Tadpoems 400 Shorts by Tug Dumbly, Flying Islands Books, 2024.

In Tug Dumbly’s new collection Tadpoems, 400 Shorts, most of the poems are three or four lines long, with the occasional epic stretching to eight. Tug Dumbly is the performance name of Geoff Forrester, Nowra-born Sydney poet and a past bard-in-residence on ABC JJJ Radio. Tug explains that the collection grew out of posts he made on Facebook, where attention spans are often brief, and words need to cut through quickly. He describes the Tadpoems as ‘quips’, or ‘aphorisms’, assembled from peripatetic reflections on the world’s weirdness and the little gifts that nature randomly sends our way. Some of the poems are haiku-like, and some are one-line jokes. To my mind, the tradition Tadpoems ultimately belongs to is the ancient epigram, that form that was literally carved into gravestones, so had to be kept short and pithy.

Compare for example these lines from Lucilius about a poet who takes twenty-five chests of manuscripts with him to the afterlife:

‘This is your first taste of the full damnation
Ubiquitous eternal recitation.’
 ……………………………………..– Lucilius, The Greek Anthology, trans J.J. Bray.

With Tug Dumbly’s:

Rhyme and Punishment –
Show about two Bush Poets
Who kill victims with their verse.
(12 Seasons, no sign of stopping…)

From Lucilius there is a direct line to the Roman poet Martial, master of the bitchy epigram:

You drink from crystal
and piss in brass;
it’s the vessel between
that lacks class.
–  ……………………………………..Martial, trans Laurie Duggan.

Now compare Martial’s:

You will always be poor, Aemilianus, if you are poor.
These days they only give riches to the rich.

With Tug Dumbly’s:

I have no talent for money.
But it can’t afford me either.

As Rae Desmond Jones said in his introduction to The Selected Your Friendly Fascist, “Poetry can tend to sombre pomposity, or the self-consciously polite.” Tug Dumbly is certainly not that. He’s more in the ratbag tradition of Your Friendly Fascist. He dares to rhyme and even worse – pun, both practices deeply frowned upon by most of the poetry gatekeepers in Australia today. It’s a middle finger to serious taste. As he himself admits, there are some crunchy gearshifts, and not all the quips will be equally appreciated. Some may be dismissed as dad jokes or Christmas cracker ditties, but it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to publish 400 of them. Tug Dumbly wonders aloud about his audience for this kind of work:

I’m too low for the Highbrows
and too high for the Low.
You’re my target audience,
my Midbrow bullseye, bro!

And yet in this collection he references everything from Homer’s Theodicy to Kate Bush, Basho, Zionism, the Butterfly Effect and TV remote controls. It’s a wild ride, but far from lacking intellectual depth.

Tadpoems is accompanied by some fine photos by the author, often of animals and often taken with a macro lens. I particularly like some of his close ups of fellow creatures in his more haiku-like poems:

Spiders are vain, persistent
and enjoy travel.
One keeps re-making its web
in the wing mirror of my car.

In keeping with its genesis on Facebook, Tadpoems has some sharp comments on social media:

We’re peasants in the medieval square
Watching the Public Unfriendings.

Tadpoems, 400 Shorts is also just plain funny, not the most common descriptor of contemporary poetry books:

Tattoos age with you.
Your dolphin’s now a sea cow.

This is an entertaining and very accessible follow up to Tug Dumbly’s first poetry collection with Flying Islands, Son Songs. I recommend both.

 – Mike Ladd

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Mike Ladd is a poet, essayist and reviewer who lives in Adelaide. He’s published ten collections of poetry and prose and in a previous life was the producer of Poetica on ABC Radio National. His Now Then, New and Selected Poems is due out from Wakefield Press this year.

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Tadpoems 400 Shorts by Tug Dumbly is available from https://flyingislandspocketpoets.com.au/purchase/? srsltid= AfmBOoqKcGnj pof9N5EYKe WDmTc _ePA4qNhMjzy38fT7dvKCS GSo9WaS 

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