Category Archives: Mark Roberts

A Personal Sense of Place and History: Mark Roberts reviews ‘Bloodroot’ by Annemarie Ni Churreain

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Bloodroot by Annemarie Ni Churreain, Doire Press 2017

I was in Dublin in the week leading up to Christmas 2017 and went shopping for some contemporary Irish Poetry only to find there had been a “Christmas rush” and a number of titles were in very limited supply. Coming from Australia the notion of a pre-Christmas rush on poetry came as a bit of shock, but I eventually managed to track down most of the items on my list (as well as a few extra). One of the titles I eventually had to mail back to Sydney in order to avoid excess baggage charges was Annemarie Ni Churreain’s debut collection Bloodroot.

It took me some time to get around to reading Bloodroot, but the experience was well worth the wait. This is an extraordinary connection, finely crafted and rooted in place, politics and history. While obviously written from an Irish perspective there is much here which also has an immediacy for an Australian reader. The poems about institutional child abuse, the forced separation of mothers from their children and reflections on the same sex marriage debate will all appear familiar.

The simple dedication “for my Foremothers’ hints at the power of some of the poems to come and, indeed the opening poem ‘Untitled’ is unexpectedly complex and compelling. The title of the poem takes on added significance in the context of the rest of the collection – it is not just the poem that is untitled but also the speaker/poet. The unnamed poem searches for an identity as did the children separated from their mothers by the church controlled state:

The first time
a tree called me by name,
I was thirteen and only spoke a weave of ordinary tongues.

 – Untitled

The poem ends with a hint of discovery:

Come Underground, they said.
See what you are made of.

– Untitled

The poem ‘Penance’ which is dedicated “for a girl in trouble 1951” is one of the most direct poems in the collection. There is an anger here woven into the finally crafted words which has only been made stronger by the passage of time:

‘Shame’.
……..Use this word when you speak of love.

A man of cloth will come,
Your new home is among brides.

Deny
the child inside you is the child you dream at night

and when they cut short your hair,
watch the cuts fall

like the soft fur of an animal
held still by threat.

 – Penance

This them is continued most powerfully in the title poem of the collection ‘Bloodroot – at the Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home:

Behind the gates, a black awakening of trees.
Were you made to kneel here too, Mary Josephine, Bernadette?
…………………..If I call you by your house-names will you speak?

Torn avenue and pillars either side,……….I am here for the girl
who had birds in her eyes.
…………………..If I render a wing may she speak?

 – Bloodroot

I did a little research on the Castlepollard Mother and baby Home and discovered that it was run by the Order of The Sacred Heart for 35 years from 1934. During this time the Order never employed a doctor or nurse, only a single mid-wife as required by law. During this time 3,763 babies had their births registered. It is estimated that over 500 babies died and were buried in shoe boxes in a small piece of land down a lane way. After reading this I reread the poem and felt the anger and sadness rise in me as I remembered our own Royal Commission into institutionalised child abuse, a court case I cannot comment on and the Lost Generation of Aboriginal Children.

The power of these poems comes not just from the subject matter but from the fact that these are finely crafted and realised poems. They are driven by the strength of the imagery, the internal rhythm of the poems and even how they appear on the page.

Central to the success of this collection is the sense of place and history Ni Churreain conveys. Some of this history, is of course the history of the abuse of women and children at the hands of the Church/State, but there is also an older history here vitally connected with space:

………

This hill is pagan
This hill is Hill.

It will answer in bog-tongue
and occasional fire,
burning back the earth
along the heather-stream

despite bald heels of rock,
despite the kissy mink,
despite a saintly air

until the stream runs dark
with what needs
to blacken out of you.

 – Bog Medicine

And again in ‘Doire Chonaire’, which is dedicated “for a grandfather unknown”, we once again get this break in history and a striving to make connections:

To you I owe my thirst………For a name
gets passed down through the spear side
in the underland streams that pulse with clear meaning
and thrive towards the lips
……………………………………………..A name is how we match
our tongues to the source and taste our own sediment.

 – Doire Chonaire

There is much to enjoy in this poem, the long lines that break just when you think you might be reading a prose poem, the gaps and spaces in the poem which suggests the break across generations and the use of words such as “spear side” and underland” all add to the depth of the poem.

Place returns in poems about India and Florida. In ‘Where We Come From’ we learn:

This is the Florida I will remember,
a hooded place where the moss hangs

like a lamp-lit silk, peeled from the body
and discarded among the boughs.

– Where We Come From

This is a very different world to the “underland streams” but the strength of the imagery is just as strong.

The poetry in this collection is so finely crafted and alive with language and meaning that it hard to believe that Bloodroot is a debut collection. I am hoping that there was another run on it in the bookshops of Dublin leading up to Christmas 2018.

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a founding editor of Rochford Street Review and lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. His latest collection of poetry, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016.

Bloodroot is available from   https://www.doirepress.com/writers/a_f/annemarie_ni_churreain/ 

Annemariw Ni Churreain appeared in poetry Irish Poetry feature:

 

 

 

Unfolding Complexity: Mark Roberts considers Anna Couani’s ‘thinking process’

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This is a slightly edited version of Mark Roberts’ introduction to thinking process by Anna Couani, Owl Publications, 2017

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Anna has been a friend and a mentor for more years than I care to remember. As a young poet in the late 1970s I had discovered New Poetry magazine and the Poets Union readings at the Royal Standard Hotel in Sydney. I began to meet poets and I read as widely as could among the small literary magazines and presses of the time. Then, I think it was in 1979, I came across Italy by Anna Couani (Rigmarole of the Hours 1977).

There are a number of things that I can remember from the first time that I read that book, the wonderful cover, which consisted of a simple line drawing of a kitchen with a pot on a hot plate and a bottle of salt off to the left and the opening lines of ‘Untitled’, the first prose piece in the book:

As I write down the sentences, mentally compose them and then read them off, they begin to break off like huge chunks of glacial ice, the row of type – the glacier’s cliff face at the water.”

There was  also, later in Italy, a drawing of a doorway, with most of a cane chair, a mirror leaning up against the wall reflecting another chair and a window and a piece of paper pinned to the wall with the word ‘Poetry’ written on it. This picture, for me, encapsulates Anna’s work, both literary and visual. It is, on first glance, a simple line drawing of a room. But as it draws you in the complexity begins to unfold. There is the hidden window reflected in the mirror, is it a glimpse through the doorway? There is the intricate detail of the cane chair and the piece of paper/poetry hanging on the wall.

It is interesting to realise that the connection between the visual and the literary has always been at the centre of Anna’s work. Early in her latest collection, thinking process, Anna asks:

is it ekphrasis
if the poet also made the picture?

She doesn’t directly answer this question but we know after reading the poems in this collection that the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. For Anna the “thinking process’ revolves around making art, whether it it is the writing of the poems, the making of the visual art that the poems describe , or the process of making space for the world of art and imagination. In the opening poem, ‘the idea of worlds’ she refers to her “world of work” as a school teacher:

the poignancy that
no one can understand
how it feels

the sense of restriction

but there is the other world “the virtual world already there / in the peripheral vision”. This other world is already an art work

a shimmering white border
enclosing a blue and green world

Anna’s background as a teacher runs through many of these poems. In a sequence of poems about making a print of an iris flower Anna refers to being a student learning a new printmaking technique. There is also a playfulness to many of these poems. The playfulness of an image that ends up being something completely different to what was intended, or the playfulness of words in a poem such as ‘2C’ which discusses how we are taught to ‘see’ an image. The ‘2C’ of the title is echoed in the poem when Anna writes that:

so that could mean
‘seeing’
a scene in 2D

thinking process is an important book full of finely crafted poems by a writer and artist who has played a critical, if under appreciated, role in the Sydney and wider Australian cultural scene for many decades. There is a final image from poem ‘200’ which, for me, encapsulates the success of this collection:

but texture and colour can sing
like the traditional finger painted end papers
of old books
something beautiful to see and touch.

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is one of the founding editors of Rochford Street Review. His latest collection of poetry, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016.

thinking process is available from http://www.owlpublishing.com.au/chapbook-series.html

Issue 22 Special Feature Contemporary Irish Poetry – Introduction by Mark Roberts

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Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

Approaching the Irish coast

Like many Australians my family has a close connection to Ireland. Most of my mother’s side of the family came from Ireland in the decades following the famine. Growing up my grandfather played baseball rather than cricket and his team was made up primarily of the children of Irish immigrants. My first real lesson in Irish history came after I asked him about an old gold mining town in central NSW called Home Rule that we had passed through on a family road trip when I was about 10 years old. Then, when my parents and I were cleaning out his house after his death, we came across a number of old books at the back of his wardrobe including an old IRA songbook.

But while I learnt about our Irish heritage from my grandfather neither he, or my mother, ever left Australia. Interestingly, I am also not aware of any immediate family members who had returned to Ireland until my wife and I made a fleeting visit last year, crossing the Irish sea in a large ferry called Ulysses.

We were tourists arriving in Dublin on 15 June and immediately found ourselves discussing Joyce with our taxi driver. Of course the next day, Bloomsday, was something extraordinary as a city celebrated a novel. Late in the day, as we were walking down a laneway near the river, we came across one of those readings of Ulysses that you come across now and then on 16 June . In between chapters a local poet, Stephen James Smith, performed a poem called ‘Dublin You Are’ which managed to link the celebration of Joyce’s Dublin with modern-day reality.

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As it was the centenary of the 1916 uprising the city was full of reminders of the struggle for independence, a struggle which played a part in the decision of my ancestors to leave. Another reason for migrating, of course, was the famine and a few days later at Roscommon I stood outside the Famine Museum and listened to wind and remembered a quote from Tim Robinson’s Connemara, which I had read early that year, where he described how a: “wave or wind breaks around a headland, a wood, a boulder, a tree trunk, a pebble, a twig, a wisp of seaweed or a microscopic hair on a leaf, the streamlines are split apart, flung against each other, compressed in narrows, knotted in vortices. The ear constructs another wholeness…..” At that moment I felt that wholeness and I decided to try and understand more about the links between my past and my history. As a poet and writer I knew this meant that I needed to read the Irish poets who were writing now.

Back in Australia I started looking them up. Sometimes it’s hard keeping track of what is happening in your own back yard let alone what is flying under the radar half way round the world. But I quickly realised that that this was a worthwhile and exciting exercise. With the help of a reading list supplied by the Irish/Australian poet Robyn Rowland and Paul Casey’s excellent essay in Cordite on Small Poetry Presses in Ireland, I started to discover some amazing poetry, some of which was deeply rooted in the Irish consciousness while others easily transcended national borders. One interesting thing, however, was that probably due to the Irish diaspora even the Irish centred work made connections on the other side of the world.

The work that will appear over the following three months as part of the Contemporary Irish Poetry feature is the result of that brief trip to Ireland and the discoveries that followed. I am still discovering poets and small Irish literary presses and I’m interested in hearing from people who might like to be part of this unfolding project. I’m particularly keen to publish reviews and launch speeches from recent publications. If you are interested in being a part of this project please contact me at submission@rochfordstreetreview.com and please keep coming back over the next three months to see how the project unfolds.
(Photographs by Mark Roberts)

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer, critic and publisher. He is the founding editor of Rochford Street Review and has been active in the Sydney poetry scene for many decades. His latest collection of poems, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016. He occasionally blogs at Printed Shadows

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A Micro-Climate of Imagery: Mark Roberts reviews ‘The List of Last Remaining’ by Louise Nicholas

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The List of Last Remaining by Louise Nicholas. Five Island Press 2016

list of last remainingWe choose to read books for all sorts of reasons, the covers, a good review, a recommendation from a friend, lecturer or taxi driver. In this case I came to Louise Nicholas latest collection because of its title – The List of Last Remaining. It’s a suggestive title, with an internal rhythm that suggests great things. I had never read Nicholas’ work before but I was immediately drawn in.

The List of Last Remaining is a carefully structured book. It starts and end with family, of parents and children. The opening poem, with the forbidding title ‘Coffin Bay’, relates a memory of when she thought her parents were feared lost at sea. Her fear in this poem is very real:

Then we walked along the the water’s edge as if it were
the edge of our lives, and gazed out to sea and thought
of killer whales that drape themselves in seaweed and lie in wait
for stray seals

but their parents do come back and normality returns:

And we ran along the beach and skimmed a few stones
and got back in time for tea.

The eleven poems in the first section are all about growing up, from young children skipping stones on the bay waiting for their lost parents and dinner to the awkwardness of adolescence. We are also introduced to Nicholas’ sense of humour in poems such as ‘Skittles’ where the poem itself is shaped like a skittle. The playfulness in this poem, however, isn’t restricted to its shape. The poet’s mother was a dressmaker in a small town and, as such, had access to measurements of most of the women in town – information that can prove useful to a schoolchild:

only I knew my grade seven teacher
was courting a ‘bust’ at all, let alone
38 inches of it squashed flat as two
trapped bundles of newborn naked-
ness by her buttoned-to-the-neck
blouses and double-breasted wool-
len jackets.……………………………

The other four sections in the collection continue this sense of playfulness, often at the same time as confronting quite serious or threatening situations. In a poem ‘Kibbutz Matzuva, Ulpan Class’, in the section ‘Israel 1972’ (1972 was the year of the Munich Olympic Games), Nicholas writes of a photo taken of a group of young international volunteers on a Kibbutz and remembers that the night before:

a bored kibbutz guard burst into our rooms
and threatened to kill us,

a situation that was only disarmed by Karen, who is first described as a “whining cockney” who simply said “Bugger off, I’m tired” and went back to sleep. While this is perhaps not the strongest poem in the collection, its structure does point to one of Nicholas’ strengths. The drama of the poem is announced within the first two lines and the poem then reverts to a everyday description of the people in the photograph before we return to the opening incident in the last few lines:

We, of the hot-to-trot, we, of the show-no-fear,
who, the night before, felt the great red pulsing muscle
of our hearts stopper up our throats like a fist…”

The emotions in this poem rise, fall, then rise again almost without noticing in the space of 16 lines.

Emotion is at the heart of some of the best poems in The List of Last Remainng which can be found in the middle section called‘….our little loves and commonplace deaths’. The poems here begin with the birth of the poet’s children and end with the death of her mother. These are finely crafted, intimate poems that stayed with me long after I read them. At times they almost seem a matter of fact, before a flash of Nicholas’ humour followed by a sudden turn of the screw. In the first poem, for example, the unexpected title, ‘ Rain, with a chance of miscarriage’, puts us immediately on edge, particularly when we read that it is dedicated to “Josh” who, we presume, is her son. The poem gets straight to the point:

One morning, you barely more than frogspawn,
I wake to rain and a trickle of blood.

After this initial shock the poem settles down to the regularity of a nighttime hospital:

In the middle of the night, my loss with nothing
left to lose and you still busy becoming,

But this is the maternity ward after all and there is the ongoing drama of childbirth, no doubt confronting for a first time mother facing the possibility of miscarriage:

a woman screams as if beaten and abused.
Words no mother taught her fall fully-formed
from her mouth

But then Nicholas’  laconic humour kicks in:

A baby cries. A heartbeat later, a man on the phone
…..in the corridor:
“Yeah it’s me, Darren … a girl, Melissa Jane …
seven pounds four ounces …
Nah, easy … coupla stitches but she’ll be right.”

The poem ends with the confidence that the immediate crisis is over:

I re-commit to raspberry-leaf tea,
yoga for ease of sliding you out.

There is another birth poem ‘Tunnelling into the Light’, this one dedicated to Zoe (presumably the poet’s daughter). This poem is full of the drama and movement of a second born announcing their intent to hit the ground running:

bracing………. the ram rod of……….  your back ………. against
………. one wall ………. of my uterus ………. and pushing
………. ………. with your feet……….  on the
other

The unexpected broken lines here add to the drama of the poem, the spaces suggesting the panting and the intake of breath necessary to brace for the next contraction.

These birth poems, and the poems of childhood which surrround them, are followed by a series of powerful poems about the poet’s mother’s death. These poems are perhaps even more powerful as we have already been introduced to her mother. She is the figure in the opening poem whom the young children fear has been lost at sea, she is the dressmaker in the poem ‘Skittles’. We have also, of course, just been through the drama of the poet herself becoming a mother.

Death is introduced gently in the poem ‘Family tree’. Here is the first recognition that the poet’s mother is moving away from the family she has been a part of for so long. She is no longer part of the “circle’, rather she is starting to stake her claim on the family tree:

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………beside
her sister. Her parents are on the sheltering bough above,
she’ll save a place for her brother, tag it with her hand-bag
just in case.

and we are introduced to the cause

Her synapses have long struggled
to keep place with passing time. Now they fizzle
like a cooking pot plunged in cold water.

The poems that follow document her slow decent into death. They are, for the most part, beautifully crafted, sad poems which led to the inevitable conclusion

With finger and thumb, she held your eyes shut:
you were a child well past your bedtime
wanting to stay up for the rest of the show.
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………. ………. ………. ‘On the day of your death’

The List of Last Remaining is a book that deserves to be read more than once. While it contains many very fine individual poems, its greatest strength is perhaps how well the poems work together, how each section creates a micro-climate of imagery, and how, the book as a whole brings this all together so that a reader is left with a feeling of completeness.

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He is the founding editor of Rochford Street Review and his latest collection of poetry, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016. He occasionally blogs at https://printedshadows.wordpress.com/

The List of Last Remaining is available from http://fiveislandspress.com/catalogue/the-list-of-last-remaining-louise-nicholas

 

 

Collaborations! Mark Roberts reviews ‘The Silences’ by Amanda Anastasi and Robbie Coburn & ‘Scar to Scar’ by Robbie Coburn and Michele Seminara

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The Silences by Amanda Anastasi and Robbie Coburn Eaglemont Press 2016, Scar to Scar by Robbie Coburn and Michele Seminara Press Press 2016.

the-silencesI have been thinking a lot about poets working together on projects recently. I suspect that this has grown from reading translations and feeling, at times, slightly frustrated by the idea that there is an extra layer between my reading and the original poem. I noticed this particularly a few months back when reading the translations by Stephen Kessler of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. The translations were presented next to the original Spanish and, while I couldn’t read the poems in the Spanish, it was clear that Kessler had taken some major liberties with the structure of the poems, moving words from line to line and even from stanza to stanza. Armed with a Spanish English dictionary and a good online translator I began to create literal translations from the Spanish which I then reworked myself into versions I preferred. This, I realised, was a great example of how a good translator must do more than simply translate between languages – give the same poem to three different translators and chances are you will come up with three different poems.

The collaborative nature of translations became clear to me many years ago when I first came across Moscow Trefoil: Poems from the Russian of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam (ANU Press 1975). This collection contained a number of ‘translations’ or ‘interpretations’ of poems by Akhmatova and Mandelstam by translator Natalie Staples and poets Rosemary Dobson and David Campbell. Staples would first undertake a literal translation from Russian to English, then Dobson and Campbell would write their own versions based on the literal translations. The result was a two stage collaboration, from the original Russian poem to a rough English copy and then a reworking of the concepts and images into a more polished English poem.

This process was in the back of my mind as I approached two recent poetical collaborations, The Silences by Amanda Anastasi and Robbie Coburn and Scar to Scar by Robbie Coburn and Michelle Seminara. While Coburn is the common element in each collection they are very different books and highlight different ways poets can collaborate on major projects.

The Silences is a thematic collaboration. We are given no guidance or instruction on how the poems were written or how the poets worked together beyond the title of the book, the cover image and the poems themselves.

Coburn’s opening poem, however, leaves little doubt about the central concern of this collection:

there are words that are never said.
we have no use of them

the arrow lodged at the centre of time,
finding nothing
……………………………….‘Fervour’ / Coburn

These are images of absence, of loss. The unspoken words and the emptiness that lies at the centre. It is interesting that these images are juxtaposed against the ‘fervour’ of the title – is this a passion for emptiness, silence?

Anastasi’s opening poem is as equally evocative. It takes as its subject matter an orthodox baptism, so at once we have the implied background silence of a church. But there are sounds here even if, at first,at first they are the accepted sounds of worship:

…….. A constant male rhythmic murmur.
A recurring melody over sustained organ chords.

But then comes the dissent cry of the child and the first attempts to control or silence that dissent:

……..The cooing and rocking in response
to a persistent ostinato cry. A protective

stroke of the head, and the hushing.
the endless hushing.

……………………………….‘The Initiation’ / Anastasi

The last line extends the poem well beyond the moment of baptism. The hushing, the attempts at silencing will continue long after the baby has ceased its “persistent ostinato cry”.

These images of silence, absence and hushing continue through the collection and provide the thread that Anastasi and Coburn use to weave their poems into the collection. We have phases like “make your clamour mute” and “your silence like a bullfighter’s stare” (Denial/Anasrasi), “ the coming of only a longer silence/death as absence’ (Autumn Proverb/Coburn), “voiceless breath” (The Afterlife/Coburn) and “The lead in a film for a decade unwatched” (Unexiled/Anastasi).

The collaboration here is often subtle and reveals itself only after multiple readings. There are, for example, a sequence of poems half way through the collection where you start sensing a pattern: ‘Unexiled’/ Anastasi, ‘How I feel About Living Here’ /Coburn, ‘The First Moments of His Absence’ /Anatasi, ‘Sacrificial’ /Coburn, ‘Night Walks’ / Coburn and ‘Night Arrows’ /Anastasi. Images and themes are also passed between the poets, so that the arrows that Coburn finds lodged in the centre of time later appear in Anastasi’s poem ‘Night Arrows’:

The arrows point uphill,
away from the dull prophecy

of familiar halls.

Two poems, however, stayed with me after I read and reread this collection. The Audenesque opening of Anastasi’s ‘The Prodigal Ones’ highlights her confidence in constructing near perfect lines and the setting up of unexpected rhythms:

Let us navigate this disfigured paradise,
collecting remnants of a landscape before

tar grounds, before the concrete islands
closed in, before fields became flanked

with unconcerned fences…

Coburn’s longish poem for Charles Buckmaster ‘Searching for the Lost Forest’ was also one that I kept returning to. Buckmaster, like Coburn, grew up on the rural fringe of Melbourne and was acutely of landscape and the way it has and is changing. He also used the imagery of landscape to represent the body, something Coburn also does. Coburn opens his poem with an image of the landscape where he grew up in Woodstock Victoria:

to wake again
gaze across the yellowed paddocks
the grasses have unearthed
leaving the soil bare

these lines seem to recall Buckmaster’s own memory of the landscape where his parents lived:

Gruyere – is being cleared of its forest – the mountains
become pastures – and carved wastes
and the sub-divisions come – within five miles

 

……………………………….‘an end to myth’ – Charles Buckmaster

There is another large silence which this collection actually breaks. Eaglemont Press, which was founded by the legendary Melbourne based poetry Shelton Lea, has been relatively quiet since his death in 2005, The Silences represents their first title in more than 4 years and it is hoped that there will be many more books from this important independent poetry publisher.

scar-scarThe second collaboration I will look at in this review, Scar to Scar, also features Robbie Coburn and is also from a poetry publisher (PressPress) which has recently reemerged after a break from publishing. This time Coburn is collaborating with Sydney based poet Michele Seminara and it is a very different collaboration to the one with Anastasi. Where the two poets in The Silences were working with a theme which drove their shared work, in Scar to Scar Coburn and Seminara are working directly off each other poems in a more direct collaboration.

Interestingly, Seminara’s opening poem in Scar to Scar does echo the theme in the earlier collaboration:

Listen. Silence now,
an empty bed, the sweep
of frantic embrace

……………………………….‘Pulse’/ Seminara

But it is not the silence that lies at the heart of this collection, rather it is the pulse of blood, the flow of water and of time and the connection between the poems. The blurb on the back cover refers to Seminara responding to Coburn work and it is becomes clear from the third poem that Coburn has taken the lead in this poetical dance. Much like a translator Seminara takes Coburn’s images and ideas and reworks them, responding and exploring the ideas and creating new poems.

For me the success of this collection lies in Coburn’s use of landscape to signify the body, something that was hinted at in The Silences. The scars that run through the rural landscape, that defines the young poet, are also the physical and mental scars that he takes with him into his art.

not the barren boneline of the property
the suns eye blinkers, but the repetitive
…………plot of humid air
the body pitching prayer against the silo’s shell

the connection between land and body here is almost religious:

(blood running through the property,
born into it)

……………………………….‘Boneyard’ / Coburn

This is a landscape inhabited by the poet, if only temporarily, but the strength of these poems makes a statement far stronger than any map or deed of sale:

this familiar anatomy of disconnect
where the seasons gather and enter,
should not be troubling.
as you turn, you recognise
the revolving pulse of your breath,
once again inhabiting this space.
……………………………….‘Depression’ / Coburn

For Coburn these poems are the poems of place, of where the blood runs through soil and vien. Seminara’s response then becomes once removed, like the translator, using the emotion and imagery to carve what could almost be called a ‘child’ poem:

the reason for your silence
does not matter.
body and breath in disconnect
as wind gathers in corridors – screaming
……………………………….‘Siren’ / Seminara (in response to ‘Depression’)

At the centre of this collection is the jointly written (composed?) poem ‘Scars and Counter Scars’. Like the best collaborations it can be read in multiple ways, I started reading it as a conventional poem reading from top left, down the page, then starting at the top of the next. But then my eyes wanted to read it all at once, as if it was a piece of music for two voices. The boundaries of the individual poets begin to blur and images from other poems find their way into this combined text.

These two strong collaborations show that, while writing is often a solitary process, there is always scope for conversations and collaboration between writers. Indeed it reminds us that most writing is in response to ideas, themes and images that other writers and artists have also worked with and, in many cases, each new poem is  adding another layer to an existing conversation. The Silences and Scar to Scar have joined Moscow Trefoil on my bookshelf as examples of how great poetry can be produced when poets work closely together.

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He is the founding editor of Rochford Street Review and his latest collection of poetry, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016. He occasionally blogs at https://printedshadows.wordpress.com/

The Silences is available from http://www.eaglemontpress.bigcartel.com/product/the-silences-by-amanda-anastasi-and-robbie-coburn

Scar to Scar is available from http://presspress.com.au/Coburn-Seminara.html

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A Slightly Frustrating Novel : Mark Roberts Reviews ‘Black Mountain’ by Venero Armanno

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Black Mountain by Venero Armanno UQP 2012

black mountainI have a pile of books on desk waiting to be reviewed or to be more correct, waiting for me to have the time to review them. Black Mountain by Venero Armanno has been waiting longer than most. Published in 2012 it was one of those books that intrigued me with its back cover blurb about a boy being sold into slavery to work in the sulphur mines of Sicily over a century ago. Finally, four years late, I finally picked it up.

Interestingly, after finally reading it I had to wait a few weeks before putting pen to paper. The novel itself was relatively easy to read once you get into it and has a strong central narrative that drives the reader forward. But it is also working on a number of different levels, and not all of them are successful.

Black Mountain opens with a man dreaming of a creature with no face. The man and the creature are in a bare room and the creature begs for the man to strangle him one senses to put him out of his misery. As he chokes the creature the blank face takes on the form of the man strangling him. The dream belongs to Mark Alter, a twenty two year old university drop out living alone outside a small coastal town in Australia. He has been having the dream about the creature for as long as he can remember. One night after watching a movie in the town cinema he decides to write a film script featuring the creature and then sends it off to a well known film producer. A few weeks later the producer contacts him and accuses him of plagiarising the creature from a novel called Black Mountain by a writer called Cesare Montenero.

Alter finds a copy of the book and finds that his creature really does feature in Montenero’s novel. He then attempts to track down the elderly and reclusive Montenero in an attempt to understand how they can share the same creatue. When he finally does tracks him down he finds that Montenero has fled and that his home, or more accurately a mansion, is empty. But he also finds a metal box with a manuscript inside and it is this manuscript which provides the bulk of Armanno’s novel . The manuscript is split up into a number of books (Black Book, Blue Book, Green Book etc) and details Montenero’s life from his days as a young slave working in the sulphur mines of Sicily to old age in Australia.

It does, however, takes 30 pages to get to the beginning of Montenero’s manuscript and I had rapidly become tired of the story of Mark Alter by that point. Alter is a very one dimensional character and his story so unlikely that it was only my interest in how we would get to the sulphur mines of Sicily that kept me going.  But the manuscript is a different matter. The character of the young Montenero is richly drawn and the dissolution and hopelessness of the sulphur mines, and the child slaves that are forced to work there, stands out. This is powerful narrative writing which continues through much of the rest of the novel as the young Montenero escapes and is rescued almost on the point of death.

As the story unfolds, however, we begin to learn more about Montenero’s background. He was not, as he thought, sold into slavery as a young boy by his family, rather he was the result of a long running experiment to ‘clone’ humans, an experiment which was shut down during WW1. As Montenero learns more about his background the narrative again starts to break down as the fantasy element of the novel, a sort of Victorian genetic enginering, begins to assert itself.

Black Mountain is for me a slightly frustrating novel and I sense that Armanno is trying to do a little too much in it. I did note that he has written a number of young adult novels (along with another 9 novels) and I did feel at times, particularly during the Prologue, that there elements of a YA novel close to the surface. Perhaps as a result I felt Black Mountain to be a uneven novel, which is ashame because when it is good, such as in the large section revolving around the young Montenero’s life in Sicily, his escape from from the sulphur mines and his rise and fall as a writer, it is very very good. There is just too much getting in the way of the core narrative. As an editor I would have perhaps suggested ditching the Mark Alter character completely and concentrating purely on the life story of Montenero. The novel may have been slightly shorter but you would be thrust into the drama of the sulphur mines almost from page one.

So in the end Black Mountain didn’t quite live up my expectations, which were perhaps a little high given how long I had waited before reading the novel. I felt a little like finally drinking a wine that had been cellared for years only to find that it had just past its peak.

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. He is the founding editor of Rochford Street Review and publisher of Rochford Street Press. His collection of poetry, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in February 2016.

Black Mountain is available from http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book.aspx/1205/Black%20Mountain

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Luciano Prisco – New Works, Poems from Christopher Barnett: Mark Roberts on Christopher Barnett, Poetry and Collaboration.

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Luciano Prisco – New Works, Poems from Christopher Barnett opened at the Langford 120 Gallery (120 Langford Street North Melbourne Victoria 3051) on 10 September and runs until 9 October 2016.

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Luciano Prisco ‘Buio’, 2016, oil on canvas

Luciano Prisco’s latest exhibition at the Langford 120 Gallery in Melbourne is a collaboration between the Port Phillip based painter Prisco and the Nantes (France) based writer Barnett. Mark Roberts, who has followed Barnett’s writing since the mid 1980’s, provided the following introduction to his work for the exhibition.

**……….**……….**

I have been reading Christopher Barnett’s work for over 30 years now. My introduction coming through ulrike meinhof sings and, embarrassingly, I can’t recall now whether I first saw it on stage or on the page. Either way within the space of a week or so in the mid 1980s I had read the text and seen the work performed at the Performance Space in Sydney. I remember being somewhat shell shocked after the performance, but also elated. I had heard a poetry that I had never before heard in Australia – defiant, radically political, alternative and explosive. The words bounced around me, afterwards I remembered large pieces of the monologue as if it had been burned into the back of my brain:

…………………………………………/……th first robbery
was like th first fuck……i knew there would be no glory ……
in my world ……even tho my comrade andreas my lover
andreas hoped there would be…….but when you watch those
you love either shrink or explode ……… glamor becomes
something only an artist like any warhol can understand

and

…………………….we have a story about martin schleyer ……
this mass murderer turn labour expert was going to australia
……. to teach their rich ……. about industrial democracy ……
well we plucked schleyer out & we left him in the back th boot of
a car ….. we wanted to show australian workers how to teach
their rich …….

ulrike meinhof sings was collected, along with two other extraordinary works, th last days of the world and basket weaving for amateurs in a collection by the important Melbourne based publisher Rigmarole in 1984 (Last Days of th World and other texts for theatre, Rigamore Press 1984). Together with the earlier works, A Fist in th Face of Public Taste (E.A.F 1978) and Selling Oursleves for Dinner (All Out Ensemble 1982), these works represent something unique and rare in Australian theatre and writing. At the time I sensed something of the “ultimate commitment” that Michael Dransfield referred to. A commitment to words, to their meaning and power, their pace and rhythm. If Barnett’s work didn’t make you angry, didn’t make you want to take to the streets then you were obviously on the wrong side of history – or that was how I saw it 30 years ago.

Recently I have increasingly found myself drawn back to basket weaving for amateurs. This text attacks the complacency of Australian culture and cultural criticism and takes the form of a series of voices, artists Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor and a number of critics such as Lionel Lindsay, Sydney Ure Smith, Bernard Hall, Humphrey McQueen, Max Harris and Kym Bonython as well as the generic voice of the “art critic” which functions almost like a reactionary Greek Chorus holding back art and protecting the status quo.

Early in the piece the art critic announces:

i possess no artistic sense but i find i like those pictures old & new which brings th highest price and in spite of everything sd to th contrary price still remains th practical expression of appreciation th decent middle classes have faith in what we defend it may be australia’s duty & privilege to save from th wreck of civilisation th little upon which we can build again

It is difficult not to read this and not think of the way Australian culture has developed since Barnett wrote these words. The flagship companies and galleries are seen in terms of economic multipliers, grass root artists have been cut loose, made to scramble for crumbs and scraps. Revolution may not be the current aesthetic but if this country is to have a cultural future it may become an imperative.

Before we leave basket weaving for amateurs it worthwhile to turn briefly to the last scene of the piece. scene six consists of a single extraordinary poem which is both an elergy and a celebration:

preston

…………………th song of recognised failure

iam a…………………..iam a…………………. i am a
th larrikin daughter of your error
th dumb child at th window
th cripple who has lost his show
th painter with nowhere to go

iam a…………………. iam a…………………. i am a
th killer of a decade’s wrong story
th woman locked in sound
th man caught in the cyrstal night
th person with nothing to show

iam a…………………. iam a…………………. i am a
th city left like warsaw
th night bleached in terror
th story caught in fever
th tale left untold

iam a…………………. iam a…………………. i am a
th family album
th photograph of loss
th beginning of nothing
the failure of song

iam a…………………. iam a…………………. i am a
iam a…………………. iam a…………………. i am a

Looking back on it now this poem is at least the equal of the best work published in Australia over the last 50 years and confirms for me Barnett’s position as one of our most important poet/writers. It is possible to see basket weaving for amateurs as an farewell to Australia for in 1993 Barnett left Australia for France never to return.

The almost a quarter of century Barnett has lived and worked in France could be seen as a kind of self imposed exile but that assumes that he wants to return to Australia. I sense that Barnett has found a level of acceptance for his work in France that would be impossible in Australia and that the political and cultural changes that have taken place here since 1993 has made a return less and less likely as the years have passed.

In France Barnett established an experimental theatre company, Le Dernier Spectateur, in Nantes. Working collaboratively with the marginalized and disenfranchised, Barnett, used poetry, dance and music to help empower people and has attracted praise and support from all levels of French society.

In parallel with his work Le Dernier Spectateur Barnett has continued to write and the evolution of social media over the past decade has provided him a new platform for his work. Indeed, like many others, it was through his Facebook posts that I reconnected with Christopher a number of years ago. What I quickly realised, however, was that social media was another medium for Barnett – like the written page or the stage. It was a form of poetic pirate radio.

Among those poems that I read on Facebook were sections of what was to become when they came/for you elegies/ of resistance (Wakefield Press 2013). This extraordinary work, at once a elegy for Furkan Dogan, the young Turkish activist assassinated by the Israeli military during an attempt to break the blockade of Gaza, and a memoir of Barnett’s own engagement with his own political and personal struggles.

furkan
i am
listening
to wires
being
pulled
straight from heart
because murders
eat our sadness
so it is sung
by bodies
so broken
……….

when they came/for you elegies/ of resistance is a dense work, for most of the 316 pages the poem runs in two columns down the page and the reader is propelled forward, taken by the rhythm of the words, the patterns, a machine gun scattering of words. But this is also a work that keeps pulling you back in, where you keep discovering new meanings, new references – for me it was also an education, the text has sent me off in numerous directions over the past three years – learning, discovering.

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Luiano Prisco’Gates the New Jerusalem’, 2016 oil on canvas

And so to this exhibition. Once again many of the poems have appeared as posts on Facebook, sometimes accompanied by images of Luciano Prisco’s paintings:

………..

mourn

shadows
fall over

one
another

mourn movement
want

to
walk
off world’s
edge

wherever you desire
that to be

come
barefoot
amongst bone
& flesh

…………..

There is an immediate connection here between Barnett’s words and Prisco’s dark painting. The angular edges outlined in white, the thick browns, greys and black, the thin lines of white dripping through the painting and the surprise of maroon – are reflected back in the poem in lines such as “sound from blood….”, “streaming from skin” and “walk/off world’s/edge”.

Barnett has never conformed to the image of the solitary writer – he has always been collaborating – from his theatre texts in Australia, to his work with Le Dernier Spectateur and his poetry. Once again with this exhibition his words act as mirror for the images, reflecting and amplifying an intensity – while, at the same time the paintings are doing exactly the same with his words.

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer and critic. His latest collection of poetry, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press earlier this year. He is the founding editor of Rochford Street Review.

Further information on Luciano Prisco – New Works, Poems from Christopher Barnett can be found at http://www.langford120.com.au/16-luciano-prisco.html

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Sydney Writers Festival: Ye Xin discusses ‘Educated Youth’

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Educated Youth by Ye Xin was originally published in China in 1991. The first English translation has just been published by Giramondo Publishing (translated by Jin Han). Ye Xin spoke at Chatswood Library on 19 May as part of the Sydney Writers Festival.

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Ye Xin with translator Jing Han discussing Educated Youth at Chatswood Library as part of the 2016 Sydney Writers Festival

It was an interesting experience to attend a literary event in Sydney where over half of the audience was non-European and where non-Chinese speakers had to rely on a translator to follow what was going on.

In retrospect, however, the real surprise was just how rare this experience is. Australia is a linguistically diverse continent – in the late nineteenth century there were approximately 250 indigenous languages or dialects in use around the country (and despite the best efforts of Australian governments over the last 116 years many of these languages are still spoken) – and to our north there are millions of people whose native language is not English. Yet our literature is still predominately an English language literature – work written in or by Australians, even in other European languages, still ranks as curiosity rather than part of the mainstream.

This maybe slowly changing Owl Press, which has been around since the 1990s, publishes writing by Greek Australians and Spinifex Press, is celebrating 25 years of publishing this year, has also been active in publishing and translating the works of women writers from around the world and has an Indian publishing program that stretches back 24 years. We have also seen publishers like Vagabond Press embrace writing from around Asia and the Pacific over recent years as it attempts to include Australian writing in a wider local literary context. Giramondo have also been active in expanding their publishing program beyond the English centric borders of Australian culture and their latest publication, a translation of Ye Xin’s 1991 novel Educated Youth, is further evidence of this.

Ye Xin spoke about his novel at Chatswood Library last Thursday as part of the 2016 Sydney Writers Festival. Through his interrupter he described the main themes of the novel, the “educated youths” or zhiqing, high school graduates who found themselves separated from their families and sent into the country side as part of the Cultural Revolution. Ye Xin, who was one of the zhiging, explained that many of them embraced the change with revolutionary zeal as they felt that they needed to be “re-educated”, others simply “went with the flow”. As the years passed many married, had children and settled down. Then when Mao died they were suddenly free to return to the city under certain circumstances. Only unmarried zhiging were allowed to move back. Many simply abandoned their families, or found means to quickly divorce and flee. Years later, however, the children they left behind began travelling to the cities to look for their parents, many of whom who had married and started new families.

Considering it is now 50 years since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the publication of the English translation of Educated Youth is a timely one and Ye Xin’s author’s talk raised a number of issues for both the Chinese and non-Chinese members of the audience.

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer, critic and publisher. He is the founding editor of Rochford Street Review and his own work has ben published in numerous journals both in Australia and overseas. His latest collection, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in February.

Educated Youth is available from http://www.giramondopublishing.com/fiction/educated-youth/

In the Shadow of Black Friday: Mark Roberts Previews the 2016 Sydney Writers Festival

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The Sydney Writers Festival runs from May 16th to 22nd. complete details are available from http://www.swf.org.au/
SWFLast years Sydney Writers Festival was, for many of us, overshadowed by the major attack launched on contemporary Australian writing, and Australian creativity in general, by the then Federal Arts Minister George Brandis. In an article written in the foyer of the Roslyn Packer Theatre, I wrote “I should be writing about the Sydney Writers’ Festival this morning, about the conversations, speeches and readings, but a media release from the Australia Council arrived suddenly late yesterday which stopped me in my tracks. Anyone with even the slightest connection to the Arts will be aware by now of the extraordinary attack launched on Australia’s Artistic community in the 2015 budget where funding to the Australia Council was slashed and diverted to Minister Brandis’ Slush Fund” (Artists Left Hanging by Australia Council Decision).

Now, a year later, as I sit down to preview the 2016 Sydney Writers Festival, we are faced with the reality of Black Friday when over 60 Arts organisations, find themselves defunded and the entire Arts Community face the fact that the cultural infrastructure that has been built up over the past 50 years is crumbling into dust. (see Alison Crogan’s excellent piece in The Monthly for a detailed analysis https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/alison-croggon/2016/16/2016/1463358684/black-friday).

So while this year’s festival is also being run in the shadow of an attack on the relevance of culture and writing to modern Australia it does also provide us with an opportunity to take stock and regroup. On a purely economic level, for example, the Sydney Writers Festival contributes far more to the economy of Sydney and NSW than the cost of any grant or subsidy it may receive. In fact, I suspect, that if an end-to-end cost benefit analysis was to be undertaken on the economic benefits of festivals such as writers and film festivals to the local, state and national economies, you would find that governments would make a much better return on their investment by investing in culture than by subsidising the mining industry through direct subsidies, tax breaks, the funding of major infrastructure like rail, roads and ports and the cost of cleaning up and rehabilitating sites after mining ceases. Of course, as we don’t measure economic benefits end-to-end, the arts industries are often portrayed as a drain on resources rather than a net contributor.

So moving to this year’s festival. Festival Director Jemma Birrell tells us that “Sydney will transform in May with authors and ideas flooding the city. Bringing fresh perspectives from all corners of the world….. enhance our community with their stories, humour, creativity and vision” and it is the big names that dominate the website and mainstream festival publicity. Kate Tempest (http://katetempest.co.uk/) opens this years festival on Tuesday 17th and, if her appearance on the ABC’s Q&A is anything to go by the audience, at the sold out launch is in for a treat.

Other big names at this year’s festival include Jeanette Winterson, Gloria Steinem, Marlon James, Julian Barnes and William Boyd among others. But the real connection with community often takes place takes place outside the centre of Festival activities on Hickson Road. Already a number of important sessions have already taken place. On Monday 16th, for example, Murri Elder Lesley Williams discussed Not Just Black and White at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba and Beth Yahp discussed her memoir Eat First, Talk Later, at Blacktown Library, while on Tuesday Craig Munro discussed his memoir of working in the publishing industry, Under Cover, at the State Library.

Poetry MayComing up Debra Adelaide will discuss her latest book, The Women’s Pages, at the Margaret Martin Library, Randwick, at 6.30pm on Wednesday and the May Bankstown Poetry Slam takes place at the Bankstown Arts Centre, at 7pm. On Thursday Ye Xin will discuss his book Educated Youth at the Chatswood Library on the Concourse at 1pm while Drusilla Modjeska’s session on the sweep of women’s history, love, friendship, home and finding the room to write (Friday 20 May 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM Pier 4/5 The Waterfront) promises to be another highlight.

One of the poetry highlights of the festival will take place on Friday at 3pm at the Philharmonia Studio (Pier 4/5) with the launch of the historic Australian issue of Poetry, edited by Robert Adamson and commissioned by Don Share, editor of Chicago’s Poetry Foundation.

The festival continues over the weekend with another highlight being poets Eileen Chong and Mark Tredinnick conducting a poetic walking tour of the Botanic Garden on Saturday and Hanya Yanagihara’s closing address on Sunday night.

So if you are in Sydney the 2016 Sydney Writers Festival might just provide a distraction for the doom and gloom engulfing the arts at the moment – at best it might just provide a catalyst to action!

Complete festival details are available at http://www.swf.org.au/

 – Mark Roberts

Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer, critic and publisher. He is the founding editor of Rochford Street Review and his own work has ben published in numerous journals both in Australia and overseas. His latest collection, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in February.

Making Connections: Mark Roberts Launches ‘Headwaters’ by Anthony Lawrence at the Newcastle Writers Festival

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Headwaters by Anthony Lawrence, Pitt Street Poetry 2016, was launched by Mark Roberts at The Press Book House, Hunter Street Newcastle on 2 April as part of the 2016 Newcastle Writers Festival.

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Anthony Lawrence at the launch of Headwaters at the Newcastle Writers Festival. Photograph Julie Manning

It is a great privilege to be here this afternoon to launch Headwaters, Anthony’s 15th (I think) book of poetry, at the 2016 Newcastle Writers Festival. Anthony is one of those poets whose work I have known and respected for decades and whose work has been a great influence on my own work.  His first book, Dreaming in Stone, was published in 1989 and, like an alluvial river flood, each of those previous books has added another layer of richness to Australian poetry and to Australian culture.

Headwaters is no exception – it is a particularly rich and complex layer that is washing over us today. It is, afterall, a book that could  probably launch itself. When I first picked it up it fell open at a poem called ‘The Deep’ which begins:

Crossing the bar from river to open ocean
had become a metaphor we’d devised
for separation, for moving on
so we learned to navigate by intuition
finding ourselves together and alone
beyond sight of land, where distance
and direction are defined by closure…

What need is there of an introduction after lines like these? A simple, beautiful image, the metaphor announced from within the poem easing us into the complexity to come. This is a poem of extremes – The opening image of the bar separating the river from ocean is at the end of the river which has its source in the “headwaters” of the book’s title.  The river and ocean, the land and water and most importantly, light and dark. Here Anthony references the photic and abyssal layers of the oceans – photic where light can penetrate and abyssal where the ocean is so deep no light can reach and which is in perpetual darkness.

Once again what powerful imagery we have here – a free diving couple entering the “fatal levels”. Of course there are many depths to this poem, it is wonderfully descriptive, but we are also told, in the second line, to read it as a metaphor – so we have “signal stations of remorse” and marker bouys “tethered loosely on a line”. To find out just how deep this poem goes you will have to buy the book but, rest assured, you will not be disappointed.

For the past few months I have become fascinated with a word – not a unique experience for a poet I guess, but the word has stuck with me and provided me with a tool to explore some of my favourite poets and poems – that word is ‘lacuna’ and, according to the Oxford Dictionary it means:

“An unfilled space; a gap” or “A missing portion in a book or manuscript” and finally in anatomy “a cavity or depression, especially in bone”

headwatersWhat a wonderful word and what poetic meanings.  This notion of a gap or an unfilled space is an important one for an artist, a gap suggests possibilities, untold stories, connections to be made, a space for the imagination. A good poet can find these gaps and spaces, recognise them when even when they hard to find or even seemingly non existent, but they have to also be able to make the connections and fill those spaces with poetry that makes us stop and wonder at what has been discovered. Fortunately for us Anthony brings this skill to Headwaters and we have the pleasure of watching the gaps and spaces open up and of seeing them filled with poetry.

‘Murmuration’ is one such poem. I read the title and loved the word without really understanding what it meant. I thought of the soft murmur of voices, of a conversation that you can just hear but can’t make out the words, that rises and falls in tones and which you think you may almost understand from the pattern of sounds rather than the hearing of words. But within a few lines I knew I was mostly mistaken:

The first two syllables of the word
that defines the way starlings take a spiral apart
only to fly it back together
…………..is also the sound of rain
………………………..falling over the Pantheon
or through miles of telegraph poles
on the Monaro Plain

“Murmuration” then is the pattern starlings make as they fly in large groups when they move almost as one. Not for the first time I am driven to research, Anthony has discovered this gap, this space I did not know of until I started reading this poem and now the opening lines have me diving into Current Biology Vol 22 Issue No 4 (and here I quote):

Collections of animals have been given some of the most fanciful, and sometimes unusual, nouns. ……. Tuneful finches are known as a charm, whilst corvids do less well: collections of crows and ravens are known as a murder or an unkindness, respectively. One of the most stunning examples of collective behaviour is the spectacular display of European starlings, the noun for which is a murmuration

By the way I can thoroughly recommend Andrew J. King and David J.Sumpter’s article on Murmuration if you want to really get into Anthony’s poem.

The poem has this mass movement, an aerial ballet if you like, seemingly choreographed yet spontaneous. At the same time, it celebrates the sound of the word that describes this movement, the gentle sound like rain falling over the Pantheon or through wires strung across the  Monaro Plains. So there was some intuitive logic and even meaning to my initial thoughts on the meaning of Murmuration.


– A Starling Murmuration
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Anthony has now, however, sent me off in search of Murmurations and I discovered pages and pages of YouTube videos of flocks of starlings forming the most amazing patterns, moving backwards and forwards across the sky. You see he has opened up a space, a gap that I didn’t even know existed and he has filled it with wonderful imagery.

Often the imagery and strength of Anthony’s poems can hide the beauty of the poem’s structure, but it is worth paying some  attention to how the poems in this volume are crafted. Anthony has chosen the structure of individual poems carefully and it is clear, when we look at the poems on the page, that much thought has gone into the way they sit on the page, on the line indents, the white space around the poems and the actual stanza and line breaks. He seems particular fond of tercets, the three line stanzas serve him well both in shorter and longer poems, and there are variations on this structure, with three line indents replacing stanza breaks in poems such as ‘Lies’ and a slightly different structure in ‘Expectation’. There is a another variation in the longer poem ‘Taxonomy’ with every third line broken by a middle justified line, a structure that supports a quite amazing poem very well.

And of course I can’t end without acknowledging the physical beauty of  book as artifact – from its beautiful front cover featuring a stunning wood cut by Julie Manning, to the design and production of the book – the look and feel of the book if you like. We must congratulate the publishers, Pitt Street Poetry, of course,  for bringing together such a fine production. To be a poetry publisher in Australia is a commitment of love, perhaps the 21st century version of Dransfield’s “Ultimate Committment” . It is a love of poetry and a commitment that art, and in particular poetry, has to be an important part of our lives, both individually and as a society. Pitt Street Poetry, and all other publishers that make that commitment, deserve to be supported – without them it would be much, much harder to find work like the extraordinary poems we are launching today.

This is a book that you will want to carry around with you for days. Read it through once and then return to it again and again. The poems will open up, you will find spaces that you didn’t even know existed filled with wonderful imagery and layered meanings – a tonic for this ‘always on’, instant gratification culture which surrounds us today.
So congratulations Anthony and Pitt Street Poetry and I am very happy to declare headwaters launched at the Newcastle Writers Festival on the banks of the Hunter

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer, critic and publisher. He is the founding editor of Rochford Street Review and his own work has ben published in numerous journals both in Australia and overseas. His latest collection, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in February.

Headwaters is availabe from http://pittstreetpoetry.com/anthony-lawrence/

Headwaters will be launched in Sydney on Saturday 16th April at 3.30 at Gleebooks by David Malouf as part of a double launch with Anna Kerdjik Nicholson launching Painting Red Orchids by Eileen Chong https://www.facebook.com/events/268999346771528/

 

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