The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry edited by John Kinsella
by Peter Kenneally •
Of all the books published in the United States last year, only three per cent were of foreign origin. This year is hardly likely to be any different. So it is something of a wonder that this considerable and imaginative collection of modern Australian poetry was produced in the unlikely setting of the University of Louisiana. Professors Jack Heflin and William Ryan, who direct the creative writing program there, have a longstanding interest in international literature, and John Kinsella was the natural, if not inevitable, choice as editor of this anthology, which, with 123 poets spread over almost 600 pages, is the most comprehensive collection of contemporary Australian poetry ever published in the United States.
The book looks and feels weighty. One’s first thought is that it will have some burden to carry, whether of nationality, history, currency, or ‘bestness’, and that this weight will impress itself on the reader, as it so often does in anthologies of Australian poetry. Surprisingly and refreshingly, this is not the case. The book has a lightness, a kind of shrugging off of the usual, that makes it feel especially contemporary.
Kinsella invited poets to send between ten and a dozen poems to him as a basis for selection. While he, as we shall see, claims not to employ aesthetic, qualitative, canonical standards, many of the poets do the job for him as, one imagines, he hoped they would. Although contemporary, these are generally not new works. Most have been in either one of the poet’s books, a Best Poems from one year or another, or a well-known journal. It feels as if the poets are exercising some objective form of quality control. The process works: what a poet/Kinsella has chosen to represent them, with or without quotation marks, is generally apt – Ken Bolton’s ‘An Australian Suburban Garden’, say, or ‘The Audience’ by Jennifer Maiden, or even Kinsella’s own ‘Goat’.
In his introduction, Kinsella goes to some lengths to disavow any suggestion of what he calls literary canonicity or of national representation. He displays something of a phobia about representation in general: how the poets are represented by their work, how this anthology will represent contemporary Australian poetry in America, whether it represents anything at all. His main defence against undue assumption is to fence in dubious, value-laden terms with inverted commas: ‘aesthetic’; ‘Australian poetry’; ‘represented’; and even ‘needed’. He seems to be saying: ‘Look, I know these words exist, and they are hard to avoid, but I have got their number and won’t be ensnared by them.’
‘Kinsella’s impulses are generous and inclusive, and they shine through his sometimes over-earnest, politically correct prose style’
Kinsella invited poets to send in poems for him to select from, so that their selections would reflect their current practice, or at least their view of it. ‘I wanted then to select “down”, to create the diverse and sometimes contradictory conversations which I feel are necessary to show “outsiders” the complexities of the many aspects and angles of “Australian poetry”.’ He sees himself as a facilitator rather than a canoniser, and all arguments about who should be in or out of an anthology like this as pointless. Given the absence of more than a few notable figures, for whatever reason, it is understandable, and quite reasonable, that he should dismiss the arguments in advance. Besides, he says, ‘there is no hierarchy I acknowledge or believe in at work here’, and what matters is ‘how the poets and readers deal with this community that has been artificially induced’.
Kinsella’s impulses are generous and inclusive, and they shine through his sometimes over-earnest, politically correct prose style. For example, he says that ‘there are no aesthetics at work. I do not select on the basis of beauty: neither do I search for “satisfaction” or “art for art’s sake”. I do, of course, consider the nature of the poem, the attributes that inform it as a creative object, but I profoundly distrust any form of aesthetic distancing.’ He must be perfectly well aware that this is hard to believe, as well as being somewhat contradictory: the attributes that inform a poem as a creative object are aesthetic ones, and it is telling that he sees beauty as ‘aesthetic distancing’.
At such points, Kinsella has something of the puritan iconoclast about him: it is as if the poems in the anthology have chosen themselves in some predestined way. He could, one might feel, add ‘Calvinist’ to his self-description as an anarchist, vegan, pacifist, and environmental activist. What is disarming is that, while he says that ‘the reader makes the text’, he does so not as an argument-ending party trick but as a reason to make his collection as varied and exploratory as possible – something that has in fact distinguished his attitude to anthologising over the years.
Kinsella says explicitly that he knows many of the poets included would ‘strongly and firmly disagree’ with many of his views on Australian poetry and politics, and that ‘they have offered their poems for this anthology in the spirit of community and respect for difference, and that to me is the bold and exciting thing about this collection’. His distinctive mix of the ingenuous and disingenuous is on display here, because while it may be true, it is hard to imagine many poets, major or minor, conservative or avant-garde, refusing to be in a major anthology because of some perceived intellectual difference with the editor.
‘Kinsella has something of the puritan iconoclast about him: it is as if the poems in the anthology have chosen themselves in some predestined way’
Certainly the more august(an) strand, particularly of older male poets, is comprehensively represented – in fact the impression the anthology leaves is that Australian male poets have a leaning towards a sober-sided, learned perspective, often precisely referential and lyrical, but sometimes surprisingly orotund. Poets of some consequence who would have counterweighed this feeling are mysteriously absent (or not so mysteriously, given Kinsella’s personal history with some of them). The female poets, on the other hand, and I stress this is a general impression, manage to combine innovation, emotion, and intellect with élan and lightness.
Kinsella also makes ethnicity, diversity, and colonialism central to his ‘definition’ of this collection, particularly the assertion that ‘a paranoid reading of Australian literature across the board soon reveals that knowledge and crisis over occupying stolen lands, and the damage inflicted in the ongoing state of dispossession, gnaws at the work of most Australian poets’. As he says, many of the poets he has included might strongly disagree, but the proposition, once stated, will not go away, rather like Humphrey McQueen’s remark about Peter Booth to the effect that his blank abstracts were more frightening than the paintings that actually had grotesque, monstrous figures in them.
There are indigenous poets here, Anita Heiss, for example, and Alf Taylor, but we read them within the ongoing dialogue Kinsella says all poets are part of, as well as with the proposition in mind. It is hard to escape the feeling, though, despite the presence of Ouyang Yu, the Chilean-born Juan Garrido-Salgado, π.O., and a few others, that Australian poetry, for all its formal and intellectual vigour and variety is still solidly monocultural at its core. How ironic that it should be John Kinsella who demonstrates this continuing exclusion to us.
This review provoked a reaction from David MCCooey, and my one and only ever letters page exchange (I mean that’s what the internet’s for, right
JUST THE BEGINNING
Dear Editor,
I was surprised to read, in David McCooey’s review of John Kinsella’s poetry collection Sack that I had dismissed the inclusivity of Kinsella’s most recent anthology ‘with a shrug’ in my review of The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (ABR, December 2014). I thought I had said that John Kinsella’s impulses are generous and inclusive, and also that his attitude to anthologising over the years has been distinguished by the inclusion of work as varied and exploratory as possible.
However inclusive John Kinsella is as a person and an editor, though, the Australian poetry world is still mainly mono-cultural. This means that, in my experience, an anthology of Australian poetry that seeks to be inclusive tends to look much like one that doesn’t, stylistic preferences aside. Kinsella has probably done as well as any editor could to overcome this, but there is a fair way to go. Being inclusive is only the beginning.
…and the response:
DAVID MCCOOEY REPLIES: Regarding Peter Kenneally’s concerns, I am sorry that I was not more accurate. If, as Mr Kenneally no doubt rightly asserts, Australian poetry remains ‘solidly monocultural at its core’, I nevertheless feel that Kinsella’s notably inclusive anthology could be celebrated as doing more than simply demonstrating ‘this continuing exclusion to us’, as Mr Kenneally asserts.
(I couldn’t believe that people were still calling each other ‘Mr…’ but there you go)
Wild by Libby Hart
by Peter Kenneally •
January-February 2015, no. 368
Libby Hart’s new collection is ornate and knotty in a way that the reader would never divine from its cover, which is clear and white, with ‘wild’ in plain green typescript. It is essentially a bestiary, with birds of all kinds, as well as other creatures, including humans, in wild places, blown by winds and salt spray, or bringing wildness to ‘settled’ human habitations. There is a kind of emulsion of the direct and the opaque in her style that makes the mythic, fabulous elements appear to flow out of nature, directly, but in fact it is more as if we were in a wunderkammer of natural history, where the labels on the exhibits go beyond the call of duty and try to tell us everything about everything.
The first section, ‘Huginn and Muginn’, with its Latin tags for each poem, bolsters this feeling, Huginn and Muginn being a pair of ravens (Thought and Memory) who travel the world collecting impressions for the Norse head deity, Odin. It is all arranged and constructed quite deliberately, and anything but wild, with often noticeably theatrical effects, but there are some achingly still and precise poems. In ‘Transmigration’, the poet builds a cairn for a dead cormorant, and ‘the world grows quiet as a cloister / when the lake whispers his name / the sky grieves for his feathers’.
The second half of the book, ‘Murmurations’, lifts away from this at times oppressive ‘Nordic twilight’ and, like the starlings that it celebrates, twists and turns, both ordinary and miraculous. Beginning with ‘Smack’, which weaves seamlessly around the world watching nature dismiss us and our stories, the book alights and settles, at the end, on a field of elegy and acceptance. The visual promise of the cover is kept after all.
Everyday luxuries
A trio of new poetry collections
by Peter Kenneally •
Four Oceans by Toby Davidson
Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 93 pp
Toby Davidson’s first collection, Beast Language, was published nine years ago. That feels surprising: its freshness then makes it feel more recent now. Much of the movement in that book is present in his new collection, Four Oceans, literally so, as we begin with a long sequence aboard the Indian Pacific from Perth to Sydney. It’s his younger self again, leaving home for the ‘eastern states’, but with an esprit de l’escalier twist, as that younger self gets to see and describe everything with the eye and language of the older, freer, more assured Davidson.
It is a compelling journey. The rhythms of the writing conjure up the compressed, swaying, jolting drag of a long train journey: ‘Two-seaters unlatch and swing into cradles – / my flickering doona, Canadian Monica, star-crossed and rocking platonic. Orange sparks of outer mines sprint like children for a vintage loco.’
All of Western Australia’s dense, conflicted history and present are packed into the train with him. The past may be another country, and Western Australia seems to want to be, to the studied indifference of the rest of us. Cramming these two propositions together in an air-conditioned tin can rattling through a landscape that is both empty and teeming with unspoken history can make the hair on your neck stand up, but it can also be great fun:
We totter from our snorting hellride.
Pretty quiet on a school day,
skate park, Christian bookshop at the strip.My lone souvenir is Bad Girls of the Bible
and What We Can Learn from Them
in staunch softcover.
When the poet finally gets off the train in Sydney, to be met by his oldest mate, there’s a release, an almost joyous regard of not knowing anything about where he now is, that’s quite lovely. The middle section of the book, ‘Eastern States’, shows us Davidson at play, wide-rangingly, in a place where it is up to him to provide the atmosphere. It’s surprisingly tentative at times, though with ‘At the Non-Existent Statue of a Speared Arthur Phillip’ he seems to arrive definitively.
Then in the final section of the book, ‘Cottesloe Nights’, he is back ‘home’ again, and the night is dense, dank, but full of sparks and splutters of history, strange creatures. Sometimes it feels somewhat strained, but the gravitational pull is so great one almost wonders how he escaped it in the first place. It is half Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, half the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’, but always very much itself.
Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris by Adrienne Eberhard
Black Pepper Publishing, $24 pb, 110 pp
Adrienne Eberhard’s Tasmania in Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris has an altogether different feel. In a sequence of poems about different plants, there is a delicate but unshakeable balance between ‘seeing’ the plant as it is and splicing into its DNA all the things it conjures up from wider knowledge, cultural, geographic, and historical. In ‘Silver Tussockgrass’: ‘You are the green / of oxidised copper / heraldry is your instinct, / your feather tops / fanning like pennants, flags.’ In ‘Spreading Rope-Rush’, the words spread across the page and the consonants alliterate in waves: but it is in no way a contrivance. Eberhard follows this up with a compressed, coiled poem about the same plant, which releases in turn into ‘Truth’: ‘look closely now / can you see me? / the heart of me / the way I am grass / but space and time too / constellations / and specks of mud’. We seem to have moved up a notch in creation, or have we? The question hangs, and the poem sequence floats in space, both in and out of nature.
After this, the poems that follow, about people in cultural and familial milieux, are more stolid. A family Christmas in Paris, a visit to a museum: the feeling for the past, the present tenderness, are all there, but effortfully. Right in the middle is the poem the book is named for, and which the cover design portrays: ‘Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris’. Why is this so? Granted, the sans-culottes view of history has increasingly given way to a less vengeful one, so it isn’t surprising that Eberhard has great sympathy for the doomed queen, as woman and as loving mother. Even so, she doesn’t really do anything to convince us that Marie deserves our pity, or to, as it were, check her privilege.
But then Eberhard turns things around again with a sequence based on a series of photographs of her grandfather and grandmother, taken in Java during the 1930s and 1940s. Interrogating the images, adding silent, invisible context, manoeuvring around colonial ambiguity, language slippage, exile, she sees her forebears as clearly as she sees the plants around her. The photos project themselves onto the poems after them, that move on in time but not in feeling, so that the book declines, in the best sense, into an exhalation of everything that has interested it.
Entries by Prithvi Varatharajan
Cordite Books, $20 pb, 80 pp
Entries, the first book from Prithvi Varatharajan, almost dares you to make an idiot of yourself and say that it ‘defies easy description’. The author does describe it, but only up to a point. There are poems, to be sure, but there are many more prose pieces, which he wrote to himself as emails, also addressing ‘a changing group of people as BCC recipients’. They are vanishingly slight, but they don’t vanish. It feels like alchemy. Friends, places, ideas, hold together across decades, and he is playfully formal about that in ‘City Selves’, comparing Adelaide, where he grew up, and Melbourne, which he inhabits:
Adelaide: I go to the two houses I know besides my parents’, where I still have close friends, and sit at a dining table or on a sofa and talk.
Melbourne: I sit in bars and restaurants and talk. The bars are often the same while the restaurants are often different. I go to one house often and sit on a sofa and talk.
He is not quite detached, not quite attached; and he knows it. He has the double ambivalence of the exile from culture and family: ‘How absurd it is to end up on the other side of the world from people who are supposed to look after you, when you’re unable, or unwilling, to talk to them.’
Varatharajan has produced many audio programs on literary themes, and this book is essentially a soundscape for the logocentric. The poems are the quiet passages, waiting, marking time. He travels – to Europe, ‘home’ to India, and alertly all over Melbourne and its suburbs – and brings home conversations, dilemmas, snatches of culture. He will consider quite gravely (insofar as he can be grave) what it means to be in the margins, or what to make of his Tamil identity. But then he goes to a party, has intense conversations about academia, and ‘[leaves] the party with two writers who are also cycling; our conversation is light. We cycle in single file, and I talk to them over my shoulder about an arts festival that’s on the next day. I peel off as I approach the turn-off to my house, and they carry on down the road.’
The book is full of such grace notes: it is both a rare and an everyday luxury.
These Things Are Real by Alan Wearne
by Peter Kenneally •
Alan Wearne’s work over the past thirty years or so – dense, demanding, unique, rewarding – is like the oeuvre of a cinematic auteur: one that never quite got onto the syllabus, or brought out the crowds at Cinémathèque. Technique above all, most of the time, but allied with real if unfamiliar emotion, even if the narrative needed the reader to have the right stuff in the first place before it unfolded itself.
More recently, the scope has lessened, the rhyme schemes become less ornate, the characters more constrained. One wouldn’t have noticed in his previous book, Prepare The Cabin For Landing (2012), with its overt Juvenalian satire woven through the personal narratives. But in These Things Are Real the two things have largely separated. The verse narratives in the first half of the book are more sanguine than we are used to from Wearne, with the antiqueness of the scenarios a kind of enabling constraint rather than a period set.
The first story concerns a widow, Nance, in postwar Moorabbin, reconnecting with her old friend Iris and carrying on a kind of ‘friendship’ with Iris’s husband Keith: unconsummated, hardly even a flirtation, but somehow essential to her. The first thing one notices, in the opening lines, is Wearne’s sleight of hand. Iris, he says, belonged to the ‘generation of unadorned names, / Jean and Elaine, Nance and Wynne.’ There are also Dot, Elwyn, and Gwen. They may be unadorned, but they fall together on the ear in a singular way: the way Alan Wearne hears them. The tuning fork is struck. Even more, in this first story, is the way he gets his characters to speak with his diction. ‘Now call me a sophisticate,’ Nance says, ‘but what sophisticate’s a Moorabbin sophisticate?’ Even though it is hard to imagine a person saying that, Wearne manages to get it out of Nance on the page and still make her utterly quotidian. I had not realised before how much this makes him work.
There are two other female characters, as different as could be. A single mother, in ‘Anger Management: A South Coast Tale’ falls in despite herself with a just-sensitive-enough-to-begin-with failure at everything who soon turns to anger and abuse, ‘a stocky, perspiring man, making noises no one wants / to understand, getting dragged away’. It convinces in an almost too benign way. Rather more laboured, ‘Waitin’ for the Viet Cong’ has a ‘recently retired femocrat’ looking back on a disastrous, almost fatal, flight to Paris in a headlong 1960s pursuit of love and rebellion: only to be saved by, and permanently enveloped in, the way in which one’s family insist on loving, doggedly, infuriatingly, through everything. The story creaks: the emotion does not.
The male characters represent so much that their personalities recede to vanishing point. There is Peter, in ‘Memoirs of a Ceb’, struggling with being gay, somehow finding his way through, in some semi-distant era, so mysterious it retreats before you. And finally, defiantly, in the familiar form of the dishevelled, divorced, ex-junkie ex-teacher remembering a ghastly event from the salad days of his junkiedom, who opens his mouth, for Wearne to speak: ‘So it continues, my tick-off list of / Them them and them, those those and those till it will have happened / much too many years ago, and even these memories, our sour / and blighted memories, must surely need to cease.’
Alan WearneThe second half of the book is ‘The Sarsparilla Writers Centre’: nearly fifty pages of satire directed at all and sundry. Satire, according to the Concise Oxford, is the ‘use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm etc., in speech or writing, for the ostensible purpose of exposing & discouraging vice or folly’. The brothers Fowler were rightly ambivalent about satire – hence the ‘ostensible’ lurking in the definition, ready to pounce.
In this case, the purpose is mostly to expose and discourage anyone who has got up Wearne’s nose in the last forty or fifty years, and it’s not especially edifying. There are also a couple of other retrograde tropes on show from the poetry universe: writing poems about other poets; and limp two-line squibs. There are many poets guilty of both, but seldom on this scale. Fun to perform, I daresay, but not to read. There is one, ‘The 1987 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry’, that is genuinely funny, and here it is: ‘What you see is what you get / Runner-up to Lily Brett.’
There is also a completely delightful longer poem called ‘Freely, and with the appropriate sense of space (Dreams: lived, dreamt and composed for Ken Bolton)’. If it is a parody it is a very affectionate one, and full of an uncharacteristic lightness and grace. It works because it doesn’t matter who all the poets paraded past us are, or what exactly Wearne’s grist is: fifty more pages of picaresque Bolton-lite would have been far more refreshing, if a little gassy, than all the indigestible two-liners. However, after some consternation, the realisation dawned that this is how a poet might tweet: especially one so firmly lodged in the pre-Twitter ambience of the bookish, beerish twentieth century fin de siècle. Ephemeral and stolid: it was worth a try, I suppose.
Our Lady of the Fence Post by J.H. Crone
by Peter Kenneally •
January–February 2017, no. 388
Abook called Our Lady of the Fence Post (UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 105 pp, 9781742589121) by a poet called J.H. Crone is an irresistible proposition, simply as a notion. Luckily for readers, neither is at all fanciful. This verse narrative explores the events around the appearance in 2003 of a likeness of the Virgin Mary on a fence post at Coogee, near the site of a memorial for five local rugby players killed in the Bali bombings. Crowds of fervent worshippers flocked to the scene.
The elements of the real story are fantastical enough without any poetic embellishment: faith, anti-faith, nationalism, sensationalism, online abuse, grief whirled through the media at the time, all largely forgotten now. This heady mix, fading into the fog of vague recall, is a perfect ground for the narrative and allusive skills J.H. Crone has in abundance.
Female characters bear names with a Marian tinge: Mae the television reporter; Mari the bakery owner; a Muslim woman, Maryam; even an expert on religion called Maire: but this seems only fitting. J.H. Crone has come lately to poetry after a career as a documentary maker and editor, and though she has a documentarist’s skills with history, she also spins religion though everything, in the bakery, say: ‘Mari offers a slab of soft, air-filled / bread to Jesus, but she can’t eat. Perhaps / a caramelised cardamom brulee / tart? Jesus swallows a flake. Her dolour / pours out into the throng.’
There is conflict everywhere, between genders and faiths, and strange exaltations, as Mae falls/rises into a Catholic netherworld, and everything comes to an inevitable Cronullan climax – or rather, a set of blessed anti-climaxes. Ranging wide, with compassion and compression, Our Lady of the Fence Post might just be the first verse novel that is actually a novel.
Bruce Dawe’s new collection is called Border Security ($22.99 pb, 94 pp, 9781742589138), but his world remains firmly suburban, reminiscent, good-tempered, and largely non-judgemental. These are all excellent qualities, and piqued in this case in just the right amounts by the occasional drop in pressure or poetic percussion. There is little wildlife, nature, or art. There is, on the other hand, rhyme and metre, veering between invisibility and glaring thump, giving the reader a chance to consider the point and effect of these structures. ‘Gallipoli’, for instance, is at the double march time: ‘Pay tribute to Anzac valour / That served to define us, too / With the dogged sun of their courage / Above that sea of blue.’
Everything there serves its purpose, whether you like it or not; a purpose that surprises a little, at the end of the book, after so much wry containing, especially after the poem ‘Sea of troubles’ about asylum seeker deaths, where the lines never stop their ends and the rhymes course on like waves, without making too much of that fact.
Dawe’s uxorious devotion, sometimes smothering his capacity to express it poetically, charms; as do various humorous sallies that trip over themselves, but, rather in the manner of Keith Waterhouse, they have great appeal anyway. The book’s essence is the capture of moments ‘especially chosen from the lived life … digging potatoes, marvelling at the modest glory of fruit, or the work of Cezanne’. Shades of Jonathan Richman there, but Dawe brings the reader softly back down to earth when his wife finds an old, blind dog, its end sadly clear because ‘we feared it was too late for him to make / new friends in this exquisitely incomprehensible / new world. So we learn again what ‘haunted’ means’.
Alan Loney returns with Melbourne Journal ($22.99 pb, 95 pp, 9781742589114), a selection from his ‘notebooks’ of 1998–2003, and a prequel of sorts to the excellent Crankhandle (2015). Once again, all is untitled and fragmentary, but in this earlier Melbourne period the fragments are less printerly, more philosophical and decisive, so that what are posited as fragments take on a more free-standing existence. It is as if, despite himself, he puts everything in, even in a line or two. A longer paragraph, on page seventy-eight, begins ‘there are times when what I most envy about Sappho are the holes in the papyrus. That so much can be, no, it’s not ‘left out’ (tho John Wieners, sd Bob Creeley to me once, wanted to know how much of an experience can be left out and still have the language active), but just not there.’
But Loney feels much more modern and gathering than Hellenic and absent, however convincing the chagrin. There are thoughts and criticism, often delivered with a Bergeresque finality, and it is fitting that the epigraph to one section, ‘Not enough and too much’, is a fragment of Heraclitus translated by Guy Davenport. That indicates Loney’s context and timbre as a scholar. As a poet, he is here, among the reading and observation, a man finding his way in a new city, as tentatively as any other.
He sits, pensive, by Darebin Creek, watching birds, and is in equal parts fascinated by a Merri Creek dragonfly and appalled by humanity at Northcote Mall. Overhearing and observing, too much alone, occasionally unaccountably happy, and always trailing clues, the voice of the book whispers regret at being helplessly Marxiste – tendence Groucho – recovering to assert that ‘it is hard to think clearly about emotional matters when the writer in one takes over at the drop of the first word’. The body of the book disproves its voice, thankfully.
The general sense of threat and distance that characterised David McCooey’s last collection, Outside (2011), has arrived and materialised in Star Struck ($22.99 pb, 87 pp, 9781742589107), in the form of a ‘cardiac event’ His response to this experience, set out in the first part of the book, is instructive. The event is examined, forensically, and the context given an ironic once-over in a tone that is, if not actually dispassionate, at any rate far from passionate. The writer takes over here, too.
In emergency, the event confirmed, ‘Almost as if / they were not yours, tears start / coursing down the side of your face. / “What’s the matter?” a doctor asks / “I’m just labile,” you say / and the doctor is satisfied. / You are speaking his language.’ That deadpan tone runs through McCooey’s hospital time, as does a determination to face down fear, which is only a trope, he seems to say – to be kept at bay by Muriel Spark, as ‘the doctor appears with his / silent staring students: graduates / from The Village of the Damned’.
In the second part of the book, McCooey, recovered, appears to take greater relish in his playful side. ‘Rhyming 1970s’, in particular, fizzes with delight and nails that definitively McCooey combination of screen, life, and music that energises him. In a highly original take, he forensically, gleefully, demolishes his own poem ‘Whaling Station’ in the light of new evidence.
The book then falls into a ha-ha of its own making with eighteen ‘Pastorals’ (dramatic monologues by or about various figures from popular music). His evocations, of Brian Eno, say, inventing ambient music in his hospital bed, or (bizarrely) Gabrielle Drake, are faintly embarrassing, however genuine their intent. Perhaps that is the problem: he loves music too much to wield the scalpel.
Peter Kenneally reviews ‘101 Poems’ by John Foulcher, ‘Small Town Soundtrack’ by Brendan Ryan, and ‘Ahead of Us’ by Dennis Haskell
by Peter Kenneally •
Reading these three books in April, it was impossible not to see in them flashes of what Ross McMullin has described in war artist Will Dyson’s drawings from World War I: ‘He sketched Australians waiting, resting and sleeping. He captured them stumbling out of the line, drained and dazed. He drew weariness, perseverance, fatalism.’ Ordinary and terrible: in poetry, as in war, whichever side the coin lands on, the other is always beneath it.
Dennis Haskell’s Ahead of Us (Fremantle Press, $27.99 pb, 108 pp, 9781925163285), almost banished from the comfort of the ordinary, focuses unflinchingly on the death of his beloved wife, Rhonda, after six years of pain and struggle. The cancer, the medical interventions, all take their terrible course, and Haskell regards them, in the poems, with a kind of helpless revulsion, whereas death is addressed, challenged, interrogated. The conversation allows the poetry to hold everything still long enough to comprehend something about the process.
Haskell tries to personalise death: ‘You never see him move / but now he sits silent / in the expectant corner / of every room you enter’ (‘Belief’). He tries to pass off death as a kind of allegory: ‘The word / will be a visa, in your passport / an indelible stamp, and your passport / now full of pages that you will never use’ (‘Another Country’). This is all rearguard stuff, and it is in the slow, clear narrative of the particulars of Rhonda’s own, idiosyncratic, passing that Haskell puts himself, and us, on a level footing with death. The real benefit (because nothing changes) is that we can look it in the eye, so that any reader who has already done so will be able see how precise Haskell is, and how thankless his task.
Grief, easing into the place of dying, is quite another matter: ‘I wondered / where to go / and all these months later / I still do.’ Haskell’s grief washes back and forth through the book, colouring everything a deep blue, from his present, pointless life to earlier memories, because his new ‘title’ of widower, ‘this pathetic run / of weak, short syllables / says nothing about me / or everything, catching on / my every breath / the low, dark afternoon of death’ (‘Widower’). One poem, though (‘No one ever found you’, from 1993), seems to stand against grief and redeem every thing: the wave breaks on it and then there it is, still shining in the sun: ‘it matters little where we go, / how little we know / and how much our lives have passed, our days will be filled with green / and we grow together like the grass.’
Brendan Ryan’s Small Town Soundtrack, (Hunter Poets, $19.95 pb, 89 pp, 9780994352828) continues his attempt to inhabit in poetry the hardscrabble dairy farming districts in south-west Victoria, between the Grampians and the coast, around the town of Panmure, where he grew up: ‘Out here where land and water meet / two lakes almost kiss, separated by a road under repair // banks of grey silt and a sagging fence line. / There are no trees, no speed cameras, no escaping the idea / this is a country to pass though’ (‘Road Works’).
City dwellers wonder how people can go on living in drought-stricken bush towns, or why they do. Ryan has to imagine why too, even though he knows, and he gives the landscape the gift of poetry with which to answer the question. In the section ‘Towns of the Mount Noorat Football League’, he takes us on a tour of colonial dispossession, decay, history, religion, fellowship, delivered in a laconic, ‘anti-guide book’ tone. ‘Each time I pass through / I commit to a roll call of buildings that remain / houses that have outlasted marriages, / the smell of paddocks softening the faces of locals / histories that blister / the way a Premiership holds a town together’ (‘Panmure’)
Ryan’s landscape is both cinematic and musical. ‘Intimidating flatness, mocking blue skies, orange gravel. / I’m sitting on 115 clutching the steering wheel. // A Harry Dean Stanton landscape of wandering, regret, / returning’ (‘Hurtle’). Ambivalence about family, about going away and returning, thrums through the book with almost intangible modulations – like an album by The Necks, one might say, because music is as important to him as place. ‘It awakens something within me / some inner core that has its own language / its own beat. It’s the rhythm of a recognition, / a place that can’t be disputed – / the way quiet rain falls on shade sails’ (‘The Songs I Need to Repeat’). When a poet can describe so exactly what happens in his verse, it is no wonder the poetry just keeps on driving, getting to places, moving on, working.
John Foulcher’s personal selection of 101 Poems from thirty years of poetry (Pitt Street Poetry, $32 pb, 166 pp, 9781922080424) is more eclectic and wide-ranging than the other two books here, but it touches on many of the same concerns. There is rural life, filial feeling, mourning (in his case the death dealt with efficiently by poetry is that of his mother). There is even the Notre Dame Cathedral, as premonitory and significant as Haskell’s version of it.
Foulcher has been more inclined in recent years than the other two poets to throw his voice beyond his own concerns, to dramatise – imagining Stuart Diver’s experiences at Thredbo, Keats in Scotland, even a whole school of teachers and pupils (in his book The Learning Curve, 2002). This doesn’t tend to work all that well, and there is a sense towards the end of the book of casting around, trying things on for size. But then, almost at the last, he casts his line over the life of Robespierre, not ventriloquising but capturing, filming, interrogatively, documentary-style. He writes in an earlier poem (‘Touching the Names’): ‘I want / these old lives / to go with us // as if we could be nothing more / than words, / and live / forever // in a world of sentences’, and finishes by fulfilling his own desire: a fitting end for any poet.
Peter Kenneally reviews ‘The Fox Petition’ by Jennifer Maiden, ‘Breaking the Days’ by Jill Jones and ‘Exhumed’ by Cassandra Atherton
by Peter Kenneally •
From the cover of Jennifer Maiden’s latest book (The Fox Petition, Giramondo, $24 pb, 96 pp, 9781922146946), a wood-cut fox stares the reader down. This foreign, seditious animal is the perfect emblem for Maiden’s examination of the xenophobia, conformity, and general moral diminution that she sees around her. Giramondo have given Maiden the liberty of an annual collection; as she says, this prospect ‘encourages urgency wonderfully’.
The catalyst for urgency in this book was the NSW Biosecurity Unit’s proscription, Border Force-style, of foxes, even as pets. Her poetry here has the freedom of improvisation, spiralling freely around any facts or notions in more or less the key of ‘foxness’. When the poet comes across a real fox, for example, ‘it stood its ground and looked so patrician’, summoning both Charles Fox, that radical petitioner for liberty, and Nye Bevan, with ‘the patrician tone of his Welsh miner’s voice’. ‘If I spoke to the fox without / killing it, I would be charged, but / we once had much in common. A quality / spare and wild with desperation / in its streetlamp eyes, its old headlight / eyes could still suggest a city / in shifting shapes, its identity / aristocratic in lost deceptions.’
The fox runs out of this poem into one of Maiden’s trademark ‘somebody woke up somewhere’ poems, in this case Keith Murdoch in New York with his son, Rupert. Conjured into conscience, unfamiliar but quite believable, and dreaming of yet another fox, seen on television outside 10 Downing Street, ‘Rupert ran / inside the fox’s body, felt its scars / until it found sanctuary in flowers / as red as flags and its very features / were fluid with alert survival.’
Maiden matches the dialectical in these duets (Hillary Clinton–Eleanor Roosevelt, Barack Obama–Mohatma Ghandi, and many others) with compassion and imaginative generosity, making the usual suspects more human, responsible, even admirable. Queen Victoria and Tony Abbott ignore the poet, though, lumpenly refusing to make a poem work (which may even be the point).
Maiden loves exposition and Wunderkammering: ‘a pure pedagogical joy in looking things up is optional but also fun,’ she has said. Sometimes this makes it hard to see the word for the trees – in regular character George Jeffreys’s adventure on Kos, for instance. But at least once in every poem, someone will say something miraculous, and all the knotty fact and allusion are illuminated: or invisible; either one does the trick.
In Breaking the Days by Jill Jones (Whitmore Press, $22.95 pb, 57 pp, 9780987386663), the light is so even that it is difficult to tell how much of it there is. The poet, or the poems at least, move through a world that seems to consist of blocks of experience, memory, and sensation. Sometimes they drift into meaningful configurations, but even these aren’t reliable and the poet tests them to destruction with the simplest of contradictions. It is half Parmenidean paradox and half laconic undercut: ‘Every corner kills you with its variation. / You slip on another idea. Even the streets are philosophical. / You can tell by their names / which are ordinary and about journeys.’
Various modernist ghosts linger wanly at the edges of the page: Robbe-Grillet, say, or Beckett: ‘You write under erasures / one word, another word. / You slip and fail. // Better than waiting / for what doesn’t come.’ She undercuts and erases them, though: ‘The importance is boring / if that’s what it takes. / You say as little, someone else / says less.’ In any case, these are not modern times. What kind of times they are is exactly the kind of question Jones will invariably deflate into bathos: ‘Each question recognizes itself eventually / there are no such things / as verities / but sometimes you think / you know at least / how to sort papers / knick-knacks and / casual freedoms.’
In Breaking the Days, the world is completely free of the usual particularities that poetry fastens onto. Political events in particular places; identifiable individuals, local colour, acutely described landscape or wildlife, ekphrasis, cultural reference, other poets. In fact, she says, ‘Allusions are sometime funny / or sometimes just a mistake / no matter how hard you tap / on the paper and brush / dust off the sentences.’ It may be that this is what makes her world seem so unsettling: so much of our conceptual apparatus and character armour consists of ‘information’ that without it there is a constant shiver between the shoulder blades. But it is also bracing and liberating: ‘You don’t have to look. / You can walk away. / There are stairs. // It’s not really your place / to eat cake. / It’s more of an excuse.’ Jill Jones has done poets and their readers a great favour.
In Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed (Grand Parade Poets, $21.95 pb, 86 pp, 9780987129192), the allusions have too much dust on them to brush off. Or else they are the dust: it’s not always easy to tell. The book is introduced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, describing the conditions of the manuscript of his poems he had buried with his wife, on a romantic impulse and then shamefacedly retrieved six years later. It is the romance in this scenario that enlivens Exhumed, rather than the tawdriness. There are many texts interred within the book, to the point where they may just as well be a kind of humus interring the poet, nourishing her, and adding literary spice to her love life, which is the actual matter of the book.
The poems, the book, have a wild effervescence, which is youthful in its passion and enthusiasm, but contained by the skill of the narratives in these prose poems, and far too darkly erotic too often to be thought jejune by anyone. Her lover takes almost as many guises as there are writers, characters, painters, actors to allude to, as does she. The White Rabbit, for instance: ‘I want to be swaddled in Gladwrap and slowly suffocate in his scent. Draw arrows on my neck pointing to his teeth marks. I delight in the marks he leaves on my body. But he is always late and I’m never his important date. So I set my watch to Daresbary time and wear it to bed.’
‘Daresbary time’ is really too much, too Wikipedian, but she gets away with it, miraculously avoiding feyness at every turn, as she does throughout the book. Mostly she achieves this through a kind of surreal physicality, where the carnality is so convincing one accepts the prmise. Two lovers, for example, tracing each other on the tracing paper that lies between them like a sheet, ‘The tracing paper crinkles. It is a thin barrier between us. But I can see you beneath it. I can just make out your shape. Outline. Like a crime scene. My unbroken pencil-thin line and you my victim.’ The ‘intertexts’ that she buries or exhumes in her poems (in this case Magritte, Coleridge, Gwen Harwood, and Kay Kyser) are like shards of pottery found in a garden: when dug up, they are just pieces, but glinting in the soil they have endless promise.
Reviewer’s chance often makes strange companions, but these three books collude to argue, confound, and charm, somehow finding a minor key that suits them all.
Prayers of a Secular World edited by Jordie Albiston and Kevin Brophy
by Peter Kenneally •
January-February 2016, no. 378
In her introduction to Australian Love Poems (2013), Donna Ward wrote that poems ‘are the prayers of a secular world’. Now, aided by editors Jordie Albiston and Kevin Brophy, she brings us a collection that tests this notion. The introduction by David Tacey states its case fervently, with, in this case, a bit too much determination that ‘the sacred is ineradicable’. The poems, as poems this good always do, simply shrug off external premises.
Albiston and Brophy, neither of them a stranger to immanence, have come up with an outstanding selection, one that carries a sense of ‘prayer’ as interrogation. The feel is more of magic than of prayer, as the poems incant, describe, and name what there is and dismiss what is not, in a very pre-Socratic way, with all the imagination and terrible beauty that implies.
Once again, as in Love Poems the sections take their names from lines within poems, and once again this works perfectly. The household spirits of ‘Domestic Interiors’ are perhaps the most ineffable, with Kent MacCarter’s pantoum ‘Expecting High Velocity’ especially so. Loss or lack of faith is a surprisingly strong strand in the collection, most notably Anna Ryan-Punch’s poem about the loss of belief: ‘Every Sunday, like a quiet furnace / I drew a soft, warm text / from a dark oak slot and registered / my complaint with the angels.’
Kate Lumley’s starkly terrifying poem at the end of the book, on the ‘road to El Paso’ offers a starker apostasy. And yet there is, everywhere, corner-of-the-eye lightness and wonder. This deceptively small book sits in the hand, lightly, like a missal, but its lack of certainty and its clarity make it a more interesting proposition than that. It deserves to live in your bag, dog-eared and encouraging.
Peter Kenneally reviews ‘The Law of Poetry’ by MTC Cronin, ‘The Ladder’ by Simon West, ‘Jam Sticky Vision’ by Luke Beesley, ‘Immune Systems’ by Andy Jackson, and ‘The Hour of Silvered Mullet’ by Jean Kent
by Peter Kenneally •
With her first book, Zoetrope, in 1995, MTC Cronin announced herself as a very particular force in Australian poetry. It was not just that her début was so much more immediately arresting than most poets’ first outings, but also that it had real authority. This authority, coming from force of intellect and a kind of absolutist, almost inscribed imagination, has marked her work through the years, along with an appreciation for the enabling constraint and for critical rigour. Coming from a legal background through academia, she has arrived, with The Law of Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, $29.95, 255 pp, 9781922186614) at an effortlessly monumental assemblage of poetic ‘laws’.
The Law of Poetry by MTC Cronin (Puncher and Wattman)
Cronin hands down laws for every conceivable instance where poetry attempts to accommodate the world. ‘The Law of Balance’, for instance, says that ‘In poetry, evening and twilight balance perfectly. / Mystery balances with any word you choose to weigh it against. / Poetry, however, puts the whole world out of whack. / When you read it you drift up or down / while everything goes in the opposite direction.’ Elsewhere, there are more abstract formulations, or poems that summon up Brecht’s ‘Radio Poem’ (‘Little Law without redemption / Taking a loan to start a new civilization’), among other European ghosts, and generally refuse the great Australian incertitude. It is more an annotation of possible laws that we might adhere to if we knew them, than a corpus of law, and bears the same relation to law that Philip Salom’s Alterworld bears to reality, with the same brio. This is poetry as cattle prod, and a welcome shock it is.
The Ladder by Simon West (Puncher and Wattman)
There is a relative lack of electricity in Simon West’s The Ladder (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 54 pp, 9781922186768) and, by chance of reading sequence, some grinding down through the gears required to take him in at the required pace. In his case, we have a measured classicism and a loving embrace of Italian art and culture, both observed, it seems, through a kind of glass darkly. The pagan primitive energy of Rome, with its veneer of law and culture, is here distilled to a kind of Anglican poise, all deference and lack of offence, and modern Italy fustified into a set from a Visconti film. There is the occasional glimpse of Roger Corman, but only a faint one.
It is as if the physical world is being put though a kind of ekphrastic mincer. Ekphrastic poems, usually about paintings in European settings, are notably problematic in Australian poetry. They are a problem here, too, and West’s tendency to see his life as a kind of tableau, along with his sudden metric lunges, can have a flattening effect. In an ostensibly Australian poem about running in the early morning (‘The Sports Oval’), for instance: ‘But soon with impetus that’s all their own / your thighs are lifting past themselves. / Adrenalin sets free its spirits. Gone / is the whim merely to know the shape of things.’ The seemingly placid and clear description of place and affect act instead as a kind of fog, obscuring the world.
Jam Sticky Vision by Luke Beesley (Giramondo)
In Luke Beesley’s case, contrarily, what looks like a wildly surreal accumulation of moments and wordplay (Jam Sticky Vision, Giramondo, $24 pb, 72 pp, 9781922146847) pops out its extrusions of clarity like some poetic 3D printer. Ekphrasis is triumphantly reinstated, because for each iteration, while the idea of it is hard to encompass, the object is undeniably there. Beesley ranges across every kind of modern culture, from cinema (Malick, Lynch, Wenders); to music ( lo-fi genius Bill Callahan); writing – Joyce, O’Hara, Tagore; and art – a lovely riff on Marcel Duchamp called ‘Nude descending a Solo’: ‘Cut page dessert knife salsa at the hour of lunch like pepper pressed tightly in a casual walk, buckled, under the questions. The waitress accommodated against potato, his acumen and silky argument “admired”, he claimed, his knife.’
There is even, preposterously, a Gertrude Stein-style reading of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film The Master (2012), with cabbages and the sea revolving in endless permutation. It works. When he takes on the local, for instance a corner in North Fitzroy, the result is a startling mix of Captain Beefheart and Bulgakov, but also true to the actual corner. Initially dubious, increasingly seduced, I was finally won over by a slip of a poem that is both acute and unceasingly enjoyable. Called ‘Festival Chat with Peter Craven’, it aspires to no more and no less than this: ‘A cyclone entered his hair. Trim lines, / office blocks, and season hazard tragic even // ings crisp summer beer moving elegantly in / Gerald Murnane’s beer in numerous novels of his.’
Immune Systems by Andy Jackson (Transit Lounge)
Luke Beesley ventures playfully to India, saying ‘India isn’t pure anecdote it crumbles in my telling like a poor / motor.’ For Andy Jackson, in Immune Systems (Transit Lounge, $23.95 pb, 56 pp, 9781921924828) his calm, heartfelt account of his time in India, it is not anecdote at all, and incarnates itself in the telling, clearly, unsensationally. The first part of the book is a kind of poetic drama-documentary exploring time Jackson spent in India looking at medical tourism, as well as attending literary events. Although inevitably an outsider, he succeeds in turning down the volume on the usual ‘shock of India’ without denying any of the confronting reality. It may be that his own poetic sensibility, which is to some extent that of an outsider on several levels, enabled him to write these honestly descriptive but never prosaic poems: it certainly feels that way.
‘The physical world is being put though a kind of ekphrastic mincer’
The second half of the book is a suite of ghazals. This ancient form, steeped in desire and longing, both constrained and accepting of alteration, suits him perfectly. Sometimes the form is strictly employed, with couplet endings falling, echoing (‘mirrors’, ‘stones’, ‘alone’, ‘street’): sometimes it is freer, because as he has written, after weeks in India ‘form began to feel absolutely arbitrary’. These poems condense the sights and sounds of the first section into an elemental, ashy, watery, almost funerary ache – the ghazals present many of the same facts, but stare piercingly at the reader, saying explicitly ‘Poetry dives, hides deep in the bones. Your body’s lost, splutters / in this tidal scent of rubbish, food urine, diesel fumes on the street ‘ (‘Ghazal: Kolkata’).
Jean Kent, of these five poets, is the most local, and her new book, The Hour of Silvered Mullet (Pitt Street Poetry, $28 pb, 89 pp, 9781922080448), captures once again the Hunter region of New South Wales, and in the case of the eponymous mullet, Lake Macquarie. There is much nature in Kent’s poetry, either in a semi-suburban or rural setting, and often, in this book, in the past. This past is wryly nostalgic – some of the rural childhood reminiscences conjure up Betjeman: but, instead of a shy subaltern, there are ‘In a studio above Mitre Ten / and Retrovision / ghosts of Jodie-Anne and Karen-Lynn, / Morag and Gayleen / shadow their younger sisters as they seek / a space, a year / between dressing Barbie dolls for fun / and dressing themselves for the drive-in / in earnest.’
There are shades of Larkin too, but Kent is never imitative, and absolutely never ordinary: the stories are too particular to the place for that, and the unpredictable flashes of steel uniquely hers, and uniquely a reproach to the presumptuous reader. ‘The Broken Engagement’, for instance, a four-part account of a social disaster presents to the passing eye as a tragicomedy of sorts, but is really a horror story.
Peter Kenneally reviews ‘Crankhandle’ by Alan Loney, ‘Stone Grown Cold’ by Ross Gibson, ‘Aurelia’ by John Hawke, and ‘Dirty Words’ by Natalie Harkin
by Peter Kenneally •
Poetry books as artefacts in their own right, regardless of commercial viability or relevance to the click-bait Zeitgeist, are currently showing sturdy signs of life, so it is a welcome development to have the online Cordite Review sensibility fixed in print, in a palpable way and on a graspable scale. These are fine-looking books: Zoë Sadokierski’s cover design template allows for each book to have a distinctive colour scheme and for the images within the design to reflect the verse within, in its particulars and its atmosphere.
Crankhandle ($20 pb, 56 pp, 9780994259608), continues Alan Loney’s long-standing interest in capturing fragmented or passing thoughts and utterances. It reasserts his belief that these are not fragmented in the sense of being unfinished or worn away, but because, as he says, ‘fragments are all we have, and will ever have. If some are very long and some very short, then that is simply how things are.’ This book is a succession, or assemblage, of these fragments, but not in such a way that they are in order, or stuck together at any point. There are Oulipo-esque chunks of dictionary-mining, reflections on the body, and on language, and the death and decay of each: ‘hands unable / the skill leaving him / his dream of beginning / dissolved / prospect of becoming a poet / broken / the printing press / cranking out / the crack’d word.’ It is, as Michael Farrell aptly says in his introduction, a book of ‘thinks’. Loney, with the calm concentration acquired from years as a letterpress printer, rolls them out without trying to disguise the constant whisper of the type, rearranging and redisposing itself beneath the paper at every turn of the crankhandle. The book has a kind of coda, a concentration of thought coming after the expanse of thinks, that extracts the world-weariness one senses beneath the carpet of thoughts, and asks ‘do I / merely copy words down, another / Bartleby, who’d prefer to do / nothing else with his time / with his body’. That is an unanswerable question – there is not even a question mark – but it will be interesting to see what Loney cranks out next.
Ross Gibson, in Stone Grown Cold ($20 pb, 64 pp, 9780994259622), also employs a kind of fragmentation, but one that is far more gothic and monumental than Loney’s and far less inclined to let ‘thinks’ enjoy an existential holiday from significance. His fragments are far more likely to end in a monumental full stop. In the twenty-page ‘Incident reports’, they are numbered and therefore in order: the order does not ostensibly matter, but it is there. This fits in perfectly well with Gibson’s previous orderings, for example in Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) or 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012), and most particularly the numberings of the photographs in The Summer Exercises (2009), his illustrated novel based on 100 mysterious and undocumented black-and-white crime scene photographs of post-World War II Sydney.
The ‘incident reports’, and much of the book besides, are like a shooting script for a murky green film noir, with a dash of apocalypse thrown in, mostly set in a semi-imaginary Sydney full, he says in the preface, of ‘sham company promoters; hollow share hawkers; men loitering in yards; mendacious women loitering in yards …’ and other unsavouries, including variously dumb and glamorous meth addicts and chancers. It is all calculatedly baroque: ‘Beware metallic lamplight. Limp inside the building. See the hygiene / apparatuses: how they’re glistening and seething. Eavesdrop / on a roughneck: “Let’s go fuck her in the chicken shop.” Witness a dull green / phial of liquid shining when the light’s off.’ But it is reminiscent enough of the Sydney we know from elsewhere: for example, in Michael Aiken’s A Vicious Example (2014), to make one accept it with a shiver of enjoyment.
John Hawke’s Aurelia ($20 pb, 52 pp, 9780994259615) comes from an academic perspective, and a more ‘traditional’ one than the poets-who-do-PhDs often manifest. His attachment to French poets lends his work a kind of dream like miasma that comes directly from their gestures of longing. Hawke reminds us that it was the poets, not the theorists, who first saw the world as Sign. So it is that, in the title poem, Aurelia, herself only an image, transforms the world for the poet, who enters ‘that forest / of symbols where everything coincides / These correspondences find their relation / in the name of the absent beloved, / as if the world of visible signs were itself / a vast and scattered alphabet, / out of which this lost word / might be recombined and rediscovered.’
‘It is a welcome development to have the online Cordite Review sensibility fixed in print, in a palpable way and on a graspable scale’
That is the general tenor of the book – dreaming of the imagined and lost, and trying to capture it, but ending with a handful of vague consonances. If that were all that was in play, it might all be too sonorous, as it is on occasion, but Hawke injects just enough of the un-Gallic and the modern to sharpen the senses.
At the rear of the book, as a counterweight, there is, first, ‘The Conscience of Avimael Guzman’, a longish poem that appears to be a psychodrama about that cold-eyed revolutionary, but feels more like a sustained psychoanalysis of poetry itself and its sociopathic, cannibalistic urges. Hawke’s book transmutes itself, mysteriously, from consideredness to a kind of rage: it is a rather frightening, but enjoyable process.
Enjoyment is not on offer to the reader or reviewer in Natalie Harkin’s Dirty Words ($20 pb, 56 pp, 9780994259639) and it would be jejune and defensive to seek it: this is a book of pain, anger, and declaration from an indigenous poet and artist. There is also love, of land and kin, and its expression is that of, as Harkin says, ‘a mournful rage with beauty and deep love between the lines to disrupt and transcend the pain and disdain’. The book is a kind of thesaurus of dispossession and insult, with entries from A to Z, but not in any particular order. So we have: ‘Apology’; ‘Land Rights’; ‘Xenophobia’; etc. – all ‘tagged’ at the foot of the page to connect to other poems and reinforce the ubiquity of the problem.
In many of the poems there is at the top a statement of the problem (for instance, in ‘History Wars’ a long and appalling collection of utterances from Christopher Pyne about history teaching), with a poetic riposte below. These are sometimes, however eloquent, overwhelmed by the initial quotation, which has already told us what is wrong in the clear and disdainful bark of the tone-deaf politician. The poems here feel almost helpless, even where they defeat the quote, as in ‘Mythology’, and it is only when Harkin writes directly of family, justice, or place, with no insult to gainsay, that the language takes off and becomes incantatory. In ‘Resistance’, the poet honours her Aunties, who have preserved culture and fought for justice and change, ‘These days / I think of Aunty Veronica / one of a kind / big-hearted-warrior woman / there is so much work to be done / and she / would sing-chant-rage and carry it all.’ Dirty Words is Natalie Harkin’s brave, shaky stab at living up to that, and she reminds herself and us that speaking up is hard and unsettling for all concerned.
Blue Note: Uncompromising Expression – The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 by Richard Havers
by Peter Kenneally •
Afour hundred-page Thames & Hudson hardback stuffed with photographs? A coffee table book, you might think. And you would be right, since this is a history of the most famous label in jazz – with no discography. But it is gorgeous, full of great images, the design matches the label’s style, and the book tells Blue Note’s history well for the lay jazz fan. We get anodyne liner notes rather than critical reviews of the featured albums, and Richard Havers’s style is that of an amiable journeyman, writing the required book cheerfully and efficiently. Still, the great quality that journeymen have is briskness and efficiency with facts – a surprisingly rare skill.
Alfred Lion, a Jewish refugee from Germany, arrived in New York in 1928, already keenly interested in jazz. He was also interested in art, and generally progressive. In 1939, just as Lion founded Blue Note, his friend Francis Wolff arrived: he would run Blue Note with Lion, and his photography would be an essential ingredient of its success.
The first label design, modernist, instantly recognisable and hardly changing over the years, was the first sign that Blue Note’s impact and legacy would be as much visual as musical. It was at this time that the famous ‘manifesto’ was issued: ‘Blue Note Records are designed to serve the uncompromising expressions of hot jazz, or swing. Direct and honest hot jazz is a way of feeling, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercialised adornments.’ The book tries valiantly to make Blue Note live up to this dictum, but the strain begins to show at the end.
‘Direct and honest hot jazz is a way of feeling, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse’
Wolff certainly followed his inclinations even when uncommercial, most notably giving Thelonious Monk his first opportunity to record in his own right, in 1952. Monk only made two records for Blue Note. Reading the book, one realises that the ground-breaking jazz artists are only present in passing, if at all. Miles Davis recorded with Blue Note in the early 1950s, but to no great effect, his most notable Blue Note appearance being as band member on Cannonball Adderley’s Something Else (1958). John Coltrane made only one album for the label, the much-loved Blue Trane. Sonny Rollins was briefly present. No Charles Mingus at all. There are some exceptions – Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures (1966) is one – but over-all the impression is inescapable.
The heart and soul of Blue Note were the straight-ahead hard bop ensemble men who could get in a groove and drive it, as well as exploring freer expressions. ‘Hard bop’, the label’s trademark style, can include soul, blues, gospel, Latin, or funk, increasing the accessibility of Blue Note’s output from the mid-1950s onwards. It is no accident that the quintessential Blue Note artist, Art Blakey, was a drummer, or that Jimmy Smith, almost pure groove, was one of their most prolific and lucrative artists.
It was in the mid-1950s that Reid Miles’s distinctive cover designs first appeared. Often using Francis Wolff’s photographs, with distinctive typography and often a blue or red wash, or stark black and white, there is no doubt that Miles was as much a star as the artists themselves. He is certainly the star of this book.
Looking at page after page of memorable albums with recognisable covers, Lion and Wolff’s achievement drives itself home: Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, Grant Green, Dexter Gordon, Freddie Hubbard, all timelessly preserved at maximum cool. As the 1960s wore on, Blue Note became a victim of changing tastes, and was sold to Liberty records in1966. Lion retired from Blue Note a year later, Reid Miles withdrew, and the label entered into a depressing era of corporate to-and-fro and of trying to be relevant, before becoming effectively dormant in 1977.
‘Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, Grant Green, Dexter Gordon, Freddie Hubbard, all timelessly preserved at maximum cool’
Havers makes no bones about the sad state of affairs that prevailed then, before the label began a long climb back to success following an increasing demand for both CD and vinyl re-releases, and with the boost given by acid-jazz and hip-hop artists sampling and remixing Blue Note records. What Havers brings out is that it was the 1970s Blue Note records, full of funk and fusion, and so often reviled by the technique-obsessed, ‘neo-classical’ bop revivalist faction in jazz, personified by Wynton Marsalis, that have had the most impact on these new artists. Donald Byrd, in particular, is hugely influential and has had the last laugh on his detractors.
This is an example of where the author’s desire to find the positive gives artists their due, but at the end of the book, firmly on the company clock, Havers scrabbles for superlatives, saying bathetically that one recent release is ‘as groovy as heck’. He does his duty, but the tone becomes increasingly hysterical, such as when he feels obliged to lambast the critics of Come Away With Me by Norah Jones, which, at twenty-five million copies and counting, is the Frampton Comes Alive of jazz, and is absolutely no one’s idea of ‘uncompromising expression’. There are some impressive artists on the roster: Gregory Porter and Cassandra Wilson stand out, especially Robert Glasper’s determination to reinvigorate and reinvent jazz. It is a fine thing that Blue Note has been resurrected by people like Michael Cuscuna and Don Was, full of enthusiasm for its history: but it is just another record label now.
Suite for Percy Grainger by Jessica L. Wilkinson
by Peter Kenneally •
Jessica L. Wilkinson won the 2014 Peter Porter Poetry Prize with ‘Arrival Platform Humlet’, a phantasmagoria of typographical and lexical invention whirling around a tune of the same name by Percy Grainger. This book performs the same service for his whole life and oeuvre, to stunning effect.
Grainger (1882–1961) is generally known as an interesting character first and a composer second. Wilkinson helpfully lists for us the various Percys on offer, among them the Folk-Song Collector, the Nordic, the Flagellant. This was a man who founded a museum in his own memory and who preserved a large part of the English folk tradition while also advocating ‘free’ machine-generated music.
Such a varied life called, in Wilkinson’s view, for equally varied and layered poetry. Suite for Percy Grainger does him more than proud. The events of the life are here, but are presented on the page almost as a musical score: text under text, lines sliding and rising, visual tricks, collages, whatever it takes to reproduce on the page the music and the strangeness of Grainger’s life, and ‘to evoke … a future performance, realised at the meeting of text and reader’.
Grainger was ahead of his time but also very much of it, as we can see in Wilkinson’s poetic version of his composition ‘The Warriors’: ‘Slow and languorous shot through with surging onslaughts / of nudism Fastand flowing to the bass oboe.’ There is a delightful excess of this sort of thing. There is also great charm in the way the pages look: artless, typewriter-ish, and not ‘designed’. They are reminiscent of Tom Phillips’s A Humument, and just as beguiling. In several cases, as with ‘Humlet’, the poetry flatters the music and reminds us that this is a suite for Percy Grainger, not by him – one that we can perform without intercession, just as he would have wished.
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