages it is almost as long as some Selected or Collected poems going around and, indeed I have read selected works with a greater variation of ‘quality’ – the poems in amphora retain their intensity throughout the collection. After the ‘surprise’ of the intense catholic iconography in the early section of her book, it was the more conventional   work in the middle and later sections of amphora suggest that this will one of burn’s major collections. All in all amphora deserves to become one the ‘must read’ collections of Australian poetry. In it joanne burns has drawn on her work over the last 30 years or so to create a work that threatens to become a classic.

- Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review.

amphora is available from Giramondo http://www.giramondopublishing.com/category/author/joanne-burns-author

Gig Ryan reviews Pirate Rain by Jennifer Maiden & Beneath Our Armour by Peter Bakowski

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Pirate Rain, Jennifer Maiden, Giramondo Publishing, & Beneath Our Armour, Peter Bakowski, Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets,

Jennifer Maiden’s previous book, Friendly Fire, won The Age Book of The Year in 2006, and in her latest book Pirate Rain, she re-introduces some familiar characters in her ‘cluster’ poems that wind around their several themes. Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt commiserate before the 2008 U.S. election, while another sequence of poems brings back two characters from Maiden’s 1990 novel Play with Knives - George Jeffreys, a probation officer, and his lover and ex-patient Clare Collins  (“who had killed her younger siblings as a child” repeats like an Homeric epithet), observing Hurricane Katrina, Beirut and a Somalian pirate ship. These long discursive sequences brim with comedy, irony, drama but uppermost is the possibility of evil or goodness in the world, and whether these are reactions to circumstance or inscribed in character. In these poems, the past co-exists with the present.

Most poems glimpse the chief protagonists in their moments of doubt and crisis – Hillary Clinton seeking succour from Eleanor Roosevelt, George Jeffreys amid the debris of a lurid New Orleans:

In the sixth hour of the storm,
George left the Southern Comfort with his friend,
forced open the door
and walked back towards the nightflood, easily
for the wind walked for him. Soon a broken angel
in stone floated past, and too distant a tiny
nightdress or a child.

Each commences with a character waking up – “Clare Collins woke up in the Paris Hilton. Paris // Hilton was on the TV. Fox News, having disastered // on Iraq, retrained its sites // on Paris Hilton, more in its scope…” yet, across time and continents, as if waking into a dream. Sleep and waking are some of many undercurrents  – “I rhyme most // nearest sleep, like children” is echoed in many poems that end on rhyme. Another theme in Maiden’s work is how events are depicted by the media, mostly TV, that thread through every colourful scene as with Orwell’s pervasive media in Nineteen Eighty-Four: the image replaces the real, as it interrupts, instigates or controls a character’s thought. A sympathetic reader is assumed, and sometimes addressed.  Another humming  layer is how poetry can elaborate these things, jostling time as effectively as television.  Maiden’s work energetically complicates rather than simplifies the world. “Whole as usual only in a crisis”  (‘Clare and Paris’) is one of many ideas these supremely multi-layered poems proffer:

Hillary Clinton woke up in Michigan
in the G.M. plant strike of 1936.
…McCain would win
if they just wanted someone deadly, with
a sheen of compromise…
………………………….(‘Hillary and Eleanor 1: The Companion’)

Peter Bakowski’s Beneath Our Armour traces the development of character, often locating an incident from the past to explain the present. Most are dramatic monologues and portrait poems of artists, an incident illuminating an existence outside of, or parallel with, their work – “The authority I bring to writing // I cannot bring to my life” (‘Portrait of Cyril Connolly, critic’), while other poems depict art as an aid in times of crisis. There is usually some split – just as the book’s title states -  some implied contradiction between life and art – for example the blues musician back at work in the railyards accidentally hearing his own record. Other poems are portraits of criminals,  similarly outside regular employment and regular society, and some autobiographical poems that reach into memory, nostalgia implied with the past tense .

Bakowski’s introduction states his desire to write clearly, to be readily understood, and these poems certainly achieve that.  One problem is that the voices of these characters tend to limpid sameness, and the explanatory voice often enters the prosaic. It is not style of speaking Bakowski wishes to replicate, but to evoke psychology through brief statements and observations. These poems commemorate what often seem inconsequential moments, yet many also wear a sense of foreboding, of tragedies past or to come, as in ‘Sylvia Plath writing in her journal’ – “7 a.m. // Beyond the bedpost // No mirage of glad husband…”  A few poems read like unedited oral histories, where the importance of getting down facts and memories – shorn of art  – seems an ill-fated intention.

Some descriptions are sensitively wrought:
The river is brown-hued, wide.
In its shallows small black fish appear,
hyphens of life

……………………..(‘At Brunswick Heads, New South Wales, September 2006’)

and at their best an understated profundity weaves through many of these poems.

-Gig Ryan

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Gig Ryan is Poetry Editor at The Age newspaper (Melbourne) and a freelance reviewer. She has published numerous books including New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, Australia, 2011); Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, UK, 2012); songs with Disband, Six Goodbyes (1988), and Driving Past, Real Estate (1999), Travel (2006).

Pirate Rain is available from Giramondo Publishing:http://www.giramondopublishing.com/pirate-rain

Beneath Our Armour is available from Hunter Publishing http://hunterpublishers.com.au/books/beneath-our-armour/

Alan Loney launches ‘open sesame’ by Michael Farrell

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open sesame by Michael Farrell, Giramondo Publishing 2012

This is a transcript of Alan Loney’s launch speech delivered at Collected Works Bookshop Thursday 2 August 2012

it’s been many years since I read a lot of poetry – in the last few years I’ve read almost none at all – my job, for want of a better term, was not to read poetry, but to write it – for most of my adult life I have written something under the heading or impulse or intention of poetry almost every day – but since end March 2011 I have written almost no poetry at all – and between you & me, let it be & not be, our secret – it scares the hell out of, or into, me –

what am I, if not a poet – and if I am a poet, what am I to do next – it’s not an original question – famously, as they say, Martin Heidegger repeated Holderlin’s question : “What are poets for in a destitute time?” – but if all times are destitute, and ours by common consent is, “What is Michael Farrell for” – what is Alan Loney for – what is any of us for, whether we write, poetry or not – in any case, whatever it is I can say this evening about the poetry of Michael Farrell, I cannot claim to be much of a witness, especially if being such witness has anything to do with comparative assessments like “more (or less) than any other (or Australian) poet or poets, here or anywhere, at this or other time” – I have no such capability – nor interest, now that the truth is known -

what then, am I doing here, or what specifically, am I doing here – when other, avid readers & students of Michael Farrell’s poetry could be telling you what his latest book (O, hot off the press, freshly into your hands, sharply into your mind, is all about – what’s worse, I am of an earlier generation, and as my physical arteries are no doubt hardening, no doubt my intellectual arteries are also hardening – what possible posture or position could I legitimately assume in the face of the work, so hip, so sharp, so up-to-the-minute, so of our virtual time, as Michael Farrell’s poetry –

some years ago, in conversation with Robert Creeley, he used the term ‘register’ as a pointer to what the poet John Wieners  had said to him about the way he thought about writing – Wieners wanted, said Creeley, to see how much of an experience could be left out and still have the language of the poem active – in 1965, Creeley wrote of Wieners that there was “no one more accurate in the registration of his feelings” – almost 30 years later in 1996, Wieners wrote : “I will use the distractions of this world and erect a structure from them that will be of the poem. No matter how I go, or how ruined”. –and Creeley followed this with “His poems have nothing else in mind but their own fact”. It’s hard for me not to say the same about the poems of Michael Farrell – I don’t want to make too much of any supposed or posited relation between the poetries of Farrell & of Wieners, but the notion of ‘registration’ of experience is common to them both, and that the very notion of ‘registration’ comes to my reading of Michael’s books by way of my reading of me reading Creeley reading Wieners – which is one way of saying that in these matters, lineages matter -

nevertheless, ‘registration’ is what Creeley might say is a ‘curiously apt’ term for what Michael seems to be showing in the work, knowing all too clearly that I have no comparable relation to him as Robert Creeley had to John Wieners – I don’t know what Michael intends, how he understands his activity, I’ve not discussed these matters with him, I’ve not heard him talk about them, nor have I read anything he might have written about them – all I have to go on are the marks on the published page –

In 1994 American printer Peter Koch asked Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst to make a new translation of 6th century BC philosopher Parmenides – at line 3 of Bringhurst’s English he transmutes, transforms, transfigures the ancient Greek to this : “they ran with me straight up the track that passes through everyone’s voices” – I think that, among other things, Michael’s poetry walks that track and runs through everyone’s voices – and  the writing rarely, if ever, slides off into narrative – Bringhurst also writes that, for the ancient Chinese poets, “With them, the escape from narrative is complete” – narrative, telling stories, is absent from these poems unless one thinks that, from one line to another or even part of one line to another part, multiple narratives are at work, or snatches of narratives (plural), taking fragments that are usually parts of narratives and putting them, paratactically, alongside all the other fragments of which our world is construed – yet the poet, finding & losing himself in the writing, finding & losing himself in the Buddhistic ten thousand things of the world, sets about recording the experience, inside & outside of some notion of the self, and the experience is not only of things & events, but also of the words given to them and to us as if they too were simply things & events, with the self not only as agent, but also as something given to us, simply (and this ‘simply’ is one of the great terms Creeley has given to us, or if you’d prefer, to me) as something given in the world, as a plant, an animal, a chair, a supermarket –

in 1965, the year of Michael’s birth, my first teacher & mentor in poetry, George South, died, taking his life, here in Melbourne, and I decided then not only to be a poet for the rest of my life, but also, under the influence of the letters of John Keats, to be a great one – if it was good enough for him to come to that decision, maybe it was good enough for anyone whatsoever who wanted to write to do the same – but it was not until 1970-71, a year by which time Michael’s character or personality or whatever word we have for such things now, ‘by the time you are seven you are then who you are’, that the decisive event took place in my life that shifted my very English orientation to poetry to an American one – so I was 30 and ‘already fully formed’ when I first read the work of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, and Robert Duncan – and I then knew, more or less, what I was henceforth going to be doing as a poet –

at this point I want to read to you an early poem of mine, that came directly out of this sort of sea-change in how I thought about writing – this then is 1971 -

You lean on it[there’s no catch –

perhaps myself(& you brother
a kingfisher,or
shag

…………………staring out,far
…………………& within,me
…………………& Maui

…………………………………..scaling stale fish
…………………………………..for breakfast
eyes keened
looking for where
the bird will rise
…………………another catch
…………………………………..given tongue
…………………………………..gone
…………………………………..……….&
………………………………….no rest at all
of beginnings
no end
……….of ends,nothing finished(yep, that’s us

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Gawain broke his pledge
& lived
saved by the fairy woman’s girdle

Odysseus found shelter
from Poseidon’s storm
& life
binding to his chest
the veil of Leucothoe the ocean-nymph

guy next door
in stolen panties
answers back the boss
keeps his job

…………………you do one

…………………………………….like

…………………………..take up a trade,me darling boy
……………………………….something to fall back on

……………………………………………..well

…………………………………..the postman
…………………………………..went down the path
…………………………………..to the house in
…………………………………..the trees,& the man
…………………………………..said thanks, I’m on
…………………………………..my own these days
…………………………………..the wife died 2
…………………………………..months ago, the kids
…………………………………..are all up north,i
…………………………………..was 43 years with
…………………………………..the power board
…………………………………..gave my life’s best
…………………………………..years to them
…………………………………..&                     (bastards
…………………………………..he wept

………..what’s incredible,is
………..Sisyphus turns,YES
………..& walks back
………..down the
………..hill
…………………………………..try fishing. . .

a year after,the
man said

……………….throwing them back,helps

chunks or bits of truncated narrative, not to tell a story, but to keep the image and the words that are put with it alive, or in John Wieners’ term, active – the different bits stem from different locations where various historical & mythological narratives have their sources – but the pages on which we write are now understood to be already choked with words, the culture, it used to be said, is the totality of what a people does – and this shift, from a set of words, things and practices that are valued more highly than the rest (religious rites & beliefs are among the sharpest examples, and for many others, the arts are ‘cultural’ in ways that peeling potatoes and hanging out with friends are not) – to an understanding that everything is there, is here, is what we are part of, and in which we are inevitably implicated – and the already-inscribed, inscripted page has in our time replaced the apparently empty one upon which we make our carefully delineated forms, hoping somehow that they will shine & shimmer like jewels on the page, as that too is capable of being seen as a kind of terra nullius –

open sesame is a spell, a magic trick designed to open the page or stage or screen to the beautiful & hideous cornucopia that is already there – heaven&hell in a paper bag – all the tv channels open at once, or the loquacious speed Martin Harrison wrote of, directed, not just at how fast the channels can be switched, but at how fast our attentiveness can keep up with them – I’m hopeless at it – in my early poems I took the poem on the page as a kind of music score, which told you what noises were to be sounded and when – since then, I feel that the white spaces between us, between words and other words, between the words & the chairs, have shrunk or disappeared, the gaps between one kind of writing & another have collapsed into a shredded heap of word-strips, sound-flickers, a winking on&off of content – the old Parmenidesian function of passing ‘thru everyone’s voices’ is given up for the more intimate task of registering those voices, not on the way thru, but as a way of being itself –

when Martin Harrison wrote of Farrell’s ‘loquacious speed’ he was writing of Michael’s 2002 book, ode ode – by the time of open sesame, the book opens on something like a theatre or screen of words & images that are not joined by narrative but which are nevertheless there alongside each other in a single multifarious plethora – where all the possible prepositional relationships of word & thing are operative – open sesame opens the door to the white noise of the empty & loaded page of whatever it is that can be recorded, and the need for speed is now given over to the simple fact that this and that are always & ever alongside each other – in the many voices, many words, many things, many people that we are –

but there is, as there always is, something else – experience, as we all know, is not perceptual alone – thruout this book, the poet as a feeling/thinking/laughing/hurting being is evident thruout – the wonderful et tu supermarket tells a long story quick about the pain – et tu is what Julius Caesar is said to have said to his friend Brutus as Brutus’s sword went into him – love & betrayal, value & expediency – all compacted into one bright dark experience – looking around the supermarket all the words on packaging & signage are split up simply by our angles of vision, and the promise of ecstatic consumerism dispersed – John Weiners said ‘I will use the distractions of this world and erect a structure from them that will be of the poem’ – which is a great way to elaborate a method, a method still relevant, still operative, ‘after all these years’ – but he followed this sentence with another – ‘No matter how I go, or how ruined’.  He knew the risks and had more than once paid the price of time spent in asylums. He knew the meaning of ‘ruined’ – and I want to say about Michael’s work what Creeley said about John Wieners’ work – ‘His poems had nothing else in mind but their own fact’ – personally, I have had, reading this book, to figure out how to read it, not how we should read it, but how I, at my time in life & in the grip of a freezing up not a freeing up of the writing, might read the work of Michael. I love this work, and I love the act & process of reading it, and I’m sure I’ll find out more about it as I continue to read – in this regard I can only express my great respect and gratitude for the chance to have my history rocked about as it has been. Thank you, and it is a great pleasure for me to declare the book, open sesame, duly, but never dully, opened. . .

- Alan Loney

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Alan Loney’s 12th book of poems, conStellations, is due soon from Rubicon Press, Canada. He runs Electio Editions in Melbourne and is the president of Codex Australia. His latest prose work is The books to come, in paperback from Cuneiform Press, Texas. See http://electioeditions.blogspot.com and http://codexaustralia.com .

open sesame is available from Giramondo Publishing: http://www.giramondopublishing.com/open-sesame

Expectations – Great and Small: Linda Adair reviews ‘The Recluse’ by Evelyn Juers

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The Recluse by Evelyn Juers. Giramondo Shorts 2012.

The title of this short essay hints at, but does not openly reveal, just how little will be learned about Eliza Donnithorne, the subject of Evelyn Juers ‘ investigation in The Recluse.  Juers says she ‘began by wondering to what extent Eliza Donnithorne  corresponded to, or had been subsumed by Miss Havisham’ (page 5). By the end of the 147th page,  no definitive answer is given as to who ‘Eliza Donnithorne’ was, or why she lived reclusively . All that is clear is that the sign is emptied of some erroneous meanings with regards her being a role model for Dickens’ Miss Havisham.  Fortunately, we know where the body is buried and this becomes one of the few certain facts on record and a touchstone for the piece.

Many people living in the inner west of Sydney, have heard the stories even if they had not read the press reports published at various times, stating that the inspiration for the archetypal Miss Havisham had lived in Newtown near Warren Ball Avenue . After dinner conversations about Dickens masterpiece, wherein wine and amusing chat about the latest screen version of Great Expectations prompted conjecture rather than academic rigour regarding the ‘woman on whom Miss Havisham was based’ were a right of passage. Common folklore has frequently claimed that Miss Havisham had been inspired by the unmarried, reclusive and wealthy woman Eliza Donnithorne. It is this hoary old chestnut that Juers most effectively dispatches in the course of her essay.

Like Great Expectations itself, a graveyard figures in the opening scene of The Recluse. Taking the bait of personal account, I was lured in, by the author’s first hand experiences in the early 1970s as a young undergraduate, with the introductory section titled ‘On the Corner of King and Queen’. As a former resident of North Newtown, who had studied  Dicken’s entire works as part of my honours course in  English Literature at Sydney University, I was understandably keen to find out who Eliza Donnithorne was and whether she bore any resemblance to one of the most infamously tragic figures in the canon of English literature. Like Juers a decade before me, the calm greenery of the old graveyard around St Stephens Church and its adjacent park (an open public space reclaimed from the original larger cemetery after the murder of a child during the Great Depression)  had provided occasional respite from the heat and pollution of traffic laden King Street.

The long- disused cemetery was an utterly benign park  by the 1970s, the cool dark earth having long since absorbed its mortal contents and recycling nutrients to the rich vegetation. Unsurprisingly, the known facts of the subject’s life would come from this matter of fact site.  Firstly that Judge James Donnithorne and his daughter Eliza were buried in the same grave, 34 years apart and secondly, according to church records , there had been no marriage planned for Eliza – which suggest no jilting occurred in Australia.  Lastly it is not surprising that two surviving members of a family which had travelled frequently between India, England, South Africa and Australia due to their involvement with the British East India Company, both found a final destination in a booming mercantile centre such as Newtown.

The Donnithornes were a prominent family linked to the British East India Company, and Juers cites Karl Marx’s observation that ‘the events of the Seven-Years-War transformed the East India Company from a commercial into a military and territorial power’ (p10). The subject of her search is therefore a member of a well connected family whose members travelled in pursuit of position and wealth. That said, Juers provides more information about the company’s fortunes from the 1757 (some 15 years before James Donnithorne was born) which seems less than relevant to the subject. Also, we learn a great deal about William Wright Bampton who was a contemporary and possibly a colleague of the yet to be Governor  of NSW, Lachlan Macquarie whilst he was in India. This William Bampton died in Calcutta in 1813 and it was his daughter Sarah (born 1787) who was the first legitimate wife of James Donnithorne, Eliza’s father. Whilst Sarah was Eliza’s mother, it is unlikely that she was the mother of the first two of James Donnithornes children (Henry born 1799) and Agnes Ann (born 1801) unless of course her recorded date of birth of 1787 is wrong, or she gave birth at 12 years of age. Eliza was born in July in  1821 in the Cape of Good Hope  and was the last child born to James and Sarah Donnithorne.

Notably, James Donnithorne’s eldest daughter Agnes was involved in an adultery scandal in India in 1822 within few year of Eliza’s birth.  Judge Donnithorne and his wife were not in India at the time of Eliza’s birth. After years in various postings in India and surviving a cholera epidemic, they had travelled to other posts of empire. Ultimately, the genealogy leading to Eliza’s birth, reminds one of museum curators search for the meaning of an object being defined by it provenance rather than its own use or meaning; such a strategy  works less successfully for human beings.

The cemetery at St Stephen’s Church, Newtown.

Other prominent family connections are made much of by Juers, including social rather than blood lines to the Thackeray and Shakespear families, even a tenuous but possible association with Charles Dickens whilst she resided in Twickenham. This seems little more than a desire to place the subject within a literary constellation. We are told that Eliza lived in Colne Lodge, Twickenham, in 1841 during the Census although, notably, the age of the subject is inaccurately recorded as 15 years of age which is younger than should have been. What is intriguing is that in 1845 Eliza came into a large sum of money bequeathed to her by her uncle William Wright Bampton,  who apparently  suicided.

When James Donnithorne came to Australia in 1838 he assumed the title Judge, just as many emigres gave themselves airs and graces on arrival in a new and naïve country. Given he had only been a judge in India from 1807 to 1808 where he was the Acting Judge and Magistrate of Rmgarh (Ramghyr) with District Headquarters at Chatra, this was a little opportunistic. On page 56 we learn that Eliza Donnithorne arrived on 8 Mary 1846 on the Agincourt and Juers speculates that this was possible following her financial independence. From 1849 until their respective deaths,  Eliza Donnithorne  and her father resided in Camperdown Lodge ( which in 1884 became 36 King Street) a house  leased by them despite their many properties. From the death of Judge Donnithorne in May 1852, through to the time of her own death in 1886 servants and a household continued to run – so reclusion had it limits.

Genealogy is an imprecise discipline at best ; omissions and assumptions abound even in one’s own family, where at least the oral tradition of stories will counteract some of the confusion that can arise when tracing back through historic records. Admittedly, Juers notes lost times in the life of Eliza Donnithorne.

For this reader, there was a vague feeling of deju vu to the extended gag in Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children which told the story of the partition of India. Having traced a lineage of the fictional narrator for pages and pages, the joke is let out – it relates to nothing at all and I vividly recall laughing out loud on a city bus (the one time in my life I have done this), at the joke that had been pulled on me. Unfortunately, there is no great fun to be had here. It is a matter of wading through tedium and conjecture,  trying to remember a web of names and characters as if to assemble the frame of the jigsaw puzzle for which the central closing piece must forever be missing.

The hook for reading this book was always the borrowed glamour of the literary archetype Miss Havisham and her iconic but original shabby chic ensemble. The most useful question asked by Juers is what if any relationship did the real historic figure buried in the graveyard of St Stephen’s Church, Newtown,  have on the formation of the iconic character Miss Havisham of Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations?  She deftly deconstructs that myth for what it is but allows there are holes in the argument which she neatly reconciles in her use of the  imagery  of lace that is quite appealing on ages 116-7.

Interestingly, Juers cites Rosemary Shephard’s  (curator of Lace at the Powerhouse Museum in the 1980 & ’90s) view that ‘the space are the most important element of lace, that looking through a filter of spaces lends a different perspective to the view beyond’ (p117).

Tilly Olsen’s Silences explored the issue of people marginalized and silence in literature, because of race, class, gender or even status. Here the subject is a single white female from a prominent family with aristocratic pretensions, yet she vanished in plain sight.  Whether this was due to gender or temperament we do not know. Certainly we get to know what Eliza Donnithorne was not: she was not married nor is there any reliable indicator that she was to be married. Juers notes there were no marriage bans registered.  Eliza seems to have been a well read woman who may have had the last laugh – reading of Miss Havisham and hearing talk that she had been a model  for that character. What is conjured is the image of the open -doored house on the dusty main thoroughfare to Newtown village in which a wealthy  woman lived who seldom ventured out but who unusually had the means to live her life on her own terms, lived until she died.

The Recluse is therefore a somewhat postmodern deconstruction of the very inner west sub-urban myth that the reclusive Eliza Donnithorne was the model for the angry vengeful woman  and the fulcrum one of the preeminent novels in the canon of English Literature: Charles Dickens Miss Havisham.

We are never going to meet the chimera of the subject, Eliza Donithorne, who  is,  Juers notes, an ‘irretrievable presence’ (page5) which is not unusual in a time when women did not have the vote, seldom had property and were financially dependent.

The evidence – or lack thereof –would suggest an alternative understanding of what inspired Charles Dicken’s character Miss Havisham. Claire Tomalin’s biography Charles Dickens: A Life refers to the new weekly magazine Dickens launched in 1859 All The Year Round, in which he records that by October 1860 he had begun to write Great Expectations, expected to be published from December 1860 to June 1861.

‘It did not come from research or the theatre but out of a deep place in Dicken’s imagination which he never chose to explain’ (p309). Tomalin notes that  ‘Pip’s narrative is full of mysteries, not all of which are explained: for example his two visions of Miss Havisham hanging from a beam. Nor can he, or we, ever be sure how mad Miss Havisham is. She seems mad enough when he first sees her, fixed in her distress at being jilted on her wedding day, yet she decides things for herself, gives orders to Jaggers and others, controls her money even thought she chooses to let her house decay, and lives a life that is fantastical but deliberately so’(page 311).

In The Recluse, Juers has explored  the misread sign Eliza Donnithorne, and debunked an urban myth whilst giving us a glimpse of the world of colonial Sydney . But above all, she has drawn into high relief Australian popular culture’s need to bind art to real life, to sensationalise the ordinary and make everything personal. (The popular press do this still everyday on any number of topics). And to see Eliza Donnithorne as a model for Miss Havisham is still a furphy.

However, for me, Dickens provided in Great Expectations the clues from the outset; and for the purposes of this review he, via Pip, has the last word on what inspired Miss Havisham:

A childish association revived with wonderful force in the moment of a slight action, and I fancied that I saw Miss Havisham hanging to the beam. So strong was the impression that I stood under the beam shuddering from head to foot before I know it was a fancy – though to be sure I was there in an instant.

 - Linda Adair

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The Recluse is available from Giramondo Publishing http://www.giramondopublishing.com/the-recluse

Linda Adair is a Sydney based critic and an editor of Rochford Street Review.

Little Gems of Poems: Mark Roberts reviews ‘Knuckled’ by Fiona Wright.

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Knuckled by Fiona Wright. Giramondo Poets 2011.

First collections are always interesting. On one hand we have the scenario of the new poet bursting out of nowhere with a collection that takes everyone by surprise. On the other we have the poet who has already published extensively, whose poetic style is well known and who is offering up a collection of poems for our consideration. Fiona Wright’s first collection, Knuckled, falls very firmly into the second scenario.

Wright has been widely published in literary magazines and journals, both in Australia and overseas. She has been supported by the Australia Council in the form of an Emerging Writers’ Grant and has been mentored by a number of leading poets and supported by the Writing and Social Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.

As a result there was a sense of anticipation surrounding this first collection. Would an entire collection live up to the promise suggested by those individuals poems scattered through various journals? Would the grants represent money well spent? Fortunately, in this instance, the answer is yes.

There is a confidence to Knuckled which is rare in first collections. We quickly sense a poet at ease with words, confident enough with them to pare them down to their core, throwing away those words which don’t pull their weight, until we are left with little gems of poems where each word has an earned importance and where we sense that each line break has been carefully considered. In fact many of the poems in Knuckled, suggests an approach to poetry almost boarding on the traditional.

Wright’s collection is divided up into a number of distinct sections – each one defined by its subject matter. In the first section, ’West’, the urban and social landscape of western Sydney provides Wright with a rich tapestry. In ‘We drove to Auburn’ she adopts the voice of a middle class woman from Sydney’s North Shore who has been, no doubt, inspired by TV cooking shows:

“…googled Moroccan grocers, there wasn’t anything,
so I figured that Turkish would do… “

There is genuine surprise in the poem at the ‘difference’ between the two areas of Sydney: “I didn’t know it’s so economically challenged”, but that doesn’t prevent a comment on how much petrol had to be used to access the source of ethnic delicacies for her dinner party. This sense of ‘otherness’, of difference, between the world of the North Shore and that of Auburn is highlighted in the final lines:

I think my off-the-shoulder embarrassed them. It’s a long way
from Kirribilli. There was a Torture Rehabilitation Clinic
right next to the delicatessen.

The twelve poems which make up the third section, ‘Inheriting Colombo’ are, for me, a highlight of the collection. These poems combine the poet’s experience of Sri Lanka with those of her grandfather during World War II when the troopship he was on was diverted from Singapore to Colombo. Wright’s experience is shaped by the stories her grandfather has told her:

My grandfather’s tongue
limbered, loosened
……………long before his body
I have only these stories of his war.

‘Harbour’

There are images in these poems which connect the two experiences. While war was central to her grandfather’s experience, Wright also senses the proximity of war in the modern Colombo:

I can smell war in this city, sour.
……….The khaki jeeps creep through the bus queues.
A thin-fingered soldier
………..invites me to hold his riffle,
and calls me beautiful.

‘Pettah’

But there are also experiences here which are her own. In ‘Night’, for example, Wright’s use of language and her skillful use of line breaks and spacing lines across the page create some wonderful images:

The crevasses of language

……..I step outside and slip between,
snagged on their sharp edges

This is a raw and honest poem, highlighting the poet’s response to a landscape and culture very different to that of the urban Australian landscape in the first section.

This response to landscape is again highlighted in the poems about the flooded towns of the Snowy Mountains. In ‘Old Jindabyne: Flood’, the rising waters provide a ending to an old life, marking off a childhood that now lies buried below the water. There is a sense, however, that like memory, the buried past still lingers:

They say the soggy shadows of ourselves
………….still walk on the old roads,
………….stand in queues in banks,
………….buy groceries in plastic bags,…

Years later, as the waters retreat in drought, these memories emerge:

We see our old town excavate itself –

…………..and our younger wanders,
………….their corrosions and pockmarks
………….grown obvious
………….with the hard chemistry of time

‘Old Adaminaby: Drought’’

Knuckled is an impressive first collection from a confident poet who has shown she can combine a rich poetic sensibility with a mature understanding of form and structure. Her best poems sit confidently on the page, lines break not only driving the structure of the poem, but also using the white space almost like a minor work of art. I look forward to her next collection.

- Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review.