See, when I hand the pen
to the left-handed self
it holds it like the stump of a finger,
truncated and clumsy.
It would write backwards if it could,
unwriting the right hand’s
good intentions,
not this crabbed sideways stumble
that slows thought and finds,
unsought,
some other, awkward truth.
New and Selected Poems 1991-2017 by Alison Croggon
Newport Street Books, 2017
Alison Croggon has worked across many forms in her career, and connections to several are represented in these pages – the nine-part poem ‘Specula’, for example, comes from a larger work of the same title which also involves an essay and a radio play. Her previously published poetry collections are likewise represented. But there is no distinction in this new collection between these various sources from which Croggon has drawn – a deliberate choice she carefully underlines in her author’s note to this selection. In the acknowledgements, her own titles are grouped with that of the numerous journals she has published in, and given no special attention. There is no distinction in the table of contents or in the book’s design which demonstrates each poem’s source – the only overt indication is the inclusion of titular poems from previous collections. Recognition of these moreover confirms that the new collection is not arranged chronologically, or by any other immediately comprehensible logic. Something larger is at play in the construction of the collection than the ‘historicisation’ of a writing career.
The previously unpublished works included with the selection are not all new – as her note describes, Croggon has included ‘all the poems I care to remember. I wrote the earliest poem in this book when I was eleven, the most recent this year. Some, including older works, haven’t been previously published; some have been published many times.’ At 314 pages, it is a vast collection. Accentuating this is the scope of the poetry, which shifts across forms, themes and foci with dexterity. There is for example a thread of violence, regularly connected to patriarchal structures of sex and gender, which builds gradually and comes to lie alongside the experience of motherhood in a beautiful but disconcerting and often confronting way. The poem ‘For Ben’, roughly halfway through the collection, offers an example:
Child, the world is swelling, light wavers over your unblinking eyes, the ocean lifts you on dark mouths towards the sudden dawn when you’ll howl the sea out of your lungs and harden the air. To welcome you I have these eyes and fingers to open their delight on your sundered skin. They’ll fail, as all desire fails, breaking on the reef of human weariness and gathering past its violation to simplicity Perhaps. Here is a cushion of my blood
This concern with structures of the feminine spans the collection, and shifts subtly from the gentle embodiment of poems like ‘Owl Songs’ or ‘Communion’ (‘My flesh is sad with itself, it walks in the garden / heavy and opaque, an insoluble riddle’), to the open feminist politics of ‘Songs of a Dictator’, especially ‘1. He woos his mistress’. Powerful female figures abound – Persephone, Medea, Yseult, Euterpe and Cassandra all feature.
But this is not the only, nor always the dominant theme. As Euterpe’s presence suggests, a sense of joy in art of all forms emerges regularly through a rich and challenging intertext—poems cite sources from Rilke to popular television. Nature is also an important force, and unflinching. In ‘Bird’:
The bird is a deep and troublesome fidelity. Even as maggots crawl through its braincase, it is still bird. In the skirl of storm it is bird, torn feathers, tiny bones, breasting the weight of air.
It is possible to read the collection in terms of the thematic, stylistic and emotional connections which Croggon cites as having structured her ordering of the works. But in another way, I also found myself resisting anything so active in the reading. The impression of narrative logic which emerged at points felt like a false temptation. Instead, again and again, I found myself wanting to play passive witness to the text, to take it as an offering on its own terms – in Croggon’s words, as ‘a new body of work that, like memory itself, exists spatially rather than sequentially’. This is a collection which finds structure in speaking to the experience of a life in words.
In an interview for Cordite Poetry Review with Kate Middleton in 2001, when asked about the diversity of her artistic outputs, and whether she considered poetry as her primary form, Croggon agreed that: ‘Poetry’s the first thing I did, and I think psychically it’s just in the middle, and everything else is related to it, branches out from it.’ The scope of this collection, representing the majority of Croggon’s life and testifying to the significance of her poetic output, can be read to stand then as this ‘physic middle’ in textual form. Like memory, it is fluid, richly imagistic, and has an intense and at times unsettling capacity for contradiction – in ‘Notes’:
little delicate animal your thin shoulders press against my belly the bones of your face stand out like an adult’s and your neck that white naked stem is laid across my thigh as if I could protect you
Moments when the poetry approaches the melodramatic seem to push towards the subconscious, playing on the notion of the hysterical to suggest the capacity within the psyche for panic or pain. In the poem ‘Mnemosyne’, for example:
she writhes into the mystery of her body herself dissolves and remakes itself will not be still won’t stop it’s eating her it’s closed her up she’s lost inside alone she hurts there are no words there is no hand no tongue no god no hate no love nothing to save her a crush a must a burn afraid a breath a
The lyric voice varies in its rhythms and pace but is more consistent in its timbre: the ‘grain’ of the voice is recognisable, and the work carries always a power for moments of both strength and sympathy. Form, too, shifts in subtle ways: the minimalism of ‘Attempts at being’ sits beside the more expansive ‘Beginning again’, a work taken from the same collection, but shifted into new relation in the re-ordering. Similarly, the tense energy of ‘Aubade’, tightly constrained in two couplets, is followed by the slowly building, twelve-part release of ‘Divinations’. Even when visible and connected, the themes and images move in and out of focus. In all these ways, the collection reads as an intense exploration of self. But its cohesion, paradoxically, is a product of its fluidity – it works in recognition of a life’s inconsistencies, of the manner in which the self can change, as much as it offers an image of a complete and contained poetic ‘I’.
Anatomy of a Metaphor by Peter Goldsworthy
Garron Press, 2017
The Quality of Light by Jill Jones
Garron Press, 2017
Thump by Heather Taylor Johnson
Garron Press, 2017
Garron Publishing was started in 2010 by Gary MacRae and Sharon Kernott as a means of self-publishing work, but has since expanded into a successful run of poetry chapbooks by established and emerging South Australian poets. This Southern-Land Poets series is a return to the original pamphlets traditionally sold in fifteenth century England by ‘chapmen’, and as such, their unassuming bindings do not necessarily connote the quality of their contents.
Anatomy of a Metaphor (and other poems) by Peter Goldsworthy is split into in three sections. The first, the ‘Anatomy of a Metaphor’ sequence, is a searing, seven-part poem focused on the human heart. It not only stretches the limits of a poet’s metaphorical ability, but also creates an intra-poetic dialogue between the ‘diastole’ and ‘systole’ beats. There is a hypnotic rhythm on a macro level, alternating between the relentless images of the systole and the distanced observations of the diastole. ‘2. Systole’ is a good example of Goldsworthy’s seemingly bottomless well of metaphors:
Red centre of a growing iron-red continent, epicentre of small-magnitude non-stop body-quakes, plum-coloured boab bulb with thick upspreading roots, multi-tentacled squid-head squirting jets of red ink
Goldsworthy’s relentless litany is evocative but also thought provoking. Under Aristotelian thought, the Ancient Greeks gave the heart the prime place in human biology; it was the source of life but also the centre of all thoughts and feelings. Goldsworthy’s sequence provokes a realisation of the beauty of the heart and all that it does, and also how often we do not think about it. It beats along without us needing to.
But Goldsworthy is not only writing about the heart, he is also writing about metaphors themselves, so that the human anatomy that forms the subject matter of his metaphors is also, when viewed from the ‘diastole’, a commentary on the nature of metaphors themselves. ‘3. Diastole’ is a particularly arresting example:
The metaphor keeps order in a society that is only an arrest or two away from anarchy
Goldsworthy employs the same general style of writing in the second section of the chapbook, but applied to other body parts. His eight-part poem titled ‘Hand’ is another example of his astounding ability to provoke self-reflection through imagery:
Hand is our far-flung frontier reaching across the limits of words the border of our matter […] our mariner our voyager our miniaturized self crossing the outer silence the empty space between the worlds
Poems of Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio & Jorge Palma
Edited and translated by Peter Boyle
Vagabond Publishing, 2017
In 2017, Vagabond Press launched its Americas Poetry Series. This is a brave and much needed venture, one that borders on the quixotic: an Australian editor offering publications from poets from the Americas to the Australian reading public, for the love of poetry and the art of translation. So far, the series has three excellent entries focused on the translation of Spanish language Latin American poets into English. Notably, all three books in the series consist of translations by translators who are themselves poets. They seize the creative potential of the translating act, producing poems that walk the fine-line between the languages and cultures of the original and the translated texts, while seeking to conserve the imagery, expression and rhythm of the poems. Given that many of the translations published so far stem from the baroque to the vanguardist schools of poetry, it is no small feat that the books present readable, engaging translations that retain the playfulness, the shock, the allure and ambience of the originals. Though this review concerns the first publication in the series, it must be noted that it has continued successfully, with the two latest publications being Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón, focusing on a selection of Mexican poetry (reviewed in these pages by Gabriel García Ochoa), and the haunting Jasmine for Clementina Médici by the Uruguayan Marosa di Giorgio, with a foreword by notable poet, translator and academic, Roberto Echevarren.
Poems of Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio & Jorge Palma is selected and translated by Peter Boyle and consists of a selection from these three poets from Argentina and Uruguay. Boyle is himself a distinguished Australian poet and translator, with a long-running relationship with Latin American poetry, having previously translated poems by the Cuban José Kozer and the Venezuelan Eugenio Montejo, amongst others. Adorned with a beautiful photograph of a Uruguayan cottage taken by fellow Australian poet Stuart Cooke, that, with its ochre and blue tones, accentuates the connections between these distant souths (Australia-South America) and offers a glimpse of idyll that connects with the romantic tendencies of some of the contents. Yet, acting as the proverbial calm before the storm, this idyll also presages the turbulence of the pages to come. That is because Boyle’s book provides an eccentric, alchemical, if not iconoclastic selection that chooses the path of discovery, adventure and mysticism. To aid the reader, Boyle provides an excellent introduction that serves to not only to introduce the poets, but also contextualises the work of the three poets by placing them in their respective poetic traditions. Boyle’s introduction also addresses the task of translation itself, presenting different difficulties in each of the three cases. However concerned Boyle may be about those things that are lost in translation (rhyme, sound play), his anthology presents a delightful set of translations that read well, and most importantly, represent three different twentieth century conceptions of the poetic in Latin America: those who took up the call of surrealism, represented by Olga Orozco; the neo-baroque and experimental, in Marosa di Giorgio; and the conversational, socially engaged poetry in the poems of Jorge Palma. These are three forking paths that lead into different traditions that are well worth exploring.
The book begins with a selection of poetry by Orozco (1920-1999), and whose poems are carefully chosen from a lifetime of poetic practice, including a poem dedicated to her dead brother Emilio, dating from 1946, to the poet’s last verses, published posthumously in 2009. Orozco’s ‘Cartomancy’ sets the tone for what is to come, with its dense and dreamlike images and allusions to the world of the magical. In Orozco’s poems, this is a world where both poet and the reader are subjected to the twists and turns of fate and are surrounded by its symbols, often as jarringly juxtaposed as the twists of fate itself. Orozco was involved in Argentina’s Tercera Vanguardia, a vanguardist movement that drank heavily from the well of surrealism, embracing its formal experimentation and tendency to the violent juxtaposition of incongruent imagery. Perhaps, however, the most marked influence from the surrealists in Latin America was its play with the unconscious and its trust in dream imagery. Orozco takes from these traditions and filters them through images, experiences and places from her own past. As a result, there is in Orozco’s poems a marked tendency towards the magical and the fantastic. According to Boyle, Orozco’s faith in the magical stems from her own childhood through the figure of her grandmother who inculcated her with a belief in the magical and in the talismanic, in symbols, herbs and indecipherable turns of phrase. Orozco’s poems embrace these elements and render them on the page in the service of exploring her own recurring themes. There is in all of her poetry a fascination with both the fantastic and the fatalistic that is coupled with an exploration of the poet’s interior worlds. These are worlds marked by nostalgia for long-gone people and places of the poet’s past: the Argentine Pampa where the childhood home once stood; death; the animal-world, and the spaces once inhabited. Notably, many of Orozco’s poems are dedicated to the dead, ‘For Emilio in his Heaven’, ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ and ‘Cantos a Berenice’ are dedicated to her dead younger brother, to Alejandra Pizarnik and to Orozco’s cat. Orozco’s recurrent themes lead the poet to her own images and symbols of the plains, the elements of nature, the seasons, dogs, talismans, stones and snouts that “steal your breath”. Orozco puts these images to use to create a multifaceted image of reality, characterised as a space ruled by fate; a space in which one must attempt to decipher the runes of chance. Orozco explores this dynamic in ‘Mutations of Reality’:
Like me a captive, with constellations and ants,
perhaps inside a glass ball where souls wander,
I’ve seen reality shrink and take the form of puny Jonah
inside the whale
or endlessly expand into that skin which, in a stream of
vapour, breathes out all the sky:
indissoluble stowaway groping through the bilge water of the
unknown
or all-encompassing beast at the moment of exploding
against the wire fence around limbo […]
Like me, protector of one of destiny’s indecipherable masks,
Reality dresses up as a witch and with a sigh transforms
dazzling birds to legions of rats,
or puts all of yesterday’s and tomorrow’s wine in a pot to
evaporate
Glass by Rose Hunter
Five Islands Press, 2017
Glass is a collection of elegiac poems, a memoir of free verse about the poet’s travels through Mexico and her own debilitating ailment. The ‘you’ in book is addressed with a certain fondness (‘where are you / i feel of course now we would have the most wonderful conversation’) and an intimacy that suggests the poet is speaking to someone she was once romantically involved with:
thinking of things i had to tell you and what would you say and how you would laugh
The first poem ‘mixquic’ is addressed to ‘sean’, whom the book is also, in part, dedicated to: ‘for sean, again / for mum and dad’. The ‘you’ in the poems, it might be assumed, is Sean.
There are many allusions to Sean’s death. Whereas in ‘yellow’ Hunter makes reference – although not necessarily literal – to ‘cancers’, in ‘el edén’ Sean’s passing is the result of an accident:
magic wand bridge one-eyed fence canyon plunge buggy
tiny flimsy that killed you
There is also a passage that expresses guilt about the death of an intimate partner – presumably Sean – from alcoholism:
then i will bathe you clothe you feed you wash the dishes
hide the bottles take out the empties
call the doctor tie you down. now i will reel you back
from your brink.
Sean is the addressee of most of the poems and in this sense the book reads like a letter to the departed. Glass, however, is by no means epistolary in form or style:
(i would not interrupt say less backstory say
cut to the chase say what is the point
of this story or i would but that
would be okay too)
Often Hunter’s verse is conversational, but certain passages are also lyrical, somewhat oneiric, and almost surrealist:
the dragon head on your chicken back
turkey feet and cowrie legs. wattle dewlap quill cuttle
ventricular, come i will dab you bib you
we will be like the children we never were. show me
your pony gait your ice cream cone fur and jester ears
Many of the poems, such as ‘bajío’, include uncredited epigraphs:
– the exhibition was about lost things you see. leashes slack on the ground.
Perhaps the epigraphs are fragments of overheard conversation, or words written by Hunter herself as ‘quotations’ of divergent voices or viewpoints. The epigraph in ‘bajío’ seems to suggest the existence of an escaped dog and, like most of the epigraphs in Glass, has an equivocal connection to the poem itself, which begins:
if we take a lobster for a walk well how to put that harness and can they even go on land and for how long? would they break their feet?
This passage, which could be observed as somewhat of a departure from personal narrative voice that continues more or less throughout the collection, brings to mind Gérard de Nerval, the nineteenth-century French poet who is said to have taken a lobster on a blue ribbon for a walk through Paris. Also, it is reminiscent in certain ways of Gabriel García Márquez. Hunter normalises the lobster on a leash with her conversational tone (‘can they even go on land … ?’) in much the same way as Márquez uses fairly ordinary language to describe fantastic occurrences. Hunter’s lobster on a leash is by no means physically implausible or as irrefutably surrealist as, say, García Márquez’s story ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ in which an angel falls from the sky during a storm, but the two are comparable in their use of dry, pragmatic language that draws the reader into an imagined realm:
He argued that if wings were not the essential elements in determining the difference between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels.
In Hunter’s poem, however, the fantasy lasts for less than a stanza before she flips into stream of consciousness:
[…] i ate squid dashed against the rocks
with a specified promptness or precision or something
for it to taste a certain way or something.
[…] look
i have eaten lobster only twice and still don’t know what it
tastes like.
Elsewhere in the book, Hunter’s recollections of Sean and Mexico are often nostalgic, but ‘bajío’ is decidedly unsentimental:
listen. if you are talking to a person on the street one day and the next day they go out and die like going for a hamburger or barbacoa [barbeque] like big deal they just go.
Hunter, particularly in the ‘brisbane’ chapter, also refers to her own encumbering illness: ‘we just don’t know why / i have dead legs’. At the same time, however, the speaker is incapable of forgetting Sean:
if i could go back to that day. i would do more than take a picture of you
Hunter’s use of form – the indented lines, the large gaps within the lines, the relentless enjambment – is central to her stream of consciousness style. In ‘wickham terrace’, among other poems, the sentences are enjambed not only over lines and stanzas, but also over numbered sections:
i.
[…] my father whistles through his teeth
lifts one foot, then the other touches his hand
to his mouth, his glance a thrown bus. time
ii.
is lost no matter how you lived it
The rarity of end-stopped lines and the way in which Hunter positions the sentences across the page accentuates the free associative design of her syntax. When end-stopped lines are included (‘did they not fight enough / did they not love enough’) they are all the more forceful. The fact that Hunter uses enjambment across numbered sections and their respective page breaks and the way she often begins poems with ‘and’ or ‘or’ contribute to the impression that even though there are 21 poems divided into three chapters (‘mexico city’, ‘jalisco’, and ‘brisbane’) Glass in many ways reads like one extended poem. The extent to which Glass is autobiographical is of course irrelevant, but the personal and somewhat regretful tone that pervades the collection make the poems nearly always compelling.
River’s Edge by Owen Bullock
Recent Work Press, 2016
Owen Bullock stated in his ‘The Breath of Haiku’ article in Aoeteroa that ‘the modern haiku can be about anything, not just nature’. Readers of his previous collection, Urban Haiku (Recent Work Press, 2015), will be well aware of this position. Preferring to focus on the human and blur the distinctions between haiku and senyrū, haiku of human nature as opposed to the world, Bullock’s latest collection, River’s Edge lends itself well to investigations of textual forms.
old notebook his daughter's recipe
The individual lines featured on the back cover hint at what lurks beneath the surface of River’s Edge: a focussed recollection of the wisdom and experiences of a variety of people that brings together multiple viewpoints at once. Like a recipe followed by heart, unpretentious and yet demanding, each poem represents the attempt to preserve the moment – at a loss to see clearly beyond the titular river’s edge:
some of the waves overtaking the others (55)
Above all, the collection’s appearance is deceptive – while the haiku are characteristically brief and simple, they are intricately crafted and mindful as memories resurface and are subsequently overtaken, as expressed by the overtaking waves of the poem above. Sometimes as unobtrusive as a passing phrase about cleaning the mantel within someone’s home, the text demonstrates the advantage of a form that omits so much and yet hints at what is left unsaid, as revealed within the establishing haiku:
dusting her little vases this is my devotion (3)
By no means the last poem about seemingly irrelevant moments that at times evade understanding, words are rendered particulate within these fragments, the lines unstable and language suggestive of the personal. From the first page, Bullock appeals to the reader to not simply be satisfied with aphoristic haiku, inviting them to peer beyond what is printed on the page and read between and across the lines. For example, consider the following poems:
New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Day the unlit candle old clocks that don’t work top his kitchen cupboards (38-39)
In these two instants, the reader gets the sense that each line could be interchanged, omitted or exchanged within the individual haiku and considered a stanza within a larger poem. The potential of the ‘unlit candle’ in the concluding line of the first haiku to also serve as the establishing line in the adjacent poem is refreshing and reveals the multiplicity at the centre of the text, the potential for a myriad of interpretations and perspectives. These meditations on memory celebrate dislocation and uncertainty. Despite the repetitions of ‘I’ and ‘my’, the collection seems to relinquish a sense of possession:
walking a road I drive daily nothing familiar (25)
In this instance, Bullock suggests an ever-evolving experience and perception, one that is simultaneously informed by the speaker and referential to the reader. The reader approaches the collection with their own experiences and memories, ‘walking a road / I drive daily’ and Bullock, considering these several perspectives, offers ambiguity, ‘nothing familiar’, leaving readers with the feeling that what they’ve just read might be their own recollection. Suggestions for co-creation are hinted at in the text’s lack of a context or titles, in what might be considered an attempt to disavow ownership of words or narrative. Consider the following, from the middle of the collection:
somewhere in that mass of cloud a few of your cells (51)
Above all, these meditations on individual and collective memory centre on the creation of a nebulous and subjective experience for the potential reader. This is not to say that Bullock doesn’t make space to return to tradition, such as in the vertical poems that appear in the collection:
avoiding the bumps mascara in progress (57)
These poems serve similar objectives to the poems described above, but Bullock’s decision to write certain haiku vertically may be considered a return to traditional Japanese haiku structure. The decision represents a further challenge to readerly expectations. With no syntax and cut to infer tone or emphasis, the reader determines the rhythm. The implications of these unfolding observations are determined by and revealed according to decisions known only to each individual reader.
It is the collection’s unpredictability and capacity to ‘reanimate old meanings and words to reflect radically new contexts’ (‘The Breath of the Haiku’, 48) that makes River’s Edge worth reading more than once. Held in an opaque, regenerative temporality, the instants sustained within this simple paperback are brief, captivating and ever evolving:
getting younger
each day that passes
river’s edge
for Caron (33).
Cordite is chuffed (once again) to announce that, joining Rosalind McFarlane, Amelia Dale and Joan Fleming as commissioning editors, Prithvi Varatharajan is joining the Cordite Poetry Review fold as commissioning editor for media poetry.
Prithvi Varatharajan holds a PhD from the University of Queensland, where he completed a thesis on the adaptation of contemporary Australian poetry by ABC RN’s Poetica, paying particular attention to its adaptations of John Forbes, Ouyang Yu, Vicki Viidikas and Ali Cobby Eckermann. He is a producer of cultural radio programs and audio books, and has produced for Red Room Company, RN’s Poetica, Earshot, Lingua Franca, Weekend Arts and First Person. His writing (poetry, reviews, interviews, scholarship) has appeared in journals including Adaptation, Cultural Studies Review, The Quarterly Conversation, Mascara Literary Review, Asymptote, Island and Cordite Poetry Review.
Cartoon Snow by Aidan Coleman
Garron Publishing, 2015
South Australian poet Aidan Coleman’s previous book of poetry, Asymmetry, was published in 2012. It charts Coleman’s traumatic experience of a stroke, and the resulting loss of symmetry in his body, life and writing. The book strings together revelations made startling through poetic bluntness, from the initial shock of incapacitation to the excruciation of gradual rehabilitation. However, physical damage was not Coleman’s main worry, but rather loss of language. He conveyed his anxiety in an interview: ‘a poem relies on metaphor … if you don’t get that real high … you’ll never write a poem’. Happily, these fears were alleviated with Asymmetry, which not only teems with astonishing and idiosyncratic figures of speech, but also operates as an entreaty for readers to think about illness anew.
Published three years later, Cartoon Snow demonstrates Coleman’s enduring acuity. The 17-poem chapbook is thematically lighter than Asymmetry, but it does not lack in an underlying philosophical enquiry. The cover features ‘The Spirit of The Time’, Charles Gibson’s 1910 whimsical illustration depicting a joyful child being pulled along on a sleigh by an equally joyful relative. Windows are coated with heavy snow but there is no indication of malcontent. Cartoon snow, evidently, appears different to factual snow. The sharper edges of reality are softened by the gentle pixellation of a romantic, pictorial focus rendering the subject innocuous. The cover is apt for a collection that asks questions about simulacra.
The book opens with the titular poem ‘Cartoon Snow’, where the speaker observes a freezer packed with ice that is difficult to dislodge. Coleman writes: ‘You realise the benefits of cartoon snow’, drawing the reader’s attention to the notion that literary illusion often softens the blow of existence, the freezer a signifier for life’s hardships. The poem instantiates this act of softening but also offers a reflexive vision on how these metaphors are produced. They are as ironic as they are romantic: ‘Sugar cubes of igloo bricks … / dazzling acres, you would dress for’. Such lines juxtapose a contradiction between what we know to be true, and what we wish to be true. It is unlikely you would actually have a desire to dress for the necessary realities of a very snowy day.
‘Cartoon Snow’ sets the tone for the upcoming pages, as we are pulled into a shared, tacit knowledge of how poetry works upon us. The paradox in romantic irony is at play as the poem drifts into the phantasmagoria of the ‘snowy night’ of Anglo-American poetic tradition. The drift brings to mind such antiques as Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and Emily Dickinson’s ‘Snow Flakes’, operating within a snow-globe of ethereal, exquisite phrases. The phrases engender marvel and lift us up above the mundane, yet they can also trap us in a frozen, false perception of safety. Coleman’s poem offers similar repose from the actualities beyond – such as a snowy night that is bitterly cold and painful to trudge through:
How gently it erases fox-prints and sleigh-tracks, the stamp of hoof
The speaker expresses dyadic desire: for poems to convey brilliant verisimilitude, but also for a heightened version of our world. We are in want of cartoon snow because such representations ease ‘the vexatious sharp edges of our pasts’. It offers a respite from relentless facts and rationalism. The speaker admits that it is tempting and pleasurable to ‘retire/once more to the puffing cottage, its windows a blazing/ marmalade’. The huskies inside are peaceful as they ‘settle for the uncluttered life’, an admission that brings the poem full circle in its contrast to the early image of the cluttered fridge. Poetic illusion is a kind of truth, Coleman seems to say, and it occupies the edges of the corporeal to ease our lives as we graze against them.
‘Sideshow’ is Coleman’s playful exploration of an Australian Christmas, in which he writes of a ‘Christmas down by the river’ where the carols are distinctly Australian, in a location that cannot achieve the illusion of a wintry and cosy European Christmas: ‘ice-cream van carols/pour into evening’. Such European notions are irrelevant in Australia’s heat and among its plethora of unique native animals. Coleman points out ‘kangaroos instead of reindeer’, and the unintended blasphemy of the nativity display where ‘an echidna, a wombat, and a platypus’ brings the baby Jesus his gifts. This deliberate hybridisation operates through comic images, but the evident delight in this feels radical. Coleman displays his uncanny wit in the last stanza, as a sudden vagary reveals his fondness for it all:
Is it the joy of their delirium that makes it look so much like looting? Anyway, we liked it .
Such examinations continue in ‘Barbarian Studies’, which takes the everyday scene of supervising a child and deploys it to break down the illusion of stereotypical masculinity. Here, masculinity is stripped from the male parent and comically endowed to his child. The parent imagines himself carrying out a more ‘manly’ activity elsewhere, which could be singing drunkenly like ‘a coachman circa 1840’, or in a Viking boat rowing hard. The poem surprises as it illuminates the title’s significance: when one thinks of barbarian, one usually thinks of someone who dominates through aggression. But is that not an apt description of many children loose in a playground? Certainly, they invade and conquer such areas. However, and this is the hinge on which the poem pivots, they still need their parents to propel them and assist their navigation. They may behave like Vikings, but as Coleman grudgingly remarks: ‘the Vikings … at least did their own rowing’.
The concluding poem ‘Diagram and Leaf’ is a fitting, meditative moment among the comical metaphors and metaphysical questions. It addresses more directly the longing for truth in the semblances of poetry. After the disruption of poetic liberties, Coleman reveals an admiration for the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ – as Coleridge famously called it in 1817 – employed by readers to truly appreciate the poem’s interpretation of the world. Coleman admits to ‘tricks on paper’, but such tricks and illusions are celebrated in ‘Diagram and Leaf’. The water ‘sparkles’ – it is not grey and dull, and we arrive at who we are by asking why we value this. What lies beneath ‘obsidian and mirror’ is not how we are, but how we long to be – the world remade through our submersions in poetry. Coleman has not lost his touch for singular metaphors. As he deconstructs the role of such metaphors in this exceptional chapbook, these poems invite us to question our perceptions of reality, heightening our understanding of what we often need the world to be, even if only as ‘tricks on paper’.
In Some Ways Dingo by Melody Paloma
Rabbit Poetry, 2017
The cover of Melody Paloma’s first poetry collection, In Some Ways Dingo, is a work by the artist Emma Finneran called ‘Into Stella.’ It’s formed from acrylic, ink and pastel on cotton drop cloth. Finneran’s work is interested in the material possibilities of drop-cloths: cloths typically instrumentalised into catching ‘the excess paint from Mum’s feature wall’ (in Finneran’s words) and to be eventually ‘rendered forgotten, formless, shapeless, degraded – to be dropped.’ Finneran’s practice reanimates and repurposes drop sheets into paintings, embellishing aleatory markings. The green and purple brush stripe near the centre of the cover art of Paloma’s book, for instance, elaborates on accidental strokes to create a marking that gestures towards a street strip, evoking the way In Some Ways Dingo drives its reader across the page. This is a poetry collection that Sian Vate suggests doubles as a ‘road movie’ (Melbourne launch speech, 2017). In any case, this cover displays discarded detritus as productive of making, meaning and abstraction. Finneran’s practice is both procedural and unruly freeform. Thick with the textures and the robust practicalities of art making, Finneran’s work mirrors as much as it frames In Some Ways Dingo.
Paloma’s poetry picks up and repurposes found phrases from youtube videos, a NSW government website ‘Wild About Whales’, pop culture refuse, and roadside waste. There’s a ‘catalogue / for the front yard of that one house on the street’. The ‘catalogue … in part includes:’
waffle maker toilet seat amplifier tarpaulin dog food pink cot tyre bird of paradise doona (‘Small acts of self-preservation,’)
Loni Jeffs notes how, in Paloma’s book, ‘[i]nteractions with people are sparse, but the objects that they leave behind are present ‘in piles.’ Paloma’s poetry involves piling objects upon the page, usually compartmentalised with line breaks, but sometimes with commas as well, as in the case of ‘gum wrappers, receipts, packs of Panadol / and once, a stuffed crocodile,’ (‘On reality tv,’). The poems ‘Itemise lives spilled out’, an itemisation that involves naming, gathering and ordering things, even annotating specific features of interest, with a spacing that suggests a ‘notes’ column next to the items catalogued:
shell pond shoe baby wheelbarrow bottle with a crook neck now toxic (‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme’)
Paloma’s use of poetic catalogue as a kind of documentation of detritus could be read through the non-fiction poetry framework of the Rabbit Poetry Journal’s Poets Series (this book is number 9). At the same time, though the poems incorporate lists within themselves, the poems are not themselves lists, or rather, in their reading, they rapidly move back and forth from being lists to being less list-like, suggesting by doing so the way narrative, description, lyric, road movie can be boiled down to an itemised catalogue for a ‘knick-knackatorium’ (‘A letter in three parts or more’).
Returning to Finneran’s drop-sheet: it is also a useful reference point for In Some Ways Dingo because of the way these poems persistently return to what falls downwards, what is buried, and what it might mean to fall into the ground, ‘swallowed by pavement’ (‘Sinkhole Poem’), ‘Edge sinks back into the / Ground’ (‘Periphery’). This book is animated by the injunction to: ‘remember all things come from the ground’ (‘Olympic Australis’).
The poem ‘Special Values and Characteristics’ reads, in part:
Significant geomorphical interest; with attributes not yet fully identified but which may include important fossil or sub-surface features. Specialised habitat for plants and animals. A geological resource that may have mining potential.
These lines, along with the title of the poem ‘Special Values and Characteristics,’ are taken entire from the Lake Gairdner National Park Management Plan from the Adelaide Department for Environmental Language and Heritage (2004). The only alteration is the excision of bullet points. Repurposing the language of the state, forcing us to read a government document as poetry, Paloma’s poem displays, with the arresting force of an open -cut mine, the way culture, environment, country becomes reduced into points of profit potential. The poem does not end with the words of the state: rather, set apart from the rest of the poem in italics, the repurposed material potentially functions as a page-long epigraph to a poem that registers a space ‘where the ground closes in’.
Paloma’s powerful use of ‘Remaindered, devalued goods’ as fodder for ecological and political poetry could be situated within the avant-garde aesthetic category of the ‘stale’. In a review in Cordite Poetry Review of Emily Stewart’s recent book, Knocks. Paloma describes Stewart as part of a ‘new wave of avant-garde poetry in Australia’ but that Stewart’s poetic processes simultaneously resist being boxed into a singular movement or community. Just like Stewart’s work, Paloma’s work can also be cited as part of a ‘new wave’ of Australian poetry and resists easy categorisation. I’m also thinking here of Paloma’s gripping experimental performance at her Sydney launch of the long closing poem of the collection ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme,’ where she squatted, jumped, crunched and ran her way through the poem. I think here also of her durational performance piece hosted by SOd, ‘Some Days’ taking place over the course of this year, a long poem which is written or edited every day of 2018. At the time of this review’s writing it is divided into monthly segments, each radically different from the last. But this of course is entirely subject to change. In Some Ways Dingo embraces lexical shifts on the level of the line, through the poem, across the page, between poems. Language tugs in multiple directions, across different spaces/places, moving beyond, through, away and deep beneath.
Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017
Philip Morrissey and Tyne Daile Sumner, eds
re.press Publishing, 2017
To begin this review, I would like to make the most important of declarations and acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which this review was written; and would like to thank Narungga scholar, writer and poet Natalie Harkin for having assisted in the editorial process. I would also like to acknowledge and pay respects to Lionel Fogarty, the Yoogum language group from South Brisbane, and the Kidjela people of North Queensland, whose inestimable linguistic, cultural and spiritual legacy is clear in Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017.
The publication of this collection marks a retrospective moment for the Australian literary landscape. Lionel Fogarty, born in South Burnett in Southern Queensland, is a poet praised by John Kinsella as ‘the greatest living “Australian” poet’ (2013, 190). The controversial writer, Colin Johnston, also described Fogarty in 1990 as ‘Australia’s strongest poet of Aboriginality’ (26). (Colin Johnston is also known by the name of Mudrooroo, or Mudrooroo Narogin, an act that is seen by many as a misappropriation of the Nyoongar language.) I mention Johnston’s voice above many more fitting critics in this review to juxtapose Johnston’s and Fogarty’s fortunes in the last two decades as somewhat of a tragicomic mirror of the Australian literary landscape and our need to seek out an ‘authentic’ indigenous Australian voice. I write in heed of the deeply tenuous position Johnston occupies in Australian literature as explored by Anita Heiss in her book, Dhuuluu-Yala: To Talk Straight (2003). Heiss posits that from the time of Johnson publishing of Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature in the early 1990s, ‘he was regarded as the authority on Aboriginal writing, and anything associated with it’ (4). When Johnston’s authority to speak on Indigenous Australian issues came under question in the years to come, the fallout regarding his lack of consultation and misappropriation caused an indelible impression upon our conception of indigeneity. Such debates over identity politics and cultural authenticity have changed how we read the work of Indigenous Australian writers – creating an obsessively objective distance that misleads us from the real conditions of writing, as well as obscuring the literary production of unabashedly indigenous voices. I would argue that this is certainly the case with regards to Lionel Fogarty, one of the most unrewarded and unrecognised figures in Australian and World Literature.
In Fogarty’s poem, ‘Finalist Unnamed’, a previously unpublished work included in this collection, he writes satirically of his omission from the ‘honour-roll’ of literary prizes: ‘My name is now the finalists unnamed? Ha’. The irony in these lines speaks to Fogarty’s imagined opposition to white Australian society, as well as his management of the distance between himself as an Indigenous Australian activist from the literary community. These seeming tensions reflect many of the frailties of the Australian literary landscape; the inability for indigeneity to be properly conceived of and read adequately in mainstream literary landscapes and markets, the literary-suicide of labelling oneself an ‘activist and poet’ to a wider Australian readership, and further, a lack of proper close engagement with Fogarty’s poems themselves. This review intends to grapple with these incongruities and signal, perhaps ambitiously, a trail that leads in to Fogarty’s nebulous, and yet, capacious collection.
The editors, Philip Morrissey and Tyne Daile Sumner, have collated both published and previously unpublished poems. The latter have been edited and published with close involvement from Fogarty himself. In this manner, Fogarty’s involvement as a co-editor and poet answers Peter Minter’s call for ‘a renewed ethical and aesthetic architecture’ (2013, 157). The poems are ordered in distinct periods where Fogarty was said to be particularly prolific: 1980-1995, 2004-2012 and 2013-2017. While this periodisation of Fogarty’s works may run the risk of emphasising perpetually relevant concepts (such as deaths of Indigenous Australians while in police custody or political representation) within discrete periods of production (many of the themes, phrasings and poetic rhythms are returned to, after decades), this structure offers a chance of seeing Fogarty’s images and turns-of-phrase evolve. This is particularly true of the 1980-1995 poems, a period described as a ‘high point’ for Fogarty while working alongside one-time partner, co-editor and publisher, Cheryl Buchanan, of the Kooma Nation in South Queensland. Buchanan’s work as an editor and publisher is significant for this section. A leader in her own right, Buchanan almost single-handedly published Fogarty’s first volume of poetry, Kargun, in 1980, stating in the official launch of the Yoogum Yoogum collection in 1982, that no publisher wanted to touch such ‘heavy political material’ (n.p.). It was her belief in Fogarty’s revolutionary style of writing as speaking rather than writing that moulded these poems, laying the foundation for his future work. In the foreword to the Nguti collection published two years later (1984), Buchanan would state: ‘Lionel regards himself as “a speaker, not a writer”, and does not like to be categorised as a “poet”’ (n.p). This sense of frustration against the identity of a ‘writer’ pervades Fogarty’s earlier poems. That is not to say that Fogarty’s poems can be read as discrete, singular entities. For instance, the demands of activism that pervade his earlier work transform into renewed decolonial thinking in the areas of education, Trans-indigenous solidarity and the historicising of Indigenous Australian activism. In this way, Fogarty performs a metaphorical encircling of his own position, what the Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant described as a reconstituted echo or a spiral retelling’ (1997, 16) regarding his own returns to earlier works. Morrissey himself notes that in revising each of the poems into English for publication, ‘the selection process has been complicated by Fogarty’s habit of revising and recycling sections of poems’ (Morrissey 19). As readers, then, we are privy to the forming up of Fogarty’s oeuvre in real-time. Such a re-processing, a spiral retelling of language-events, makes this collection of poems doubly worthwhile.
A reader might perceive, for instance, that the metaphorical implication of ‘death’ in the early poems – for instance in ‘Do Yourself a Favour, Educate Your Mind’ – differs greatly to the later poem, ‘Signing My Death Lionel and Hell’ (another example might be his variance in using the word ‘academic’ as the collection draws on.) In the former, ‘death’ acts as a metaphorical removal of Anglicised Australian identity imposed upon Fogarty in his being brought up in Cherbourg Mission: ‘(I) wrote my death in/George the Third’. In the latter, Fogarty imagines himself as a dying lion, Lionel literally translated to ‘Lion and Hell’ in order to convey his cyclical rebirth in the natural world, dying as a physically embodied writer, but eternalising himself through the potentially infinite re-readings of his works:
With my thousand words the dead woods are white dreams. Whistle the dead calls at morning night and depart away my spirit. Starless days are able to shine death, as rouse is use for me to die […] Listen it’s time for me as a writer to die.
Another way of perceiving the poems in the structure the editors have placed them is by transposing Fogarty’s poems alongside the political events that helped to shape them. For example, often the themes and motifs of his poems are direct references to news articles and current events, as a metaphorical (and at times literal) pastiche of contemporaneous jargon. This is evocatively evident in the composition of the unpublished poem, ‘Academic Great Boundaries’, which reflects on the water policy in the Murray Darling Basin and the dams that stop the water flow. In the poem itself, Fogarty metaphorically conjures up a dam wall through juxtaposing a self-authorising scientific vernacular divorced from feeling with his own intuitive writing:
Governments and nunnery highlands lie 49,000 bores lowering the table pastoral Non-flowing rate of 3% per annum.
In contrast, Fogarty alludes to the lack of benefits locals receive from the dam itself, remembering the incongruity of earlier colonial excavation of the land that eliminated native Australian flora and fauna. He questions the reader:
Are departmental shrubs destroying the remade reports? Is every central country plain without pains? Eliminate all inappropriate species The fallacy of the first dugouts Sunk in marbled stone.
It is also worth recounting the poet’s formative experiences, as they are at times presented, disfigured, in Fogarty’s poetry. For example, it is impossible to read his works without knowing of his politics. After growing up in Cherbourg Mission and becoming involved with the Brisbane Chapter of the Australian Black Panther Party, Fogarty was charged and arrested for demanding money with menaces and was detained in an adult prison while still legally a juvenile. Despite being acquitted for a lack of evidence, the experience remained with Fogarty and was recorded in a provocative account of his arrest in the poem entitled, ‘Related: Charged’:
Welcome here, you son of a cunt, This pig said to me. Sign your death warrant, you son of a fucken moll. Next released on bail
The crucially formative event of Fogarty’s adult activist life was the tragic death of his brother, Daniel Alfred Yock, a talented painter and dancer murdered under police custody in Redfern. This prompted some of Fogarty’s finest elegiac works, as well as some of his more charged political statements. Side by side, the 1995 poems ‘For Him I Died – Bupu Ngunda I love’ and ‘Murra Murra Gulandanilli- Waterhen’ can be read as a most profound expression of grief.
Poetry for Cordite 87: DIFFICULT is guest-edited by Oscar Schwartz and Holly Isemonger.
Says Holly: Poems can be spiky, sassy, cutting and frustrating – difficulty is built into how we perceive them. Probably as a result of schooling – a process that can excel at removing pleasure from thinking, learning and reading – we grow up learning to sap ‘meaning’ from poetry rather than enjoy the experience of the words. We don’t give a shit, as young children, about the ‘message’ of songs and nursery rhymes … the pleasure comes from the sounds and shapes of words, humour, formal invention, strange narratives and sensual descriptions. The term ‘difficult’ is often levelled at poems that don’t have an easily accessible meaning. We worry that we didn’t ‘get it’ and we worry that we are dumb because we don’t. This anxiety removes the pleasure from poetry that, in turn, makes poems ‘difficult’. We want poems that don’t worry about being difficult. Poems that bask in the pleasure of the ‘not knowing’.
Says Oscar: Difficult poems pose a challenge and don’t fit in. They are restless and refuse to conform, and they must annoy at least one person. We want these poems. But we don’t want to limit what’s ‘difficult’ in the way others have historically used this term. Difficult doesn’t just mean difficult language or difficult syntax or difficult grammar or difficult form. Difficult poetry can be written with simple phrases. A rhyming quatrain can be difficult. A simple poem about your feelings can be difficult, maybe the most difficult of all. Difficult poetry doesn’t have to be open for multiple interpretations: maybe it’s difficult because it poses a single political interpretation. Difficult poetry can even be ornamental. Just as long as it is thorny and sticks in the side of something or someone. It must annoy one person. That person would call you difficult if they read the poem … maybe write it with this person in mind.
Submit poems (prose, comics, visual, concrete) or works of micro-fiction (500 words maximum). Read more about submitting to Cordite Poetry Review. Please note:
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2. Cordite maintains a hybrid submissions policy. This means that the guest editor may invite five (5) Australian and five (5) overseas authors directly to submit to the issue. In addition, the guest-editor will anonymously select an additional 30-35 works from Australian authors and use their discretion to select further overseas works. For each issue, the guest editor does not know the identities of the online contributors (via Submittable) until after the final selections have been made.
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Lunar Inheritance by Lachlan Brown
Giramondo Publishing, 2017
‘Toward dusk,’ writes Brown in the book’s penultimate poem, ‘when the sky is passport blue, / you return via the National Performing Arts Centre, / its vast half-egg reflected in the stirring water.’ This poem, ‘Blank face double vision’, is reminiscent in certain ways of Lorca’s Poet in New York. Both Brown and Lorca use the phrase ‘blank face’ as well as the word ‘egg’. Also, both Brown’s poem and Lorca’s ‘After a Walk’ – like Lunar Inheritance and Poet in New York in general – evoke a sense of alienation within an anonymous, urbanised environment. Whereas Brown’s ‘half-egg’ is a realist description of the National Performing Arts Centre in Beijing, Lorca’s ‘egg’ is a surrealist image of anonymity: ‘With the amputated tree that doesn’t sing / and the child with the blank face of an egg.’ Lorca’s portrayal of a nature-less conurbation is, in many ways, somewhat more unsettling than Brown’s depiction of metropolitan China, but both books are similarly formed around a poet’s wanderings through foreign cityscapes.
Lunar Inheritance is a collection of 17 poems and comprises five sonnets interposed between 12 longer works. Each of the sonnets moulds itself to a Petrarchan rhyme scheme (abba, abba, cde, cde). In ‘Tell it like it is’ Brown takes on the voice of a Pauline-Hanson-type (‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped / by Asians’). The fact that this is the book’s ninth poem, third sonnet and, therefore, is positioned in the exact centre of the collection is, perhaps, a deliberate reference to the racist attitudes at the core of the Australian psyche:
[…] Fail rates indicate that many international students just cheat, and they’re taking places from my Sandra and your Jack. Just think about it. If no one in Sydney ever assimilates, what were the ANZACs even fighting for? So keep up the pressure and we’ll soon take this country back.
The longer poems are composed in free verse and adhere to a precise stanzaic form of eight octets (except for the last poem, which is seven octets). Curiously, each octet is preceded by a noncapitalised, parenthetical line, which acts as a subtitle to the subsequent stanza:
(pride) Switch off face-recognition when your mother cries out after being abused in the street. Just get to a stage where it’s all expected, for example, at cocktail parties where even the glasses adjectivise you, because wealth’s a dog-whistling politician building a platform on graduated levels of hatred.
The poet’s directive to ‘get to a stage where it’s all expected’ is reiterated through the collection. In ‘Artistic Licenses’ the poet attempts to discharge racist incidents from his mind, ‘your brother … / … is yelled at by a tradie mimicking ‘Gangnam Style’ / … a rival- / ry in your creative writing class ends with two guys / joking about Asians eating cats.’ Moreover, the title ‘Blank face double vision’ is redolent of a vacant expression, an apathetic or at least externally impassive attitude to the prejudice and antagonism that people of colour experience in Australia on a daily basis. The poet’s apathy, if it can be called that, is a survival device.
(where are you really from?) Mechanically looping this question through the speakers at Beijing Workers’ Stadium, the concrete reverberates like holes in your starting line-up.
The bitter irony of the subtitle is promisingly engaging, but the following sentence is somewhat less compelling. Brown’s simile, ‘the concrete reverberates like / holes in your starting line-up’, suffers from its lack of imagism. Soundwaves bouncing off concrete are an invisible occurrence and, likewise, the effect that mediocre players have on the outcome of a sports game, although observable, is a protracted event lacking in pictorial value. Also, Brown’s combining of the literal meaning of ‘reverberate’, ‘to echo’, with the figurative meaning, ‘to have continuing and serious effects’, is, if not quite a pun, an example of wordplay comparable to the ball bounces like a bad check. This is not to say that every sentence of every poem has to be imagistic, or that every simile has to be as inventive as those of, for example, John Forbes (‘your profile / fills out like a bin-liner caught by the / wind’, ‘Colonial Aubade’), but the abstractness here is likely to leave the reader unengaged.
Elsewhere in Lunar Inheritance Brown’s similes are more imagistic and direct: ‘jackets with price tags that / flash like the white teeth of…sharks’, or, ‘sky as white as a Chinese model’s white skin’. Both similes – the former of which has consumerist, predatory and exploitative associations, and the latter of which indirectly calls attention to the popularity of skin whitening products in Asia – make use of the word ‘white’, a word that is imbued with not only the violence inflicted by white Australians on Indigenous peoples, but also the White Australia Policy and the laws that excluded people from Asia, particularly China, from migrating to Australia.
Much of Lunar Inheritance is back-dropped by urban Chinese settings seen from the perspective of an Australian with Chinese ancestry, a foreigner visiting his ‘grandmothercountry’ [sic]. When Brown writes about Beijing or Guangzhou, suburban Sydney and his family are always nearby:
your gaze
caught by a workshop that is filled with clothes
and striped bags, and for less than a second this is
your grandmother’s brimming house in Ashfield
Similarly, in ‘Sanctioned Entry’, as the poet approaches Guangzhou:
buildings seen from the air become Mahjong tiles neatly stacked by your grandfather’s imagined hands as he meets with the clan on Dixon street, Sydney
Brown’s use of ‘imagined’ is an example of the type of word Richard Hugo in Triggering Town encourages poets to remove from their poems:
words that seem necessitated by grammar to make things clear but dilute the drama of the statement. These are words of temporality, causality, and opposition, and often indicate a momentary lack of faith in the imagination.
The fact that poetry has the ability to traverse, from one word to the next, space and time, makes the inclusion of ‘imagined’ slightly superfluous to the poem.
Marikit Santiago | He (2017) | oil, acrylic, Dutch metal gold leaf and pyrography on ply | 52cm x 40cm
My practice examines a personal conflict of cultural plurality at the conjunction of Filipina ethnicity and Australian nationality. My work navigates the simultaneous sensations of acceptance and rejection of adopted and inherited cultures, which has been conditioned by autobiographical experiences within and between developed and developing worlds.
In engaging with these concerns, I access Filipino history and culture. A study of the military legacy, literature, mythology, religion, politics, socio-economic status and popular culture inform my work. The collective experiences and memory of my immediate family provides access to the oral traditions of mythology and religious customs.
My work employs traditional, figurative oil painting techniques as well as more innovative methods of pyrography (burning) and ‘polar painting’ (painting the negative colours of an image). A combination of these techniques is used to construct a layering of imagery and various types of marks.
I source recycled or repurposed material such as plywood, MDF board and other found objects and surfaces referencing the makeshift domestic constructions found in the Philippines and the ethos of ‘making-do’, an aspect of Filipino life. In addition, the use of found materials challenges the perception of value; oscillating between high and low, demonstrating my own perceptions of value and how it is ascribed to my cultural identities.
My work aims to reflect the interweaving of my ethnic, cultural and social identities. In this way, my practice has become more than a mode of artistic production, expanding to become a space for decolonising, intersectional thinking and cross-cultural dialogue. In motherhood, my practice has evolved not only crossing disciplines to include creative writing, installation and community engagement, but also further in the way of multigenerational story-telling and seeks ways to pass Filipino culture to my children in a contemporary Australian context.
To enter the mind of Philippine literature in English, it is important to note the evolution of English in the Philippines. We were colonised by Spain in 1521 and sold to America in 1898. According to eminent Filipino poet and scholar, Gémino Abad, Philippine poetry in English only took flight in the 1920s – it is a considerably young poetry, being less than a hundred years old. At this point, Filipinos spoke so many vernacular languages and even variants of ethno-languages that the establishment of a stable literature in English seemed an unlikely project.
Abad proposes three movements in Philippine Literature in English: the Romantic Tradition from 1904 to the 1940s, which espoused romanticism, poetic diction and imagery; followed by the New Critical Movement, which took place from the 1950s to the 1970s, and was imported from the Iowa Writers Workshop through the writing and scholarship of Edith and Edilberto Tiempo; finally, the drive towards the Postmodern / Postcolonial praxes from the 1980s to the present.
It is in the last movement that we find ourselves, in 2018, well-aware of our colonial reality and the role of English as both second language and colonial apparatus. English remains a linguistic battlefield; we have nonetheless appropriated the master’s weapon to wield such power of the word and to sing back with rhythmic passion.
As guest editors for this special issue in Philippine poetry, we wanted to include as wide a survey of Philippine literature that we could. The poets selected hail from all our regions – each one carrying with them their politics, predilections and their lives. Yet, all carry the Archipelago in their heart. As we near the centenary of Philippine literature in English, we celebrate all our hybrid Englishes even as we strive towards the imagining of a stable and cohesive literature.
Accidents of Composition by Merlinda Bobis
Spinifex Press, 2017
Marianne Moore called it ‘courageous attack’:
today, you span the far mountains
with an arm and say,
‘this I offer you —
all this blue sweat
of eucalypt.’
So begins ‘driving to katoomba’, from the first poetry collection that Merlinda Bobis published in Australia, Summer was a fast train without terminals (Spinifex, 1998). The opening is typical of Bobis’s inimitable gusto and extravagance: the lines follow the gesture of the body that reaches for a view, simultaneously craving and offering the world while delighting in the knowledge that both impulses remain unfulfilled.
Sappho wrote, ‘I love extravagance,’ and she would have loved it here – the speaker and her fellow traveller entwined in mutual acts of impossible exchange under a high noon throb: one offers the scent of the Blue Mountains; the other, her recognition of love in the fertile yet futile gesture. Trips to the Blue Mountains often appear in Australian poetry; recently, in ‘blue mountains line’, Andy Jackson wrote ‘the carriage is the colour / of tendon and bone’. I notice a similarity in each poem’s approach to this iconic Australian landscape, in the way the body’s relation to this space is framed through cinematic motion. There is a shared sense of fleeting vision, of temporary impression, of passing through rather than staying put, of un-belonging to the land. The fellow traveller offers nothing concrete to the speaker, only the ether made by leaves waving in the air.
Accidents of Composition is Bobis’s sixth book of poetry. It sits alongside an impressive and multiform body of work that includes prize-winning fiction, drama, radio production and musical performance. After reading through the collection several times, I discovered a disarming afterward:
Let the poem speak for itself. No poet must explain. Do not betray the labour. Yet I choose to reveal the accidents, the gifts behind the book.
It began on the 18 October 2014 in a tourist bus across the desert, after visiting the Grand Canyon. As we sped along, behind the glass window was a black bird close to the eerie sun, like a white hole against storm grey sky. I took a picture: an accident of composition. A poem. (‘Because: An Afterward’)
It is a privilege to witness this accomplished writer illuminate her work with such naturalness, and it is precisely in this spirit that the poetry in Accidents of Composition proceeds. Bobis concatenates sets of impressions made at high speed; hidden meanings and relations reveal themselves under the speaker’s powers of observation. As a form of representation a poem can be so like a photograph, somehow indexical, tracing felicitous transits in time through an uncanny framing of things briefly seen and gone: ‘Recall is loss / turned inside out’ (‘A Little Scene’). An assemblage of images carefully brought together, the collection often resembles montage film. Accidents of Composition is full of jump cuts across the globe and its history: Spain in the sixteenth century, China and the Philippines in the twenty-first. One particularly cinematic passage presents a striking play on poetry’s ur-metaphor – movement – in which the speaker crosses three train lines over three poems: Legazpi to Manila, Wollongong to Sydney, and a slow train from Albuquerque to a destination undisclosed. What does it mean to cross a border, and what does it mean to never arrive?
Napupungaw ako for a train about to leave. Napupungaw ako for that trip from home: Legazpi to Manila. I hear it now four decades or so later. Napupungaw: untranslatable. Intransitive verb: without an object. Present tense: it’s ongoing like a train of thought that never quite arrives, because the pink is too pink, the red too swirly when one remembers (‘A Little Scene’)
Unsettled modes of habitation have recently emerged in Australian literature as the substantial ethical improvement upon the putative notions of belonging shaped by earlier national writing. The problem with creative visions that claim a ‘sacred’ relation between settler-colonial culture and the land – as the critic Julie Mullaney observes in her analysis of David Malouf – is that these invoke Indigenous Australian discourses of belonging to place, often while simultaneously erasing actual Aboriginal people from that textual landscape and ignoring the historical realities of settlement. The tradition of ‘white nativism’ or ‘white indigeneity’ traverses genre and medium in Australian cultural production – film, television, poetry, popular music, literary and popular fiction, and photography. Australian modernist photography reified the notion of the white native through figures such as the bronzed surfer and the athletic life-saver and these images still dominate the global branding of Australia. Born out of a quest for national identity that began in earnest in the 1930s, white nativist ‘home-grown’ tropes appear time and again in Australian literature. And though anti-colonial and postcolonial interventions have made some headway in contesting and destabilising this tradition, writers of all colours still come up against what Mark Davis describes as the ‘white logic of nation’.
Bobis’s writing materialises in the overlapping contexts of emerging unsettlement and the de-facto tradition of writers of colour reporting from the margins. Bobis begins her 2010 essay, ‘The Asian Conspiracy: Deploying Voice/Deploying Story’, with this directive:
Imagine Australia sharing ONE tongue. I do not mean language, but literally that little pink and perpetually moist animal in the mouth.
There’s that courageous attack. How would we hold this slippery thing, use it for what we want to say, pass it to our neighbour when it is time to listen? In the essay Bobis presents an account of her nineteen-year ‘problematic journey’ towards her place in Australian literature. This story, she stresses, is only one story among the narratives of storymaking of Australian writers from varied Asian backgrounds. In a discussion on Australian literature, these personal stories behind the publishing lines are as crucial as our literature works or the theoretical discourse about us. Our creative production is more than the ‘finished texts’, products to be unpacked or projects to be problematised. It is a story-in-progress. Just as in immigration, hardly any one of us can fly over the gate, straight into citizenship.
How does one acquire ‘citizenship’ of a nation’s literature? Bobis arrived in Australia in 1991 from the Philippines. She came with ten years of university teaching experience and, already a published author, brought an aesthetic sensibility that had developed in part through formal literary training and in part through formative years of immersion in the hybrid dynamic of cultures and languages of the Philippines. Long after her arrival in Australia, Bobis continues to write in all three of her languages: the Bikol of her home in Albay (at the foot of the active volcano Mt Magayon); the Tagalog of Manila, the metropolitan centre; and English, the imperial language of the American colonisers. As Bobis wrote and researched her creative doctorate during her first years in Wollongong, she continued to chant, to sing, and to dance – code-switching between languages and methods of expression.
for Victorio Sugbo y Rojas
Grandfather, you had left long before
You even heard my very first gasp of air.
Only these papers wrapped in
Manila paper are all I have of you.
I had long wanted to see you
And knew this was a long shot.
Father is gone. So is mother.
On my table I place
Your Ateneo diploma de mercantil
Your marriage contract with grandmother
This roto picture when you ran for city mayor
The twelve land titles, your letters to grandmother
This brownish piece of cloth that graphs the streets of our house
This cursive Spanish-worded document with your signature.
I arrange your papers,
Hoping I would see you here.
This poem first appeared in Madras Courier on February 4, 2017.
Folks say they do not live there
Anymore, witches stitching
Rag figures of souls to slay,
Or warlocks brewing potions
Of bark and root three moons
Before Jesus-God lies cold
On a slab of stone.
They say they have grown weary
Of chanting the same old incantations,
Casting the same spells over loves
Lost or betrayed, claiming justice
For the helpless and oppressed,
Or setting our small worlds back
On their proper tilt and turn.
They say they have their own lives
To live, burdens to bear: fields
To till, seeds to sow, waterjars
To fill, and sons and daughters
To tend and teach mysteries
Of blood and bone, earth and sky,
Wind, water and fire.
Folks say when you first set foot
On the shores of Siquijor
That those you seek do not live
There anymore, but if you truly ache
For righteous remedy, you might linger
For a night: one might fly by
With a magic brew for you.
the corner, just there, whereto the index
lands. That is, ulilang kawayan1 comes
before you cross the road on your way home, or
your mother is off to mayhaligue
notwithstanding no poles. Barely a fence, muros
to hem in moro, barrio—prisoners
escape only from a game of twos, or threes
in the wake of something in your belly—
entrada, interna. Internar, if right under
your nose is a mile or two to boarding school.
Keep left, and the drugstore is marked zero. Count
to ten—bituka, butiki, botika2. See,
in the outskirts it is also a madhouse. Six
is the hour, and the sinuous route.
Ang ati lumilipat ng ilog kapagka nilangaw na.3
Toward the mountains, downstream: one
heads for the long shot. To orient is not
yet a direction. Nanay4 told you
she never saw the river again. When the nomads
disappear in her stories, the birds
with legs like stilts return. Mantil,
softly, as if you knew. That is not even their name.
Nothing famous ever came out of Cuatro de Julio,
The street that always interrupted the sleep
Of its inhabitants, including my grandmother’s,
Who had to listen through the bawling sorrow
Of drunkards, the scampering of the police,
All of us under their mercy: our inheritance.
Largely debt and unhappiness, our inheritance
Was not visible to those living outside Cuatro de Julio—
If it were, other people, especially the police,
Would have been more forgiving, allowing our sleep,
Our silence and our poverty. Exposed to sorrow
Like salt, we swallowed our tears, like grandmother.
Setting up a house by the street, my grandmother
Soldiered through a husbandless life, her inheritance
From God. No one was a witness to this sorrow
Except her five children and Cuatro de Julio
Which, in its early years, was conducive for sleep.
They would be meddlesome decades later, the police.
Once, on my way to public school, I saw the police
Chase my cousins for drug pushing. My grandmother
Never intervened. Soap operas and afternoon sleep
Were her chosen companion, her inheritance.
For living so long in a street called Cuatro de Julio
She should have been spared from this kind of sorrow.
Sometimes, like shabu or cough syrup, sorrow
Could be addictive. Even the steadfast among the police
Are honeycombed by it. Patrolling Cuatro de Julio,
What wild sadness were they storing? My grandmother
Could teach them a thing about this native inheritance
So instead of beating their wives, they could sleep.
In a riot or in the stoning of our house, I feigned sleep.
There’s a limit to a boy’s body in containing sorrow;
Feverish, I once wept complainingly over this inheritance.
They were busy searching another’s house, the police
But I knew she heard me loud and clear, my grandmother.
In shame, I would write my address as Fourth of July.
Grandmother, forgive me for forsaking my inheritance.
I may have left Cuatro de Julio but not its sorrow.
The police have one less thing to worry about now. Sleep.
Ah, a photo of the stunning Imelda
And her children, everyone so fine,
And healthy, not a day of hunger
Have they known. Her husband,
That Ilocano, look, quite regal I’d say.
Smart, that man, brought a whole nation
To heel. Fourteen, fifteen years, no one
Squealed. A few college brats now and then.
Can’t be helped, one supposes.
A bit of bloodshed here and there,
Half-hearted rebellions quickly quelled.
For twenty years, more or less,
The Ilocano’s word was law.
Everyone nodding yes–judge, laborer,
Beggar, philosopher, merchant, soldier–
Soldier above all. Complain, and
Vanish like smoke, simple, just like that,
Murdered, jailed, lost properties, positions.
The national debt ballooned, still
No jobs, wages shrunk,
The poor grew poorer, or died.
Imelda never stopped shopping–
Shoes, clothes, jewelry, paintings—
Because she can, of course, as though
The children selling sampaguita garlands
—Or their bodies—for food and shelter
In the streets of the capital did not exist.
Look at this photo now, how fine they look,
All her children round-cheeked, rosy smooth
Skin, perfection–these little godlings
In their seeming innocent pose.
Ay, but patience has its bounds,
Skim off the excess, the old folks would say,
When the time’s up. That day did come
For the Ilocano and his queen, skimmed off
By people power thirty-one years to the day.
This photo now, look carefully, look steady,
For the spawns, these cherubic godlings,
Are crawling slowly back to grab the seat
Of governance they think is theirs by descent.
Ay, Filipinas, now gather your hungry
Homeless children, dispossessed
By generations of venality and greed,
Now tell them the proud sagas of your saints,
Don’t allow forgetfulness. Give them to drink
The bile of your memories, aye, also its sweet,
Feed their minds with lays of honor, and truth,
Its clarity. Their dreams haunt with the sheen
Of daggers. Lull them to sleep with the staccato
Of bullets crippling old bastions of deception.
One day when all is ready, Anger will rise
From the ground to call for blood.
Ay, Filipinas, on that day, pray the angel of Peace
Sits on its shoulders to show the way home.
October 24, 2017
dumbstruck poming poms wordless biting back the birthland chieftains bereft of right reason and scales of justice sprouted ilk of the silver-minted kind of various shades of pelt and pose and puddle of politics death and deathlessness of death the butthole gallbladder liver lung spleen pancreas kidney gray matter white matter no matter of rulership in this land of birth now land for loons and dodos my dear kuya eddie on the signboard of fate drawn since balanggiga bud dajo maliwalu jabidah patikul escalante mendiola cawa-cawa ipil maguindanao talipao mamasapano until metro manila without or with a whit of reason doomed examples shot down to shut up or else dumped in vacant lots blindsided by tandems on motorbikes or roused by raps on the door pleading alias this alias that a motley lot unidentified suspected alleged marked out or mere collateral damage nobody knowing who knows the one behind the back of the back of the one covering the back of the one behind it all no one with eyes that see no one with mouths that speak no one with laws to stand on riddled with rights of the almighty one playing chief of police to the weak and the poor no leaf of swamp cabbage unstained by drops of blood no nook remote enough not to catch the anguished moans no stand of trees not rooted in lamentations light and darkness graveyards and candles lighted go on birthing in earnest more than the hallowed grounds of bloodsoaked stars starry in the fist of heaven above the land of birth brightness of star and scream in the nothingness are one energy of feeling and chili stir-fried stone thrown blindly in the chink between heavens worsening to the worst conundrum without end or sizzle of tinsel gunpowder on a pom nothing now pom pom pom struck dumb poming wordless no thing not a thing ting
(The living room seemed to be where
no living ever actually occurred.
– Alice Sebold)
Voices were kept in domestic quiet
Until the last decade claimed three.
Father: someone pushed his chair
In a town’s grievance center.
He fell face first, lips now cleft
Got orphaned by pipe and cigar.
Brother and mother: civilians in red
Plated van pelted our home with stones,
Destroying jalousies, music players,
Vases, kitchenware, and later them,
Scaring what else the house kept.
Ripening sentiments gave way
To their own gradual wastage.
Postponing their appointed time required
My attempts of the repair man’s and stone
And glass cutter’s excellent finish.
To unload keepsakes needed more than
Just any human skill, craft or trick.
Better borrow the kitten’s purr or pigeon’s coo,
Maybe the parakeet’s mimicry–-
They can temper compelling memories.
Their seeking for lost years–-like echoes
In search of geckos–-is reiterative as day:
Father’s smoke invading the nostrils;
Brother’s march songs advancing; scents
From mother’s trumpet flowers pervading;
Her teakettle’s whistling now my own.
I’m teaching my nephew the basics
of math, how a sign can be used
to compare numbers. Two is greater
than one, five is less than ten.
The key is to have each alligator
mouth swallowing the bigger
number: hunger points in one
direction, unless both sides being
compared are equal, two lines
to match the balance, the fulcrum
between a pound of iron
and a pound of feathers. Soon
the child weighs one against
another, the world divided
into all that is greater, all
that is less. Consider how rain
in a storm is greater than
the day’s threads of drizzle. How
our hands can only grasp
what’s less than a palm-sized
morsel. And I who will never bear
a son of my own, will I ever be equal
to or always less than my brother?
He unhooks the rope, places the knot to the skiff
and drags it towards the water. Unreadable, the waves
are pages that keep on rewriting themselves, like thoughts
of the American President on China’s artificial islands
at West Philippine Sea. He could see the structures
from where he stood, as if some rich neighbor
decided to build a strip club on a sand bar. But he was not
bent on avoiding them, these “builders in bad faith,”
as the Barangay Captain calls them. For he, his father
before him, and all the village fishermen had long
considered that reef as their inter-island waiting shed,
shoal away from shore. So he packs his provisions of fresh
water, dried fish, rice, kerosene lamp, transistor radio.
He fixes the nets and of course, the bayonet. He once
found it during an oyster dive, sharp metal stabbing sand,
glinting in underwater sunlight. Did some WWII soldier
drop it to mark our Exclusive Economic Zone as prelude
to the UNCLOS? He asks himself, aware of the proviso
in the Constitution reserving all archipelagic marine
resources for Filipinos. He pushes for the sea, the skiff,
a sharp pen piercing through sand and waves as if writing
land titles. Better occupy the waves than be written off.
Treaties redefining territoriality become useless in the context
of man-made shores and artificial islands. He turns the radio
on and Floyd Mayweather is now being booed, declared
winner over Manny Pacquiao. The “Pambansang Kamao,”
they say, carried the game, the elusive American, all form,
all technique, won by points before a jeering live audience.
Is this how boxing should be, won by crafty non-fighters
with cheap tricks? Boxing can’t win wars. He thinks. “I thought
I won,” said Pacquiao, apparently, more dizzy with the defeat
than the punches. Manny, you can never win against Money, no.
Not against this undefeated American in US shores. Their government
needs him in this age of ISIS and Chinese threat. He tells the Las Vegas
prize fighter, still thinking of how Obama danced around, ran,
hugged, elbowed, jabbed, and smiled his way off a China issue,
whether or not the Philippines can expect American military
support in case of war. His motor is roaring now, in full throttle
towards the Chinese firmament. “Manny can’t beat Floyd
because he’s not bright enough,” he hears Floyd’s father.
So he throws the net down the water, a Chinese vessel
speeding towards him, his bayonet shining under the sun.
