Tag Archives: Australain Literature

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

________________________________________________________________

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

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

———————————————————————————

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

A Welcomed Life: Les Wicks reviews ‘Honey & Hemlock’ by Julie Watts

Posted on by
6

Honey & Hemlock by Julie Watts. Sunline Press, 2013.

Honey and hemlockWhen I was lucky enough to have a stay at Tom Collins House in Perth I was told about the historical resentment that WA writers had about the exclusionary attitudes of “the scene” over east. Considerably lessened, they’d say, but still very real. I was surprised at this proposition in the age of comparatively cheap airfares and e-mails scuttling across the globe, but in the end I saw their point.

Julie Watts was one of an array of dynamic, fascinating emerging poets whom I ran across during my stay. I was expecting good writing when I received her first book “Honey & Hemlock” but I got a hell of a lot more. Like many inaugural titles the subjects are heavily autobiographical ranging across lovers, parents, daughter, mishap, nursing home and pets. But given that familiarity of theme, the reader is even more enriched by the gift of her language… the way she makes enlivens these themes.

There is a heavy dose of joy and wonder throughout this collection, yet more vital medications for the future of Australian poetry. All within the context of a fully nuanced life; in “After the Eye Injury” we’re breathlessly led along a pilgrimage of newly re-experienced colours to her altar of light. With “A Swim in the Sea” the poet plays with a simplicity of moment to a turn at the end that saw an audible ah from this reader. The familiarity with and love of the sea is evident throughout this collection

Watts savours a real sensuality in “6:45 AM” and “Achilles heel” then follows through with this startling new take on an eggs & sperm in “Eggs” – sperm on a tissue in a bin:

for three days they butt
at a white rough sheet
of pulverised tree.

This open sensuality carries through so much of this collection in everything from the stroking of the cat to breathing salt air… “A Spit of Sun”

and the world bursts
a pollen of people

The expenditure of time honing her craft is evident throughout. “Lilith” is a deeply satisfying study. In “I like Old Women” she comments:

they understand invisibility
no one can touch them now

“Maslow and the Ladybird” is another poem that careens out from the simple proposition of a ladybird landing on the poet’s wrist. It concludes:

vermilion folds a savannah
of all libidos

“So Much Depends” finishes the book and I couldn’t extract a single word from this poem, the whole works so perfectly. Had I been allowed only to read six books this year, there would not be a moment of regret if this had been one of them. Any of us “eastern-staters” who may not have run across her or even Roland Leach’s Sunline Press are strongly encouraged to rectify the issue.

- Les Wicks

——————————————————————————————–

Les Wicks has toured widely and seen publication across 16 countries in 9 languages. His 10th book of poetry is Barking Wings (PressPress, 2012). This year he will be performing at the world’s biggest poetry festival in Medellin. http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm

Honey & Hemlock is available from Sunline Press. http://www.sunlinepress.com.au/

Risk Taking and Fast-paced Comedy: Heather Taylor Johnson reviews ‘Pangamonium’ by Zanesh Catkin

Posted on by
Reply

Pangamonium by Zanesh Catkin. MidnightSun Publishing 2012

Let’s begin with the cover: it’s shocking pink with black silhouettes of an inverted man, gun and elephant, and there is a dildo in place of the ‘i’ in its title, Pangamonium. Seriously a standout at any bookstore. Now, for the farce that lay inside….

Francis Germaine is a freelance writer whose occupation just took a very wrong turn in Africa to a culturally arid country, shaped like a kidney with a central question mark, called Panga. It is here, while in jail for a mismatched suitcase full of dildos, he meets Easter, an African who is in search of pirate treasure in the form of his grandfather’s own booty. While Germaine agrees to join Easter, for purely financial gains, the two become enmeshed in taking down a dodgy sex toy factory (what other type of sex toy factory would one expect?) which literally chains its underage workers to the job. Joining them is a Amila – a librarian who really needed to get out – and her destined lover Daeid – a Bollywood fanatic.

Though Pangamonium deals with major post colonial issues of capitalism in a third world country and child slavery, debut author Zanesh Catkin has written a fast-paced comedy. The narrative lends itself to many laugh-out-loud moments, and though I wanted to, and felt I needed to, I failed to fall prey to 90% of the jokes. But I don’t think it is reason enough for me to say the book isn’t funny. The book is very funny. It’s funny in its premise, it’s funny in its structure (the indexes, especially), it’s funny in its literary quirks (particularly the bastardised intertextuality) and it’s funny all the way back to the author’s imaginary origin we have no choice but to call his ‘bio’. There were times I began thinking that the book could be so much more if only there was more genuine tragedy, but that is pure bullocks on my part. There is plenty of tragedy in this book, only it is paraded around in near slapstick drag. If the tragedy of this book is that the tragedy isn’t tragic enough, then that is a tragic assessment, because to say this book should be or could be anything other than what it is – a political spoof, and a literary one, at that – really points to the pretenses of the critic, and if that were the case I would have to come back with, ‘then you write the book it should’ve / could’ve been; see if you can do something better’.

This is an adventure story, no doubt, and though I found it initially difficult to get into (there were days at a time when I didn’t pick it up, proving it to be a chore rather than a joy), something happened, and I’m not sure where it happened exactly, but something happened that made it ultimately difficult to put down. Either I had caught on or it had caught on or everything had simply fallen into place, but reading the book became an adventure in itself. And speaking of adventure, this is MidnightSun’s second book in its first year of publishing. Publisher Anna Solding has made a bold choice with Pangamonium as a follow up to her own ethereal very-literary The Hum of Concrete. It leads us to question what will come next. But for now it is Catkin’s turn, whose literary prowess particularly shines in Francis Germaine’s incidental, penned-along-the-way articles, and in Easter’s enormous and disarming character. Truly one can see the risk taker that Catkin is when, like a ray of sunlight in a boarded up cave, he gives us something spiritual in a corporal way. Rather than spoil the plot, I’ll just say the ending takes the book to an inspired level.

-  Heather Taylor Johnson

____________________________________________________

Heather Taylor Johnson is the author of two poetry books, Exit Wounds and Letters to my Lover from a Small Mountain Town. Her third collection will be out in February from IP. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and occasionally teaches it at Flinders University. Her first novel, Pursuing Love and Death, will be published by HarperCollins.

Pangamonium is available from MidnightSun Publishing:  http://midnightsunpublishing.com/books/pangamonium/

A Sparkling Constellation: Kate Pardey reviews The Hum of Concrete by Anna Solding

Posted on by
2

The Hum of Concrete by Anna Solding. MidnightSun Publishing. 2012

There should be a rule against acknowledgements at the end of a novel. How can readers be expected not to keep on reading? As I blithely turned the pages at the end of Anna Solding’s excellent novel The Hum of Concrete I was confronted with some details about its inner workings that I would rather not have known. It was similar to watching a woman being sawn in half and then being taken back stage to be shown how the woman contorts herself into small boxes while the saw cuts through only a hair’s breadth away from her toes.

Spoiler alert, spoiler alert …. We’re told in the acknowledgements how some of the stories which make up this novel existed independently and then how good friends, and there seems an army of them, helped Solding in those last intense months when she ‘frantically tied all the strings together’. To her credit Solding does tie those strings together beautifully; the ending of The Hum of Concrete is as satisfying as the ending of any good novel and her friends deserve their acknowledgements.

There are many novels which are a combination of short stories, deftly woven together, think Julian Barnes, David Mitchell or Gail Jones but perhaps there could be a new name for this kind of novel? A decameron novel perhaps?

The Hum of Concrete is called ‘a novel constellation’ which is as good a name as any. Is this a confession that the author does not see this as a novel at all but rather a collection of short stories, which like a group of stars, will eventually, form a recognizable pattern. This is not a criticism of the Solding’s work just a perspective of a reader who likes to know what kind of book she’s buying or borrowing before she commits.

Interspersed amongst Solding’s intriguing stories of five main characters are wonderful evocations of what life is like in the  Swedish city of Malmo. We’re given vivid descriptions of Malmo in the quiet of winter, lively markets in summer, picnics in parks and feeding the ducks all of which work to give greater depth to her stories. Sometimes these places seem incongruous with her characters’ lives although perhaps that is what Solding is trying to tell us; that lives can get too caught up with people and rather we should spend more time enjoying the beauty of what is around us, the seasons, ripening fruit and even hissing geese.

This wariness of people is a theme also played out in Solding’s clear and deep appreciation of children. All five women are mothers and whilst their children have the capacity to bring worry and fear into mothers’ lives they also have a capacity to bring love and to help adults make sense of the world around them. The trajectory of these women’s lives seems solely propelled by their relationship with their children. Perhaps on a second reading partners will appear more centre stage or better still this will happen in Solding’s next novel; her ability to deal with the complexities of relationships would work well on a bigger canvas.

A secondary theme, which reinforces her main message, is the idea of gender. Solding looks at people’s ability to cope with what is different, the failures and successes of acceptance. This aspect of the novel is thought-provoking and is too large an issue to be left on the periphery. These are small criticisms of what fundamentally is a very good  ….. decameron novel/novel constellation.

MidnightSun is committed to an honourable cause; in these troubled times they are prepared to take risks but, I would suggest,  their publication of Anna Solding’s The Hum of Concrete was never a risk but rather a guaranteed success.

-Kate Pardey

———————————————————-

Kate Pardey is a Sydney based fiction critic.

The Hum of Concrete is available from MidnightSun Publishing: http://midnightsunpublishing.com/books/the-hum-of-concrete/

Short Bursts – Lucas Smith reviews life kills by miles vertigan, Sleepers Publishing 2011

Posted on by
1

One of the reality television shows in miles vertigan’s first novel life kills is called ‘the world’s funniest home paraplegics’? Whether this strikes you as amusing or not, in the age of The Biggest Loser we are surely not far away from gawking at the disabled for amusement. Also encountered are the even more plausible “unsightly rabbity chewing styles of the disgustingly beautiful” and the hopefully very close “celebrity snuff hour”. It is praise to say that this novel does not compromise on its humor.

life kills is not so much a novel as it is a sustained style. Martin Amis insists that style is inseparable from content and life kills at its best lives up to this dictum. Here’s an example:

“the woman on the phone thinks i’m a retard like it says ring in case of an emergency and i’m thinking that in my neck of the woods a now completely irrelevant pesco punk never has been with his head impaled in a plane window has all the basic hallmarks of a lay-down misere dog balls face slapping capitalled bolded huge imposingly times roman fonted fucking emergency”

It’s tempting, with this breakneck writing style, to let the reading experience be hypnotic, like watching a waterfall. But slow down the anarchic prose and a decent plot emerges, which saves life kills from being just funny postmodern obscurantism. A hitman, a ‘wealthy german industrialist circa 1923′, boards an airplane and assassinates various denizens of first class. He is waylaid by a series of unhelpful flight attendants, ostentatious advertising and his own neuroses. Interspersed within this main story are the personal, emotional and existential crises of pilot and co-pilot brad and chad and the vindictive rivalry between flight attendants bubbles and sparkles, which keep things moving in hilarious fashion.

To label life  kills as a work of avant-garde or ‘experimental’ fiction (indeed what fiction is not) is to miss the point. For the most part the style is remarkably easy to follow given there are no quotation marks, full stops, commas, or capital letters. (Each section does end with a perfunctory   punctuation mark) After a while the reader begins to mentally insert punctuation. In the pure dialogue chapters, vertigan cleverly has the characters saying each others names as substitutes for quotation marks. The book is written in short bursts that kindly break up the text for the reader. The shortest chapters are only one page, the longest is five (e-book) pages. The print edition runs to little over one hundred pages.

It seems that everything these days is a critique of ‘consumerism’, such that the word has lost much of its force. Yet vertigan is much cleverer than most. The satire is inventive enough to get around its heavy-handedness.

“hey brad there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you really do you really have something to ask me chad because you know there’s nothing more amazing for me than the sweet childlike interrogatives that spill and waft like little fairy blossoms from your tracheostomyphone like innocent whimsied honeydew from some mechanical freakshow…”

The modern condition of infinite, contradictory, desire has not been paraphrased better than this:

“i’m chugging down a family sized roomful of oh so delicious ‘n’ tasty quadruple battered and deepfried triple lardburgers while some loser retro amish dude uses my abs as an anvil.”

What keeps life kills from being, frankly, an irritating first year creative writing prose poem exercise is the impeccable sense of rhythm. The words might not be divided into discrete sentences or even thoughts, but they are free-flowing poetry, like a Willy Wonka production line or migrating birds. That and the wit and wordplay, turn what could be an enervating slog into a compelling narrative.

It is not without flaws. Sometimes the prose really is too dense and it’s hard to know what’s happening or who, if anyone, is talking. But getting to the point is not the point of this book. It is for readers who relish a challenge. And it is worth noting that books like this, by their nature, are difficult to critique without making a category mistake.

The novel concludes with unexpected i.e. somewhat traditional, pathos and the hitman emerges from his decadent morass as an insecure and complex human being, all the more accessible, one suspects, because of his very untraditional voice. The style carries the day. life kills is a welcome change from the ponderous and breathless and oh-so-significant middle-class social realism which dominates Australian fiction.

This is a risky book for Sleepers, the Melbourne outfit that also publishes Steven Amsterdam and its yearly Sleepers Almanac. Here’s hoping it pays off.

Lucas Smith