Category Archives: Mark Roberts

Confronting the Culture, Language and History of War: Mark Roberts reviews ‘Valence: Considering War Through Poetry and Theory’ by Susan Hawthorne

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Valence: Considering War Through Poetry and Theory by Susan Hawthorne. Spinifex 2011.

Valence057In a recent interview Alison Crogan was asked “Is poetry important”. Her answer was blunt and honest:

The fact is that it is not important to many people: They get by their whole lives without encountering it, and who is to say they are the worse for it?………..it is important to me. It’s an art in which language is put under pressure and investigated in ways which questions the assumptions that we make about it” (http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/croggon-alison/a-unicorn-0612043/reviews/interview-alison-croggon-may-2013-21)

For the poet who comes to poetry with an avert political consciousness, who wants poetry to speak, question and argue, the issue becomes more complex. They are, for example, confronted by Auden’s statement in ‘In memory of W. B. Yeats’:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Poetry can be an effective tool in to pressure both language and the assumptions that underlie society – but if such analysis remains, for the most part, firmly anchored in “the valley of its making” what is the point. The question, for the political poet, or the poet that has written a political poem, is how to escape from the valley?

Recently, during the ‘festival’ that ANZAC Day seems to have become I considered what happens when poetry/art does venture out its valley. I repeatedly heard Eric Bogle’s ‘The Band Played Walzing Maltida’ being played on the radio and TV – but the more I listened to the context it which it was being played the more I realised that it was no longer the anti-war song that I remembered. The words hadn’t changed but it had become an almost anthem, a hymn if you like – the message was now celebrating sacrifice and death rather than mourning and questioning them.

I guess if you work hard enough you can turn anything on its head – the ruling classes, after all, are not noted for their appreciation of irony and subtlety.

In approaching Susan Hawthorne’s extraordinary chapbook, Valence I found myself thinking of a number of things. Of course there was the tradition of war poetry, which most of know from the poetry of the First World War (Wilfred Owen and Sigfred Sasson). But there were also other images – a beautiful illustration by Carol Archer of a fence at Pine Gap on which the women who had camped at the gates, had tied many little ribbons (P76 Issue 2 1984). I also recalled an exhibition I had seen and reviewed in 1985 – Peace and Nuclear War in the Australian Landscape, an installation by Darani Lewers, Jan Birmingham and Tanya Crothers. In an interview I conducted with the artists Jan Birmingham spoke of the difficulty of representing images of war as powerful sections of the media have appropriated many of the more terrifying images of war and made them seem glamorous and exciting. (http://printedshadows.wordpress.com/category/exhibitions/peace-and-nuclear-war-in-the-australian-landscape/)

Valence is an “annotated poem”, each page contains a poem, together with some notes describing the thoughts and references behind the poems. At the back of the book there is a Bibliography referencing books and journal articles. Clearly this is no ordinary poetry book. We are also given a brief introduction:

I wrote this poem in 2009 over several weeks. I had been thinking about war, about the roles played by my mother and grandmother in the twentieth century wars. Then there was my mother’s brother, imprisoned in Changi who never recovered. How do you measure this loss?

The poem begins with the suggestion of war, the language which prepares us, pushes us towards acceptance:

all day long the gods have been screaming
their prevalent song of war and pre-emptive strike

language is important here, the language of war, of grief, of violence and loss. There are images, unexpected, that take your breath away – lines like:

that widowed ground has been filled with half-grown trees

recall old battlefields, the bodies buried and the vegetation returning. It also calls to mind the women, the civilian victims – the rape, the loss of family, the destruction of community – all part of the modern war machine: “buried poetry risen unbidden”

Memory plays a central role in these poems. The personal history of war, remembered atrocities, still fresh/flesh after decades – a lived history. In poem 6, about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hawthorne writes:

in Sabra and Shatila only bodies are left
shadows of screams echoes of eyes
that have stopped seeing stopped recording
a nation’s memory will not unwrap when the chain
is nothing but missing links one by one
each memory becomes a wilderness

The book ends with a sense of despair – the legacy of the horrors of the 20th Century which continues into the new century:

you dream of flight with wings with claws some days
you sob because all the elegies for the dead all the strings
played with furious pathos will not stop the clot of war

But the poetry is really only half of Valence. It is an annotated poem and each page contains both a poem and a set of notes/observations. While at first this is a little disconcerting – do you read the poem and the notes at the same time or do you read all the poems before going back and reading the annotations? Once you overcome this slight dilemma, the annotations actually add to the impact of the overall poem.

The annotations often extend the poem they are linked to, expanding both the context and the meaning. The annotation for the first poem, for example (“all day long the gods have been screaming/their prevalent songs of war and pre-emptive strike/ war leaves you gobsmacked words slaughtered in the throat”), expands the impact of the poem:

Militarism, fundamentalism and the sex industry share the same ideology. Traumatised and vulnerable individuals become fodder for war and religion and pornography and prostitution.

In poem 6 (about the 1982 Lebanese War), Hawthorne shares with us the inspiration for the poem:

This poem came from seeing the film, Waltz with Bashir, an animated film made by Ari Folman in search of memories he had lost following the 1982 Lebanon War. Like the patients referred to in the poem, the minds of those who participate as soldiers in war sometimes stop recording

Valence is a powerful book on a number of levels. It contains a powerful anti-war poem, rich in imagery and history, full of passion and measured anger. It also operates on a more direct level, directly confronting the culture, language and history of war. In the end it doesn’t fit well in Auden’s poetic valley – it is a work that demands to be widely read. Perhaps it should be compulsory reading in the period leading up to the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.

pine gap

Carol Archer ‘Pine Gap Fence’ P76 Issue 2 1984

- Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review and is working on a collection of poetry.

Valence is available from http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/Bookstore/book/id=226/

Spinifex Press and Finola Moorhead’s Modern Classic

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A Handwritten Modern Classic by Finola Moorhead. Spinifex Press 2013. (First Published by Post Neo Books 1982).

handwritten

From the original 1982 Post Neo edition

I must have read Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic just after it was published in 1982. It was one of those books that you never forget. It was handwritten not typed.

HANDWRITTEN!

I had to relearn how to read this book. I started as if this was just another book but by the second paragraph I had tripped over words and landed flat on my face.

Finola’s handwriting is not that hard to read (compared to mine for example) but I had to approach the text in a different manner, I had to read more closely, and I had to reread just to make sure… those last two letters are they ‘th’ or a strange ‘r’? Is the word “death” or “dear”? Reread the sentence…ah must be death!

But once you crack the code you are in!! And it’s a wonderful place to be (whether it is 1982 or 2013!) and the Post Neo edition has held a special place on my bookshelf for decades.

A Handwritten Modern Classic is a manifesto, it is (at times) handwritten poetry disguised as prose. Interestingly it still seems contemporary – Malcolm Fraser may not be PM but the issues remain the same. Above all it asks questions about writing and literature that we still need to ask today.

It is exciting that Spinifex has republished this small press classic – and brought it to the attention of a new generation, a new group of readers and writers. It will be interesting to see how it is received 30 years after Pete Spence and Post Neo Books decided to publish a handwritten manifesto – a classic even then!

Rochford Street Review is proud to be able to publish berni m janssen’s extraordinary launch speech for this ‘classic’ of Australian literature and is over the moon at being able to publish Finola Moorhead’s own thoughts on her classic becoming a classic!

- Mark Roberts

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A Handwritten Modern Classic is available from Spinifex Press http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/Bookstore/book/id=219/

The Ultimate Commitment: Michael Dransfield on the 40th Anniversary of His Death

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Dransfield PriestTomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Michael Dransfield who died on 20th April 1973. Last year Rochford Street Review published a series of articles and reprints of reviews on Dransfield as we felt that the approaching 40th anniversary of his death deserved acknowledgement – perhaps a new edition of some of his books for example. I did suggest to UQP that a facsimile edition of Street of the Long Voyage would be very popular…but alas today it appears that all of his work remains out of print.

So to commemorate this date I am republishing a review I wrote of the Rodney Hall edited Collected Poems which first appeared in Southerly in 1988.

The Rochford Street review Dransfield feature can be found here: http://rochfordstreetreview.com/2012/04/20/michael-dransfield-table-of-contents/

Robert Adamson is organising a memorial reading/seminar to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Michael’s death – for further details please check the Michael Dransfield Appreciation Group on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/groups/6075328475/ – or keep checking back here as Rochford Street Review will be publishing details as soon as they are available.

- Mark Roberts

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Michael Dransfield Collected Poems Edited by Rodney Hall. University of Queensland Press 1987. Reviewed by Mark Roberts. First published in Southerly Volume 48. No 4. 1988. Collected on the Printed Shadows Website December 2011

When Michael Dransfield died on Good Friday, 1973 at the age of 24 he had already published three collections of poetry and established a reputation as one of the most successful and popular of the new wave of young Australian poets who had emerged in the late 1960s. Since his death a further four collections have appeared, culminating in the Collected Poems (UQP 1987). When one considers Dransfield’s rapid rise to prominence, together with the attention focused on his lifestyle and the tragedy of his early death, it was almost inevitable that, to some extent, his life would come to overshadow his poetry. In fact, in the fifteen years since his death, the ‘Dransfield myth’, together with the decline in fashionably of the romanticism at the heart of much of his poetic imagery, has meant that his reputation as a poet has been attacked by a number of critics. In such a context, the publication in one volume of all of Dransfield’s published work, provides us with the opportunity to review his overall achievement and, hopefully, to reach a more realistic assessment of his work.

One cannot begin to examine Dransfield’s career, however, without noting the important role Rodney Hall has played over the last twenty years in bringing Dransfield’s work to the poetry reading public. It was Hall, then poetry editor of The Australian, who first ‘discovered’ Dransfield’ in 1967. It was Hall who passed Dransfield’s work onto Tom Shapcott who was then putting together an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry for Sun Books which would eventually become Australian Poetry Now. Shapcott and Hall also helped Dransfield prepare his first two published collections, Streets of the Long Voyage (UQP 1970) and Inspector of Tides (UQP, 1972). While Hall encouraged Dransfield during his life, Dransfield’s death revealed the extent of Hall’s devotion to the younger poet. Hall took on the task of collecting all of Dransfield’s unpublished poems and prepared a selection for publication. The result were the two posthumous collections, Voyage into Solitude (UQP 1978) and The Second Month of Spring (UQP, 1980).

Hall has organised the Collected Poems so that the volumes in which the poems first appeared are mostly kept intact. As a result the poems appear in rough chronological order beginning with Streets of the Long Voyage (containing poems written between 1964 and 1969), The Inspector of Tides (1968 to 1971), Drug Poems (1967 to 1971), Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (poems from mid 1971), Voyage into Solitude (a posthumous collection of unpublished poems from 1967 to 1971) and The Second Month of Spring (poems from 1972). Not all these volumes, however, have been left intact. In the introduction Hall argues that where a poem has been published in more than one collection, he has chosen to leave it in the ‘large book’. As Hall believes that Drug Poems was an anthology of “pieces addressing a particular subject”, a number of poems that had previously appeared in Streets of the Long Voyage and Inspector of Tides, and others that would later appear in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, have been left out of the Drug Poems section in the Collect Poems. While Hall’s argument for this exclusion is, of course, perfectly reasonable, it means that the overall effect of the Drug Poems section in the Collected Poems is reduced.

Reading through the poems from streets of the Long Voyage and The Inspector of Tides I was once again struck by the balance Dransfield is able to find between the apparent simplicity of his individual images and the overall complexity of his most successful poems. This can be clearly seen in one of his best known poems, ‘Pas de deux for lovers’, which begins

Morning ought not
to be complex
The sun is a seed
cast at dawn into the long
furrow of history

A seed is, of course, a simple object. But it contains the potential to be something far more complex. So Dransfield’s morning sun becomes a planted seed and, as it sprouts, the day suddenly becomes far more complicated until we reach the final line:

…………Day
is so deep already with involvement

This overall richness of imagery, achieved by selective use of language and a careful juxtaposition of individual images, is one of Dransfield’s great strength in these first two books. One can recall numerous poems where he achieves it – ‘Chris’, “Surreptitious as Desdemona’, ‘Linear B’, ‘Death of Salvatore Quasimodo’, ‘Bum’s Rush’, ‘Ground Zero’, ‘Geography’, ‘Loft’ and ‘Inspector of Tides’ among others. While Dransfield, of course, was not the only one of his contemporaries to achieve this, the ease with which he achieved it again and again in these first two books, both of which were published before he was 22, is an indication of just how early he matured as a poet.

Dransfield was a self-declared romantic and the richness and delicacy of his imagery was an important part of his romanticism. The poems in his first two books are filled with what might be called clichéd romantic symbols – magic carpets, crystal wine glasses, Greek mythology, Vincent van Gough, ruined mansions , fallen aristocrats, candles and dukes. But Dransfield’s romanticism was not confined to his poetry. He increasingly attempted to live the romantic image of the ‘suffering’ artist cut off from mainstream society because of his/her sensitivity. This can, perhaps, be best seen in his drug poetry. Streets of the Long Voyage, The Inspector of Tides and Drug Poems contain some very powerful and moving drug poetry. ‘Bum’s Rush’, for example, is one of Dransfield’s best poems. But as his addiction deepened, drug related imagery began to dominate his poetry more and more.

In his earlier poetry drugs became a vehicle for his romanticism:

Becalmed now
on Coleridge’s painted sea in Rimbaud’s
drunken boat. High like de Quincey or Vasco
I set a course
or the Pillars of Hercules, meaning to sail
over the edge of the world

‘Overdose’

Even death, if it was surrounded by drug imagery, took its place in Dransfield’s iconography of romanticism:

last week, I think on Tuesday,
she died
just gave up breathing
toppled over
a big smashed doll
with the needle still in her arm
I made a funeral of leaves
and sang the Book of Questions
to her face as white as hailstones
to her eyes as closed as heaven

‘For Ann so still and dreamy’

Dransfield, in fact, clothed the life of the poet and the junkie in the same romantic imagery;

Once you have become a drug addict
you never want to be anything else

‘Fix’

to be a poet in Australia
is the ultimate commitment

‘Like this for years’

The inference here is clear, poets and junkies are really two sides of the same coin. This sense of the suffering individual artist/drug user, while clearly growing out of the milieu of the late 1960′s, has come, in time, to represent the less successful aspects of Dransfield’s romanticism.

On the acknowledgement page of the original Sun Books edition of Drug Poems, Dransfield states that a number of the poems “will appear in Memories of a Velvet Urinal to be published in the USA in 1972.” This was an overly optimistic note. According to Hall, Geoffrey Dutton had promised to take the manuscript with him to the US but, as it turned out, it was not accepted for publication. Memories of a Velvet Urinal was, in fact, to remain in a number of different manuscript forms until Maximus Books in a Adelaide published a version in 1975.

Shortly before his death, Dransfield gave Hall one of the manuscripts of Memories of a Velvet Urinal which Hall then sent to a British publisher. As this was clearly a later version of the manuscript than the one eventually published by Maximus Books, Hall has used it in the Collected Poems. The differences between the two versions are quite important. Dransfield had actually discarded a number of poems which appeared in the Maximus edition – “madness systems parts one, two, three, four and the last”, “Making it legal 1 &2″, “Flametree” and “To the great presidents” appear only as appendices to the Collected Poems. The situation is complicated by the appearance in the Collected Poems of another poem with the title “To the great presidents”. In the Maximus edition this poem appeared under the title

were no
mar
no more war

Hall argues, and the evidence would appear to support him, that this actually represents a separate concrete poem and not a title. At this point I would have appreciated a further note of explanation from Hall concerning the transfer of the title “To the great presidents” from one poem to another.

The Collected Poems version also rearranges the order of the poems so that the book is now divided into four sections. This is, in fact, the most important change as it brings Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal into line with both Streets of the Long Voyage and The Inspector of Tides, both of which were divided into sections. The Maximus edition has the feeling of almost being thrown together. It begins with ‘Epitaph with two quotations’, a poem which is physically difficult to read and one of the weaker poems in the book. The Collected Poems version, on the other hand, opens with the title poem, ‘Memoirs of a velvet urinal’, a striking poem about a homosexual encounter. Dransfield, by regrouping the collection, and rejecting a number of poems, has tightened the book considerably. Whereas it was quite easy to believe after reading the Maximus edition that all the poems had been written in the four-month period between May and August 1971 (which, in fact they had), the Collected Poems version has a much more crafted and professional feel to it.

There is also a tendency in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal for Dransfield to move away from the heady romanticism of his earlier work. In a poem like ‘Play something Spanish’, lines like:

planes of light. yes. they were effective. yes. you
are lost in them, their obvious coast
led you away to a place you cannot identify. spain?
never. play something metaphysical…..

suggest that contemporary American poetry was beginning to have a greater influence on his work. Unfortunately, there are also poem, such as ‘Poem started in a bus’, which depends upon a heavily clichéd, moralist ending:

…..Its easy
to forget violence while violence
forgets you

It’s difficult to escape the feeling that Dransfield could still have done more to the manuscript of Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal. The evidence suggests that, in the face of a number of publishers’ rejections, this editorial process was well underway at the time of his death. If he had lived, Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, in time, may have been shaped into a volume which surpassed the achievement of his first two books.

Voyage into Solitude is the first of two collections of unpublished work which Rodney Hall edited after Dransfield’s death. In this first collection Hall assembled his selection from the period 1967 to 1971. In effect this represents the material that Dransfield, and those who helped him, rejected when editing material for those books he did publish during his life.

Overall it is probably fair to say that Voyage into Solitude is a tribute to the editorial process which went into the first four books. There are only a few poems in this collection which I would have been prepared to argue for. These would include ‘Sonnet’, ‘The sun but not our children’ and the wonderfully descriptive ‘Pioneer Lane’. For the most part, however, it is easy to see why these poems were left out. Many seem incomplete, an image doesn’t work properly or, as is more common, is too clichéd to be effective. Though it was obviously important for Hall to collect and publish these “rejected” poems, in the context of the Collected Poems, Voyage into Solitude remains a book primarily for the Dransfield scholar or enthusiast.

While Dransfield seemed to be developing, almost organically, away from the lush romanticism of his earlier work in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, the poems in Hall’s second posthumous collection, The Second Month of Spring (UQP 1980), marks a dramatic change in both style and content. All the poems in this collection were written during the last year of Dransfield’s life. In April 1972 Dransfiield, while riding his motorcycle, was run off the road south of Sydney by an off-duty policeman. Besides some serious injuries to his head and leg, the pethadine he was given in hospital undid months of effort put into overcoming his addiction. As might be expected, the accident figures prominently in these last poems:

used to get through
three five six
books a day
now can’t read
much more than
one short poem
or an article
blame it on
medication
happens to all who happen here
it was the same
in darlo
months ago
since my last
accident
april
in fact
i write
cannot revise
they also serve

‘October elegy for Litt’

Dransfield stopped referring to his work as poems during this final period, preferring to call them raves. In effect the work in The Second Month of Spring can be likened to the final explosion of light a star gives off as it starts to collapse in upon itself. These last poems are, in fact, intensely personal, almost to the point of being a diary in verse.

As far as style goes they are poems cut back to the bare essentials:

even an
ugly joint
will get you high
as afghan
hills

‘imports’

Word plays often become an end in themselves, and even his earlier work is not safe:

look ahead
straits of the long
voyeur

‘cadlike’

While this is not great poetry, it is difficult not to be moved by the extremes of emotion – anger, hope, resignation – and, at times, the intense physical pain, which these poems highlight.

Rodney Hall, in his introduction to Voyage into Solitude, made the point that Dransfield is one of the few Australian poets to ever have “a genuine popular following….among people who do not otherwise read poetry”. The sheer size and scope of the Collected Poems, I believe, illustrates why Dransfield was able to build up this following.

Dransfield may have felt that being a poet in Australia was “the ultimate committment”, but there is no doubt that the late 60s were an exciting time to be a young poet in Australia. While most of his contemporaries saw themselves as “modern” poets, breaking the hold of the conservatives on Australian poetry, Dransfield was reading the romantics as well as contemporary American and European poetry. Though critics may disapprove of Dransfield’s romanticism, there is little doubt that, during the late 60s, it tapped a feeling among young people and, as a result, can be said to lie behind much of Dransfield’s initial popularity.

Perhaps, in the final instance, Dransfield’s greatest strength can be seen in the development we can trace in the Collected Poems from the early, richly romantic poems, through to the more hard-edged poems of Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal. Sadly, his tragic death in 1973 cut short this development. We should be grateful to Rodney Hall for editing this collection because, if nothing else, it has helped focus attention back towards the poems and away from the “Dransfield myth” which has come to dominate his reputation since his death.

-Mark Roberts (1988)

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review and is working on a collection of poetry.

A quick search of the UQP website suggests that there are no Dransfield books currently available (even the John Kinsella Selected Poems is “currently unavailable for purchase”).

The best place to read Dransfield’s poetry would be the Sydney University based Poetry Library who have 398 of his poems on-line http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/dransfield-michael

Fragments and the Whole: Mark Roberts reviews ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ by Laurie Duggan

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The Pursuit of Happiness by Laurie Duggan. Shearsman Books (UK) 2012.

dugganLaurie Duggan was one of the first Australian poets who captured my imagination when, as a seventeen year old, I came across ‘Marijuana Christmas’ in an issue of New Poetry. Forgetting for a minute how exciting the title ‘Marijuana Christmas’ was to a 17 year old, Duggan’s poem was expansive, both in subject matter and the way it spread across the page. It was also much longer than the poetry I was used to, spreading across 8 pages of New Poetry. But while it was long, it was also fragmentary, as Duggan took notices stuck to the wall of a post office, quotes from newspapers and friends, signs glimpsed from a train and worked them into the poem with some beautiful descriptive and lyrically rich poetry.

This fragmentary nature of Duggan’s writing has been has been commented on before and there are some obvious parallels to the visual arts – the use of collage and bricolage for example. For me, one of the keys to understanding this part of Duggan’s writing became apparent in an interview David McCooey conducted with him in 2003 (Double Dialogues Issue 5 2003. http://www.doubledialogues.com/archive/issue_five/duggan_mccooey.htm). In this interview Duggan talks about how a childhood illness, which resulted in a collapse at school, hospitalisation and substantial memory loss, impacted how he approached writing one of his early books, Adventures in Paradise (1982):

“One of the problems I have with my childhood—and this affects the way the poem gets going and its compositional process—is that I have very few real memories of it. I did, as Adventures suggests, have a stroke when I was sixteen, and I think I suffered a good deal of memory loss as a side-effect. So what the poem presents is really a disparate group of snapshots (often things I think are memory are memories of photographs viewed later rather than the actual events).

He then goes on to describe memory and autobiography as “ridiculous constructs, made out of all sorts of odd pieces of information”. While he might be talking about a specific book and process it is possible to see this early approach to writing reflected through much of his subsequent work. It is at its most obvious, perhaps in the powerful book length poetic narrative The Ash Range (1987) where he welds together fragments of historical documents with descriptions and analysis in both prose and poetry to create a powerful narrative of place (the Gippsland area of Victoria), both real and imagined.

I began reading The Pursuit of Happiness at the same time I came across the notion of ‘fragmentary literature’ through the US based on-line literary journal Qarrtsiluni (http://qarrtsiluni.com/about/). The journal was having a literary ‘Fragments’ themed issue and, through the guest editors, Olivia Dresher and Catherine Ednie, I discovered the ‘manifesto’ of the Fragmentary Literature movement in the shape of Olivia Dresher’s introduction to the anthology In Pieces An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing (Impassio Press 2006). In this she writes:

One quality of fragmentary writing is the lack of a traditional beginning or end. Instead, the two are merged into a brief and concentrated middle……. Fragments can stand alone, separate from one another; they are written (and can be read) in quick, illuminating bursts and can feel complete just as they are. There’s an energy within a fragment that gives the writer and reader a sense of freedom’

This notion of ‘fragmentary writing’ made me recall McCooey’s comments around Duggan’s use of bricolage in his Double Dialogues interview. Indeed in The Pursuit of Happiness we can see Duggan experimenting with fragments, both as stand alone extremely small poetic structures and also as components in much larger pieces.

Perhaps the most obvious use of the small fragmentary structures in the collection can be seen in the two Angles sequences, ‘Angles 1-18’ and Angles 19-32. Interesting the two sequences occur towards the beginning and the end of the collection, effectively providing bookends for the majority of the poems in the book.

The ‘Angles themselves range from simple ‘found poems’:

on Clapham High Street
- VOLTAIR –
- drycleaners of distinction – “

Angles (4)

Which recall a much earlier fragments of found poetry such as:

In Herani, the Post Office
“Counter-cultural Americans are
just as mad as straight Americans” ”

‘Marijuana Christmas (1976)’

to almost haiku like sequences:

the door knob
cold to touch
frost on the western rooftops
ethereal blue plastic
on rows of vegetables”

Angles (7)

On one level these short fragments almost seem to be pieces that Duggan couldn’t expand or place in a larger piece, but liked too much to discard. As Dresher says they can be read “in quick, illuminating bursts and can feel complete just as they are”. They may also be working however, on another level. The title ‘Angles’ perhaps provides a hint. Each fragment provides a different view, a different angle of looking at the poet’s surroundings – in the this case the different social and physical landscapes of England. While there are longer poems here that examine different aspects of Duggan’s experience of England (and indeed Europe), there is an immediacy to these shorter pieces which suggests perhaps an outsider attempting to come to terms with a new environment which, while familiar on may levels, still has many points of difference from the familiar Australian context.

This notion of the post-colonial returning to the colonial centre, the ‘empire writing back’ (to borrow a phrase from Bill Ashcroft and Helen Triffin), is an interesting way to approach Duggan’s recent English based writing. There is definitely something very ‘un-English’ about much of the work in The Pursuit of Happiness and his previous two collections, the chapbook Allotments (2011) and Crab & Winkle (2009). Duggan approaches the English landscape with a lightness and brightness which perhaps springs from his descriptions of the Australian landscape. In the same way that the early colonial painters painted the Australian landscape through an English/European perspective, Duggan brings to his observations of England a sensibility that has been shaped by a very Australian consciousness.

It is interesting to approach the longest poem on this collection, ‘The Nathan Papers’, with this understanding in mind. ‘The Nathan Papers’, we are told, is older than the other poems in the book, having been written during an eighteen month residency at Griffith University during 2005-2006. The poem begins centred firmly in a Australia described by an artist:

eucalyptus after rain, even this , trunks straight or sinuous,
reminds of Sydney Long, art has made this environment, its
pathways, marked, curve towards the dormitories”

It is a familiar landscape, populated with familiar people and places. Bus connections are described in detail and Duggan describes places once familiar to him which have now been lost:

the Green Iguana (Newtown)
the Prince Edward Hotel (Darlington)
Nicholas Ponder Bookseller (Double Bay)
But not Nicholas Ponder.

For someone not familiar with the Sydney literary scent of a certain period then perhaps some notes would have been appreciated at this point, but this naming of place is a technique that Duggan is continuing to employ in his more recent English writing.

Indeed the conclusion of this poem finds Duggan in England “in the dining hall, Eliot College, Kent”. ‘The Nathan Papers’ details an important journey for Duggan, from the familiar and comfortable to the new which, at the same time, is much older than the post-colonial Australia he has left behind. It is a journey that has been at the centre of his recent work and which he has further developed with skill in The Pursuit of Happiness. It has provided an extra dimension to Duggan’s work and one which I will be interested to see develop over the next few years.

Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review and is working on a collection of poetry.

The Pursuit of Happiness is available from http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2012/dugganPoH.html

The Stella Prize Short List – a long time coming

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stella-logo-largeThe issue of gender equality in literature one is a difficult one. One one side there is the argument that writing should be selected, published, read and awarded on its merits irrespective of who wrote it and that the writer’s gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, politics etc should not come into it. On the other hand there is the argument that  such objectivity is impossible, that all the odds the odds are stacked against writers who write from outside one of the literary mainstreams.

As someone who has edited a literary magazine and as an editor of a website that attempts to run reviews and criticism of new Australian writing, such questions are critical to the way I approach my work. When P76 was receiving unsolicited work my memory is that we received far more work from male writers than female writers (this was in the 1980s and 1990s). While I don’t pretend to know the reasons why I suspect that it is not that there were more males writing poetry than females – I tend to suspect that males felt more confident sending their work out or saw their work as public whereas perhaps some women writers felt less condiment offering their work for publications. Oner way I attempted to overcome this was to approach a number of women writers directly to try and ensure a more balanced gender split.

With Rochford Street Review the issue is a little more complicated – on one level there is the question of how many books by male writers have been reviewed compared to female writers. Then there is the question of the reviewer – how many of our reviewers are female as opposed to male. I attempted to collate some of these figures on the occasion of Rochford Street Review’s first birthday last November. The results of this analysis can be found at http://rochfordstreetreview.com/2012/12/02/happy-birthday-rochford-street-review/.

And so to the Stella Prize. There is a certain irony in the fact that up to 2012 works by female writers have won 16 out of 55 Miles Franklin Awards. While the importance of these statistics can be debated, the questions obvious go much deeper than a single award. During 2012 there was a widespread perception that women’s rights where under attack. There were, for example,  the obvious attacks lead by the commercial radio shock jocks which were reflected in gender specific attacks against Australia’s first female Prime Minister. One of the founders of the Stella Prize, writer and editor Sophie Cunningham, summed it up when she said “After a rapid acceleration in women’s rights in the ’70s and ’80s, things have started to go backwards”.

This was also playing out in the literary arena. By 2012 it was pointed out that roughly 50% of books published in Australia were by women, yet books by women were under represented in Award short lists and on the review pages. So in mid 2012 a group of women decided to set up an Australian Literary Award open to women writers only. Based on the Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction, the Stella Award was to offer a prise of Aust$50,000 for the ‘best’ book by an Australian Woman – unlike the British award it is not limited to fiction.

This week the short list for the initial award was announced. Those making the final cut are:

  • The Burial – Courtney Collins (Allen & Unwin)
  • Questions of Travel – Michelle de Kretser (Allen & Unwin)
  • The Sunlit Zone – Lisa Jacobson (Five Islands Press)
  • Like a House on Fire – Cate Kennedy (Scribe Publications)
  • Sea Hearts – Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)
  • Mateship with Birds – Carrie Tiffany (Picador)

Interestingly, while the prize was not limited purely to fiction, it would appear that all he short listed books fall into that category (one could debate the status of The Sunlit Zone as a verse novel). While it would have good to see some more poetry among the shortlist, it is encouraging to see Five Island and Scribe making the cut against the larger publishers.

The winner will be announced in Melbourne on 16 April.

- Mark Roberts

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The Stella Prize website can be found at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/

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

Music and Words: Mark Roberts previews ‘Seven Stations – in any order – a love poem for Sydney’. A song cycle by poet Chris Mansell and composer Andrew Batt-Rawden

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Seven Stations – in any order – a love poem for Sydney. A song cycle by poet Chris Mansell and composer Andrew Batt-Rawden. Alison Morgan (voice and thumb piano), Anna Fraser (voice), Ezmi Pepper (cello), Joe Manton (bass), Josh Hill (percussion), Stefan Duwe (viola), Acacia Quartet (string quartet), Andrew Batt-Rawden (voice and conductor). 7pm, Friday 01 March, 2013 at the Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium of Music

Stations Banner 600 x 357 pxReading the press release for Seven Stations – in any order – a love poem for Sydney, a song cycle for mixed ensemble and electronics by Andrew Batt-Rawden (composer) and Chris Mansell (poet), prompted two very early childhood memories.

The first was catching a train into the city with my mother. I must have been very young, it was well before I started school. I can remember waiting on the platform at Meadowbank station and watching a stream train fly through the station (yes I am that old!). Later, after the boarding the ‘red rattler’ there was the wonderful electric smell, the shuddering of the carriage, the rattling of the windows and the rhythm of the wells on the track. After leaving Burwood the train curved towards the city. If you looked down you could see into backyards full of vegetables and washing lines, looking up you could see the city getting closer and closer. As the train approached Central it dropped down below the level of the other lines and criss-crossed under what looked like ancient brick aqueducts. Then, suddenly after leaving Central the train disappeared under a building into a dark noisy tunnel – only to emerge at Town Hall station where my mother and I climbed the stairs to emerge in the heart of Sydney.

The second memory is from much the same time. Growing up as a Catholic Easter was an interesting time for a child. There was lots of chocolate, but there was also the solemn Catholic Easter rituals. Good Friday was especially busy as there was Stations of the Cross in the morning and the Solemn Good Friday Mass (which went for ever!) in the afternoon. The Stations of the Cross was much more exciting. It was an easy narrative, there were pictures on the wall and the priest walked around the church telling a story – while it was a particular bloody and distressing story, it was one which I seemed to already be very familiar with – and there was lots of music. Many years later, as a long term lapsed Catholic, I returned to St Mary’s Cathedral for Stations of the Cross to hear the Cathedral Choir sing Miserere Mei Deus. It was a very moving experience.

While it seemed perfectly natural for me to make the connection between train stations and stations of the cross, I’m not sure it is a connection that others will easily make (particularly if they are not from Catholic or High Anglican background). Going a little deeper, however, there is something of a secular ritual about Seven Stations – We are taken on a tour of Sydney’s CBD train stations (though it appears this particular train does not stop at Wynard or Martin Place). At each station we hear a different response to the station, its history, its surroundings and the people who pass through it (and one of the stations is called ‘Kings Cross’).

Andrew Batt-Rawden

Andrew Batt-Rawden

It is perhaps a little surprising that there is not more collaboration between poets and composers. At first glance it would appear to be a natural extension of both the poet’s and composer’s work – in each case one should be enriched by the other. In reality, however, things can be a little different. For the poet (and I am coming from a writing background), the music adds another layer of complexity. The poet is working with the internal rhythm of the lines, wondering when to break a line, whether to use this word or that, understanding how the words/lines will look on the page. While they will also be working on the ‘sound’ of the poem, of how the poem will sound either read aloud/performed or the internal sound when it is read silently on the page, the addition of music can take the poem in a very different direction. The poem has suddenly lost any pretence of being self-contained – it is now part of something larger. The rhythm of the poem can be disrupted by an external rhythm, the words take on different sounds, even different meanings, in the context of the music it is now a part of.

For the composer I’m sure the task is no less difficult. On one level the poem becomes another instrument to write for – there are different ways for each word to be sung, the poem becomes part of the musical text, it is notated into a different language.

It is also a different task for a listener/reader. The reader of a poem brings their own context to the work, they respond to it and to an extent they make it their own. They can read it fast or slow, they can emphasise some words and let others almost disappear. When a poet reads or performs a poem that level is taken away. The poet/performer now controls many of the subtleties but it is still the words that convey most (but not all) of the impact.

Adding music into this mix muddies the waters even further. For most pop/rock/popular music I would argue that the words are still key, the lyrics of a pop song sit on top of the music, the beat may drive it but it is the singer, in most cases, who fronts the band. When we look at jazz, however, the relationship can start to blur. The voice begins to take on more of the attributes on an instrument and there is generally more interaction between the voice and the other instruments. This becomes even more apparent when we turn to classical music. On one level the voice is another instrument and the ‘sound’ may be as critical to the success of the piece as the meaning of the words.

So trying to preview the premier of a new song cycle for, voice mixed ensemble and electronics is problematic if all you have are the words of the song. Fortunately, in the case of Seven Stations – in any order – a love poem for sydney, one of the pieces, ‘Town Hall’, was previously performed as part of a Chronology Arts program in Newtown last August.

Town Hall (the station), we are told, is the second busiest station on the NSW rail network (Central is the busiest) and this is reflected in both the music and the words of the piece. The music begins with a frantic percussive cacophony which echoes the metal on metal sound of an underground train which slowly blends into a repetitive horn which suggests the traffic chaos of the city above the station. We are at once placed into the middle of the city. Then a few seconds of silence – perhaps reflecting the moment of calm between trains – before the city returns.

SStations cover grabWhile the words on the page also reflect this slightly frantic edge – In particular the way “I am” is repeated throughout the piece emphasises the repetition that takes place every time the train door opens as well as echoing the musical reference to the sound of the train wheels on the track – it is when we hear the words sung as part of the piece that we can begin to appreciate the value of this collaboration. In the recording I have heard Alison Morgan ( Soprano) and Jenny Duck-Chong (Mezzo Soprano) provide the words with depth, their voices sometimes weaving around each other, multiplying Mansell’s repetition, at other times complimenting each other, pushing the words out ahead of the music demanding our attention (“look at me!”).

Read in isolation from the music, Mansell’s text hints at different aspects of the station and its surroundings. It is linked to the Queen Victoria Shopping Centre and reference is made to the statue of the old Queen:

I am the Queen…….. Victoria
…………….reigning still
…………………over retail

in perhaps the strongest image of the piece the past history of the station site as a colonial cemetery is recalled in the next lines as the dead Queen becomes:

the white dark witch
………blessing
…..and cursing
….the newborn

……breaching
from the underground

In ‘Town Hall’ we can see evidence of the successful collaboration between Batt-Rawden’s music and Mansell’s words. Batt-Rawden’s manages to take Mansell’s text and makes it work on another level. It is a different experience to reading the words on the page – richer, but more demanding of the listener/reader.………..

I recently asked Chris Mansell how the collaboration with Andrew worked her reply suggested that it was a trusting collaboration where both parties were willing to let the other take the running at different times:

We worked both collaboratively and in isolation. We had meetings beforehand, swapping ideas, swapping sounds (I’d recorded train sounds), swapping music (Andrew giving me an idea of the sorts of things he liked). Despite the disparity in our ages, we were on the same wavelength creatively. Andrew is very energetic and likes to take risks musically. I didn’t want to hold on too tight to the words – I wanted to give him room to move. I wasn’t going to stand over his shoulder – that way it’s not a true collaboration, it’s one person trying to impose their will on another. You get better results if you can be surprised when you collaborate.

Reading through the text of the other 6 stations (“We adore Thee, O Christ, and bless Thee”) I became slowly aware of the potential of the complete song cycle. The text is playful at times – the title ‘Getting off at Redfern’ hinting at the old Australian (or at least Sydney based) colloquialism – or the reference in ‘Sydney Terminal’ to “the fruiting towns/ (Orange, Berry….)”

Seven Stations in any order – love poems for Sydney promises to be an event of some importance. Its first performance will take place at 7pm, Friday 01 March, 2013 at the Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, NSW. Lets hope it is the first of many performances and may there be many more collaborations between poets and composers.

- Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review and P76 Magazine.

The text/poems for Seven Stations – in any order – a love poem for Sydney is available from Chris Mansell’s website http://www.chrismansell.com/Home.html

Information on Andrew Batt-Rawden can be found at the Chronology website http://www.chronologyarts.net/content/andrew-batt-rawden. A recording of ‘Town Hall’ can be found on Andrew’s SoundCloud page https://soundcloud.com/abattrawden.

Bookings for Seven Stations – in any order – a love poem for Sydney can be made at http://www.trybooking.com/Booking/BookingEventSummary.aspx?eid=39238

Sweet flesh of memory: Mark Roberts reviews Burning Rice by Eileen Chong

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Burning Rice by Eileen Chong. Australian Poetry Limited, 2012.

burning rice
The title poem of Eillen Chong’s first collection of poetry, ‘Burning Rice’, refers to the different amounts of water needed to cook rice. Brown rice needs more than twice the amount of water to cook than white rice. In this instance the poet has miscalculated, forgetting to put in the extra water for brown rice:

…….I smelt the charring
then saw: scorched rice like black gold,

The impact of the burnt rice, however, goes beyond the inconvenience of having to throw out the charred grains, clean the pot and start again. The cooking of the rice is the last step in a long process which, to Chong, is almost spiritual:

‘Planting rice is never fun’ – generations
of men, women and children ankle-deep
in padi fields, bent double at the waist,
immersing seedlings day after day

Finally, the harvest: sharp scythes glinting
in the afternoon sun,….

There is a connection between the burnt grains of rice stuck to a pot and the long process of growing and processing the grains. In fact the connection is even deeper for it is not just the process that produced these grains but the generations who have planted and harvested the rice over years. So, in the last line the burning of the rice becomes almost a betrayal of tradition and family:

my ancestors’ ashes in a bowl

It is this connection between the present and the memory of a culturally disparate past, that lies at the centre of the best poems in this connection. For Chong the connection is often difficult, stretched across time, place and culture – but for the most part she manages to maintain and celebrate the richness of this difference.

In ‘Kelong’ this memory is driven by photographs in a album. Perhaps it is a constructed memory, based on the stories the poet has been told about the photos, as these are things she could not know first hand:

My mother smiles at the camera. Her cheeks push
against her glasses and her belly strains with me.

The series of photos in the poem record three generations (the unborn poet, her parents and grandparents) fishing off a jetty, cleaning and cooking their catch. In the final stanza the memory becomes real as chong places herself firmly in the poem, claiming the memory as her own:

I am there as dusk falls, when my grandmother steams

the orange fish in a wok, when my granfather picks out
the eyes with his chopsticks. I can taste the sweet flesh
even as I caress the outline of its carcass…….

The fish has become the link with the past, the ‘carcass’ of a memory, perhaps the earliest physical link the poet has with her family. The ‘”sweet flesh” another layer of memory that the poem has added on top of the original photographs.

This layered memory is also critical to the longest poem in the collection ‘Shophouse Victoria Street’. Here the poet has grown up surrounded by the ordinary domestic activities of generations living in the same space:

My father, dark-haired and pale-bodied, cradles me.
I wear a silk suit with brocade booties and a crooked
smile. On special days I cannot predict, my mother heaves
a large kettle onto the stove and then pours a stream of hot water

into the deep tiled trough. We scoop and pour
scrub and wash. Outside, my grandmother bends over
the black sewing machine. Under the trestle table
her foot pedals out a rhythm.

But Chong’s generation is the last to be born and live here. We are given no explanation beyond:

Family by family, like bees gone mad
we fled the nest

Only Great Grandmother remains, the only reason the family returns to visit until she dies alone “in the upstairs room”. There is a measured grief to this poem, a bitter-sweet memory of an old house, in another country, another culture. It is also a poem where a major break occurs. This is where generations of her family lived, the poem traces the richness of this memory, but also of the break – the great grandmother is left in the old place while the rest of the family swarm like bees trying to find a new home. The funeral that concludes the poem accounces the end – and sugests a new beginning.

There is sense in many of the poems in this collection of the poet making a statement – these are my memories, this is my history, this is my poetry. It is strong statement, well made.

Chong’s poetry is vividly descriptive, at times her languageborders on prose and indeed there is one fine prose poem, ‘My Father’s Lesson’, in the collection. It is, perhaps, the long descriptive lines of these poems, heavy with a sensuous imagery, which helps makes this such an impressive debut. It will be interesting to see how her work develops.

- Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review and P76 Magazine.

Burning Rice is available from http://www.australianpoetry.org/2012/04/18/new-voices-series-2012/

Savouring the Undertow: Mark Roberts reviews ‘Body Language’ by Elizabeth Allen

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Body Language by Elizabeth Allen. Vagabond Press 2012

I have been carrying Elizabeth Allen’s first major collection, Body Language, around with me for a number of months. After you have been reviewing for a while you expect to be able to make a decision of a book on a first reading – you can usually make a call on what the direction the review will go in. This was not the case with Body Language. That is not to say I disliked the collection on a first read – far from it. It is that the collection asked a number of questions, opened up a number of possibilities that needed to be explored before I could set pen to paper (or fingers to keys).

One of my first reactions was that I felt there was a ‘confessional’ tone to the collection. This was probably driven by Allen’s use of the first person, the ‘I’, in many poems – and at times it is a very personal I:

I am weaving my life
though all these other lives,

Leaving

It is an ‘I’ that made me recall Plath and Sexton and sent me to my bookshelf to reread them in the context of Body Language. And so I carried Body Language with me for another week as I dipped into it Ariel and The Awful Rowing Toward God.

Allen is no Plath or Sexton (which is probably a good thing for her poetry). While there is a confessional edge to this collection it is, in the end, understated and assists in her analysis of her identity as a poet and her analysis of her relationship with those around her. This analysis is a detailed one and one which she hints at by her choice of a David Malouf quote at the beginning of the collection:

The place you come from is always the most exotic place
you’ll ever encounter because it is the only place where
you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in
people’s lives

Allen has perhaps given us a key here – the personal, confessional nature of much of the poetry in Body Language is, in fact, outward looking. Her analysis then is not as deeply personal as it might first appear. At its best her poetry reaches beyond the personal to the social, to the lives that surround her:

You are reminded again of how many people there are,
how strange a collision of factors determines what we are,
how small this corner of consciousness you keep defending
with each breath.

At Winton

This poem opens the collection and raises many of the issues that are explored throughout the book. At Winton is written, for the most part, in the second person

Here your body learns the seasons.
She brings you a home-grown pear, slightly bruised.

While there is nothing earth breaking here in the use of the second person in this poem, there is a hint of a little more ambiguity than one expect. Allen’s ‘you’’ is an external observation of the ‘I’, in the context of the collection the ‘you’ is the poet, standing outside of herself, observing, analysising. Suddenly, however,  listening to the sound the car engine makes labouring up a hill there is a brief shift:

Underneath the engine runs a clichéd tune:
I miss you I miss you I miss you

The next line moves back to the second person but the intrusion of the ‘I’ in this line centres the poem. This sense of loss – for a relationship, a lover or perhaps a death – provides the driver for the poem, and makes the use of the second person so successful.

This combination of seemingly simple descriptions of everyday events with this undercurrent of loss runs through much of the poems in Body Language. In ‘Venice’, for example, it is death that cuts through the everyday:

the internet-café-man
lectures about coyotes in Australia
and how one jumped his brother’s fence
snakes
wildlife
the latest kind of mac

We soon sense the undercurrent draining any humour from the opening lines:

the cold drips
into me
like acid rain

Until we learn the reason:

his death has arrived in an email
sent over a week ago

Once again we are not sure whose death – it is enough that there has been a death, a loss felt more keenly due to distance and time.

While ‘Venice’ approaches death slowly, only announcing its presence in the last third of the poem, in other poems it is far more central. ‘Forgetful hands’ opens with a funeral:

Eyes watch your coffin
through delicate patterns

of fire and ash,

But the public sense of loss retreats as the mourners disperse from the funeral. While neighbours might bring food:

After weeks it is just the three of us
with strange food to eat.

Forgetful hands
still set a place for you at the table.

The strength of this poem is perhaps its understatement. It is full of simple descriptions of everyday things – a funeral, scuffed shoes, a family meal, worn stairs – but Allen builds an intensity of feeling which sustains the poem.

While not all the poems in Body Language deal with death or loss, I did feel that these poems did underpin the success of the collection.There are other poems in this collection which stand out -’Bent Street, interior’ for example details two people moving around a house. ‘She’ inhabits the first stanza, ‘he’ inhabits the second. There is no connection between them apart form the fact they inhabit the same space – so perhaps there is, even here, a sense of a future loss.

When thinking about Allen’s poetry I keep returning to the term ‘understated’. At her best, however, there is an intensity to her understatement which creeps up on the reader – a loss is hinted at, but the everyday continues for a little longer, or there is an edge to a description that makes you wonder what lies below the surface. This is probably why I carried Body Language around with me for so long – to savour that undertow and wonder at the possibilities.

- Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He currently edits Rochford Street Review and P76 Magazine.

Body language is available from http://vagabondpress.net/collections/poetry/products/elizabeth-allen-body-language

 

 

           

Something Disconcerting and Delicious: Mark Roberts reviews ‘Schadenvale Road’ by Chris Mansell.

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Schadenvale Road by Chris Mansell. Interactive Press. 2011.

I have always regarded Chris Mansell as one of Australia’s leading poets so I was a little taken back to read that she is described on the back cover of Schadenvale Road as “one of Australia’s most accomplished short fiction authors” – had I missed something? Actually I approached Schadenvale Road with a hint of apprehension, my experience reading prose by writers who are predominately poets has not always been a good one. Not everyone can make the transition from poetry to the relative freedom of prose – some can’t let go of their background and their prose reads like an extended poem with no line breaks, while others embrace the apparent freedom offered by prose and take it much too far.

My hesitation lasted two paragraphs into the first story ‘Echidna Obscura’. Mansell is a ‘natural’ fiction writer – at once her style is confident yet unobtrusive, the imagery and narrative tugs at you, dragging you into the stream and sweeping you along. ‘Echidna Obscura’ is a simple story of an artist named Echidna living in the hills outside of town and his slowly developing relationship with Elanora. As the relationship advances at glacial speed Echidna decides to go bush, taking an old camera and a roll of film. Each day he takes a single picture and returns home only when all the roll is finished. When he opens the camera, however, he finds that the film hadn’t loaded onto the sprocket correctly and the film hasn’t wound on. Almost like a metaphor for the story nothing appears to have happened on the surface but approached from a slightly different perspective the narrative is heavy and rich with meaning.

The characters in this collection are mostly outsiders. For the most part they live outside the city or towns, or if they do live in town they are physically cut off from their neighbours, like Vorzetser, the writer stuck in a town called Paradise:

….The townspeople could have been alien plants for all the notice he took of them and he was utterly unaware that there were people living in the surrounding hills. They washed past his door and handled his personal correspondence without making a ripple in his life. He wrote to important friends who lived anywhere but in Paradise and complained about the parochialism of the place without ever speaking much to anyone, He was as prejudiced and wilful as it was possible for a poet to be without exploding.

There is something almost Dickensian about the wilful poet living in almost self-imposed exile in a town called Paradise. The final irony occurs when he travels out of Paradise to receive an award and he finds himself lost in the airport – his life “balanced on a point”. He realises he can move forward or simply disappear in the crowd, not answering to his name. We don’t find out what he does.

There is more than a hint of the early Peter Carey stories in Mansell’s short fiction – those in The Fat Man in History and War Crimes where Carey exploded onto the literary scene. Like the early Carey, Mansell creates a detailed narrative, we feel as we can almost recognise some of the towns and landscapes she describes. At the same time, however, there is something just below the surface, something that knocks our perspective just a little off centre. Something disconcerting and delicious.

We can see this in ‘The One in the Room with the Ceiling of Stars’. On first reading this story appears to revolve around a woman who starts hearing voices in her head and is confined to an institution. She can, however, remember a time before the voices: “She tried to remember how she got into this situation. It seemed to her that before the voices had begun she was happy”. But even then she was an outsider:

And then she remembered the people who came. Not good, but she supposed they loved her. In truth, she had very little idea what this might mean. She tried to figure it out. It seemed to be some sort of obligation. People said , “I love you” and you were supposed to say back “I love you too” and this meant you had to do things for them.

When she first starts to hear the voices she tries to understand them as they are often in different languages. She studies and learns many different languages in order to understand them. At first her family is happy with her as she studies, but when she tells them why she is studying there was suddenly “ a lot of serious conversations in secret places”. As the voices increase so does her “imprisonment”, cut off from the outside she finds a degree of solace in a room with a rounded ceiling covered with “paintings and gilded stars.”

The voices themselves are pleading, asking for forgiveness, asking for help. “some accused her of things or demanded that she do things”. Mansell handles the build up of tension well, we sense that something has to give – but when it does it is both unexpected and perfectly rational and we pinch ourselves for not seeing it coming.

The notion of the outsider is also central to ‘Walking into Ice’ where the main character goes on a journey/quest to find a wild cat or panther. There is debate about whether the panther exists, some claim to have seen it, but whether it exists or not it represents the unease, the fear of the unknown. Of course the quest for the panther becomes a metaphor or another journey and we begin to suspect that maybe the quest has become an internal one:

I took my bearings and as comfortably as the alien creature I had become, I gathered the dark around me and walked with my flame red hair through the silent , unanswering country to continue to look for the shadowing caves of real ice.”

The notion of the ‘panther’ or big cat that prowls at night, hiding in the darkness and threatening the otherwise peace existence of the characters occurs a number of times in this collection, most noticeably in the final story ‘Lot 20 Schadenvale Road’. This story follows a woman as she becomes an outsider, discovering a ‘secret’ valley and eventually settling there in what at first appears to be an almost perfect idyllic existence. Then suddenly one night she senses something in the garden:

I can’t say I felt the presence of evil – but it was something close to evil. An absence of light that was at the same time completely empty and completely full of fear – not the observers fear , but a physical fear that it feed on, that belonged to it and nurtured it and pulled down anything within its range.

Is this the panther, the black leopard, that people sometimes think they see? For Mansell, perhaps it is this absence that provides an edge to her prose which makes it so compelling.

Schadenvale Road should cement Mansell’s reputation as one of Australia’s leading writers. Already  firmly established as a major poet, it suggests that her fiction should start receiving just as much attention as her poetry.

- Mark Roberts

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

Schadenvale Road is available from Interactive Press http://www.ipoz.biz/Titles/SRd.htm