Category Archives: Writers

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/

A Heartrending Memoir: Georgina Scillio reviews ‘An Imaginary Mother’ by Bron Nicholls.

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An Imaginary Mother by Bron Nicholls. Black Pepper Publishing 2013.

nichollsaimcoverThis heartrending memoir by Bron Nicholls of her ‘strange mother’ is well written and hard to put down.

Nicholls’ relationship with both her parents, especially her mother Phyll with whom, naturally, she spent more time, was very difficult. Often Nicholls was given contradictory messages and the more she tried to please her secretive and unpredictable mother, the more her mother frustrated her and belittled her efforts.

As a child Phyll and her younger sister Meg had been sent to Sutherland House, an orphanage for destitute children at Diamond Creek in Victoria. They were neither destitute nor orphans and never forgave their father for having sent them there. At the Home they were not ill-treated but their hair was cut short, they had very few possessions, the food was meager and they were made to work hard housekeeping or in the farm.

Phyll retreated into books and became an avid reader for the rest of her life, often living out in her head the events of the books she read. It was an escape into an imaginary life which caused her to ‘block’ out many things, including her family.

One of the main flaws of the narration in An Imaginary Mother s that Nicholls calls her mother ‘Phill’ and at other times—sometimes in the same paragraph—she calls her ‘Mum’. Again, with her father, he is both ‘John’ and ‘Dad’ when just she or he would have been clear enough. At times, this proved confusing and one had to re-read the piece to find out who are the people mentioned.

There are also sections of the story where we are left wondering what happened next. For example, the horrendous bus trip with Nicholls and Nicholls’s very sick sister was described in great detail and is very moving. But as the author changes subject immediately, the reader is left high and dry and not knowing what was wrong with girl: did she recover? Later on in the story, the girl reappears, so we can assume she did not die from whatever sickness she had been suffering.

In another instance, the author and her mother are sitting on the verandah, waiting for the father to arrive as he was late from work. The reader becomes anxious and worries: did Dad have an accident? Did he arrive home safely for dinner? But instead of answering these questions for us, Nicholls talks about her beloved dog, Jelly Roll, who is now old and who has to be put down by the vet. We get the impression that there is more affection for her dog, than for her father.

What was also sad about the author’s childhood is the way her Christian fundamentalist father’s rigid beliefs blighted his family’s lives and especially that of the author. When Nicholls tried to escape, she ended up in more trouble. She states very briefly (one sentence) that she got married to the violent young man with whom she had fled. We are not told why and how she decided to make such a seriously bad move and we are left rather puzzled: if she knew he was so unpleasant, why did she marry him? Was her desperation that great?

The marriage did not last long and she continued moving from place to place—she moved house more than 40 times—at times leaving jobs and friends behind her. She admits to be following the example of her parents, especially her father, whose restlessness made him continually change jobs, suburbs and States.

There are some bad luck stories, but Nicholls does not indulge in self-pity, on the contrary, she blames herself for when things go wrong. The way she cared for her ill mother in the last years of her life is very touching, even though her efforts were not always appreciated.

In spite of some shortcomings, this is a very worthwhile book to read, if not for anything else to learn about the consequences of mental illness on other members of a family. It is also a very interesting story about the struggles, both financial and social, of many Australian families in the early and middle part of the twentieth century.

The book has several photos of the mother, the author and her family and is an excellent way to engage the reader. The front cover, a photo of the mother, with the author as a baby in a washing tub in the garden, is rather delightful.

- Georgina Scillio

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Georgina Scilliohas had work published in Quadrant, Arena, The Australian and several other literary journals. Her collection of short stories A Dandelion on the Roof won first prize in the 2008 Northern Notes Writers’ Festival.

An Imaginary Mother is available from http://blackpepperpublishing.com/nichollsaim.html

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 thinking about writing: berni m janssen launches Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic

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

a-handwritten-modern-classic


In 1977 Finola was writing the everything of her living, in her own hand, in a small notebook and this is The Handwritten Modern Classic. She was writing of her living, her thinking about her living, the thinking about writing, and writing all of this – this everything of Finola’s living at that time.

I first read the Handwritten Modern Classic in the eighties, and was delighted and my delight has been re-ignited.

Simone Weil says ‘attention is love’ and Finola is attending, attending to the everything of her living, and this everything so interesting and of interest, we feel Finola loving; living, thinking, writing, everything. We are immersed in this close attending of everything that is so interesting and it is in this that a present, a now, that continues to be now, is composed.

In The Handwritten that present is still so now, continuing into this present

In the handwritten the writer is always present: present in the writing of the hand

In the handwritten the voice of the writer is printed. The handwriting a voiceprint.

The handwriting composing the voice in a continuous present that we are reading now.

And so present, that my delight continues.

But, what a cheek Finola has! To name her writing a classic as she is writing it, well before she is dead. What a tongue in cheek she has! She is poking her tongue at capital H History, capital L Literature, capital A Authority and all capitalisation! Amongst other things.

Finola says

- it is political to write a handwritten modern classic -

In 1977, feminism spoke of the personal as political, and so Finola writing the everything of her living is a political act. As a writer, thinker, feminist, lesbian, protestor, questioning, questioning the everything of living, outspoken, critiquing; this places her outside of the mainstream, on the outer. Standing on the outer is a way to look in, look at, closely. Standing on the outer, looking in, so many minute details, filter in to focus, out. Pass.

She is writing of the everything of living in that time of 1977 – the politics of politics, the politics of living, the politics of thinking, of being, of relationships, of communication; thinking about and questioning the everything of living – writing, freedom, rules, roles, genius, romantics, literature, philosophy, alienation, imagination, insanity and sanity, of what is correct, of escape, of sarcasm, expression, failure, success, of barricades, a little seventies literati gos , an occasional portrait, wry observations, and of conversations with mother, lovers, friends and of speaking of language unbound in a Fitzroy laundromat. What a gritty hilarious romp it is!

As Gertrude says –

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.

(Composition as Explanantion)

Finola pays respect to her lineage. Nods to the thinkers and literary forebears: Austen, Woolfe, Simone Weil, Marcuse, Wittgenstein, Coleridge, Tolstoy, Eliot. We feel this continuity. And of course, the entire composition, more than a nod to Gertrude Stein. It’s a rigorous conversation with Gertrude’s Composition as Explanation.

The Handwritten makes us laugh, sigh, groan, roar in protest, escape into, deeply, deeply into, the thinking and the imagining and the writing. As Finola says ‘imagination is best employed on what is’.

I am breath-taken, breathless by the scope, the attention, the detail, and the writing – the language so wonderfully composed. Composing the everything of a living, in words elastic, precise, evocative; playing playful. A sentence being more.

The Handwritten Modern Classic is difficult to read. We are unfamiliar now with handwriting – an idiosyncratic flow of script. Finola’s handwriting loops and lurches across the page. You must pause whilst reading to distinguish an ‘i’ or an ‘l’, one must pause in the reading of the writing, take time to be with the writing, in a way that text typed, text texted does not.

We pause in the irregularity. Pause to decipher, and in those moments of pausing, we are ciphering the word, rolling it around, and the word is clarifying and as the word clarifies the sentence has formed and nestled in our consciousness. The act of ciphering the hand, makes space for the intensity of thinking, of thinking of living, of questioning the thinking of living and the writing is living with us, as close as it can be.

This writing makes us stop to think, and in the pause of reading we are thinking, as Finola has been thinking through her writing of her living. She is not only thinking of how the writing is to be written but how her living and thinking of her living and her writing of her thinking of living is written. We pause in the loops of the handwritten, as we pause in the loops and twists of living, and the loops and twists and returns of thinking. We return again and again. We must start again, in reading and thinking, and reading the writing of living and thinking.

As Gertrude says, writing is often not recognised at the time it is written whilst it is very contemporary and exciting, but that often it must wait some thirty years or more before it can be recognised. And this is mostly when the writer is dead. Long dead. However once it has been accepted after it has been refused, and the writing is still contemporary and exciting, this is what makes it a classic.

Finola has us in her now of the living of these days in 1977. There is a freshness still, a beauty of the moment, a now that continues into now, that makes it a classic. A classic does not have wrinkles in its words, nor dust collected in the serifs. Unless placed there, with intent.

Gertrude says that a classic is wonderfully beautiful, after many have found that it has been annoying, difficult, stimulating. Some see the beauty whilst it is still annoying difficult and stimulating. Others will never see beauty in such.

A classic endures time.

Fresh as it was then, we are in the present of her writing of her living of everything and it is a delight, and the delight also makes it a classic.

And so Finola, who with tongue in cheek, nodding to her philosophical and literary lineage, with imagination, attention and foresight wrote The Handwritten Modern Classic. She wrote this from the outer, from the other side of the law, and as Gertrude has said you are an outlaw, until you become a classic.

As I was reading, I was noting so many lines, sentences, thoughts that delighted me and that I wanted to quote -so many hilarious quotable lines that I wanted to share, to sprinkle through these launching words, but they became so thick, I may as well have read you the book, so better you buy it and trip with this handwritten, pause in its stimulating difficult beauty, living in the writing of the living and the thinking of the living and the writing of the everything. Buy this book, so that you can begin and begin again, for the continuing delight of it. Gertrude would be well pleased with this classic composition!

- berni m janssen

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

“How little we change! How much we change!” – Thoughts on new edition of A Handwritten Modern Classic – Finola Moorhead

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Finola Moorhead at the (re)launch of A Handwritten Modern Classic - Collected Works Bookshop Melbourne.

Finola Moorhead at the (re)launch of A Handwritten Modern Classic – Collected Works Bookshop Melbourne.

Notebooks with mock leather covers, looking like a Reader’s Digest edition of the Complete Works of, say, Thomas Hardy, called, I think, “modern classics”, were sold in newsagents. There were neither lines nor words within. Di Wilson gave me one. She had suffered me writing my first novel, Lots Of Potential. I have an elusive memory-feeling that this notebook was an ironic present. Di shared with my mother a rich vein of sarcasm. I play those curly balls with a straight bat. I do, and being a sportswoman, I know what I mean. Being a sportswoman never ever sat with the full package of “being a writer”. Being a writer meant that you were an indoorsy person who read well and didn’t mind the sound of your own voice. My voice does not have a particularly pleasant timbre. Like the disappointing image in the mirror, the sound of my voice on radio makes me recoil blushing and rushing outside to hit a ball. Hitting a ball with a straight bat means, when metaphorically referring to a response to sarcasm addressed to myself, is nodding and seriously doing what is sardonically suggested, that is, stepping to the pitch (for those ignorant of cricket = where the ball bounces) to disempower the spin, not aggressively trying to whack it for runs. But whack it for runs, it seems, is what I have done. Ania Walwicz said to Kris Hemensley some time between 1972 and 1977 about me, “Who can believe a writer in a tracksuit?”, a little thing I have remembered all these years because she nailed my problem. What the f*ck am I doing pretending to be a writer when I don’t look/act/seem like one? .Forty years on I reckon I know what would have ensued had I been believable in the sense that Ania meant. I don’t think I have to explain that to readers of the Rochford Street Review, but I really don’t mind not being invited to speak and read at Writer’s Weeks or Festivals, judge literary prizes, give my opinion on the best books written in a given year, teach creative writing, hunger for residencies, grants and so on. So much of that is what you seem, not what you are, or what you wrote exactly. It drove me mad and it does drive me crazy when I am interviewed by someone who has not taken the time to read what I’ve written enough to understand or appreciate what I did.

What I did in terms of literature is important to me; the how, where, why of the what. What my sportswomen-friends read is not what I write, though, dear literary folk, they do read, a lot; an amazing amount. Their opinions are fierce on who is best, better and good; they are talking about plot. Plot is what I am not good at, though I do try. What I love is how a story, or feeling, or insight, or record unfolds, how the writer explains and describes. I love structure, form, philosophy subtley embedded in metaphor, symbol and action. What literary writers like is language, and I love them for that, but English for me is like a second tongue even though I have no other. That, ironically, is why I am a writer.

Kris Hemensley, forty years ago, like he is now in owning Collected Works, was a person as place. He was where we who wanted to explore the possibilities of writing gravitated as villagers might gather and chat at the well; outside the establishment, the houses and offices of standards where stamps of approval were given in relation to accepted, tried and true values of literature as taught in universities and schools. He gave Melbourne its avante garde in the literary genre by being open and versed in what was being done in England, America and Europe in the moment of the 60s and 70s, and publishing new work in any way he could. I was lucky enough to visit that well and drink from its licence.

So freed from being a short-story writer, or playwright, — my poetry was always over-blown and declamatory – I could set about writing “writing”, as we called it at the well. What was verse? What was prose? Was it grammatical? Did punctuation matter? These were good questions. But I don’t think I ever really “got it”, which means I had a fundamental problem with post-modernism. Women’s Liberation had thrown a spanner in the works in that, suddenly, the track-suit (even though I didn’t own one) made sense to other people, women. So by 1975 my image fitted in with a mob while my writing could develop in another intellectual direction. By 1980 I had worked out that I could write fiction with a female aesthetic using the allowances afforded me by being for a short while in the company of men who were writing great stuff which changed literature for the rest of the century.

In between these two was the serendipitous gift of a notebook and the writing in 3 weeks in 1977 of A Handwritten Modern Classic whose first edition has a print-run of one. For all those apparently sane people who collect things, especially rare books this one is the very definition of unique. Start bidding. In 1985 it was published by Pete Spence, who opted in his concrete-poetic way to keep the hand-writing. When Spinifex Press brought out the hard copy for their e-book publication of it this year, I read my “classic” again and it’s cute, it’s crazy, it’s readable; it is the picture of a thirty-year old’s mind, which I recognise as mine.

How little we change! How much we change! We can never have that opinionated energy again; a certain sort of poetry is ever youthful. By poetry I mean a delightful marriage of words, fresh, like the first taste of an avocado; an experience of literature which feels like teenage love. Maybe the wearing down of the sandstone, aging, can result in something sculpturally nice; the sharp edges of criticism smoothed by the wisdom that one must accept that people need their illusions, their ideals now not much more than words spoken, that tolerance is a part of the caution we have learnt to survive, we are more circumspect with what we commit to paper. The re-issue of A Handwritten Modern Classic has brought home to me the importance of being true to your age, when putting thoughts into words for others to read.

- Finola Moorhead

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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

Recording Images: Robbie Coburn reviews ‘Flying Low in the Minor Key” by Anthony Lawrence

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Flying Low in the Minor Key by Anthony Lawrence, River Road Press, 2011.

Anthony-Lawrence-CD-cover-image-21-150x150Anthony Lawrence is unquestionably one of Australia’s most important contemporary poets. Flying Low in the Minor Key, released on CD as part of the excellent River Road Poetry series, brings together 30 of Lawrence’s finest poems spanning from his first collection to his most recent and uncollected work, read by the poet himself.

There is much to enjoy here, and it is clear this fine compilation has been delicately chosen to be listened to either in its entirety or simply as individual tracks.

The blurb for the release sums up Lawrence’s style perfectly, as “perhaps the most Romantic of Australian poets” but the true appeal in Lawrence’s work is in his stark imagery and diversity, and this collection is a wonderful display of his command over the lyrical, and the clear drive of narrative that runs fiercely through his verse.

This is evident from the moment the listener presses play in the fantastic opener “The Drive”, which recounts a childhood incident involving the firebombing of a car, beginning with Lawrence remembering the drive to the police station with his father:

My father could not look at me as we sat in the back of a white Sedan
on our way to the police station
But I looked at him.
He was staring straight ahead through all the years his son
had disappointed him.

It is this no-holds-barred, controlled lyricism that separates the poet from many of his contemporaries, tackling less glamorous topics with clarity while still upholding his use of description, creating an atmosphere that is honest, confessional and compelling. The poem continues:

When the detectives arrived I was having a family portrait taken…
I ran behind the Sunday school buildings and confessed
to the lawn scraping currawongs,
I watched black smoke, like useless prayer, gutter into the Sydney sky.
The sirens were a long time coming.

While ultimately being an appreciation and acknowledgement of family that is hidden during the angst and turmoil of adolescence, as the poet and his parents now “talk… about the violent spirit of a teenage son”, while sharing “their names” and “blood”, Lawrence consistently manages to intertwine experience with evocative imagery, creating a visual element most written poetry fails to achieve.

Another standout is the award-winning and hauntingly atmospheric “The Rain”:

Rain, and driving thoughts of rain, miles
and hours of it, inches and yards of light
and dark rain, where seamless cloud has been
stitched and gathered into a great undoing
of itself…

A heavily descriptive piece, water is a consistent theme in Lawrence’s work, particularly in earlier collections The Darkwood Aquarium, Three Days Out of Tidal Town and Cold Wires of Rain, and becomes a foundation for much of the work presented here.

The poet has a particular appreciation for the alluring qualities of rivers and oceans in poems such as “The Trawler” and “Oceanography”, while the title poem, far different in subject describes “the night’s paint being prepared or still wet on the leaves and grass”, as a change unexpectedly occurs.

The latter poem breaks away from Lawrence’s usual take on the lyric, written in the 2nd person, creating vivid imagery that causes the listener to ponder its deeper meaning, revealing the impressive range and control of the poet’s voice. Lawrence characteristically writes from the point of view of a naturalist, and this piece effectively summarizes the collection as a whole.

Ultimately, this is a brilliant CD, presented in a beautifully printed cardboard sleeve that demands to be heard again and again, and would be enjoyed by any regular readers of Lawrence’s work and indeed all lovers of good poetry.

To hear the poems is an experience far more intimate than simply reading in silence, and Flying Low in the Minor Key is moving and memorable listening, reaffirming why Lawrence, all these years on, remains at the forefront of Australian poetry.

- Robbie Coburn

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Robbie Coburn is a poet and writer from country Victoria. His first chapbook Human Batteries was published by Picaro Press in 2012. He can be found at  www.robbiecoburn.com

Flying Low in the Minor Key is available from River Road Press: http://www.riverroadpress.net/?page_id=331

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

What does satisfaction feel like?: Miriam Zolin reviews Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe

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Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe. UQP 2012

tarcutta wakeIn our first world comfort zone, we’ve mostly forgotten what it feels like to have an empty belly. That kind of hunger is mostly something we’ve found a way to solve. But there are other hungers, and it is these yearnings for a those other kinds of sustenance that Josephine Rowe tackles in Tarcutta Wake. This collection of short stories, snippets and slices pares back the layers of her characters’ lives to describe – with metaphor and indirect gaze – the human ache to be the weft in something’s weave.

Tarcutta sits at the mid-point between Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne. It’s in New South Wales, on the Hume Highway and up until relatively recently was the main road route between the two centres. Four hundred and fifty six kilometres from Melbourne and 438 kilometres from Sydney: whether or not you stop there, the secret of its position has the pull of the symmetrically symbolic. (Few ever stopped there, I gather – and even fewer now that it’s been bypassed by a dual carriageway freeway). I could not help making the leap, as I read and re-read this collection, extrapolating out from Tarcutta to ‘mid-point’ and leaping out from there to ‘limbo’. The story that names the collection is at least in part about being past the midway point – it touches on aging and death – so maybe I’m reading too much into nothing, but that’s something Rowe’s stories tend to lead us to. Our species has a kind of inbuilt hunger for stories, and we are good at filling in the gaps, even if we’d rather someone did it for us.

On my desk at home I have stack of other peoples’ photos. They are old, faded and sepia. I bought a vintage album and they were in it but because I bought the album for the album, and because I couldn’t bear to discard these pictures of real people, I keep them in a stack tied with ribbon and I reach out to look at them from time to time, between other things. I can see just enough in them to be tantalised by who they might be and what their stories might be, but knowing is impossible; they are completely out of context. A man in a suit with a brick wall and climbing roses behind him holds his trumpet in his left hand, against his midriff. A buxom older lady with a tight bodice glares into the camera. A family of five stare at me from the centre of a dirt road – a strange little group in the middle of nowhere, all dressed up for civilisation and only gumtrees all around. These photos have a similar effect on me to Rowe’s collection. Her pieces are like snapshots, full of intricate detail and deftly drawn characters. Her people are fleshed out in delicate brushstrokes, and we feel we almost know them, but she is all show and no tell. In ‘Into The Arms Of The Parade’ a model takes a break from sitting for a portrait. She is intrigued by the artist’s existence, and wishes she could turn over a postcard she sees on the shelf: ‘I thought that if I could only flip it over and read what was on the back, I might be able to know something about her.’ The model is experiencing something like I experienced when I read the story with her in it. I wanted the back of the postcard.

Another story, ‘Heart of Gold’ is narrated by a puzzled observer of some strange and unexplained behaviour. The piece finishes with the line, ‘We tried our best to make sense of it.’ As did I. I turned that page back and forth, reading the story over and over again to try and make sense of it. The piece became more and more beautiful the more I read it – I believe I could recite it now, if prompted. But the meaning I yearned for was out of reach.

The paradox of Rowe’s writing is that even as she stops short of rounding out her pieces to something we could recognise as a ‘story’, you do sense that you are in safe hands. She has a gentle, assured touch, a deep understanding of what it means to be searching and lost. But she draws no conclusions. Without a doubt, her portraits of people and circumstance create a clear, true picture, each authentic in its simplicity and complexity, poetic in its language. But they are only portraits. The story is somewhere else.

And no, there is nothing unfinished about this collection. The writing is all beautiful – breathtakingly so. But it does have incompleteness about it. These stories will not help you find answers to your questions. They will not provide you with explanations. They will, instead, push you gently to the window and remind you to keep searching for a way to satisfy your own very human need to connect.

- Miriam Zolin

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Miriam Zolin’s writing has recently appeared in PenTales, Griffith Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Book Review and The Sleepers Almanac.

Tarcutta Wake is availble from http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book.aspx/1206/Tarcutta%20Wake

For another view of Tarcutta Wake see Lyndon Walker’s resposnse Practicing for the Novel: Lyndon Walker reflects on Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe